Soon after the 9/11 terrorist attack upon our nation, President Bush spoke to a joint session of Congress. In this nationally and internationally televised address our president said: “I want to speak to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends.”

Long before our president praised Islam as a good and peaceful religion, Islam’s founder, the Prophet Mohammed, said the following: “The sword is the key of heaven and hell; a day of blood shed in the cause of Allah, a night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting or prayer: whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven, and at the day of judgment his limbs shall be supplied by the wings of angels and cherubim!”

How do we reconcile these two irreconcilable statements? Obviously, we can’t; both of them cannot possibly be true. Thus, we are forced to ask ourselves which statement comes from the more reliable authority. Undoubtedly, when it comes to Islam, there is no more reliable authority than the Prophet Mohammed.

In an interview with Al Arabiya television, our president recently took his ill-conceived defense of Islam to new and heretical heights. No longer content with merely calling the religion of the sword a religion of peace, our president insisted that “all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God.” To dispel any possibility of dismissing his heretical statement as a mere slip of the presidential tongue, President Bush repeated it in no uncertain terms later in the interview. According to an official transcript released by the White House, our president went on to say, “I believe there is a universal God. I believe the God that the Muslim prays to is the same God that I pray to. After all, we all come from Abraham. I believe in that universality.”

In the title of his latest book, Bill Sammon, senior White House correspondent for the Washington Examiner, proclaims President Bush “The Evangelical President.” If you ask me, it sounds like Sammon ought to change the title of his book to “The Unitarian President,” since President Bush is suddenly sounding more like UnityVillage than the Bible Belt.

Far from teaching President Bush’s professed “universality,” the Bible instructs us to “try the spirits [to see] whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1-3). According to the Apostle John, “many false prophets,” not to mention false doctrines and false religions, “are gone out into the world.” It is imperative, therefore, that we discern the true faith and the one true God from all false faiths and their various false gods. The only way to successfully do so, John contends, is by applying to all religious faiths the acid test; that is, the Biblical injunction to judge every religious faith by its doctrine of Christ.

When weighed in the balance of the Biblical doctrine of Christ, all religions, with the lone exception of Christianity, are found wanting. It is Christianity alone that teaches the Biblical Jesus. All other religious faiths teach another Jesus (see: 2 Corinthians 11:4) or another god. Therefore, it is only the Christian faith that is truly of God and inspired by the Spirit of Christ. All other religious faiths are spawned by “the god of this world” and inspired by “the spirit of antichrist” (2 Corinthians 4:4; 1 John 4:3).

Our president’s assertion that Muslims and Christians have the same “universal God” is an absolute absurdity. For instance, Christians worship Christ as God, while Muslims believe that it is blasphemy to say that Jesus is God and that anyone who dares to do so will be “forbidden entrance into paradise and cast into the fire of hell” (Surah 5:18, 72). According to the Apostle Paul, God saves us from our sins upon our confession of His Son Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior (Romans 10:9-10). On the other hand, Islam teaches that confessing Jesus as God’s Son is an unpardonable sin that incurs both the curse and condemnation of Allah (Surah 9:30-31; 10:68).

There is absolutely no way that Christians—who deify Christ—have the same God as Muslims—who demean Christ as a mere man created from dust, whom their god (Allah) can destroy anytime he takes a notion to (Surah 3:59; 4:171). If President Bush is right and there really is a “universal God” worshipped by all religions, then our president’s “amalgamated almighty” is a hopelessly conflicted and insanely schizophrenic deity, since he saves some for heaven and condemns others to hell for the exact same reason; namely, confessing and believing in the Biblical Jesus.