Here’s a real inside view into the superstitious silliness of Hinduism from a woman in Burke, Va., who appeared recently on PBS’ Religion and Ethics Newsweekly:

“We illuminate our house so that the goddess Lakshmi can find her way,” explains the middle-aged mother, Monu Harnal, about the numerous candles around her residence. “In our house, we have the puja room, the prayer room. My dad, he chants and we follow him. First, we pray to Lord Ganesha, who is the removal of all obstacles. And then, we pray to the goddess Lakshmi to bring in both material and spiritual prosperity.

“In Hinduism, the nice thing is all the gods are like your board members in your life. They act like board members. And you can call on one of them whenever you need something for a certain problem or issue or whatever it is. You can call on them to say, ‘Okay, Goddess Lakshmi, I need a little cash here.’ ”

Most people know that the first basic article of faith for Muslims is “there is no God but Allah,” but guess what comes second in their list of six?

“The second article of faith is belief in angels and jinn,” informs religions expert Rick Rood of the World Religions Index organization. “Jinn are spirit beings capable of both good and evil actions and of possessing human beings. Above the jinn in rank are the angels of God. Two of them are believed to accompany every Muslim, one on the right to record his good deeds, and one on the left to record his evil deeds.”

The Koran, like Calvinism and other satanically-inspired doctrines, supports the idea that all things—both good and evil—are the direct result of God’s will.

“Those who conclude that Islam is a fatalistic religion have good reason for doing so,” writes Rood. “The paramount feature of Islamic belief, aside from its strong monotheism, is that it is a religion of human works. One’s position with regard to Allah is determined by his success in keeping His laws.”

Rood continues, “Though mankind is depicted as weak and prone to error, Islam denies that man is a sinner by nature and in need of a Savior, as the Bible so clearly teaches. People are capable of submitting to God’s laws and meriting his ultimate approval.”

What I find very telling is that during Islam’s “golden era,” when the Muslim empire spanned from Spain to India and reached down into Africa, adherents included some of the world’s finest philosophers and mathematicians.

Intellectuals tend to gravitate toward theological systems that hinge on self-discipline. What’s funny, though, is they foolishly fall for the dumbest in superstitious nonsense.

Rood, for example, says, “The Koran mentions numerous names of Allah, and these names are found frequently on the lips of devout Muslims who believe them to have a nearly magical power.”

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In his Sunday sermon last week, my pastor, Richard Jordan, told of a sad email he received from a man writing, “I really don’t know what do. I don’t know whether I’m saved or not.”

Jordan reported, “He said, ‘I know Jesus Christ is God who died on the Cross to pay for my sins; I know He was resurrected to give me eternal life—what I can’t figure out is whether I’ve trusted Him right or not.’

“As soon as somebody says that you know that there’s trouble. He wrote, ‘I’ve trusted Him, I’ve said He’s my savior, I’m relying on nothing but Him but I still don’t have peace,’ and he then spent three paragraphs about how he’s trying to believe—what he’s doing to trust Christ and be sure that he has.

“I know what this guy’s dealing with because I lived there in religion myself years ago. I thought believing was doing something and I did anything anybody told me as best I could, conscious that I wasn’t doing it perfect and conscious that, boy, when it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t really getting me past God. It might get me past you, but not Him.

“You know what real faith is? It’s looking at your doubts and saying, ‘Forget ’em—I’m not saved by my doubts; I’m not lost by my doubts. I’m saved by the Cross and I’m just going to rest in that.’

“Here’s a guy—I don’t know him—who could very well be saved, but because of religion, because of thinking ‘I got to do this and I got to do that’; because of somebody coming along and saying, ‘Well, if you were really saved, you wouldn’t do this, this and this that you’re doing. If you were really saved, well, you’d quit all that like I’ve done.’

“You know the problem with that? Name whatever it is that you want to quit. I read over there in Proverbs 6 there’s seven things God hates and cussing isn’t one of them. Drinking isn’t one of them. Chasing wild women is not one of them. Pride is there, though. Now how you doing with that one?

“You know how you’re doing? You’re messing up about three times a day, aren’t you? And I’m being real gentle with you here. Well, if a guy got drunk three times a day, wouldn’t you call him a drunkard? If he got drunk three times a month, wouldn’t you call him a drunkard? And you’re going to say, ‘Well, he can’t be saved.’ You sin a sin God said that he hates more than that and you do that many more times a day, so you better be careful about that perfectionism in your conduct because it ain’t there! Your perfection’s only in Christ.”

When Paul talks about those “oppose themselves,” that’s exactly what Satan wants Believers to do—live the opposite of who we really are—

and it has to do with always trying to please God but failing, when Paul says that in Christ we’ve already pleased God.

Paul writes in II Tim. 2:26, “And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will.”

Satan’s will for our lives is that we’d be his captives so he can take away what belongs to us by our birthright in Christ.

The methodology of his attack is summed up in Col. 2:8: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”

Jordan says, “What are the avenues of attack? Philosophy. That word there is ‘loving wisdom.’ Human viewpoint. Systems and theories about truth and life that aren’t based in the Word of God, but are in human viewpoint. And ‘vain deceit’—empty delusions. ‘After the traditions of men and the rudiments of the world’—that’s where they come from. ‘And not after Christ.’ You see those last three words are the real problem.

“How’s your life going to be transformed? Paul says it’s ‘by the renewing of your mind.’ But if you never put that (Bible) information in your mind to have it renewed, what’s going to happen?

“You’re going to trust religion to transform you, aren’t you? You’re going to trust a bunch of rules—some regulations—to stop sin. It’s, ‘Give me some things to do and I’ll go out and do them,’ and you’ll put yourself back under law, not under grace. The law condemns you. The law of God condemns the best of us. That’s why religion—rites, rules and regulations—is just a treadmill to get you nowhere. God in his grace gives it to you all in Christ up-front.”