I want you to get a picture very clearly in your head. It's a picture of two Southern Baptist preachers discussing how the Atlanta Braves won the World Series. These are men who truly believe in the power of God showing itself in the world, real fire-eating, Bible-thumping, Revivalist preachers. They are sitting in a livingroom, discussing the game the week before.

"And then, when the pitcher threw that strike in the eighth inning!"

"Word! It was like the power of God ran down through his arm!"

"Testify! Jesus be Praised!"

Now read the Osama Bin Laden transcript.

This is what it is to them, the power of God shining into the world. The finest event in many centuries of Islam; the finest event since the Fall of Byzantium. That was the first thing that struck me reading the transcript, that to them it is such a tremendous, unadulterated victory.

There was not one word of regret for the deaths. Not one item of remorse for the souls thrown to the fire like the children to Baal. This is a callousness that the West, by and large, has entirely lost in the last fifty years. Even our most hardened warrior has some trace of feeling for the dead and broken in a war. But Allah, the All-Merciful, rarely speaks to these scum of Mercy. Allah, the All-Beneficent, rarely speaks to them of benefaction. Allah-The Ever-Loving, rarely speaks to them of love.

To them, Allah is the All-Hateful, the God of Horror, the God of Ravening. A God of Blood, more sanguinary than Kali, more bitter than the Demon Orcus. Not a God of Love but a Demon of Terror who revels in souls sacrificed to his honor. In fact, their Allah is nothing more nor less than Satan. And that ought to really tick off most Muslims.

I think I dislike Osama Bin Laden more than is quite understandable. I know why he thinks the way he thinks. This is not a Ted Bundy or a Jeffrey Dalmer, this is a Prophet Of Lovecraftian Terror, a mahdi of murder, a worshipper of some Demon he just calls Allah. As a christian and a believer in a God of the Book, that really ticks me off. He's painted me, by extension, with the same brush. I feel like a German-American in 1945 trying to explain that I really don't like Hitler a bit.

I know something else, this is a guy with a massive ego problem. He thinks he's Mohammed reincarnated and I mean that in the fatwah-justifying sense.

Look at his use of poetry. This goes beyond the normal mullah or sufi, interpreting the words of Mohammed. Osama is making up new theology, whole cloth. And he is doing it in the exact same way that Mohammed did so, up to and including ensuring that all his revered words are recorded, especially on tape. We are, after all, beyond palm leaves.

He thinks he is Mohammed. Or, at the very least, the mahdi. Certainly a latter day prophet. Seeing as he is Sunni, this is at least a minor faux pas; Sunni recognize a single Prophet and His name is Mohammed and his God is Allah.

So first Osama Bin Laden perverts the words of Mohammed by picking and choosing as he wants (look up some of those surahs and see if they don't say something other than what he was saying.) Then he sets himself up as a latter day Prophet.

The heck with Americans tearing him limb from limb, every decent Muslim in the world should be doing so.

And I know something else: I don't think we need to bother having anyone "Testify." He's just damned himself through his own words. Before Man and before any God of the Book. This guy is shortly going to wake up, much to his surprise, in hell.

And I don't think Allah is going to be "all merciful." At all.

Former paratrooper John Ringo's novel "A Hymn Before Battle" (Baen) is now out in paperback. E-mail: abn1508@mindspring.com