Pints With Aquinas - 214: Muhammad Was a FALSE Prophet w/ David Wood

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

In this new episode of Pints with Aquinas, I interview David Wood (popular YouTuber, Evangelical Christian, ex-convict, ex-West Virginia trailer park resident, and all-around awesome dude-with-an-amazing-conversion-story). David has a real passion for apologetics—particularly as it relates to refuting Islam. In this amazing conversation, we pick apart Islam, using Aquinas' writings on Muhammad as our guide. Check out his channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Acts17Apologetics  SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints    Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING  Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show.  LINKS  Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/   SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd Website - mattfradd.com MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx  CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform Website - mattfradd.com  Facebook - facebook.com/mattfradd/  Twitter - twitter.com/mattfradd 

G'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. Today I am joined around the bar table by David Wood from Acts 17 Apologetics to discuss Islam. I don't usually spend a great deal of time reading my guests' bios, but I think it's probably important that you know a little bit about David because we allude to some of the things that have taken place in his past without getting into them, and many of you may not know who he is. First of all, he's got a massive YouTube following, well over 300,000 people. But here's just a little bit about him from Wikipedia. In his video testimony, which I'll link below because I really want you to check it out, he said he was an atheist in his youth, that he had run-ins with the law by breaking into homes and later went as far as smashing his father's head in at the age of 18 in an attempt to kill him.

He believed that morality was merely relative since, you know, there is no God, there is no meaning. Kind of reminds me of a sort of Raskolnikov character from Crime and Punishment. He also said, David, that after the assault on his father, he was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for malicious wounding. And then while in prison, he encountered a Christian named Randy. And anyway, it's a lot on Islam. And anyway, so I just want to kind of give you that he's an evangelical Protestant. So there you go. There's a little bit about David. This was a really, really, really, really, really interesting conversation because David isn't a Catholic. And so in this episode,

I'm going to share with him what Thomas Aquinas has to say about Muhammad. And I stop every other sentence and then kind of let him, you know, talk a little bit about that. So that's what we're going to do. I want to say thank you to Strive21. Strive is a 21-day detox from porn course that I created. It's pretty cool. We have over 17,000 men in the course. We professionally recorded videos every day. Look, that's what I look like without a beard. What do you think about that? I first saw porn when I was eight years old. True story. So check it out, strive21.com. It's 100% free and you can be as anonymous as you want. If you are a man who struggles with porn or lust in any way, please check it out, strive21.com. And then our second sponsor is Halo, which is a Catholic meditation app to help you find peace and grow in your spiritual journey.

So if you want an app to help you with your prayer life, if you get distracted, you know, and you want to get better at praying, check it out. Look at this, a nine-day prayer challenge. That sounds cool, doesn't it? So check them out. Halo.com, there'll be a link below. Click that. If you use the promo code MattFrad, you get access to the entire app. But even if you're not paying for the app, they have content that's updated every day. So I think you'll really enjoy it. I showed my wife when they became a sponsor. She still has it on her phone. She still will do like a nightly examine by listening to the person kind of lead you through this thing. They have sleep stories, all sorts of stuff. So please check them out.

All right. Good. Here is my interview with David Wood. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think below. G'day, David Wood. How are you doing? I'm doing well, Matt. How are you doing? I'm doing well, Matt. How are you?

Doing well. This is the first time we've chatted, and it's an absolute pleasure to have you. I've been really enjoying your channel of late, and a lot of my viewers were really excited when I told them that you'd be on the show. So thanks so much for taking the time. Seems like you have a smart crowd. Yes, a very intelligent group now obviously you've got a really interesting and powerful story which we can't get into now as way of introduction but i'll put the link below so people can go check out your channel they have to watch that that opening video it's absolutely fantastic showed my wife she loved it but uh as way of introduction uh who is who is david wood

um i'm a little bit of everything. A little bit of ex-con, a little bit West Virginia trailer park survivor, a little bit Bronx, a little bit country, a little bit rap, human beatboxing machine. My academic background is in philosophy, Uh, my, my, my academic background is in, uh, is in philosophy, but I ended up, um, focusing a lot on Islam in the area of apologetics over, uh, over the past, I guess, almost two decades, just because my best, my best friend in college was a Muslim and he was trying to convince me that Islam is true. And this is a good segue into our

topic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My best friend in college was Nabil Qureshi. I'm sure a lot of your viewers have heard of him. And Nabil tried to convince me that Islam is true. And I have this I have this habit of not trusting what people tell me because a lot of people have the, I mean, on the one hand, it's reasonable. When we hear, when a Hindu tells me about Hinduism, I don't think he's trying to mislead me or something like that.

Or when someone, a Buddhist tells me about Buddhism, I don't think, oh, he's trying to trick me. But when people are telling me, this is how I know my religion is true, I don't, I'm not just going to believe what you're saying. I want to, I immediately want to go and check your sources. So Nabil would, you know, give us this presentation on amazing scientific insights of Muhammad that couldn't have been known by Muhammad at the time, but were only being confirmed by scientists today. And my reaction was always,

all right, I wanna see it in your source. I wanna see that in your source. I'm not taking your word for this. I wanna see what it actually says. And so I ended up having to buy these collections of Muslim sources. And then as I would read them, I would show Nabeel, actually, wherever you got that from,

it's not actually what Muhammad says here. But look at what he says over here in the same passage. And so it was kind of that sort of situation. And then after several years of that, Nabeel became a Christian. And I thought, cool, I'm done with Islam because that was the only reason I was studying Islam. My best friend was a Muslim. And then sort of watching the stand that Nabil took when backlash started coming upon him, I realized, wow, Muslims make really cool Christians. And there's a reason for that.

They're told all their lives that saying Jesus is Lord is a one-way ticket to hell. They understand that they may have to give up their families or that their families will never want to talk to them again. Or even worse, if someone ever decides to carry out the penalty that Muhammad laid down for apostates, that's death, that's death by beheading. And so, you know, it's easy for someone in the West to become a Christian, even if they don't have a Christian family, because, you know, it's not a huge deal to lots of families. It's a huge deal to Muslims. And so the flip side of that is when a Muslim says, you know what, I've been told all my life

that this will get me sent to hell and I may have to give up my family and I may eventually be killed over this, but you know what, I wanna know Jesus anyway. That's someone who will lay down his life for Jesus. And that's why they can make really awesome Christians. And so at some point I just realized, wow, maybe I'm not done with Islam. Maybe we need to be dealing with this pretty regularly. Now, two questions I have for you is, what did you and Nabil kind of

enjoy doing together to be friends? You've got to have a common interest. Before he was a Christian, other than sparring over the scriptures, what was it that you enjoyed? We had very similar senses of humor. Like, we would be in class together or something like that, and there were just times when a teacher would say something, and Nabeel and I would both start giggling, and I would look around, and no one else in the room thought that it was funny, except me and Nabeel. And it was just like that. I mean, uh, move with the exception of

music. Cause he, he, he liked some weird techno dance stuff that, that I thought was, that I thought was, uh, was, uh, was terrible. Um, but, uh, apart from that, the movies we like, the shows we like, uh, we can sit down and watch, uh, watch, you know, videos for hours. And we like the, we like the same stuff. And we were, you know, from a moral perspective, just, you know, we're, we're both on, we're both in college at the same time. And we didn't want to be doing a lot of the other stuff that a lot of other students were doing. And so we would just, you often end up hanging out together and, you know, and doing stuff like watching videos or getting into an argument or, uh, reading something and then, and then discussing it. So yeah, we're, we're, we had, we had pretty

similar, pretty similar personalities when it, when it came to that kind of stuff. It takes a great deal of courage, doesn't it? To change, uh, you know, your worldview, especially when you think think or you thought that you would go to hell if you were to kind of renounce your particular faith? What was that like seeing him wrestle with that? Because I think so often we treat each other like we're machines, you know, and we give somebody a syllogism and we expect them to spit out the answer and to change their life accordingly. But of course, we're not like that. We're all very invested in different ideas and different beliefs. And it feels sometimes like a tapestry, you know, that if I remove this or if I add this, it's going to absolutely change

everything. And so we're reluctant to, not just our interlocutors who we disagree with, but we too as Christians are sometimes very unwilling to look at our own worldview and the arguments we may have for the particular things we believe. What was that like seeing that in him? Yeah, well, it was interesting and it was a concern for me, too. Right. Because, I mean, I understand this stuff as well. I understand what it's going to do to his family if he leaves Islam. And Nabil had the closest family I'd ever seen in my life. Right. I come from a background of massive where everyone, everyone, everyone, almost everyone in a trailer park has a massively dysfunctional family. I'm talking West Virginia trailer park where I was.

There might be other trailer parks in other places that are completely normal. No offense to other trailer park communities. Because I don't know. I experienced a couple of trailer parks and they were not pretty. There was abuse and everything else going on. But yeah, with Nabil, it's, I mean, the first trip we ever went on. We went on a trip to another school for for for an academic speech and debate competition. We came back and his mom sat there for like five or 10 minutes in the parking lot hugging him because he'd gone away for for for the weekend. And I was thinking, gosh, I got out of prison every day trying to convince this guy that he needs to leave Islam and come to the Lord Jesus Christ.

And if he ever listens to me, if he ever says, you know what, David's right, I'm basically destroying that family in the process. And so, you know, even I knew that. but Nabil knew that, and it was a massive concern. And so it's basically where, you know, like me, I was in a cell, I was in a cell, and life couldn't have been much worse than it was. So at that point saying, hey, wait a minute, should I consider Christianity? It's not like, oh, if I'm wrong, my life is going to get worse. There wasn't many ways that my life could get worse in that situation. But for someone who's a Muslim who says, hey, if I believe in Jesus, what happens? Well, their lives can get worse in a lot of different ways. And so it's basically whereas someone in a really horrible situation might just say, okay, is there some good reason to take Christianity seriously?

And if so, then there's nothing holding me back. But for a Muslim, it's almost like it really has to – the evidence really has to reach some significant threshold because they've got so much at stake. If they're really – if they have serious doubts about Christianity, even if they say, okay, I see that you have good evidence for the resurrection. I see why you guys believe that the New Testament is reliable. I see why you believe that Jesus claimed to be the divine son of God. I see these things. if you're not really sure, if the case isn't strong enough, it's, well, I've got so much to lose by making this decision that I'm going to keep holding off on this until I reach some threshold of assurance on this. Yeah. That's really amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I was in the Middle East. I was invited to go speak in Abu Dhabi, and I spoke at this gigantic Christian conference. Many of the people who were there were from India or the Philippines, a couple of thousand people. But I remember I was kind of proclaiming the gospel up on stage, hearing the call for prayer bellowing at the mosque next door.

And I remember those who invited me said, just do not speak against the prophet. So that's what they call him, though he isn't one. But because they said there might be people from the government there i'm like oh dear goodness gracious this will be fun uh but thankfully abu dhabi of course is a quite a quite a liberal area so it was no problem but i i the last time i did an episode on islam was with a convert to christianity derry a little and somebody from and it was i know this was a muslim from iran got so upset with that that he successfully hacked into my instagram account and took it down and then started posting Saddam Hussein pictures, which was weird. And it took me a couple of months to, about three months to get it back.

So I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens after this episode. Not really. I'm not looking forward to it at all, at all, at all. Hey, before we talk about what's wrong with Islam and we look at what Aquinas had to say about Muhammad, I thought it might be interesting if we just said what you see in Muslims that you appreciate, that you find virtuous, that you wish perhaps Christians could imitate to some degree. Well, there is, you know, one of the reasons that Nabil and I got along so well was we both took our beliefs seriously. And we are both we were both concerned about, you know, issues of eternal significance. Muslims and Christians both believe that there's there's a truth out there that if someone

is right and someone is wrong, that we can get to it. And so right there, right there, there's a massive difference between a lot of other students on college campuses. Many of them don't care. Many of them don't believe that, you know, if there is a truth that you could possibly get to it and don't particularly care one way or another on various moral issues unless you disagree with them on something. Now it's becoming... Now interestingly, back then it wasn't an issue. Everyone seemed like a relativist, whereas now you have to be crushed if you disagree with someone. So they're becoming more moral absolutists nowadays. As I throw this out there and get your take on it, it feels like the modern left are becoming what Christians were criticized of being back in the day, namely preachy, boring, constantly offended. Yeah, yeah.

And so, yeah, absolutely correct. And so it's basically, you know, Muslims take their beliefs seriously, and they still believe in defending what they believe and in criticizing opposing positions. And there's something you can respect about that. Even if you disagree with what they're claiming, you can still respect that more than someone who says, me, you can still respect that more than someone who says, anything anyone believes is fine, or I have to crush you if you disagree with my emotional reactions to things. If you're actually laying down, hey, here's what I believe. Here's why I believe it. Let me explain to you why I believe this and why you should believe this. And let me explain why what you're saying is wrong.

You can respect that, even if you ultimately disagree with their message. All right, absolutely. So just to be clear, like we are not kind of attacking individuals here, but we do think Muhammad was not a prophet. And we do think that while Islam teaches true things, that's not a great deal, doesn't, shouldn't instill within us a great deal of confidence. I mean, Satanism teaches some true things, namely that Satan exists, but this isn't attacking any individual people. But what I wanted to do today is share what Aquinas had to say about Muhammad and then let you kind of talk about each of these points. But first of all, I have to ask, I mean, I'm Catholic, you're evangelical, I think that's how you might term or call yourself. Were you familiar with Aquinas? Have you read much

of him? Did you ever read what he had to say about Muhammad? I'd read his comments before, but yeah, my background's in philosophy. I wasn't a medieval guy, but everyone's going to come across Aquinas in some ways. And so my main focus was on what's called the Bayesian argument from evil. So it's like the most modern developed form of the argument from evil. So basically the argument that, you know, the kinds and degree and variety of evil and suffering we have in the world is evidence against the existence of God. And different philosophers formulate that in different ways. And sort of the latest edition of the argument was, of the argument is a kind of Bayesian argument. And it's cool because those philosophers, even though they're using the argument, they said that all previous versions of the argument. So I kind of focused on that. But even on an issue like this, even in the problem of evil, there's a disagreement among Christian philosophers and theologians. The dispute is, don't want to go too far into it because it's kind of confusing, but it's basically,

it's called theistic personalism versus classical theism. And they view they view Aquinas as sort of the champion of classical theism. And but today, most people would fall, according to this theory, most people would fall into the theistic personalist camp, meaning that we we kind of view God as a person. And keep in mind, we're not talking about the, you know, the persons of the Trinity or something. God is kind of like us, but, you know, much bigger, much more powerful. And so that's how we're thinking of him. And so the claim of people who are using this in the field of the problem of evil is that if you're thinking of God as like a really powerful person, you're almost thinking of him as like a superhero.

And therefore, it makes sense when you're dealing with the problem of evil to think, well, why doesn't God sort of swoop in and fix this? Whereas the classical theists are thinking of God more as like the ultimate source of being that underlies everything else and upholds everything in existence. They're kind of not thinking of him as like a person who's sitting up in the clouds or something like that. And so studied Aquinas there, and then everyone who takes introduction to philosophy usually looks through the five ways and stuff. So basically on a couple of apologetics issues, and then for that issue the the classical theist and uh theistic personalist distinction studied aquinas but yeah other than that i wasn't really a medieval medieval kind of guy i was more modern like you know human descartes and yeah and then all the way up to the to

contemporary i'd love to get a beer with you one day because i think you and i had some similar experiences when we were teenagers i was quite convinced of solipsism as a kid before hearing the term. I remember chatting with my friend Gareth in the library and telling him that I was deeply afraid he wasn't real and that when I went home, he ceased to exist and I'd be none the wiser. He felt bad for me and tried to tell me that he did exist. And I just said, well, that's what you would say. And we didn't get very far. But anyway, speaking of modern philosophy. But you hadn't, had you come across this text from Aquinas? I think, yeah, I think I've seen it in various places.

Not sure where, but like just, you know, online articles and stuff about Islam and stuff like that. All right, well, let's go over it. I've broken this paragraph into five short sentences, some of them two or three sentences, I figure we'll go over them each at a time. So this is from Aquinas. He says, Muhammad seduced the people by promises of

carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free reign to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men. Help us understand that.

Because, I mean, we have a lot of viewers who have no idea about Islam and no idea about Muhammad. So I'm really looking forward to getting your insights on this. And that's actually hard to believe if you kind of look around at the Muslims around you and you think these are very modest people, modestly dressed. What are you talking about? Free reign to the carnal pleasures and stuff like that. What in the world are you talking about? But if you read the Muslim sources and their history, that is, Aquinas is spot on on that one. When Muhammad was declaring himself to be a prophet early on,

his message was basically, hey, there's one God. You pagans have it wrong. You polytheists have it wrong. Us Muslims and the Jews and the Christians, we're all on the same page. There's one God who created all of this. And you need to submit to him. And I'm a prophet. I'm coming to tell you this you know some of his main arguments would be things like listen to the beauty of my words that i'm speaking to you this is clearly the message of god no mere human being could come up with such beautiful and amazing uh messages for you and so on so that was kind of his case and needless to say didn't win a lot of converts yeah it doesn't work when i try and argue with my wife and i use a a lot of converts yeah it doesn't work when i try and argue with my wife and i use a similar line of argumentation she doesn't buy it yeah so it

it didn't work out very well you did have people who converted but not a lot most people thought that was uh that was silly and even even the re even the reason that it looks like a lot of these people converted it seems to have more to do do with there was apparently some level of respect for Jews as somehow being authorities in matters of religion, even in Mecca, because the Quran would sometimes appeal to that, right? Like, hey, you know that the Jews are saying this stuff. You know that the Jews are right about this. And so it seems that he was preaching monotheism in a culture that was becoming increasingly familiar with monotheism and that there were people who were going to get on board with that. But again, he did not win a lot of followers with that message. Once he left Mecca and moved to Medina and had formed

alliances with some other tribes and so on, that's when the message changed, too. I mean, the primary driving force behind conversions, it changed, too. If you join me, we're going to go out, we're going to take everyone's stuff and we're going to take their stuff. And if you die in battle while we're taking their stuff, then you go to heaven. We're getting even more stuff. And a lot of the emphasis was on taking sex captives. And if you go to paradise, then it's this eternal, basically brothel. And you read the Muslim sources and we hear the number, you know, 70 or 72 virgins that you get

in paradise. Some of the sources and some of the commentaries and so on, that's actually the minimum. That's the minimum you get if you're just a regular guy. You can get vastly more. And so they're called virgins because as you have sex with them, later after you're done, Allah restores their virginity miraculously to them

so that you can then have a new virgin the next day. And people were wondering, people were even asking, hey, you know, how are we going to handle all this? How are we going to handle all this sex? And so Muhammad's answer was that Allah is going to give you a supernatural erection so that your penis will never go limp. And so that way you never, you just never get tired. And so you look at this and it's, wait a minute, the Islamic paradise, what Muhammad was calling the people of Arabia too, is an eternity of deflowering virgins. And so... Now, let me ask you this, because I mean, people probably have never heard it put that way. Where are you drawing this from? People might be wondering if you're straw manning the position or just making stuff up whole cloth.

Yeah. The, uh, you, you, you have multiple Muslim sources. So you have the Quran. That is, that's the, that's supposedly the eternal word of God. Supposedly Muhammad had no input into that. Uh, that is just the, with respect to the Quran, Muhammad is basically a mailman. He received it. He passed it on to you.

Uh, but the Quran says thats also have to obey muhammad they have to obey his decisions in surah 4 verse 65 allah says that if you if you disagree with muhammad on anything then you're not a real muslim you have no real islamic faith but throughout the quran you have these promises of these these hord, and it talks about them as having swelling breasts and things like that. But they're your, these maidens that you get in paradise. This gets fleshed out more in the Hadith. And so those will also, you'll find in various Hadith collections, passages, some of them quite disturbing. So you'll occasionally read something like, the wives of Jews and Christians in this world will be transformed into the sex partners

of Muslim men in paradise. So you, Matt, will go to hell, but your wife will be taken by a,will become the sex slave of a Muslim. So it's basically there are different levels of authority in some of these sources, and Muslims have rankings of what are really trustworthy hadiths and what are less reliable. But you kind of find this stuff all over the place. And it's in the tafsirs as well. So basically, if you go to passages of the Quran, which talk about the maidens or huris that you get in paradise, and then you read the commentaries where they fill in some of the views of Muhammad and his companions,

you get some very disturbing pictures of paradise. And you wonder, who would this be appealing? Who would this be appealing? Now, obviously, obviously, we're men, we understand why that would be appealing. But normally, we don't think that's the best part of ourselves, the part of us that's just focused on, you know, common pleasure. Yeah, that's it. Like, that's the most important thing. So to make that the sort of key feature of paradise is focusing. It's like you're saying, hey, guys, I mean, if you look at what Muhammad did, he's going around. It's robbing, taking people's property, taking women as sex captives and sex slaves, and then you're making heaven one big version of that. And we're looking at that going, who is this appealing to? It's like he's saying, hey, guys, what are the lowest, most animalistic parts of you? Those are the parts I want to focus on. And the better parts of you, the things that are focused on the eternal and so on,

yeah, those are kind of important too, but not as important as this stuff. Yeah, it's interesting. It's kind of like when you're a child or you're growing into a teenager, you might think that heaven is like basically playing computer games and having sex and getting drunk at parties. But as you grow older, you realize that this isn't what we were made for. This doesn't satisfy the deepest parts of ourselves. So there might be good things to them. Wow. You just gave me an awesome idea for a video. Yeah. A video in which a prophet comes along and tries to win over lots of young people by saying it's an eternity of playing Call of Duty and then a bunch of people convert. And it's really kind of a parody of Muhammad.

If you ever see that, if you ever see it, Muslims who are watching, if you ever see me come out with a video, Matt came up with that idea. That was his. That was his idea. Right. But then as you grow older, you know, you start to think, well, OK, there might be some good things to those things. But I've tasted of that. I've engaged in this. And, you know it might leave me empty or at least not as fulfilled as i could be right so so that that's that's fair enough this this leads us to the the second line here from aquinas he says now as for proofs of the truth of his doctrine he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the

natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity. He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration, for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth. Yeah. So along the lines of, uh, Muhammad only bringing forth, you know, arguments and proof, which would, you know, appeal to a kind

of modest kind of wisdom, uh, again, his sort of, uh, go-to argument early on was what you might call the argument from literary excellence. Look at how amazing my poetry is. Therefore, it's from God, which is, you know, if you're in a society that really appreciates that, you might think, wow, this is, you know, this is really good stuff or something like that. Whereas if you're thinking about it a little more, wait a minute, you know, Mozart is great. It wouldn't make much sense to say, hey, look at how wonderful Mozart's music is. Therefore, it's the inspired music of God. Something strange about that. So you had points like that. You had throughout the Quran sort of appeals to natural theology saying, hey, you know, look at the world. This is obviously created by God. theology saying, hey, you know, look at the world. This is obviously created by God.

But. Yeah, if you if you if you if you're looking for supernatural signs, if you're looking for supernatural signs that would confirm his confirm him as a prophet, their things get much, much shakier. His you I'm trying to be careful here because Muslims are going to disagree with this. Aquinas is right. Muhammad didn't come with any supernatural signs except the Quran, according to the Quran. According to the Quran, Muhammad's only miracle, miraculous sign was the Quran itself. Muslims today will reject that because they're believing later sources. And basically in the Hadith, you have all kinds of miracles of Muhammad. But, you know, the Sira literature starts more than a century after the time of Muhammad, and the Hadith collections come a century after that. And so the passages that Muslims are normally thinking of in terms of Muhammad performing a miracle are basically two centuries after the time of Muhammad.

And it's in a context where Muslims have been going out talking to Jews and Christians saying, hey, you need to believe in our prophet. And Jews and Christians would say, what miracles did he perform? And saying, none, it's just the Koran. Look at the lovely Arabic calligraphy. And that wasn't persuasive to Jews and Christians at all. You know, the Jews are thinking, wait, Moses part of the Red Sea. What'd your guy do? Wrote, wrote, you know, well, he couldn't even write, but you eventually wrote it.

What, what is this mess? And Christians are thinking, well, Jesus walked on water and, you know, raised the dead. What, what did your guy do? He came out with a book. So that's weird. Anyway, long story short, people started coming out with all kinds of miracle stories of Muhammad. You know, people were thirsty. He shoots water out of his fingers, things like that. So the stories are late, but

you have to really press this issue with Muslims. You have to go through the Quran and show all the passages where over and over and over again, Muhammad is challenged on why he can't perform any miracles. And the answers are, well, people in the past were given miracles and they didn't believe them. Or, you know, isn't it enough that I brought the Quran? That's all you need. And so it's always a lot. And keep in mind, this is the word of Allah. Allah is constantly offering excuses and explanations as to why Muhammad can't perform any miracles like prophets who came before him. And that only makes sense if Muhammad wasn't performing miracles, right? It doesn't make any sense if people say, hey, why can't Muhammad perform miracles?

It doesn't make any sense to say because earlier generations saw miracles and they didn't see them. The response, if Muhammad were actually doing these miracles that we read about in later Muslim sources, the response should have been, what are you talking about? He's performing miracles all the time. But that's what you don't find out. performing miracles all the time. But that's what you don't find out. Now, the couple of exceptions here are that Muslims will say that the Quran talks about Muhammad's night journey, where he's taken supernaturally to Jerusalem to visit the heavens and so on. But the problem there is, even according to Muslim passages, I mean, even according to later Muslim commentaries and Hadith collections that comment on the night journey, it was some sort of vision. He wasn't

physically taken there. He was in his bed. So there's no way to verify that the Quran is claiming anything miraculous about that in the sense that we're thinking about miracles. miraculous about that in the sense that we're thinking about miracles. And the other is you have the claim that Muhammad split the moon, but the Quran itself, so that in the Hadith, you have this claim that Muhammad split the moon in half and that everyone saw it and that this was a miracle. In the Quran, there's a vague passage that talks about the end and it says, the moon is cleft asunder. And they say, aha, that's a miracle. Problem is in the actual Quran passage, it doesn't say anything about Muhammad doing anything or this having to do anything, this having anything to do with

Muhammad. And even if you read Muslim commentaries, Muslim commentaries will say, no, this is talking about a sign of the end times or something like that. And so the only things that Muslims can point to in the Quran, as far as Muhammad doing something miraculous, are very vague and indefensible. The only miracle the Quran clearly claims for Muhammad is the miracle of the Quran. And so the entire case for Muhammad bringing any supernatural sign would come down to whether the Quran is supernatural. And the Quran's argument for itself is that its literary quality is so amazing that it could only come from God. And I don't think that's, I don't think Aquinas is going to accept that as supernatural. Because notice,

the problem with this is, you'd have to say that the Quran, I mean, what is the Quran? It's a collection of words arranged in an order to convey some kind of meaning. You'd have to say that the Quran, I mean, what is the Quran? It's a collection of words arranged in an order to convey some kind of meaning. You'd have to say that a human being could not arrange words in that order. And that's where everything breaks down. What do you mean? A human being can arrange words in any order we want. At what point can you say, you know what, a human being could not arrange words in this order. And so even on his face, the argument is silly. If you actually read the Quran, it's, my goodness, what a train wreck this book is. It's completely disorganized. Almost every passage you quote to a Muslim, they'll say,

that's not what it means. So Allah was just apparently a horrible communicator. You read these passages, they'll talk about, you know, you can beat your wives into submission. You say, Muslims, what does that mean? They say, oh, what it really means is something completely different. And so it's just this constant, Allah couldn't say what he meant, and it's all disorganized, and you can't figure out which passage cancels out this other passage. You don't know the historical background, the historical context. You can't understand it. The idea that this is so amazing that it can only come from God, yeah, I can see why Aquinas would think that Muhammad didn't come with any supernatural signs or miracles. This also, there should be a name for this fallacy. Maybe you know of it. The sort of heads I win, tails you lose fallacy, where it's essentially, don't you see this proves God is the author of it because it's so beautiful.

And if I agree with you, then you win. But if I disagree with you, well, the problem's not with the text. The problem must be with you because you're not sophisticated enough to see just how brilliant it is. I'm sure that's part of what you get. Well, yeah. And that's that's the thing. Muslims set themselves up as the judges of this contest. Right. When, according to the Koran, it's a it's a challenge for unbelievers. You you see if you can produce something like this. And if you can't, you have to acknowledge that it's the word of God. But now notice, Muslims put themselves up as the judge because people immediately started trying to meet that challenge, right? There was a guy who followed Muhammad around. His name was al-Nadr.

And Muhammad would get up and recite his revelations, and al-Nadr would stand up after him. Poor guy. Give his own poetry. Give his own poetry. And then say, you guys tell me, in what way is Muhammad's poetry better than mine? And so he's attempting to meet this challenge. The response was, as soon as they captured him in battle, they killed him.

They sold almost all of the other captives back for ransom, except this guy. They killed him. except this guy, they killed him. But you have people, there's a website called Asura Like It where a bunch of people have made surahs like this. There's an entire book called The Truth For Khan, which imitates the style of the Quran, but gives it a Christian message.

And there have been people who will stand up on a bus in the Middle East and open The Truth For Khan and read from it. And Muslims are getting off the bus going, thank you for reading the Quran to us today. So they apparently can't tell the difference. And so, yeah, the bottom line is they say, hey, here's the miracle. And if you say that sounds like a that doesn't sound all that impressive to me, it doesn't sound like something that a human being couldn't come up with. They say, well, you just well well, you're not sophisticated enough to understand it, or you're biased, or you just hate Islam. And so no matter what you say, you lose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, when it comes to Christianity, C.S. Lewis revivified that

argument, either God or a bad man, the Lord, liar, lunatic. We could add legend, right? I suppose we could also add possessed, kind of given our Christian worldview. Now, when I think of someone like Joseph Smith, right, who the founder of Mormonism, I can't agree with his claim to be a prophet. So I could perhaps say he's a liar. I could say he's a lunatic. I could say he's a legend.

I could say he's possessed. I can't think of any other option. What would you say about Muhammad? Have you given that much thought? I'd say that's actually how I break it down. When someone asks me, you know, who was Muhammad? What was he? Was he possessed? Did these revelations have merely human origin? Was he insane? Was he a prophet? Those are normally the categories you normally look at. One, do these revelations have a purely human origin? Two, since we're Christians, we can talk about a darker source of the revelations.

And then three, what evidence do you have that this is actually from God, that he's actually a prophet. And you see a lot of reasons in those first two categories to think that either his revelations have a human origin or a darker origin. So as far as, you know, the human revelation, just, you know, that appealing to people's carnal desires, that seems like a classic cult tactic. You have things like that. You have Muhammad constantly plagiarizing things that are now in the Quran that we can find in earlier sources. And I don't mean earlier reliable sources. I mean, sources that we know were later fabrications. And Muhammad doesn't seem to be able to tell the difference between, you know, a fifth or sixth century source that clearly made things up that no historian on the planet would take seriously, and actually quoting the Torah or the Gospel, where according to Islam, those are revelations. Muhammad is talking about the Torah and the Gospel, but doesn't seem to be aware of the

difference between a fifth century heretical or just fictitious forgery or something like that. Doesn't seem to be able to understand the difference between that and the actual Torah and gospel. And so as far as human origin, yeah, just he's getting these sources from places where we know the source. We know this comes from the Arabic infancy gospel. We know where this comes from. We know where that comes from. Looks like he's just taking these things and incorporating them into his religion. A lot of the just weird teachings he has, like, you know, if a fly falls into your food, make sure you dunk the fly because one wing has a disease, but the other wing has the cure for the disease. He seems to be obsessive compulsive about how Muslims have to groom themselves. He put them on a schedule of how frequently they needed to take care of their armpit hair, pluck their pubic hair and things

like that. He just had them on this schedule. He would tell them how many stones they had to wipe themselves with after they go to the bathroom. He would tell them which foot to step into the bathroom first. He would tell them how they had to go to the bathroom. You have to squat to pee and things like that. So just, it seems like obsessive compulsive. So it seems like a problem there. So you look at that kind of stuff and you say, this just looks like a guy who had some issues and he's there in seventh century Arabia. And you take everything that's going on around him in seventh century Arabia. You had the pagans and their religious practices, which were things like taking a pilgrimage to the Kaaba, walking circles

around the Kaaba, bowing down to the Kaaba. They had those practices. You've got some teachings of various heretical Christian groups, because I think it was Justinian, the Roman emperor had expelled heretics and a lot of them went to the Middle East. And so a lot of heretical people with weird books came to the Middle East. And then you have, of course, Jewish monotheism and the claims of not only the Torah, but also the what became the teachings of the Talmud and so on. You find all of the, it's like Muhammad took all of this and rolled it up into a big ball and said, this is, this is the new religion. So all of that looks like a human origin. But when you get into this, you get into the spiritual stuff, you know, as Christians, we would say, well, you had Jesus and he taught various things and his, his disciples

were with him for a few years. But the takeaway message that the gospel that they went out and preached was a message about his death, his death, his resurrection and his deity. That's the takeaway message, the gospel that they went out and preached, was a message about his death, his resurrection, and his deity. That's the takeaway in the book of Acts and in their letters. Guys, you've got to get this down. He's the divine son of God who died on the cross for sins and rose from the dead. So that's the takeaway message according to the apostles. But we're also told false teachers, false prophets are going to arise. What are they going to do?

They're obviously going to lead you away from that. And then you get down to the time of Muhammad, and you look at what Muhammad teaches. It's basically, hey, you Christians, you believe in God? You believe in one God? So do I. You believe that Jesus is the Messiah? So do I. You believe Jesus performed all kinds of miracles, including raising the dead?

So do I. You believe Jesus is going to dead? So do I. You believe Jesus is going to return? So do I. I agree with you on almost everything. Virgin birth, miracles. We agree on all of this stuff. Except these three little things. He's not the divine son of God.

He didn't die on the cross and he didn't rise from the dead. Now, if we can just get past those three little things, we're totally on the same page. So the Christian perspective would be, my goodness, we've been waiting for you because you're like the ultimate perfect example of a false prophet. Agree with you on all kinds of things, except the very heart of the gospel, and then try to lead people and keep people away from that heart of the gospel. So that doesn't seem just random, you know, absorbing teachings. That actually seems like the classic biblical perspective on a false prophet. Yeah. And then in addition to that, you've got some spiritual issues. You might say

that Muhammad, when he first starts receiving revelations in the cave, his first impression was that he was demon possessed. So he becomes demon possessed. He tries to hurl himself off a cliff. Whatever he encountered actually stops him from jumping off a cliff. And Muhammad goes home to his wife and he's freaking out. He's saying, cover me, cover me, basically hide me from this thing that's chasing me. And it's his wife and her cousin who convince him that he's not possessed. They weren't in the cave. They have no idea what he encountered. But they convince him that he's not a, you know, he's not possessed. He's a prophet of the almighty. And so that doesn't, I mean, you know, there's something to say about first impressions. Yeah. Sometimes your first impression is the correct one. You've got people who didn't encounter whatever he encountered and they're telling him that what he thought was demonic possession is actually, uh, is actually an angel from God. So you have that, you have the infamous story of the satanic verses, where Muhammad was longing for some sort of revelation that would help his tribe convert to Islam, because they viewed him as a joke. And so he wanted some revelation that would

convince them to convert to Islam. And finally, he got a revelation saying that Muslims could pray to three pagan goddesses, Allat, Alusa, and Manat. And so it's basically these are, it calls them the exalted cranes. So they're these birds. And the idea is that Allah, he's way up there. And so you can pray to these three pagan goddesses, and they're like birds that will carry your prayers up to Allah. So Muhammad delivered this as part of the Quran, this new revelation from the Quran that you could now pray to the pagan goddesses of his tribe. And you're good because they're just going to carry your prayers to Allah. So Allah is still supreme. They're just these extra goddesses.

And so he delivered this to his followers. His followers bowed down in honor of the new revelation. and so he delivered this to his followers his followers bowed down in honor of the new revelation and the pagans bowed down in honor of the revelation too because they were excited that muhammad was now promoting their goddesses well muhammad comes back a little later and he says that the devil tricked me into doing that he says i was receiving the revelation from the angel gabriel when satan stepped in gave me those verses and and convinced me to recite those. Now, bare minimum there, Muhammad couldn't tell the difference between the revelation from God and the revelation from Satan. He couldn't tell the difference between being inspired by Gabriel and being inspired by Satan. And so that should be disturbing. But so that's the satanic verses. You have another time in

Muhammad's life where a magician got a hair from his hairbrush and used it to cast a spell on him that lasted somewhere between six months and two years. But he's basically walking around in a state of delusion, claiming that he'd done things that he hadn't, gave him delusional thoughts and false beliefs. And finally, he snaps out of it and says that, you know, he'd been under a magic spell, which if you're God's last and greatest prophet, it just kind of seems that people shouldn't be able to take you out like that just by getting a hair from your hairbrush.

Then you have the way that Muhammad is receiving his revelations. I mean, it sounds like something out of The Exorcist when he's being inspired. He'd be on the floor, his face would turn red, he'd start pouring down sweat and stuff like this as he's receiving his revelations. So put all that together, it looks like you definitely have a lot to be uh concerned about

as far as is there a spiritual dimension here where muhammad is being used as a puppet by darker forces so you consider the first option the second option and the third option is what is you know what are the arguments for islam and again the the core argument, Muhammad's main argument is this argument from literary excellence. Now, I just wanted to read a quick, short chapter of the Quran to show people what we mean here when we talk about the Quran challenging people to bring a single chapter, like one chapter that we read in the Quran. Let me read this short chapter. So this is an entire chapter of the Quran. Some chapters are very long long You go towards the end, they're pretty short So this is a short one at the end

In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful Say, O ye that reject faith I worship not that which ye worship Nor will ye worship that which I worship And I will not worship that which ye have been wont to worship Nor will ye worship that which I worship To you be your way and to me be mine That's an entire chapter of the Quran Now a Muslim a Muslim is going to say, ah, but it only

works in Arabic. Well, guess what? You can read that in Arabic too. That's what it sounds like, right? It doesn't sound that impressive. The idea that a human being is incapable of writing something like that. Again, this would be like fans of Eminem or something coming out and saying, Eminem's raps are the inspired raps of God. And then Jay-Z's fans say, no, Jay-Z's raps are better. And then Eminem's fans say, okay, well, let's put Jay-Z up against Eminem and you'll see that Eminem's are better. Oh, by the way, us fans of Eminem, we're the judges of the contest. That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. That's exactly what Muhammad did. fans of Eminem, we're the judges of the contest.

That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. That's exactly what Muhammad did. That's how it's set up in Islam, that if you don't agree, the Muslims are the judges, and they'll just say you're biased. And so it's a very, very strange argument. Doesn't seem like it comes from the same God who came with parting the Red Sea and

raising the dead and things like that. All right. Well, thank you. So Aquinas says just that, that he performed no miracles. We have two more parts here. So here's, here's the, here's the first on the contrary says Aquinas, Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms.

And I like this line. It's almost like a offhanded sarcastic jab here. He says, which assigns not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. Yeah. And he says, I'm going to steal that one. Yeah.

What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and tyrants. Yeah, that's good. I'm going to steal that one. Yeah. What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning. Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teachings, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms.

Now, I just want to pause a moment because as I'm reading this, I have no doubt that we're going to have some viewers who are like, this is how could you possibly speak this way about our Muslim friends? And I guess I'm just kind of curious as to where this comes from. It might be a sort of religious indifferentism that we've kind of fallen into, you know, basically all religions are teaching the same thing. Maybe it's because we've witnessed legitimate discrimination and bigotry towards our Muslim friends or compatriots. And to that, we would condemn that.

As Christians, we're supposed to love our enemies and wouldn't even consider Muslims our enemies, but we're supposed to love them. But to allow somebody to believe something which is false is not a loving thing. And so, again, even though we kind of said this at the top, to criticize a person's religion is not to criticize them necessarily. And it's certainly not to sort of demonize them or dehumanize them in any way. Yeah.

I mean, and if you look, you actually have this pattern laid down in the Bible. If you were being oppressed, Jesus was coming to help you, right? If you were oppressed, Jesus was there to defend you against the oppressors. But if you were an oppressor, he was coming down on you hard, right? I mean, especially religious oppressors, people who are leading people astray. I mean, gosh, read about his interactions with the scribes and Pharisees. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. He calls them whitewashed tombs. He calls them brood of vipers.

He calls them snakes. He calls them, I mean, he really, really insults them. If he had a YouTube channel, those clips would have went way up. Yeah, he was, I mean, savage, savage. Savage. With his takedown. Destroys. Yeah, and so, you know, as Christians, we think, ah, but look how loving Jesus was.

That's how you should be treating everyone and everything. And if you look a little closer, no. If you were an oppressor who was oppressing other people, especially a religious oppressor, Jesus was coming to pick a fight with you. And he was not going to be nice about it. And if we think, okay, religious oppressors are fair game for criticism and rebuke and even insults, right? Even insulting them, Even mocking them.

When Jesus says, you know, you strain out a gnat but swallow a camel, he's making fun of them, right? Because these guys, they would actually strain out their water. They would put a cloth over their water to strain it out to make sure they didn't accidentally swallow a tiny little gnat, which is an unclean animal. And he's saying, look at the stuff you're doing. You're straining out the gnat, but you're swallowing this giant camel, which would have been on the big end of unclean animals. So that's just mocking them. You guys are so obsessed with

all this meticulous little stuff and you're missing these much bigger issues. How are you so dumb? Right. So he's even to the point where he's mocking them. So as Christians, we should be thinking, yes, if groups are being oppressed, if people are saying, hey, we're going to go out and kill these people or something like that, yes, we should be ready to defend them. But if we say, okay, in Christianity, no, oppressive, hypocritical, religious leaders, we go after those guys. Well, guess what? Muhammad's the supreme example of that, right? He's the supreme example. There is no higher example of a religious oppressor and hypocritical religious leader who's leading people astray. There is no higher example than Muhammad. So it's basically, if it's ever okay to criticize and condemn a hypocritical religious

leader, then it's okay with Muhammad. Well, we know from the Bible, it is okay in certain circumstances. And therefore you have to say it's okay to do with Muhammad. And so when Aquinas points this stuff out, it's, you know, he's right on the money. He's right in line with scripture, I would say. Let's just kind of conclude his paragraph here.

He says, nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness. On the contrary, he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law. It was therefore a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity. It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly. All right.

So you had a few issues there. You had the issue of Muhammad coming in, you know, coming in the power of his arms. And he's been called the prophet of the sword. But Muhammad said in the Hadith, he said, my livelihood is under the shade of my spear. In other words, that's how I make a living, by going out and fighting. Muhammad said that I have been made victorious with terror. That's in their most trusted collection of narrations from Muhammad, that's Sahih al-Bukhari. But he said, I have been made victorious with terror. That's in their most trusted collection of narrations from Muhammad, that's Sahih al-Bukhari. But he said, I have been made victorious with terror.

Terror was his weapon of choice in triumphing over his enemies. And when Muslims would win a battle, it was, you see, Allah sent us help and he gave us victory. If they lost a battle, it was, oh, we lost the battle because, you know, someone did something wrong, and it's

that person's fault that Allah is not blessing us in victory. But Allah is clearly behind Muhammad going out and violently subjugating Arabia. And the goal was the violent subjugation of the entire world. Muhammad said he'd been given a vision where he was shown the entire world and that Islam had achieved victory and controlled all of it. So yeah, that was the goal. And the means was actually going out, marching and fighting. And winning those victories was a sign that God was on your side, unless you lost, in which case it was evidence that God was mad at you over something. I just want to kind of interject here, because no doubt when you criticize Islam, I'm sure you have many people who say, look, I can say the same thing about Christianity. And that was an example that you just brought up that I thought, well, that's kind of true of the Jews too.

Like when we read the Old Testament, if they won, they attribute it to God's blessing. If they didn't, they attribute it to God's punishment. So if you're going to argue that against Islam, how is that not an argument against God's chosen people? Oh, well, I'm not using that as an argument against Islam. It makes sense if you really believe you're doing something for God and you're successful. It makes sense to think, you see, God blessed what I did. And if something goes wrong, it's to think, oh, God's upset over something. I mean, as far as Muslims will use this as evidence. Look, Muhammad won this battle.

Muhammad won this battle. Well, what happened when he lost a battle? Oh, well, you know, God was mad at him or something that that can't be used as evidence. And I would say, I would say not from Jews, not from Christians, not from Muslims. It's being, because again, it's put forward. Look, the Muslims were totally outnumbered at the Battle of Badr. There were three times as many unbelievers as there, and yet they won. Clearly, clearly, Muslims won that because Allah had blessed them, not because Muhammad promised that anyone who died in that battle was immediately going to paradise, where he's going to get his virgins and so on It must just be because

Because Allah helped them. Well, what happened to the next battle the Battle of Uhud where Muslims were crushed? Oh, it's because you know Allah was mad at them over something So yeah, you can you can believe all of that But as far as using this you see God is God is with us God is with us and because they really Muslims really look a lot to the early stages of Islam, where Muhammad conquers Arabia, and then his companions conquer more. And then, you know, over the next couple centuries, they go all the way across northern Africa, up into Europe, in the West. And then in the East, they go all the way out until they're, you know, they're in India,

you know, in the centuries there. So look at that miraculous spread of Islam. It must be, it must be true. And the question there is, well, what happens when it stops? And it gets stopped. Oh, because, you know, Allah was mad at us because we weren't, uh, you know, we weren't, we weren't enforcing Islamic law the way we should. So he's not blessing us anymore. Um, well, you can always see that point is yeah no evidential value yeah yeah well hey as what do you how do we how do we love i got a couple of questions i want to know uh do you have muslims who write to you and say that your channel is actually helping them and then i want to ask you like what we can do in our daily life many of us aren't in relationship

with muslims uh should we be seeking those relationships out? Should many of us kind of spend a lot of time reading the Quran and delving into this sort of apologetics? How do we lovingly help our Muslim friends, if we do have friends who are Muslim, to come and see the error of Islam and the truth of Christ? Yeah, I encourage people one not there is this tendency in the west now to think that it's mean or offensive to talk to people about their religion

and so on and it's just it's just nonsense and it's not true even especially if muslims come from a different cultural background where they haven't been here like three or four generations if they're if they came if their family came more recently, they love to talk about this stuff, right? And I want to tell Christians, your average Muslim would love to talk to you about Islam, right? But he's sort of absorbing the idea that this is offensive to Westerners, and so you don't talk about this stuff, right? So your average Muslim is a little bit nervous about talking about stuff, too. But but he would love to. He would love to tell you about religion one, because if he believes that Islam is the truth, he's supposed to reach out. And you can even quote that to Muslims. You can say, look, Sir, 16 verse 125 commands you to invite all to the way of to the way of Allah.

So why aren't you why aren't we having a discussion right now? My book commands me to preach the gospel. Your book commands you to invite me to Islam. Why are we why are we walking past each other every day? You can actually bring that up as a as a as a little intro. But so, one, if Muslims take the religion seriously, then they'll want to share Islam with you. But two, they really believe that we've all been manipulated into thinking that all Muslims are terrorists. And so they believe that the media have manipulated us by constantly focusing on the terrorist attacks and things like that, that, you know, we think all Muslims are like that or something. So they would love to talk to you about their religion. And so if you know that, then it's pretty easy to start a conversation with a Muslim. You just say, hey, you know, I've seen some, you know, I've seen some stuff about Islam and, you know, some YouTube videos or something like that. But I'd be interested in hearing from an actual, you know, from a Muslim, having a Muslim explain Islam to me. So I just wonder, can you sit down and tell me what you believe? And for a first conversation like that, I would I would just listen and listen and listen and listen, listen, ask questions.

And I would ask kind of I tell people to focus a lot on on what questions like what what do you believe about this? What do you believe about God? What do you believe about Muhammad? What do you believe about Jesus? What do you believe about the Quran? What do you believe about the Bible? And then after you've covered all the main bases there, then to kind of transition into why questions. Well, why do you believe that about God? Why do you believe that about Muhammad? Why do you believe that about the Bible? Why do you believe that about Jesus? Why do you believe these things? Because at that point, you start getting some reasons. You start getting their reasons or any arguments that they might have for their position. And if it's someone that you know, you're going to be seeing over, over and over again, like a classmate or a coworker or neighbor

or something like that. First conversation, I'd probably leave it at that. I would probably leave it with, you know, getting those reasons, getting what the person believes and getting those reasons why. And then I would, I would say, Hey, well, it's interesting that you gave me some reasons why you believe this stuff. Would you mind if I went and looked into some of this? Would you mind if I went and looked into some of this and then got back to you if I have any more questions? And think about this.

Most Muslims are going to be thrilled that you're looking into this stuff, right? It's like a Christian. I mean, Christian, imagine someone comes up to you and asks you about Christianity. Oh, yeah. And you tell them what you believe, and you tell them that Jesus rose from the dead. Imagine that person says, oh, would you mind if I went and looked into this a little more and come back to you with some questions? You'd think, wow, this is awesome, right?

Well, guess what? A Muslim's going to be happy to continue that conversation. But then, now that the person has given you his or her specific reasons for believing in Islam, lots of people are always worried. They look at all the different sources Muslims have, and they're just, where do I begin? I mean, the Hadith are these massive, multi-volume collections of sources and so on.

Where do you get started going through that stuff? But notice, once a person has given you specific reasons on why they believe certain things, well, then now you know exactly what you have to study, right? You have to study those particular reasons. So it narrows your focus. And then you, you know, you spend a week studying that issue and then getting back to the Muslim. And notice this is, this is, this is kind of built for getting into the gospel because you've asked the Muslim what he believes about Jesus, what he believes about the Bible. And so you now have an opportunity to come back and, hey, you

know, I was looking at what you said about Jesus and I just had a couple more questions for you because Jesus said right here and Jesus said right there. And so how do you reconcile that? Oh, your Bible's been corrupted. Well, now I have a couple more questions. Why does the Quran tell Christians to judge by the gospel if the gospel has been corrupted? And so you can, it's sort of, by the gospel if the gospel's been corrupted what's and so you can it's sort of it's it's much less difficult than than people think yeah yeah that's really good do you have many muslims reaching out to you and telling you that your channel's been helping them uh lots um yeah i posted i posted sort of video compilations of comments from muslims who left islam after watching my videos and some of them videos. And some of them don't

be some of them don't become Christians. Some of them say, hey, you know, I left Islam and I'm an agnostic now or I'm an atheist now because you kind of have a couple of different reactions that you do occasionally have a Muslim who leaves Islam and becomes like a Hindu or something like that. But it's rare when when Muslims leave Islam, it's generally atheist, agnostic category, or Christian, because those are the options. Because what you have here is, when a Muslim leaves Islam, he either just doesn't trust people telling him about religious matters anymore, and so he becomes an atheist, or he says, I don't trust Muhammad anymore, but I still believe Jesus spoke the truth. I still believe in God. I still believe in revelation. I still believe in all of these things. And so not not a very difficult step to becoming a Christian in that situation. But yeah, let me let me put it this way. This was probably

maybe four or five years ago. But I would I would get up and I would I would skim through my comments from the day on YouTube. And when someone said, hey, you know, I left Islam after watching your videos, I take a I take a screenshot of it and then I would post it on Facebook. And just by sort of skimming the comments in the morning, I was able to post between one and three per day every day for over a month just from just from people who are leaving Islam daily. And it was just basically too time consuming. It's time consuming to go through comments. But now, I mean, yeah, every time I actually focus on that and I look around, I can find tons of it. It's basically

once you have a ton of videos, it's very time consuming to go through. You need an assistant who just does that for their job. I'm sure you could find some folks who'd be willing to do that pro bono. Yeah. But yeah. So, so, so more recently I would, I would, I would do it in a particular video. I would, I would say, I say, I'm just going through the comments on this one video that I posted the other day. And you would get like 10 or 12 people who say they left Islam just in the comment section of one video. So that's something that Christians really need to get their minds around. If you have a heart for reaching Muslims, or even if you don't, you're just concerned about the spread of Islam and the

impact that that can have on the world. There has never been a time, there has never been a better time in history to deal with it than right now. There's never been a better time to reach Muslims than right now. It's so true. I mean, Aquinas' text has not reached more people than your videos. How's that for humility? Yeah, that shows who the better thinker is. That's right. But yeah, I mean, if you think about it, right, for 14 generations, you basically had the Muslim world and the Christian world. And they were fairly, you had some interactions along the way, but they were fairly religiously segregated, right? You went to the Muslim world, almost everyone you ran into was a Muslim. You went to the Christian world, almost everyone you ran into was a Christian.

And in the Muslim world, their leaders could insulate their people from ever hearing any sort of serious presentation of the gospel and for from ever hearing any criticisms of their religion or ideology and so the people were just never even exposed to a serious presentation of the gospel or serious critique of islam yeah and that's that that's that's been going on for 14 centuries all of a sudden we get down to our time and you and you you and i could talk to mus right now through YouTube, through other platforms. You can talk to a Muslim in Saudi Arabia through Facebook on your cell phone. I mean, this is the most dramatic shift, apart from maybe the invention of the printing press, is one of the most amazing dramatic shifts in history as far as sharing information. And so right now you've got the entire Muslim world that's been kept hidden and isolated from this information for centuries.

And now we have the information that they need that's been kept from them. And we have the ability to share it with anyone who has an Internet connection. And we have the ability to share it with anyone who has an Internet connection. And so, my goodness, it's like the Almighty is saying, hey, I'm giving you everything you need to reach Islam and to reach Muslims. I'm putting it all on your hands. I could not possibly make this any easier for you. Wow. Why would you not want to take advantage of that? If you haven't yet created a video that invites

Christians to prayerfully consider whether or not it is that our Father is calling us to evangelize our Muslim friends, please do that. You, you do it. Yeah, I've got videos where I talk about this awesome situation, but yeah, I could probably make it clear. Because it's such a great point. Yeah, I've got videos where I talk about this awesome situation, but yeah, I could probably make it clear. Because it's such a great point. It's such a great point. Like, since we love, we're being called to love people, and since we want people to come and know Jesus Christ, then we could dedicate some time or a significant portion of our lives to reaching out to our Muslim fellows, you know?

Yep. And it always surprises me that people get converted over YouTube videos. I also get lots of comments from people who are saying that they've left atheism or whatever, they've become a Christian or something like that. I always say to myself, I have not once been moved by a YouTube video, so I almost find it hard to believe that people are having their lives changed.

But I mean, there's always a new crop of hundreds of thousands of people who have certain questions about certain things. And I think the Holy Spirit can use our videos absolutely to help people. Yeah. And I think I think you're in the situation where you've already studied a lot of this stuff in the past. And I'm in a situation where I've already I've already studied all these things. So it's hard to it's hard to, you know, make a persuasive case to us. That's right. You know, that on stuff we we haven't covered before but it for lots of people who have been raised in a in a certain environment and they've

never been exposed to stuff and all of a sudden you know the first reaction is this he this can't be right there's no way what this guy's saying is true it is it's impossible but we're you know i'm giving references and stuff right where you can go look at something then they go look it up oh my goodness and then you it's with mus Muslims. It's like this light switch moment. Like, at first, it's no, you can't be telling the truth. No, you must be lying. No, I hate you. Things like that. be right. My leaders have never told me any of this. If they've been hiding, if they've been hiding this information from me, what else are these guys hiding from me? And sort of that's, that's that light switch moment where, wait a minute, I can't simply mindlessly trust what my religious leaders have told me. I need to look into this for myself. And that's that when they start looking into it, that, you know, for themselves, that's when really cool things happen.

start looking into it for themselves, that's when really cool things happen. Final question. Why is it that the left, if we can use that term, have a sort of sympathy for Islam? It would seem to me that the left, who is pro-homosexual marriage and all this stuff, would be very much opposed to Islam as well as Christianity, but even perhaps more so Islam. Why is it that, do you think, because I actually can't figure it out, that it seems that we want to talk about Islamophobia and these sorts of things.

But, yeah. Any guesses? Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, if you look at the ideologies, I mean, Islam, you know, gay people have to be killed. Women can be beaten into submission. Women, according to Mohammed, women, a woman's testimony is worth half of a man's testimony because women are inherently less intelligent and less moral. You look at this stuff and you would think, wait a minute, there's no way, there's no way. I mean, if you look even closer, Muhammad is described as the whitest prophet in the history of the prophets. And he bought, owned, sold and traded black African slaves. His followers started the institutionalized the slavery of Africans a long time, a long time before the United States even existed. And he would have sex with his slave, with his slave girls. And he even got one of them pregnant. And so you look at this and you say, this should be a paradigm example of someone that, you know, leftists would reject and want to condemn.

And yet they seem to be best buddies and it just seems to be like they're both focusing on an enemy and hey as long as we have the same enemy even though it's our enemy even though it's our enemy for completely different reasons we need to unite for now maybe we'll have our disagreements later and it's basically the, you know, the people on the far left think that if they, if they can, if they can bring down their main enemy, they think, you know, they've just won everything. Whereas the Muslims are thinking, yeah, if we can bring down these other people, then, then we're going to win. I personally think that if it ever comes down to Islam versus leftists, I think the leftists are going to get eaten alive antifa with their little little baseball bats they're

going to get alive in about two seconds so yeah but yeah i i think it's just you know i think it's just we have a common enemy so let's unite for now and i've even i've even seen muslims who are being interviewed admit that they're saying yes we understand that we have completely different positions on gay rights and things like that but we need to keep quiet about that stuff for now. Very good. Very shrewd. Yeah. There's a line from philosopher Peter Kreeft, when an enemy is at the door feuding brothers reconcile, which I think he meant in relation to Protestants and Catholics against secularism.

But there's something similar going on there. Final question I have for you is I know that YouTube kind of flagged one of your videos recently. I going on there. Final question I have for you is, I know that YouTube kind of flagged one of your videos recently. I'm on Patreon. You know, that's how I'm able to kind of run this ministry. Yeah, I'm not actually terribly nervous, I have to say.

People often say to me, like, what if Patreon flips on you as it did last year or the year before on a few people? Part of me thinks that could be the best thing that ever happens to me, actually. But what are we to think of this you know living in this sort of secular society where presenting an orthodox

christian message is not only frowned upon but cancelled i mean you've got this massive youtube following of over 300 000 subscribers uh how do you sort of process all this uh uh yeah well it's uh yes you know again i'm looking at this as this is the greatest time to share information in history and it's just the idea that i can make a video tonight and 50 000 people will have watched it by tomorrow is uh is just awesome that's if it doesn't really take off, you know, sometimes you'll wake up, you know, the next day and 200,000 people watch it. So very, very awesome. If you're looking at the, from that perspective, but you also, you also have yeah, this, this attempt to crack down on hate speech because you do have hate speech out there and you'll have the, you'll have companies like, like just recently it's like Verizon and Starbucks and they all said that they're they're pulling down ads from social media

because of all the hate speech well if you're one of the platforms and that's where you're making your money from these advertisers and they're saying hey you know crack down on hate speech then you're going to crack down on you're going to crack down on hate speech the problem is you've got the people who are working on the trust and safety teams of these platforms are all these people who just came out of their safe spaces on college campuses where they've been taught anyone who disagree anyone who disagrees with you on anything makes you feel emotionally turbulent yeah is a racist and is committing hate speech and so they've got you know the the

companies the plot i mean the the companies like verizon and starbucks they're thinking of hey you've got you know white supremacists and things like that on here. You need to crack down on them. Whereas, you know, the person working on the trust and safety team, they're thinking, you know, oh, anyone who criticizes Islam must be a racist and a bigot. They couldn't actually have a problem with women being beaten into submission and, you know, girls being taken as sex slaves and sex with prepubescent girls. They couldn't actually have a problem with all of that because they don't know that Islam teaches any of that. So the only reason you could be criticizing Islam would have to be racism. And so, yeah, they just start banning content. But yeah, it wasn't one video. YouTube routinely blocks my stuff. I get messages all the time.

What recently the objection was, all I did in my video was present statistics from open doors on the persecution of Christians. So I just listed the top 10 countries where Christians are most persecuted. And YouTube took it down as hate speech. And so you're in this situation where you can't even speak out if Christians are being persecuted. But everyone needs to rally around Muslims and other groups and protect them. Is this your primary job? Like this is your YouTube channel. Is this what you do for a living essentially to support your family?

Yeah, I'm a YouTuber. So honest question, are you nervous? Like are you afraid that YouTube will pull your platform and you'll be left with nothing or a plan B? I mean, I would make it work. I would, if I needed to go to alternative platforms and stuff like that, there, there, there is a concern. It's just, it's not, Hey, you're going to shut me down. It's you're going to take me down a few notches if you shut down my channel. Right. Because, you know, if I, you know, if I'm, if I'm getting, you know, a million views a week and then you knock me to

another platform, well, I might be getting 30 or 40,000 views a week because I'm, you know, I'm new to that platform. So that will actually take, you know, it might take me another 10 years to build up on, on another platform. So there is that concern. I'm not really, I'm not really scared. I've been, I've been through too much. I like to be scared to be scared of some, of YouTube, some total dork in a, in a, in his, in his ivory tower in a trust and safety team. I will probably write for a while. I'll probably say, okay, guys, I'm going to spend the next year or two writing if I get shut down while simultaneously building up on an alternative platform. That's good.

I do think that is the Christian response. Lord, I submit this all to you. And whatever happens, happens according to your will, either know, like, you know, Lord, I submit this all to you, you know, and whatever happens happens according to your will, either your perfect will, your permissive will, but I submit it to you. And if you want to take this thing down, if somebody wants to take this down as this within your will, glory to Jesus Christ, you know?

And so I feel like often we kind of oscillate between, we get really upset and discouraged or we passively accept what's happening to us. But there's a third option where we could glory in what the Lord has allowed, which is a grace from God. But it's something, you know, I know a lot of Christians are kind of considering as big tech seems to be kind of cracking down on different conservative voices. Yeah. And that is normally how I take setbacks. If there's some sort of setback, I think, okay, well, maybe I'm supposed to do something else now. And so, yeah, I say, you know, kick and scream when, you know,

the tech tyrants are telling you what you can and can't say because they are impacting. It's just bad, right? It's just bad if they say, oh, you, you Muslim, you're allowed to speak, but you Christian, you can't speak. You Muslim, you You, Muslim, you can point out if people are attacking Muslims, as you should. And you, Christian, you can point out when Muslims are being attacked, as you should. But you, Christian, cannot speak out about what's happening to Christians because you might offend some of the groups that are doing the oppressing out there. And that's just insane. So it's sort of a situation where we have to do whatever we can do. And so we can call out the hypocrisy and we can call out the censorship.

But at the end of the day, what can they really do to us, right? Right. Final question. Final question. I'll let you go and live your life and be with your family. I also am a fan of One Punch Man. And I had to ask, what is the meaning of both One Punch Man and who is that, the Tin Man on your bookshelf there?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's a Tin Man there. But someone gave me that years ago and said something like, I used to think you didn't have a heart, but now I do. Ah, that's nice. It's sort of the Tin Man.

The Tin Man didn't have a heart. And then he got one. Yeah, so it's sort of, it's sort of, uh, it's sort of the tin man, the tin man didn't have a heart and, and, uh, and then he got one. Yeah. So it's kind of, it's kind of, you know, I'm a psychopath, so I'm supposed to not have a heart. Um, but I kind of have one. So that's that. And one punch man was just, uh, um, I have, I have five sons and, and years ago I used to watch, I used to watch lots of shows with my, my second oldest son, Blaze, and I just didn't have the same interest in shows that I did with my oldest son, Luke. And one day he said, hey, you want to watch an anime with me? That's called One Punch Man. And I go, I'm thinking no. I'm thinking I've never watched an anime before.

Wasn't interested. But then I was thinking, gosh, I should be watching shows with him because he always sees me watching shows with with my other son so okay i'll i'll watch this and we sat down and he said yeah it's about this guy who's so powerful he could destroy everything with one punch and i was like this is gonna get really boring really quick like if your power is you can destroy everything with one punch and then we said and then we i was like hooked in like five oh yeah yeah that's the point that's the premise he's miserable and he's miserable and depressed because he, you know, I have no feeling anymore because he's so powerful. And so how does he deal with that?

And so, yeah, it's kind of in my mind, it's kind of, hey, you know, don't don't judge it until you've actually you've actually checked it out. But but simultaneously, people ask why I have it back there. And I say because it's a it's loosely based on the story of that is loosely based on my apologetics ministry. Oh, hey, let me show you something. Oh, nice. I promise I didn't do that because you did it. But have you read the graphic novels? No, no, never checked any of those out.

but have you read the graphic novels? No, no, never checked any of those out. Yeah, I got into comics several years ago when a friend of mine turned me on to them and I'd really like to because my understanding is they began as more of a graphic novel and then... Yeah, and it was cool

because it was a guy who didn't have much skills in art. He just was great at coming up with these weird situations and these weird characters. What's your favorite line from One Punch Man? Or favorite episode? He was fighting the monster from House of Evolution.

And the guy went on this epic rant about how he has been bred and evolved to be this ultimate killing machine. And then he starts beating up one punch man and he's punching him all around. And one punch, Saitama's flying around as he's getting hit. And he's going, oh no, I think I've made a terrible mistake.

And he's getting hit back and forth. And you think I've made a terrible mistake fighting this guy. And it's showing his thought process as he's getting punched around. As he's thinking about all the stuff this guy said and why he his thought process as he's getting punched around as he's thinking about all the stuff this guy said and why he's made this terrible mistake and he realizes that it's like half off i mean it's like double coupon day at the grocery store yeah that's the mistake so he

just stops and just hits the guy and splatters him all over the place and so uh yeah i like those i like those uh those situations that he that he gets into fantastic well and and and i and i like when uh someone a monster will start going on his monologue yes the reason i am coming you incitement will just go shut up you think just because your life sucks you get to go around terrorizing planets and uh so stuff like that yeah yeah i enjoy i would want to say to those who are watching if you do have children definitely preview it before you show your children because there's definitely some questionable content in certain episodes. But it is. I very much enjoy it.

But David, thank you very kindly for taking the time to be on my channel. I will put links below to your channel. But is there anything else you'd like to point people to before we wrap up? No, just, you know, figure out, you know, figure out what you what you want to do as a Christian and go out. And anyone who's doing something that you regard as important in this world, do everything you can to help those people out and support them. The bottom line is there's lots of Christians out there doing some awesome and important stuff right now. So if you see them out there and they're being targeted, then we are in a battle for the future of humanity right now.

So again, do everything you can do as a Christian. And whatever you can't do, you leave that to God. Awesome. Thank you, David. All right. So I hope you leave that you leave that to god awesome thank you david all right so i hope you enjoyed that if you are a muslim viewer because i know we even have one muslim patron at least i hope you enjoyed that um hey speaking of patreon i want to invite you to become a patron patreon.com slash matt frad we are about to release a seven-part video series course on Augustine's Confessions. It's going to be amazing. We also have other sorts of courses you can take from experts like on Thomas Aquinas and Flannery O'Connor.

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