The other day I came across a YouTube video of President Bush on ABC Nightly News. Newscaster Charles Gibson asks, “Do we all worship the same god—Christian and Muslim?” to which Bush replies, “I think we do. We have different routes of getting to the Almighty.”

When Gibson asked Bush if he thought practicing Muslims, like Christians, would go to heaven , Bush answered, “Yes, they do. We have different routes of getting there.”

Seeing this, I was reminded of a sermon on tape I have of my preacher, Richard Jordan, speaking the Sunday after 9/11. He said, “I watched TV, just as you probably did Tuesday evening, when the president gave a word about what was going on and, in that, I was touched . . . you know, you can like George Bush or not; I find it very interesting that he will unashamedly stand before the public and profess himself to be a Believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. And he’s not ashamed to do that, and he doesn’t do it in a cut-corners kind of a way. And he’s not afraid to say that it makes a difference in his life. That could be a lesson to some of us and he did that before he got the job he has now. That, if nothing else, is kind of an encouragement to me that he would have that kind of boldness and would let it make a difference.”

Of course, I lost all respect for Bush as a self-proclaimed Christian when he invited the Dalai Lama for a chummy visit to the White House last year, gushing and holding hands with the Tibetan “luv” guru as he proudly gave him a Congressional Gold Medal.

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People love to make these parallels between the Bible and the Koran as if they’re both equally sound books from God, but anybody who knows anything about the Koran knows there are tremendous contradictions.

The Koran denies Jesus Christ was crucified. The Koran says it took God eight days to create the world. The Koran says that one of Noah’s three sons refused to go into the Ark and was drowned in the Flood. The Koran says it was Pharaoh’s wife, not his daughter, who adopted Moses.

The Koran says Abraham took his son Ishmael, not Isaac, for a sacrifice. The Koran says Abraham lived in the valley of Mecca, not Hebron. The Koran says Abraham—get this—rebuilt the Islamic Kabah (it says Adam was the original architect!). The Koran says Abraham was thrown into a fire by Nimrod, even though Nimrod had been dead for centuries by the time of Abraham’s life.

As author Robert Morey explains in his incredible 1992 expose book The Islamic Invasion, “The seventh-century Arab, and Muhammad in particular, did not think in terms of linear time, that is, historical chronology. In the West, people think of history in terms of a straight line with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

“In the East, people think in terms of never-ending cycles. Evidently, in the Middle East at the time of Muhammad, Arabs did not have any settled conception of time at all. Arab stories and legends put together places, people, and events in one present vision as if they were all living at the same time!

“This is why throughout the Quran, Nimrod and Abraham, Haman and Moses, Mary and Aaron, etc. were all pictured as living and working together. This is why the Quran can put together the flood and Moses, the tower of Babel and Pharaoh, etc. as if all those things happened at the same time.

“This is a very serious challenge to the integrity of the Quran because it violates the historic chronology of the Bible and secular history at the same time.”

The Koran says that not only did Solomon understand “the language of the birds” but that “winds also performed his will, and the jinn . . . To him were obedient demons of the most diverse sorts, and the evil spirits were given into his hand.”

The Koran’s male and female “jinns” were spirits to be worshipped and feared and could be found in trees, stones, rivers and mountains.

“In terms of pre-Islamic religious life, the basic orientation of the people was that of superstition—the Arabs believed in the ‘evil eye,’ the casting of curses and spells, magic stones, fatalism, fetishes, and the fabulous stories of the jinns, or what we call in English genies or fairies,” reports Morey.

“Most people in their childhood have read some of the fantastic fables found in The Arabian Nights, stories of Aladdin’s lamp, of flying carpets, etc. It is no surprise therefore to find that the Koran also contains references to such things as the evil eye, curses, fatalism, and the fabulous jinns (Sura 55; 72; 113 and 114).

“In many Islamic countries, Muslims still wear an amulet around the neck in which a part of the Koran is recorded to ward off the ‘evil eye.’ ”

According to the Koran (Suras 46:29-35; 72:1-28), Muhammad, on his way back from Mecca, preached to and converted the jinns who, in turn, preached Islam to the masses.

“Thus, the male and female spirits who inhabited the trees, the rocks, and the waters of Arabia were now Muslims and under the control of Muhammad,” writes Morey. “This is a classic form of shamanism in which Muhammad now claimed to be in control of the spirits of the earth.”

Morey reports that Muhammad’s mother Aminah, in fact, often claimed to be visited by jinns: “Muhammad’s mother was involved in what we call today the ‘occult arts,’ and this basic orientation is thought by some scholars to have been inherited by her son.

In fact, it was when Muhammad was in a trancelike state that he’d receive his “divine” visitations and then rise and proclaim what had been “handed down” to him.

“From the description of the bodily movements that were often connected with his trances, many scholars have stated that these were epileptic seizures,” writes Morey. “For example, the Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam, published by Cornell University, points out that the Hadith itself describes ‘the half-abnormal ecstatic condition with which he was overcome.’

“What must be remembered is that in the Arab culture of Muhammad’s day, epileptic seizures were interpreted as a religious sign of either demonic possession or divine visitation.

“Muhammad initially considered both options as possible interpretations of his experience. At first he worried about the possibility that he was demon possessed . . . The bodily characteristics connected with his religious trance seemed even to Muhammad to parallel those of people in his community who would fall down in fits and of whom others would say that they were possessed of devils.

“He became so depressed that he decided to commit suicide. But on his way to the place where he was going to kill himself, he fell once again into a seizure. He experienced another vision in which he felt that he had been told not to kill himself because he was truly called of God.

“Yet even after this religious experience, he still became depressed and filled with doubt.”