Remember the shocking TV footage of the Shiite self-flagellation ritual that followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, where thousands of grown men ran together in the street, chanting prayers to Allah as they whipped themselves on the back so that blood was running down?

In their religion that has to do with chastising and punishing themselves in order to get the attention of their god, something that originated with Baal worshippers in I Kings 18.

In the Old Testament passage, it says they “called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.

“And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.

“And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them.

“And it came to pass, when midday was past, and they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded.”

Every pagan religion holds up the idol of prayer and it often involves rituals with chanting.

Yesterday’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly program on PBS ended with footage of Hindu devotees celebrating Lord Krishna’s birth.

As a woman from India was quoted reporting on the event, “There's loud chanting and people are singing and getting very excited about the midnight hour, and we're getting ready to welcome Krishna. As the midnight hour approaches, we dim the lights. The priest comes out and actually brings a live baby in a cradle, carrying him on his head, depicting how it truly happened with Lord Krishna.”

When it comes to the Buddhists, my pastor, Richard Jordan, explains, “They have the prayer wheel you spin and it’s sort of like the TV game show where you spin the thing and where it stops you get the money. It’s just that. Their god, by his divine reaching down, stops the wheel right where it stops. That’s the heathen praying.”

I talked to a bright, good-looking woman yesterday in the Starbucks at 51^st and Broadway who swore to me that she was saved the moment God gave her the special gift of speaking in tongues.

When I explained to her that the Apostle Paul makes clear in the Bible that only men were ever empowered to speak in tongues, and that there always had to be an interpreter present for it to be authentic, she backed off, saying for her it was “prayer language” and something that “came out of the anguish of my heart,” given to her by God for only Him to interpret.

I immediately thought, “Well, if God knows every thought a person has, as the Bible tell us, why would He need to listen to some unintelligible gibberish, created by Himself and caused to be suddenly blurted out from her, so that He could know the ‘anguish of her heart’?” There’s NO logic to that!

Once I told this 40-something woman she was engaging in mysticism and that Satan had her duped by getting her to focus on sensory delight and supposed supernatural experience as a ‘sign from God,’ she practically bolted for the door. She was so angry with me people at surrounding tables stared to see what was going on!

I have to say, the encounter was not pleasant and my heart was racing for a half-hour afterward! Not good for my nerves!

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My pastor, who says he’s read the Koran cover-to-cover four times, once had an encounter with a neighbor who is Muslim.

When Jordan said he had some questions he wanted to ask about specific verses in the Koran, the neighbor simply responded, “You're not supposed to read that. You're an unbeliever. You got no right to read the Koran! It's the Holy Koran. Unbelievers are not supposed to read the Holy Koran!”

Jordan explains, “He and his family don't read it either but they hold it up.”

In the Sikh religion, their holy book is called the Adi Granth (comprised of 6,000 hymns written by six gurus) and it is actually physically worshipped!

“In the home as well as the temple the Granth is treated with reverence, given its own shelf, and usually placed on a cloth or cushion before being used,” writes Karen Farrington in her book, “The History of Religion.” “Above it there will be a canopy, further emphasizing its holiness, and the reader will use a fan or chauri to prevent any flies or dust from landing on it.”

Jordan said he was once inside a Sikh temple in India where “they've got this big room you go into and there's this little tent-like structure and inside it is a wagon holding their book.

“And the book's as big as one of these tables. I asked a guy, ‘Well, what does that book teach?’ and he said, ‘I don't know, we can't read it.’ I said, ‘You mean you don't know how to read it?’ and he said, ‘No, we can't read it.’ They're not allowed to read it!

“At night they take the thing and put it over in a little closet on the side of the room and worship it. Their book's hidden from them.”

Jordan continues, “I appreciate the Bible; God wrote His Word and said, ‘Oh earth, earth. Hear the Word of the Lord. Get a hold of it!’ And He put it in your language so you can read it and understand it. The Bible is an accessible book.

“I asked my neighbor once, ‘Which Koran do you read?’, knowing there are about 30 different versions of them. And if you read one version and it says something you don't like, you can say, ‘Well, that's a bad translation,’ because the Koran can't really be legitimately translated.

“Newberry's probably the greatest English scholar in Arabic the Western world's produced, and he produced a copy of the translation of the Koran, but he doesn't call it a translation; he calls it an interpretation because, as he says in his introduction, ‘The Koran cannot be properly translated. It can only be understood in Arabic.’

“You hear people say that about your Bible. That's religious hoodley-doo, but they don't think they can understand it. God provided His Word to be understood translated. It's just as much His Word in the translation as it is in the original language. You know that from verses in the Bible, where you see a verse translated from one language to another and it's still God's Word when it's translated and there are verses in the Bible that demonstrate that to you.”