Pints With Aquinas - The Truth About Islam: Pedophilia, Violence, and Conquest (Apostate Prophet) | Ep. 530

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Ridvan Aydemir, known online as Apostate Prophet, is a Turkish-born former Muslim who grew up in a devout Sunni household and later became a prominent critic of Islam. After a period of intense religious study and ideological shifts—including atheism, secular communism, and Judaism—he became an Orthodox Christian catechumen. Ridvan launched his YouTube channel in 2017 to document his deconversion and critique Islamic teachings, gaining notoriety for controversial videos and public debates with Muslim apologists. A staunch advocate of free speech, he has been critical of both Islamic doctrine and Western institutions that, in his view, suppress legitimate criticism of Islam. Ridvan regularly collaborates with both atheist and Christian thinkers and has debated numerous Muslim figures on theology, human rights, and religious history. 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early, score a free PWA beer stein, and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 https://mattfradd.locals.com/support 💵 Show Sponsors:  👉 Seven Weeks Coffee – Use promo code MATT for up to 25% of your first subscription order + claim your free gift: https://sevenweekscoffee.com/matt 👉  Exodus 90 – Join Exodus 90 on August 15 for St. Michael's Lent: https://exodus90.com/matt 👉  Truthly – The Catholic faith at your fingertips: https://www.truthly.ai/ 👉 Hallow – The #1 Catholic prayer app: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas 🎵 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas 👕 PWA Merch – Wear the Faith! Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com

Pines with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a ground-breaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the Catholic faith. Start your seven-day free trial today when you download Truthly on the App Store. Christians often tend to be very naive and blind toward the evils that come from others. It is good to be forgiving, but you have to recognise that the wolf is out there to still eat you. Unfortunately Islam is a perfect culture that will happily take advantage of this. Within 50 years they want to take over. They want to start running these Western countries and once they start running these Western countries they want to run them the same way these leftist idiots

or even the conservative idiots. Sex slavery, forcing people to convert or to pay protection money and be killed, wife beating, pedophilia, it's not just something that they happen to defend or do. We're talking about Mohammed as the perfect example for all humankind for all times. And he is a pedophile. I'm sure there are Muslims who deny this. There are some Muslims who deny it. So how do we know they're wrong and that you're right? Thank you so much for watching Pines with Aquinas.

Before we get into the interview, I'd like to ask you to please consider subscribing. Over 58% of people who watch this show regularly are still not subscribed. So please do it. It's a quick, free, easy way to support the channel. We really appreciate it. Reid Vance, great to have you on the show.

It's a great pleasure to be here. I was just telling John that I need to find a different mug for this. By the way, that's fresh cup, fresh water. I just poured that for you before you came in. But I mean, this is very, come on, I need another mug, like an apostate prophet mug, coffee, water. That's right. That's what I should have brought you. Do you have some? I do have some I'm not really, not really doing much of that lately. I need to get back to doing that.

You're welcome to take that one. Have you seen these pints mugs on the pretty? They look awesome. Pretty is the wrong word. Because you said this is water. Yeah, you're trying to get me drunk. It's not vodka So you'll know quickly So I want to just kind of tell people how this interview came about. Okay. All right, so I had seen some of your

Work earlier with a prostate prophet and my understanding was it was a very I mean it is a very successful channel You've got over five hundred thousand subscribers. You were an atheist youtuber Which you became an atheist YouTuber, which you became an atheist after being a Muslim for a little while. I then got the impression that you may have been exploring Christianity. That was it.

Yeah. Because I didn't watch a lot of these videos with David Wood, who I love, he's an awesome fellow. But I saw the two of you together more and more. I'm like, okay, maybe he's looking into Christianity. So I asked Cameron Batuzzi, he gave me your number and I reached out to you and you, it was wild, I did not expect this, you said, I just got your book

on the Rosary, which was just like, okay. So these are the things I know about you. I have it right here actually. Okay. The pocket guide to the Rosary. I'm paying you to do this right now. Yes, yes. No, it's, it was very, it is a very interesting and very wild, I'm not sure,

I don't know if I'm supposed to use the word wild here, I don't know what to say really, but it's like, I have been on YouTube for many years now, and I started out with just one message, which was that I'm an ex-Muslim and that I know a lot about Islam Islam and that people say a lot of things about Islam that are usually wrong, that there is no proper voice that criticizes Islam and that points out all the flaws and dangerous aspects of it. So I wanted to just focus on that. I wanted to start with a YouTube channel where I analyze and basically expose the bad aspects of Islam and all that.

So that's how I started and it picked up very, very rapidly, grew rapidly. At some point I stopped making videos on a regular basis, took a step back and came back with more live stream commentary, did lots of stuff with David Wood where our friendship really came in. I got together with him, did lots of stuff with David Wood, where our friendship really came in. I got together with him, did lots of different things. And at some point I was going through the difficulties of life and of thinking, okay, this is working out. I reached a lot of people.

I'm telling lots of people the problem about the problems with Islam and all that, but I'm always conflicted and always confronted with one issue, which is while I speak to people about the bad thing in the world, I myself am battling with the void and the emptiness behind it on a personal level. Okay, I'm fighting something that is bad here in the world. But to what end really? What am I doing this for? And I'm doing it because I care about the world I'm doing it because I care about myself because I care about the my loved ones and and humanity and all that But what then like it's it's it's all it seems like it's all for nothing and it's also atheism

I want to say might work out for lots of people. I can say that there are probably lots of people who live happy lives as atheists and all that. And I'm not going to say, you know, there are horrible people living bad lives and so on. I'm not gonna say that. Lots of people might be very happy with it. For me, it didn't work out in the long run.

I feel, I often felt very hopeless and empty, having no hope for the future, nothing to look forward to, and all that. And I always had some sympathy for religiosity and for Christianity. It's a very, very long path, but at some point I ended up being sympathizing with Christianity. Before that actually came Judaism I was looking into Judaism and practicing Jewish things Jewish prayers and all that after I went to Israel with David would I know there's a Lot here that I'm revealing right now So when you're you wait so was your YouTube channel You as an atheist exposing Islam or was it just not necessarily,

it's not necessarily that you were an atheist, it's just that you wanted to expose Islam. So I guess what I'm asking is, was your channel primarily an atheist channel that combated Islam, or just a channel that combated Islam? It was just a channel that combated Islam. I think that's also one of the main reasons

why it got so successful, because I saw lots of the main reasons why it got so successful, because I saw lots of channels that were doing the whole all religions bad, atheism versus Trump. They're all so bad. The words. They're tremendously bad, but I wanted to sit down and just focus on Islam instead of dividing the audience and all that. And I honestly feel like even if I go a different path right now, on the channel the main focus

will still just be Islam. On a personal level things might be different now, but the focus of the channel is usually on Islam, maybe with a little bit of a different perspective, but that's it. So it wasn't about atheism versus Islam, it was just about Islam itself, because I thought, and I think the same thing right now, we have lots of disagreements in the world, we have lots of disagreements in the Western world, lots of different beliefs and all that. And I think that with Islam, we have a problem that is bigger than all of our disagreements. And we can disagree and discuss all kinds of different things all day long. But Islam is a certain issue that should have a specific, a certain focus where we should

all get together and talk about it. Were you raised Muslim? Yeah. And where are you from originally? So I am of Turkish origin and was actually born in Germany to a family of very religious Sunni Muslims of Turkish origin. So they were immigrants in Germany. I was born

into that family and was raised under very, very religious strict standards that were not necessarily always imposed on me. But for example, I wasn't allowed to listen to music at home. Music was bad, forbidden, horrible. Any kind of music? No, no music at all. And it's a weird thing to be just be... And the thing is, my whole life I Bad forbidden any kind of music no music at all and It's it's a weird thing to be just be and and the thing is my whole life I was I loved music as a child. I had such deep love for music and But at home, it's it's forbidden. I'm not allowed to listen to it it's very very very strange and very conflicting was raised with lots of Paranoia and hate towards non-Muslims, disbelievers in Germany, in a Christian country, in a mostly Christian country. There's one thing

that I always remember, which is very, very bad. I was in first or second grade or something. I'm a little child, like this little child here. Over the weekend, I went to a gathering with my family and their religious group in Germany. And over the weekend, I was basically told eschatological things from the prophecies of Muhammad, which are authentic and which Muslims around the world know of. Over the weekend I'm told that in the near future possibly there will be a time where we Muslims will fight the disbelievers, the Christians, but we will also especially fight the Jews and kill them and eradicate them. And they will hide behind rocks and trees.

And the rocks and trees will say, Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. And we'll be like, oh, okay. But there's only one tree, which is called the Qargat tree, which is the tree of the Jews which will not betray them. This might sound a little bit crazy, but this is actually a very authentic, verified narration that goes back to Muhammad. This is a prophecy that he made. He said this must happen before the last hour comes, which is why Muslims around the world believe in this. And I learned this as a child. So I go to school on Monday and tell my friend,

these little dumb kids here, tell my friend about these things that are going to happen. And he's like, he's shocked and weirded out, but I learned this stuff as a Muslim. So there's a lot to unpack there. Oh, I mean, unpack at all. I'm fascinated. I think sometimes when we share our own story, we kind of get sick of the sound of our own voice because we've heard it, but I'm hanging on every word you're saying. Because again,

it's not like they were saying like in an analogical or an allegorical sense that we'll overcome the Muslim. That wasn't what they were saying. No, no, it's very, very clear and very strict. And so Islam is very, very clearly laid out So Islam has very clearly laid out prophecies by Muhammad himself that Muslims around the world believe in, and the Quran is also quite clear on how Allah has a problem with the disbelievers. For example, the Quran says in chapter 9 verse 29 and verse 30 that the Muslims are to fight those who don't believe in Allah and the Last Day and in Muhammad and who don't adopt the true religion, that means Islam, among the Christians and Jews.

So the Christians and Jews specifically, which the Quran calls the people of the book. Jews and Christians specifically are to be fought if they refuse to convert to Islam, and they're supposed to be suppressed and subdued, and they're supposed to be made to pay what's called ejizya, which is protection money. And this was also historically applied to Christians and Jews and other minorities. So the concept here is the Muslims are supposed to always expand and fight. When they encounter non-Muslim populations, they are supposed to tell them to convert to Islam. If they refuse to convert to Islam, they're supposed to say, okay, then you will either

become our subjects and pay protection money and do as we say and follow these and these and these and these and these laws. If you fail to pay, you will be your fair game and can be killed. If you don't want this arrangement, then you can run or you can fight and die and be enslaved. That's basically the idea. In chapter 30, in verse 30 of the same chapter, so the next verse, it then says, very interestingly, it justifies this animosity and says, the Jews say Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say the Messiah is the son of Allah. These are the words that they adopted from those who disbelieve before them. May Allah fight them. How deluded are they?

So this is how the Quran's perspective on these two different religious groups. You may have noticed I just said it starts with the Jews say Ezra is the son of Allah. Where aside from the animosity, the hostility, the insanity that comes out of the scripture. You can also see that it spouts nonsensical stuff. When you ask Jews, including learned Jews, rabbis, scholars, anyone what this means, Jews say Ezra, Ezra, son of Olathe, are usually surprised and like, what are you talking about? Nobody can make any sense of this. So it's like an overconfident YouTuber

just making these statements, but he's saying it like boldly and say, yeah, this guy must know what he's talking about. And then someone fact checks him and is like, this guy doesn't, he's not serious. Yeah, according to the narratives that we have, relating about Mohammed's interactions with Jews and later on with Christians, we see that Jewish groups that he was interacting with before he eventually ended up massacring

or expelling them came to him and asked him questions to test him, test his knowledge because he wants to convert them and they refused, So they come and test his knowledge and all that. And sometimes it seems like they were mocking him and kind of in modern terms, trolling him, and asking him questions, like nonsensical questions. And it may be that they asked him a nonsensical question or said something nonsensical to him just to test how he reacts and he actually took it seriously.

So he started adopting this idea that the Jews actually believe Ezra, or in Arabic it says Uzair, which is interpreted as Ezra, that Ezra is the son of God and that this is what Jews believe. Now when you bring up this issue to Muslim apologists and scholars, they try to make all kinds of different excuses about this. Like, oh, this might be referring to a certain group of Jews, and it might be allegorically, it might refer to some obscure thing, but no, it's not. It actually gets really bad when you look at the things that Muhammad said outside of the Quran. There is an instance where he describes what will happen to the Jews and the Christians in the afterlife. And when it comes to the Christians, he very clearly says the Christians will be brought

forth by Allah and they will be asked what they believed. And they will say, we believed in Jesus, the Messiah, who is the son of God and who is God. And Allah will say, you have lied or you have disbelieved and he will drop them to hell. Then he brings forth the Jews and says to the Jews what did you believe and they say we believed in Ezra the son of Allah and God and he says you have lied and disbelieved and he will drop them to hell. This is clearly a general statement about Jews. So this is one of the big

signs where the Quran shows great ignorance and where you can see that this is not a book that comes from an all-knowing divine being that has a message for the world. It comes from an ignorant person in a 7th century Arabian desert who just gets his knowledge from the people around him without really being able to fact check them. Which is why, by the way, in the Quran, the Quran often defends Muhammad against allegations by people surrounding him, including polytheistic Arabs and others. And several times it says like, and they say you are a liar, but

you are not a liar. They say you're crazy, but you're not crazy. They say these are stories of the old. And it also says, and they call you the ear, which means, so they call them the ear by which they meant that he just hears stuff and just repeats it. Like he just absorbs whatever he hears and that's it. But this is what the Quran is. And this is the religion that we are facing, an overconfident, ignorant religion full of hostility against those who know better. That's basically what Islam is. How did you go from being a child raised by Sunni Muslims who would go to school, learn what they taught to rejecting

that faith. What was that process like? It was a very, very long process. So there was a time when my parents wanted to move to Turkey from Germany because they thought it is not acceptable for religious Muslims to live in a non-Muslim land in Germany. So they wanted to move to Turkey and I had to move with them because I was only 16 years old. In Turkey, I started going through a whole identity crisis

trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong. You were 16, you said? Yeah, and until that point, I was raised with religious standards and I had lots of respect for them, but I personally wasn't very invested in them. And I tried figuring out different ways and went into politics, started like resenting Turkey and how things are there.

It was a great culture shock. I really loved Germany. I really loved the way German people were and the way they thought. And going from that country to Turkey was, there were just, there were too many things that I clashed with, including how the individual is treated, how individual freedoms are treated, how you're respected, or you're expected to respect

everything that is forced down your throat. And you are supposed to, I don't know, women are treated very poorly and so on. And I found the solution at some point in rebelling against that by thinking what Turkey actually needs is a socialist communist revolution. This was the popular thing to go for in the environment that I was in. Later on I... Are you still going to the mosque and saying your prayers? Yeah, yeah. But less and less at that time and also kind of fighting with my parents about it because this is very unacceptable to them and at that point my father kicks me out several times

and says don't come back and I just come back at night and so on. Very very strange times thinking back now. You were 16 when he was kicking you out or a little older? A little older. Yeah there was a few years after that. Then there was a very tragic traumatic thing that happened. After I moved to Turkey I had a very close connection to a relative, my aunt, who was actually the... Or you pronounce it as aunt?

Australians say aunt. Okay, good. That's the right way. But I had a very close connection to her and she was the younger sister of my father, but she was very different. She was very intelligent, very free, I don't know, independent minded and all that. She had this relationship with me where she wasn't the older sister that I never had who was giving me advice and talking to me

and being just fantastic. The thing is at some point she decided to go more traditional and found some guy in Turkey, although she was living in Germany still, she found some guy from Turkey that she ended up marrying and this guy moved to Germany to live with her. But the guy quickly turned out to be quite messed up and quite violent, to be repressive and all that. And would do things like threatening her, telling her not to go outside by herself, not to talk to people online and started threatening her more and more and more. There was a time where she told me that he's causing trouble and threatening her now because

she goes online in her free time in the evening and just plays some, I don't know, some online pool games or something like that. And there are male names attached to the other people that she plays with. And she also wanted me to keep this to myself because her relatives were basically accusing her of making mistakes as usual by just being rogue and going her own way and so on. But this was a religious guy from Turkey. She at some point tried separating and divorcing because she thought,

okay, I tried this, going this path, it clearly didn't work, this guy is crazy. He kept threatening her. She told me to keep this whole threatening side to myself. Then one day when I was in school, I was still in high school in Turkey at that point, I go home. This was actually very, very, this had a lot of impact on how I thought in the following years. I was in school one day and I had a very, very huge headache and my eye was like, what's that called?

Twitching. Twitching, yeah, yeah, severely. And I had no idea what's going on. And I told my teacher, I have to go home, I don't feel good. So I go home, as soon as I arrive at home, I fall asleep in my bed. I woke up later that evening and go into the living room and see my mother crying at her computer, at her computer.

And I asked what's going on. And she says, your aunt, what is with my aunt? She's dead. What do you mean dead? She had been killed by that guy. I was like, what? Are you joking? And she's like, how can I joke about something like this? Look, it's right here. And I go over and I see an article, a news article article, a news article from the place where he used to live reporting how they were separated and he found her and approached her one day on the street. He had a thing issued not to come. A warrant.

Yeah. Yeah, to not approach her to such a distance. And he encountered her in the middle of the street, went over to her, had some verbal exchange with her, and then took out a gun and started shooting and shot 12 bullets at her face. Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. After which he then shot himself

and she was killed immediately. So she died immediately. She was declared dead right there on the spot. He was in a coma for a week and then he eventually died as well. And this really just, this was a huge shock to me. The thing is, when I came home on that day, I told my mom, like, I have a headache

and I have this thing going on with my eye, I don't know what this is. And she was like, you know, there are some people who say that she was following these Sufi explanations. Sufi is like Islamic mysticism and all that. And there were some texts by early Sufi is like Islamic mysticism and all that. And there were some texts by early Sufi scholars who said stuff like, if your eye twitches, if the left eye twitches, it means this, if the right eye twitches, it means this. It means something good is

about to happen, something bad is about to happen. And she was like, it could mean that something bad is about to happen according to these. And I'm like, please stop. So I go and lay down and go to bed. And then I wake up and I received like the worst news that I had received in my life so far. It destroyed me. It shattered me. And I remember going to her grave.

Her body was brought to Turkey and was buried there. And remember going there and for the first time trying to sit there for hours, just communicating with her with in hopes that she actually hears me and all that. And then I remember what happened that day with my eye and I start making connections. And I also start remembering

things that she said to me before she died, like that she wants to try going toward becoming more religious and all that. But after she died, I took the things that she said to me about trying to find meaning, trying to become religious, and started going toward that route myself at one point thought, you know, like the whole idea of socialist revolution and politics and all that, it's nonsense. I have to find my purpose in life and have to follow my path to religion. And I think that's the kind of, instead of actually leading me toward resentment and anger toward Islam, because it is an Islamic culture that this attitude which led to her death arises from, I went into a different direction and started becoming Islamic and religious, even more so, and became extremely devout.

And for the next three years or four years I was strictly practicing Islam, praying day and night, studying, trying to be the most devout Muslim that I could possibly be But at the same time I was also Reading the Quran and read it once twice and eventually a third time And I had very serious questions that I never really got the answers to including that The Quran is described as or is believed to be the perfect unchanged verbatim word of Allah from before creation delivered to us today, to be followed and believed in at all times by all mankind. But in the same book, I just find so much ignorance and honestly stupidity about the world we live in, the natural world, about different religions, about Abraham, about Judaism and Christianity, about... And then so much hate and mistreatment, mistreatment of women, which didn't really... Wasn't really right with me, considering that I always had

a very good relationship with women and always had like good views of women and I grew up in a culture where equality was a great thing and all that. There were so many questions that I just couldn't properly answer. And when I looked for answers, I found that they are focused on distracting and just explaining a way instead of simply answering the questions, including things like how Allah describes how He brings the sun from the east and it goes into a muddy pool at night. That's where the sun goes when it goes down. And then Muhammad describing further that he says to one of his followers, do you know where this goes?

At sunset pointing at the sun and his followers says, Allah and his messenger know best. And Muhammad then starts explaining and says, well, it travels until it reaches the setting place, until it reaches the setting place where it then prostrates under the throne of Allah and asks for permission to rise again in the morning. And Allah gives it permission to rise. So then it goes back to the place of rising and rises again for the next day. Until some point in the future, Allah will not give it permission to rise again and will say to it, go back where you came from, and then the sun will come and it will rise from the west.

And that's when we know that the day of judgment is about to come. And all my life as a Muslim, I heard that one of the signs of the end will be that the sun will rise from the west. And suddenly I read it and I see how this is actually introduced. And it's just,'s just so stupid. How did you reconcile believing it to be stupid while also being a devout Muslim? That's the problem. I tried to suppress those, like my actual thoughts about it. And then that's where the real fight started because I thought, wait, this doesn't make sense,

but I can't say it doesn't make sense. I have to find an answer to it. So I tried to find an answer to it. I was going to say, I would imagine the next step would be to try to interpret this in a spiritual sense. Yeah, and there is just no explanation. And I look into interpretations of it, and I see that the interpretations of this Qur'an verse, the exegesis in the early years of Islam don't go into such a direction at all. Only later on, as Muslims began discovering the rest of the world and discovering a more enlightened world, they start reinterpreting these verses to mean something different. While regular traditional Muslim scholars still in the 1500s still think that this is literal and that the earth is actually flat and only those wicked astronomers and scientists believe in the round earth and so on and

I Try to suppress my mind and the questions But it only it only works until it just doesn't anymore So but are they different with their different schools? just doesn't anymore. But were there different schools in the beginning of Islam that you could have turned to for a different interpretation and then just written off the more strict interpretations as too legalistic? No.

There was a school that I found out was seen as a more rationalist school in the early centuries of Islam that was later on suppressed and basically crushed and made illegal, which was called the Mutazila. They were known as rationalist people. And I thought maybe this makes sense, but they weren't actually about being rationalistic about the war. They were just about, it was rather a matter of how they interpret free will and predestination and how they interpret whether the Quran is

the created or uncreated word of Allah and so on. So matters that are kind of besides the point here. And there are no real interpretations. And I find at some point that these reinterpretations of the text start developing, especially over the last centuries. But it's quite obvious that they're just trying to explain or they're not applying an exegesis, but rather an eisegesis. They're simply trying to find a new meaning

to something that's obviously wrong. And it just doesn't really resolve the problem at hand. The Quran is not a book that is meant to be totally metaphorical and all that. It is a book where Allah supposedly says that it is a revelation by Him word for word that makes everything clear as day, makes everything very, very clear and easy to understand,

and that shows people endless science about the world. There are some Muslims today, when you bring up these scientific issues in the Quran, they say, oh, it's not a book of science. Well, unfortunately, the Quran itself doesn't say that. The Quran itself clearly and actually challenges people and says, and look at the sky, how it has no cracks and how Allah raised it up. In this, there are signs for you.

So the Quran itself clearly talks about these things as clear signs and evidence that it is Allah himself who created everything. So it is a book that tries to be about science, but fails to be about science or fails to be correct about science. Christians like myself, when we bring up some of these discrepancies, are told it's because you don't read the Arabic and so you're not actually reading the word of Allah, but presumably you were reading it in Arabic. I wasn't reading it in Arabic, but I was reading it. I started making use of a word-for-word translation and etymological analysis and all of that,

which is what I love to use nowadays. Okay, but then were you accused of the same thing then? You're not reading it in Arabic, therefore you're not really understanding it? Well, the funny thing was, I am still sometimes accused of doing that, but once I bring up, once I respond with a resolution to this, which is directly

going to the Arabic interpretations of the Quran. And also in today's time, we have the internet, right? It's very easy. If you want to look up what a Quran verse actually says, I have my familiarity with Arabic language and etymology and all that by now. But if you want to look up what a Quran verse actually says, you can very easily search for the Quran verse and type something very easy on the internet, Quran corpus and whatever verse you want. And it will quickly give you the different translations, in addition to that, the morphology,

the breakdown of the verse word by word, how this word is used throughout the Quran, how this word is formed part by part, you know, and so on. I suppose, yeah, but I guess it seems to me that more than maybe not knowing the Arabic perfectly, you're going back to authoritative sources who do know the Arabic and who are confirming that this thing that doesn't make sense to you, that's exactly how it's meant to be taken. For example, the big issue, which when you bring it up to Muslims today, they often will say, no, this is clearly not a problem. This is clearly metaphorical, clearly allegorical.

But the Quran says in the, I always forget the number of this, in the eighth chapter, I believe, that the sun goes and travels to its resting place where it then sets in Himat-e Spring. And who would believe that? that the sun goes and travels to its resting place where it then sets in Himadi spring. And who would believe that? Obviously, there must be something metaphorical or allegorical about this. This can't be literal. But the thing is, if you go back to the earliest interpretations of the Quran, written in Arabic, partly nowadays available in translations, the Tafsir of Tabari, which is one of the earliest authentic interpretations of the Quran.

What it says is it comments on this verse and it then lengthy discusses the details of this muddy or dark place that the sun actually sets into. It talks about how according to one view, it is a hot spring. According to another, there's a dark and murky muddy spring, according to some it goes in this way, it goes in that way. Interpretations that this is actually not an actual spring only start coming into existence centuries later when Muslims start expanding and including populations that are already aware of the shape of the world, pretty much.

All right, let me be a Muslim apologist for a second. I mean, how does this differ from Christianity? You have some church fathers that seem to hold quite clearly that we live on a young earth, they have no concept of evolution. And now all of a sudden you have Christians who maybe wish to believe that the earth is old, that are very much open to evolution. So couldn't you just say the same thing? You're reading Genesis.

It might, I'm not saying it does, but someone might say it might seem ridiculous to them. So they go back and they look at some of the earliest sources, how did they interpret it? And they interpret it in a way that I'm not willing to accept today. So what's the difference? Why not just say, actually, you're wrong to think of it in a literalistic way. So were those people who interpreted it. And so just interpret it in a spiritual way now, in a poetic way now. Well, I want to ask you that question.

Oh, no, don't do that. I'll do that when you interview me. You can ask me. No. So here's the thing. When we talk about the Quran specifically, this becomes a problem because the Quran itself is viewed as, there are no discussions about the purpose and what the purpose of the Quran actually is, what the purpose of certain texts within the Quran are. Like when you read the book of Genesis, for example, you have a text that there's lots of aspects of it that might be difficult to deal with, such as the age of individuals that lived

according to the text, how they lived to become like hundreds of years old. And I don't know, you can talk about Noah's Ark and how it's actually plausible for it to happen in reality. You can talk about Jonah and how it all came forth. And there are lots of different views. John, well, I was also gonna say, in addition to that, there's also clearly different genres in the Bible.

So you do have poetry, you do have different things. When it comes to the first five books, the Torah, the Pentateuch, there are traditional Jewish viewpoints on that, there are traditional Christian viewpoints on it, there are newer Christian viewpoints on it and so on, and there are lots of discussions on to what extent these texts are supposed to tell a true story or a literal story, to what extent they are supposed to be simply educational and all that. With the Quran, there is not really much room for this

because the Quran itself, it starts out with saying that this is a book about which there is no doubt. It later on says that if there's only one discrepancy in this book, then it is clearly not from Allah. It says that this is a book full of signs about the world, look at it and so on. So it makes these things like, instead of, for example, talking about a time where the stars fall or something like that, which is for example, a narrative that you might find in the Bible.

In the Bible, this is not used as an instance of saying, look, this is clear proof that this was created by Allah. In the Quran, you do find that. In the Quran, you do find these narratives as pointing at Allah's creation. Look at it, this is proof that this is from Allah, but it clearly is not.

So there is a difference of genres. And it's very plausible to me that Muhammad may have picked up lots of these wordings and these narratives from the Jews and the Christians that he interacted with, but he clearly couldn't make sense of the things that he was picking up. And he simply regurgitated and recited these things in his own new revelations as if they were clear revelations from Allah, supposed to prove that it is Allah who is behind everything and Islam is the truth and all that.

So there are lots of different ways of dealing with this in the biblical sense, not so much in the Quranic sense. Okay. So then how do you abandon Islam? It was very difficult. It took many years. I was repeatedly told that if I have doubts, I'm supposed to simply seek protection with Allah. There's a narration where even Muhammad addresses this. He says, upon people asking him questions, he says, the devil will come to you and he will ask you questions like, who created this and who created that? And he will also say, who created Allah?

When he comes to you, seek refuge in Allah from such idle thoughts who created that. And he will also say who created Allah when he comes to you seek refuge in Allah from such idle thoughts and all that. And it's like, okay, I'm just supposed to seek refuge in that set. But the thing is, the Quran also repeatedly says things like, it does explicitly threaten to torture you in the afterlife, like Allah will send you to this place of burning and he will basically rip off your skin and will like revive you so that you suffer again and again and again, unbearable torments and all that. But it also repeatedly says, and do they not think,

do they not use their minds? Do they not think? Are they deluded and so on. So I thought to myself, with all the doubts that I have, I thought, I mean, if it is true and if Allah is behind all of this, He is the one who gave me this, who gave me a mind, who gave me the ability to question, who in the Quran itself tells me repeatedly to think and to question.

So can I be really blamed for just asking these questions? And once I allowed myself to think about these questions and to go through with them, I think that there was just no way of going back. Around what year was this? I'm asking because I'm wondering if it's during the time of the new atheism when there was this kind of full frontal intellectual assault on... It was 2013, 2014. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So that was, it was, yeah, it was kind of in the hype of the atheism. I started going online at that time on Instagram and all that and started

encountering a popular trend of talking trash about Christianity. Yeah, from Muslims, atheists. Usually from atheists in the West. And what kind of, what was disappointing to me was that nobody was really talking about Islam. And when they were talking about Islam, they were usually not very accurate. And it was like half knowledge and all that. So I thought I wanna talk. I learned so much.

I don't want this to go to waste. I just wanna talk about it. And the one thing that also really motivated me to talk about this was that I saw at that time, also from my own past, from how I was taught Islam and how I was taught to spread Islam, I saw how people lie about Islam very, very much. How there are many people who try to represent Islam

or who try to make defenses for Islam and say, no, it's a misunderstood religion. It's a religion of peace. It's a religion of tolerance. It's love, it's misunderstood, nothing to do with violence. And I was part of it. I know the community.

I know this is nonsense. I know that it's a religion that is full of hate and intolerance and of lies and of threats. And where does that come from then? Where does that myth come from? Well, so over the first almost 1400 years, it was quite normal for Muslims to go around and be proud of the fact that they are a conquering expansionist religion. Nobody ever came and said, oh no, no, we are misunderstood, bro, we're just a religion of peace. This was not a narrative that was popular among Muslims. where an Islamic organization in the Middle East, an organization of Islamic collaboration called something, oh I see, came out and started pushing this narrative that Islam is being

misrepresented by certain people around the world because people suddenly start getting more knowledge about Islam. The world is getting closer together after World War II and becoming, you know, having talks together on an international basis in the United Nations and so on. And people start noticing that Islam has a, like in comparison to all the other cultures that fought and made peace and so on, Islam seems to be specifically insistent on violence and on human rights abuses, on slavery. Like at that time there were still multiple Muslim countries that were still running like legal slavery.

The Saudi Arabian representatives were still coming to America while having slaves with them and so on. And so at that time people start questioning Islam and the Islamic representatives start coming together and forming this mutual, this common thought of like we have to basically defend Islam and fight this perception that Islam is especially evil. So they start talking about how Islam is actually about peace, but at that point, their purpose is not to say we have to lie to people and say it's just it's totally peace. To them, the explanation

is yes, there is war and there is conflict and there is fighting, but it is supposed to be done in order to bring peace under Islam to the world. But the narrative then starts getting corrupted and developing and developing and developing. And actually one of the main people responsible for this distortion here is very, very ironically, George W. Bush, who was also an extremely unpopular figure in the Muslim world, but who famously after 9-11 came out and said,

Islam is a religion of peace. He gave a speech and he said that, Islam is misunderstood, Muslims are not at fault, Islam is a religion of peace. And he basically gave this whole speech on, to kind of bring calm to people taking it out on Muslims in America. But this contributed to spreading this idea,

like the idea that Islam is a religion of peace, this phrase became extremely popular after George W. Bush uttered it and started rising. And then Obama comes on later and says, 99% of Muslims are totally peaceful and Islam is all about peace and all that. And it's clearly not. So over the last half century,

but especially over the last 25 years or so, we've had this very distorted, weird idea that Islam is all about peace, when until then for over a thousand years, nobody ever even suggested such a dumb idea that Islam is about peace. In fact, so two things, according to Muhammad himself in a very, very corroborated authentic narrative,

he says that he has been sent by Allah to fight the people until they testify that none is worthy of worship except Allah and that he is the messenger of Allah. So that's his duty. Secondly, one of my favorite sources actually, Ibn Khaldun, he's a medieval scholar of history and social matters. He's a considerably forerunner in sociology today even. and social matters.

He's a considerably forerunner in sociology today even. Like you will be taught about him in sociology and basic sociology. He wrote a book called Mukaddima where he basically summarizes the different cultures until now and so on. He says in this book that unlike Christianity and Judaism, Islam has a very, very distinct role in that it is a universalist and expansionist religion. And where the head of the state is also to be the head of the religion, the caliph, and he has the duty

to spread the religion by will or by force. And this was the usual narrative among Muslims themselves up until the last century where things started getting really distorted and weird. And I am one of those people who are just here to fight that distortion. Who in your mind is doing the best work in this area right now? If someone's watching, they want to learn more about the liesars of Islam or they're questioning it. You said there's a lot of bad stuff out there, or maybe faulty information about Islam. Who are some of the top people turned to other than the apostate prophet?

I'm glad you said that. David Wood. My friend David Wood, before I came into the scene, I started looking at people who criticize Islam fairly. And the thing is, one of the things that I noticed was, aside from those who don't know much about Islam and who defend Islam, there are also lots of people who defend, who attack it but who are not very fair or not very great at it.

David Wood, I noticed at that time was one of those people who are doing it very, very fairly and accurately. And I think so until this day. Now he's a very good friend of mine and he's doing fantastic work. So I would definitely recommend number one, David Wood. Another would be, there are so many rising people now on YouTube.

What is David Wood's YouTube channel called? Side something apologetics? What is it? It used to be act 17 apologetics until he deleted that channel and started new. And why did he do that? He has he come out and was it was it has he come out and said all right there was a mistake we're starting again or no he was like well there were there were issues there were content issues and there was also like a content confusion and things like that. I don't know. He had a long explanation to no worries. How you want to have him on me if he wants to, and we can talk about that, but fair enough. So David, you should do that. So what does his channel is now apologetics roadshow.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Other like, is there like a book like you gotta read this book or, um, other, like, is there like a book that you got to read this book or? One, I should have brought that with me. It's my, it's one of my favorite books, In God's Path by Robert G. Hoylund, who is a historian, who focuses on the early expansion of Islam and pre-Islamic history. He wrote a very, very fantastic book, Breaking Down How Islam Actually Spread. It analyzes it from the beginning of how the Muslims were all about expanding and fighting and raiding, and weren't even focused on spreading Islam initially.

They were just all about raiding and winning and all that. Then later started imposing Islam on all their subjects. And then that's how they continued. So him, Tom Holland has some very, very good stuff, not the actor, not the author. In the Shadow of the Sword is a good book. Robert Spencer does a lot of good stuff. And yeah.

That's great. So was there a point where you said, I'm no longer a Muslim? There actually was. So I had lots of questions where you said, I'm no longer a Muslim? There actually was. So I had lots of questions, and at a point I decided that I have to simply allow myself to think and to question. And there was a long time of questioning and of reading the Qur'an again to allow it to make sense to me, and it just got worse, honestly. And there was actually a point where I was on my way

and I was going home and before opening the door, I'm thinking the entire time as I'm going home and eventually stood there and said to myself, I still remember it, I said to myself, I'm not a Muslim, I don't believe in Allah and I don't believe in Islam. And from then, from that moment on, I was done with Islam and wanted to look forward to finding out what the truth is. And I started reading different texts and thinking about different things and would say

spent like up to a year or so in agnosticism Then I then went into the direction of hardcore atheism and ice-cold atheism Where I was until it makes sense right look it just seems that if you feel that you've been Deceived the likelihood that you're gonna go out of that deception to a diss to another Seeming deception the reason it seems that way is because it uses similar language, it uses the word God. Maybe there's teaching about hell that you've come to dislike, the law. You might see ignorant people, hateful people. I can see why you'd be like, I'm just done with this.

This is rubbish. Yeah, I felt very betrayed and lied to. It is a very messed up thing where you are taught that this is the entire purpose of life and that's all you stand on basically. Then suddenly it's destroyed and you're just standing there thinking, really? What now?

Now life is meaningless basically. Were you reading the New Atheists? Were you? I did. Finally enough, I only became informed about the New Atheist movement, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and all that after I started going toward atheism and after I left Islam. And did you think there were positive arguments for atheism or just that there's no convincing argument for theism therefore? I would say that my perspective was never that definitely atheism true.

It was rather that there seems to be simply no convincing argument for the existence of a deity or the existence of gods. And it's all just an idea that was developed in a void. Totally, like psychological crutch. You can understand psychologically why people would like there to be some kind of comforting narrative. And this is also, I would say that the difference between me and lots of the new atheists would be that I never was in a phase where I felt like, maybe very briefly, but maybe very briefly, I was in a phase where I had some, like, some hate toward the idea

of religion and God, but it was quickly over and I just started sympathizing with and understanding why people believe. And I mainly had my problems with Islam because I saw it as a global threat. I mean, I could see even, I said this often in the past, I could even sympathize with Muslims simply wanting to believe in Allah and in Islam and all that. And I wouldn't have a problem with it if it didn't come together with all the bad stuff. I know it's a bit of a straw man to say that the atheist only disbelieves so that he can act in all sorts of egregious sort of sexual ways. But I think there is at least truth, I think, that if God does not exist,

I really don't see why I'm bound to hold any form of morality except for the fact that society will punish me or you'll hate me or something. Maybe I care about that more and maybe I care more about my group flourishing or something. But did you kind of, how did you live your life once you thought there is no God and there's no one holding me accountable? It's funny because after becoming non-religious, I spent a few years, I went into a new work environment, made new friends and spent several years just partying, like every weekend, just going clubbing and getting completely drunk and all that. And the thing is, every single time that I did that, I just felt horrible later that night and especially the next morning.

Physically or you also just regretted it? Physically and also in kind of a depressed mood, and like, what am I doing? If you're anything like me, you sometimes reach the end of summer feeling a little spiritually drained and in need of rest. That's why I'm excited to tell you about St. Michael's Lent with Exodus 90. Rooted in an ancient tradition practiced by St. Francis of Assisi, this 40-day journey was born out of his deep devotion to Saint Michael the Archangel. In fact, it was during this practice that Saint Francis received the stigmata, a profound moment of grace and transformation. Join Exodus 90 in bringing back this ancient tradition, a chance to break away from distraction, reconnect with prayer, and fortify your faith. This year, they're diving into the letters of St. Paul

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the way I'm living right now, I'm a heavy smoker, drink a lot and party a lot, just work to afford this kind of stuff. There really is no point. I might not live very long and I'm also fine with it because what's the point anyway. Like there was basically the mindset that I was in. And this is just me personally,

I know that there are lots of people who go different ways to do productive stuff, but the whole idea was just, I couldn't really find a greater meaning in life and I could of course sit down and make use of different philosophies. There are philosophies developed about this existentialism and things like that where you acknowledge that there is no ultimate meaning in life, but you can bring meaning to your life and all that.

And sure it can work. And sure, you can focus on a more productive life instead of focusing on a destructive life and bringing suffering to your day-to-day living and to those you love and all of that. But the thing is, ultimately, it's all still void. It's all still nothing. All is meaningless, as Ecclesiastes says, which I read many, many times as an atheist.

It's such an excellent book, isn't it? It's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, I tend to have what you seem to have, that is a rather melancholy, I don't know if you do, so a melancholic kind of temperament where I'm continually sort of thinking about these sorts of things.

And that really bothered me as a teenager too. I just thought if God doesn't exist, then, yeah, I mean, I've met some people who say, no, it's even more beautiful, right? Because it's like, this is just a happy accident and it makes it more beautiful that it's meaningless. I'm like, I just couldn't understand that. But I also didn't want to go from it's meaningless, therefore God exists. Yeah. You know, that's like a child who wants Christmas to be exciting again, so starts believing in Santa Claus.

So, I mean, why, so, okay, how did you begin to be open again to the possibility of there being a God? So it is pretty brutal to think about the world as meaningless or without a greater inherent meaning purpose. I never really accepted the idea that it is all meaningless, but rather that it is inherently meaningless and that you can make meaning in the world that you live in. Let's say I pop into existence in this random world. As I live through the world, as I eat and drink

and get to know the people around me who also want to eat and drink, I necessarily start forming certain boundaries and bonds with these people and making connections and making the next step in line with whatever is going to be best for me in the long run and And what is not if I start fighting and killing people? I know it's going to be very uncomfortable and bad if I start being nice to everyone and abiding by the rules. I am

I'm very likely to expect a better life for myself and those that I love and so on so you could always go You could be kind of utilitarian and go for what is what is better in life and all of that but the thing is Even when you do that Even when and I can I can fully agree that In a meaningless world you can still find meaning and live a fantastic life I have met lots of people who live fantastic lives as atheists and all that But even then when you sit down and question the greater purpose or the greater meaning

behind this and the ultimate end of all of this, it's like, okay, I want to sit down and I want to make the world a better place because I love people and I love the people around me. I love humanity. I love what the world is and so on. Okay, great, fantastic. I can spend the rest of my life contributing to knowledge, to science, to great arguments, to pleasure,

to happiness and all that, fantastic, okay, great. But where is this all going? Let's say this goes on forever. Let's say existence and humanity and the universe goes on forever. Then you're simply in a place that permanently goes on with no meaning at all. And you can develop to this and contribute to this, eventually it will just die and fade away and it all means nothing to you. It means

something to other people who are also supposed to live in this world for a temporary amount of time. They will also die. Eventually it goes nowhere. Maybe there's some system here that benefits from what we are doing in our temporary lives, I don't know. If the world eventually altogether disappears and becomes non-existent, it's even worse. And that is usually the scientific perspective that at some point it's supposed to simply get crushed. Then it's even worse.

There are like everything you do, you can spend a lifetime and thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of lifetimes developing and making things better. It's ultimately for nothing at all. Yeah. And this question, aside from all the arguments for God, always bothered me. I listened to all the arguments for God, the intelligent design and all the different arguments. And they are not really convincing to me, but this

whole idea of the ultimate meaning, it just, it bothers me all along. And when I became an atheist, I adopted this mindset that I have to, that I can only subscribe to something if I know 100% that it is true. I have to have 100% prove that it's true. But then where do you go with this attitude? Nowhere. I don't even think you can get Descartes cogito with 100% certainty. You've got nothing. You've got nothing, I think. Nothing. I thought about this very often and it's actually kind of something very bad and an illness that I adopted as a result of becoming an atheist, I would say. Interesting. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I don't know how you feel about arguments for God today, but I'll tell you how I feel. I don't know if you've heard much of what I've said about this, but for me,

the arguments for God's existence have always resembled beautiful paintings in a museum that someone who is deeply moved by them is pointing at. And I just can't seem to fully get on board with their enthusiasm, right? I'm like, yeah, I guess. No, totally. Yeah, I see that. Now, if I compare arguments for theism with arguments from atheism, I do agree. It seems to me, with my limited intellect, that the arguments for theism are better. It seems to me that arguments for atheism are things like evil and the hiddenness of God. Those are pretty good, it seems to me. But for me, the more I've been afraid, to be honest about this, for the longest time, but I just got to a point where I'm like, I just seems like God exists, and I don't even know if I could not

believe in it. So, and that's not terribly noble, and it's not a reason for you to believe it, but that's honestly kind of where I'm at. I just think I have this relationship with God. I pray to God. My whole, yeah, it just, it seems like He exists and so I'm willing to go along with that and listen until, it's sort of like when people lay out the whole, you could be just a computer simulation. It's like, it seems like this is real. And I'm open to there being a computer simulation, but I'm going to need really good evidence before I abandon this view that I have kind of come just to hold naturally without many

big peaks or speed bumps or whatever. Yeah. So that's kind of where I'm at. And then I also say, when I see really intelligent atheists to debate really intelligent Christians, I just feel like the Christians seem to win every time. So all that together, I'm like, I'm just going to go on believe in this thing. Yeah. I listened to so many debates and discussions about the regular traditional way of classical theism, arguing for the existence of God, arguing against the existence of God and all that. And I feel like at this point right now, I'm still just as unimpressed as I was with this

kind of stuff like five years ago. It never did anything for me. Yeah. Neither side, honestly. Okay. So we might be kind of... Similar in that way. On a similar level. So I listened to the existence of God and the cosmological argument, and

it's like, okay, I see how it makes sense to you and how it gives you strength, but honestly, it does nothing to convince me of the existence of God. And I see how it makes sense to you and how it gives you strength, but honestly, it does nothing to convince me of the existence of God. And I see the responses by the atheists, and I think, yeah, I see where you're coming from, and I get it, but it does nothing to me to actually change my opinion on whether the argument for God is strong or not. So it's just kind of like a mental exercise that I'm not particularly very interested in. And I see how some people love it, but I honestly, and this is not meant to be an insult

to those who like those arguments or who use them, but I personally don't think that they are like good tools to convince people of either side. Maybe it works for some people, I don't know. This is just how I view it. So I think personally they don't do anything. I think what it does for people is, for people who've been told that Christianity is intellectually vacuous, it shows them that, oh no, there are very intelligent people who have very

robust arguments for the existence of God. And then you're like, okay, now this is a viable option, because I don't know how to respond to these Christians. Those sound pretty compelling. Maybe I don't feel convicted by them, but I know if I was in the ring with William Lanncraig or Dr. Ed Faeser or Trent Horn, I'd be demolished. So, you know what I mean? So, okay, so now that I think it's intellectually credible,

even partially, then I'm more open to it. Yeah. I kind of, I just, I approach the whole thing a little bit differently. So for many years, I had this attitude of, unless I know it's definitely true, I'm not going to take a step. I had a discussion with, so over the last years,

first I went to Israel with David actually, with David Wood last year, where we spent up to almost two weeks there. And I went to the Western Wall and it had a huge impact on me. I feel like for the first time in so many years, when I stood there, I started feeling something. It's like I was numb until then for many years and I went there and I started

feeling something and I thought, wow, I wish I could spend some time just here, just reflecting and taking it all in. And I saw religious Jewish people there, including two religious ultra-orthodox Jewish men who approached us thinking that we are secular Jews and who wanted to basically tell us to follow the commandments of God. And once they found out that we're not Jewish, they're like, oh, where are you from? Oh, we're from America and we're just here to cover what's going on right now and all that. And those guys became very emotional. Like these two guys who had no plan of actually approaching us for anything became, one of those guys like started tearing up and said,

thank you, thank you so much. And I was like, I expressed to him how we see the situation and we want to kind of, you know, come here to cover things and like support and all of that. The guy started almost crying, tearing up and saying, thank you, thank you so much. Thank, he said like, thank you like a thousand times. I don't know. And they were obviously very religious.

One of those guys came and he pointed at me, said he might not know him, but he loves you, he knows you or something like that. And I don't know, this was like so moving. And they didn't try to give me anything. Like one of those guys actually, this older man, he went back, he said, wait, wait a second. He went back and he didn't grab anything. He just came back to me. Like they were kind of emotional and all over the place. And it kind of, it moved me really.

And had more and more interactions with religious people there. And for the, for, for an amount of time in 2024, like he wanted to say 2014, I don't know why. In 2024, I started going toward Judaism actually. Yeah, what's funny about the Jews, right, there's a great sentence, is I was on Shapiro's show recent, not recently, last year. And I just, I think I joked with him after like the fact that you don't want me kind of makes me want you. Like we Christians are like bending over backwards to get you into our camp. And they're

like, yeah, if we don't, you just stay where you are, please. We don't. It's like the, uh, it's like the pretty girl who doesn't want you. Yeah. Like, oh, well, now I got to, now what's, why don't you want me? What's wrong with me? All right. So yeah, you start to be attracted to Judaism. All right. So tell me about this. This is the funny thing.

We seem to be kind of similar in different ways. When we were on the flight back to America from Israel So it was an overnight flight and there was this guy who walks around the plane and who basically approaches people and asks them if they do Tefillin, which is to wrap the thing around their arms as the Bible commands. And so he comes to me and says, do you wrap Tefillin?

And I'm like, no. He says, oh, did Teflon? And I'm like, no. He says, oh, did you ever try it? I'm like, no, I'm not Jewish. And he's like, oh, okay. And then he, my brother, and he's like, he reaches out his hand and just does this, and I'm like, oh, cool. And I'm like, sometimes I wish I was.

And he's like, nice. And he just walks away. And I'm like, we're not hiring. Thank you though. Because they're told not to. Because we have so many more commandments we'd have to keep. Yeah, and not to, actually it is seen as a thing, like if somebody converts to Judaism

and doesn't practice Judaism properly and doesn't keep the commandments, it's actually seen as a downside for them. Even with fellow, fellow Jews that are currently Jews, they're supposed to tell their fellow Jews to keep the commandments. If they don't keep the commandments, it's a downside. So if they accept a convert in, they have to make sure and have to know that this person is serious and this person is going to follow the commandments as they are laid out and they are like over 600 commandments. It's

like, it's a big package. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas for the Gentiles. We just have seven. Yeah, they say, if I think believe in God, we want you to believe in God, but follow these laws. That's it. So, um, but if you really want to convert, fine, we're going to help you convert. That's what they say. And there's something kind of attractive about this. But I tried it and I tried practicing certain things and I felt like there was a point where I was actually waking up and doing Jewish prayers and things like that. Tell me how this happened. So did you go online and go, what stuff did Jews do? And then try to do that? Did you know someone who was kind of guiding you in this?

Well, I talked to several people who were giving me some introduction and some advice, and who were kind of surprised by my interest and how I was moved in Israel. And they did give me some advice on where to look, what to get, and I bought a little prayer book and found some rabbis who said that they are happy to, that they invite me to participate in their Sabbath, and they would like me to observe it and to participate. And when I'm there, I can, it's just to basically share it with people that they feel some bond with that love them and that they love. And aside from that, if I have the intention to convert or something, we can talk about that aside from that. So that was their thought.

And that's how I started exploring. I started reading by myself, reading a book actually. I got a book which was about what it means to be Jewish. So I started getting into the basics of the book and it was very fantastic. And started picking up practices to see whether it's good or whether it works or not. Such as?

Well, I would wake up in the mornings and read the morning prayers, which are very long, remarkably long. And- Remarkably, I love it. remarkably long and um remarkably putting on the teflon which is wrapping the commandments around your arms and on your head and putting on a veil and and all that and basically praying while you're doing that having dietary laws having a mezuzah which is this thing that is at the,

at your door post where there is a parchment of a commandments and all that. So lots of different things. I started doing that. And the thing is I still love it. I still respect it. I still admire it, but I didn't really feel like I was doing anything meaningful.

I felt like I was just cosplaying. Cosplaying basically. Yeah, that's the word I use. And that's basically what I was doing anything meaningful. I felt like I was just cosplaying. Cosplaying basically. Yeah, that's the word I use and that's basically what I was doing there and it wasn't meaningful. And at that same point, at that same time, my wife was, she was an atheist for over 10 years and she started becoming religious toward Christianity. I just thought that female atheists were a myth. You know, I just, I've never met many of them. I know some of them show up at these atheist conferences, but I always thought they were being hired

to come in and pretend. All right, so she was a real atheist. They're paid generously to appear. Yeah. But no, she was an atheist. And I actually, this is how I met her. I met her online because she wasn't, because I was in my atheist phase

and she was running an atheist Instagram page and I was following it and found it hilarious. And we started messaging and getting to know each other. Yeah. And ended up getting married and all that. Okay. We were atheists together for a very long time. And while I was experimenting with my Jewish stuff, she was becoming religious and was

going to Orthodox Christianity. Oh, interesting. And I was like, what's happening? Okay, can we just step back? I want to step back and ask what happened? How did the new atheism die? Because your story there of you looking into Judaism, she looking into Christianity is just, I mean, I hear this all the time now. Yeah.

What happened? Was it that, I think this might be it, but you were inside, so you'd have more of an insight into this than me. Was it that atheism was never able to provide a cohesive worldview. In other words, it could attack well, or at least thought it could. But then when it came to, okay, what are you though? Like, how should we live? What is true? It seemed like there was a ton of infighting, because they seem to merely identify themselves by what they weren't, namely, idiot, God-believing morons, weren't, namely idiot, God-believing morons, than what they were, which was what? Yeah, it's, it's, um, I would say it's kind of about, um, sorry. So the rise of social media, the emergence of social media led to lots of people who didn't have, uh, who weren't in the public to become public and to share their opinions,

no matter how smart or dumb they are. And it led to lots of people, I would say, expressing their distaste with the traditions that they live in, the religious beliefs that they have, and so on, and people sharing this very, very publicly and very openly, and especially in the Christian world, there was very little pushback against this. And it was just a bunch of angry people going online and talking trash about God and Christianity.

And Christians trying to be nice and not really knowing how to respond. And people are not really shutting them down or anything. They're just doing this. And funny thing is, I remember like 10 years ago, there was this whole idea that, wow, Christianity is dying and atheism is rising. soon everyone is going to be an atheist. Look at the statistics and all that. Look how rational we'll be. Yeah, and pregnant men! Wait, what? How do we get to that? It quickly got out of hand.

Like that escalated quickly. That line from Ankh-e-Man? Yes, and the thing is there's also this hypocrisy, which I noticed from my own side as an ex-Muslim, where you have these non-Christian or ex-Christian atheists who go out and talk about how bad religion is. But then when the topic of Islam comes, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on.

Isn't that wild? Let's not be bigoted. Let's not be Islamophobic. It's like, wait a minute. So we have Christianity, the culture Hold on. Isn't that wild? Let's not be bigoted. Let's not be Islamophobic. It's like, wait a minute. So we have Christianity, the culture that led to your having these freedoms and this beautiful life and all that. And you have issues with this.

You have anger and all that directed at this religion. And then we have Islam, the religion which is the most oppressive religion in the world, the most destructive religion in the world that is also threatening to take over your society, and you're like, oh, we don't want to talk bad about that. Seriously? This doesn't seem very rational. Yeah. It is interesting.

And there are lots of people, to be fair, in the new atheist sphere, who have spoken about Islam and who have criticized Islam and who have acknowledged it, but it's always just, oh yeah, you know, that's a secondary issue or a lesser issue. And when you actually speak about Islam and are critical of it, you get lots of leftist, atheist pushback. Like I mean, to this day, the atheist leftist circles are calling on and trying to cancel Bill Maher because he doesn't like Islam. So many people just... Isn't that wild? Leftism and Islam?

What a weird bedfellows. It is very very... What accounts for that, do you think? Is it demonic? And I don't know how far you are down your Christian journey, so you might not be comfortable with that language, but I wonder if both leftism, at least at the far fringes of it, and Islam are both enemies of Christianity. I would say it comes down to some simpler explanations, which are that it has a lot to do with people being just stupid and ignorant. And I read this, I read this meme once it said, you know, everything happens for a reason. And sometimes that reason is you're an idiot and don't think things through. Ah, I like that. Now there is among the leftists and the atheists, I have to say as much as they spread lots of dumb stuff, dumb ideas,

there is one thing that is very common and very dominant among them, which is that they often try to argue from a place of very emotional compassion and a very misguided and misplaced sense of feeling bad for the others and for the minorities and all that. And feeling like, you know, the Christian traditional guy at home, he's the bad guy. And those other minorities, no matter who they are, they must be the good guys. Let's protect them. It's a very stupid idea. Do you see that among the left towards the Jews?

No, because the Jews have become part, because the Jews? No. And why? Because the Jews have become part, because the Jews are successful people. They're successful people, they're integrated people, they do very well. They are often economically, educationally, intellectually, and so on, doing even better than the local traditional Christian population, white population. So they stick out as those who are better off than anyone else, which is why they don't deserve your compassion for those who are treated unfairly and those who don't have it very well.

So you have to always, even if the worst people are at the bottom, and they are at the bottom because they are, they are, they stick to very horrible ideas and horrible things, you have to see them as the good guys who deserve your protection. This is basically the leftist mindset. You know what's funny is that this, this is a perversion of Christian compassion. Yes. So this is Christian, this came from Christianity and it's been distorted. This is what Tom Holland argues, where he basically argues accurately, I would say, that much of the culture that we have in the West today, including the leftist culture, the liberalism and all of that, is basically a perversion and distortion of the good values that people took from Christianity.

The understanding each other, the seeing each other as equals before God, the compassion for the less fortunate and so on. These are Christian values that people who are anti-Christianity take from Christianity without understanding that this is what Christianity gave them, and then they hate Christianity in return for perceived injustices within Christianity. It's so ironic. They think Christianity is bad or Christian culture, a Christian tradition is bad, it's

unfair, it's mean, but they basically criticize the Christian culture and the Christian injustices and unfairness from a Christian perspective without understanding that this is what they're doing. It's the Christian culture that gave people freedoms. It's the Christian culture that brought forth what you call liberalism, the democracies that we have in the West. The human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human, is based on a Western Christian mindset. These are Christian ideals that were perverted and distorted and are now used against tradition itself.

It's kind of, it's dumb, you know, it's stupid. And unfortunately, Islam is a perfect culture that, or a perfect religion and a perfect culture that will happily take advantage of this and come here and say, yeah, cool, cool, cool. You guys keep doing that. You guys keep tolerating and attacking each other while we increase our numbers

and start imposing our own laws and our own issues. This is what's happening in the UK basically and in other European countries. Wow. I wanna tell you about some amazing coffee we were sent recently. It was from Seven Weeks Coffee, which is America's pro-life coffee company.

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even if you don't find yourself convinced by them. But when I asked you about Judaism, you said it just wasn't really, this may not have been your exact words, but it wasn't doing anything for you. But do you have any intellectual reasons not to accept Judaism? Because maybe you were doing it wrong

and you should be a Jew, or maybe it doesn't matter how you feel and you should at least look into the objective reasons to think Judaism is true. Well the funny thing about Judaism is that the Jewish scholars don't make any, don't really argue and don't make any arguments to prove that Judaism is true because it's like we're not in the business of that so that's what they what they would say. They're really not trying very hard. We don't want you and we got no good reason to think this is true. It's great to meet you. So Jews are commanded and there are Jews in our time who make efforts to do that as well.

They are commanded normally to tell non-Jews as well to believe in God and to abide by the basic laws of God. Jews are popularly not doing that right now very much because they have a very complicated and difficult history where they just kind of adopted this attitude of let's just not talk, let's just keep to ourselves and all that. There are some Jews who try to break this and who try to go back to the commandments of telling others also to worship God and all that. But mostly they just want to keep to themselves, rightly so, because of things they have gone through. But honestly, when I was looking at Judaism and looking into Judaism, I was looking more toward getting an answer to prayer and also analyzing its text and its arguments

and all of that. And the thing is, what you're basically told is you don't have to believe in... No, you don't have to be a Jew. You are told to believe in God and to believe that this is from God, but all we want from you is that you simply become what's called a tribe of Noah or children of Noah and follow the Noahite laws, the seven laws, which are basically about belief in God, no idol worship, no sexual immorality, established laws and so on. That's it. But the general idea is that people are told not to establish

their own religions with their own doctrines and all of that, which to this day doesn't make much sense to me. Humans tend to want to establish things to go by and to believe in. You can't just tell them, just believe in God and live like that, and that's it. Don't make your own religion. It doesn't really work like that. Christianity is an answer to this. I had my objections to Christianity when I was looking into Judaism, and I was thinking that Christianity might be a misinterpretation of Jewish texts and a misunderstanding and a corruption and so on. So at the time that my wife was going toward Christianity, I was actively trying to block

Christianity and block the cross and all of that and trying to simply stick with following the Bible and doing prayer and all of that. And I was never really fine with the idea of simply becoming one of the benign Noah, as they call it, the children of Noah. And it wasn't really appealing to me. But the thing is, I don't know how it happened, but at some point I started turning toward Christianity and trying it out, and adopting certain practices from different Christian traditions.

And I was actually more drawn toward Catholicism. I wanted to try it out. And the first time that I sat down and started and tried out a Christian prayer, it felt very, I felt like it was very genuine and it felt like I am speaking to God. I am expressing something that I truly feel. And I started approaching Catholic practices more and more, and I looked into the rosary. How did you do that? I have the rosary here, like I got a rosary here, which is fantastic. I always had some respect for Catholicism. I looked up, I had some interest in looking up Catholic things that you guys use and the rosary, which looked very interesting, very nice to me. I wanted to have, I wanted to look at it and just wanted to practice it.

Did you sort of go online and say, how do I pray the rosary or how did that? The funny thing is I actually had a rosary at home, like an old one that I just had because I thought it looked cool. Yeah. Fair. But then I picked it up one day and just looked up how to pray the rosary. And you just found some website or video or? I actually went on a Vatican website and looked at how to do it. Then I found a, what's it, American Council, something, something Catholics, and they had this whole guidance, guide on how to pray the rosary. And I sat down and actually, without really yet believing in

anything, started practicing it and it felt beautiful. And it was, I loved it, you know. Can you point to what you loved about it? Well, first off, looking at the mysteries of the Rosary, the daily ones, looking how it tells you a story. And I'm familiar with the story. I read the Gospels before this. But putting some heart into it and some context to it and going through the story of the rosary and the crucifixion, the resurrection, the enunciation, what Mother Mary goes through and how the rosary relates to her. And just doing the rosary, Hail Mary full of grace.

It's like, it's very complicated because I come from a Muslim background which has like very heavy iconoclasm and Unitarianism in the most brutal way, theologically, and also says that Christians who believe in Jesus will go to hell and spend all eternity there, who believe that He is God. So all of this is a little bit difficult, but I come to it and I sit down and I start praying it, and I start kneeling and doing the practices as described, and it just feels

humbling, and I feel like it is filling a void that I had for so many years. And I start feeling the devotion and start feeling this love for Mary and start feeling love for... What really struck me was the sorrowful mysteries in the rosary, the crucifixion of Jesus and all of that. Sitting down and reading through it while doing the rosary brought me much closer to it and I start getting it basically. And the thing is, one issue right now is my whole, like the last 10 years or so I spent with hardcore atheism thinking I need logic and reason and 100% proof for everything and so on.

But then I sit down and I start doing these things and all of that is like, I'm not really waiting for it to be 100% true. Can I give you an analogy that I've been thinking of lately and I wonder if you resonate with it? To me, it's sort of like nutrition and exercise. Suppose you've got different people and they're giving you different arguments for what will make you feel the best,

what will make you feel healthy. It what will make you feel healthy, you know? It's almost like I don't need to know why eating these things will make me flourish. If I eat them and I flourish, that's proof enough. I think something is like that with Christianity, where it's like as I begin to implement these prayer practices, follow what the church teaches, even if I'm unaware as to why she teaches it, if I find myself flourishing, okay, I like that. I can tell this is spiritually healthy, you know, and unless I've got really good reason

to think in the long run it'll be to your detriment, just like if you keep eating this food, yeah, you feel good now, but later on you'll realize you shouldn't have exercised, you shouldn't be eating whole foods. Unless I've got really good reason, then I'm like, I'm gonna keep doing this. Like this internal evidence is proof enough unless and until I have a defeater. And it's actually very good. It is very good.

And it connects to how I felt before I decided to jump in. Because over the years, I tried different practices to replace the void, such as meditation, studying Buddhism, and adopting the Buddhist mindset of simply accepting everything as it is, not trying to run from the suffering, but accepting the reality of suffering and just finding

peace with it and devoting yourself to that and meditating. And I have to say, meditation was actually a very helpful practice, but it wasn't really the same thing. It felt good to take your mind off things and to meditate and all that, but it's not really the same thing. Sitting down and following certain practices and certain prayers, while also reading the scripture and kind of assessing the plausibility of it and seeing no problem in Christianity being plausible, seeing no problem in the divinity of Jesus and the sonship, and all of that being plausible.

Practicing certain Christian things made me feel like I'm happy with this. I like it. I love it. And I want to believe that it is true. I'm not sure if it's true, but I want to believe that it is true. And I actually sat down and had a conversation one day with David, David Wood. And it's kind of funny to talk to him because he's like a diagnosed psychopath. So he's like, he can't really relate to the feelings and all that. How interesting.

It's sometimes kind of odd to talk to him about feelings and what to do. But I sat down and said, hey, listen, I've been practicing lots of Christian practices. I've been praying every day now for the last month or so. And I feel very happy. My life is, I feel so much better suddenly. The void, the depression, everything is gone. I feel much better about life and all that. I have hope again.

But the thing is, I don't know if it's true and I don't know if I'm supposed to commit to all that I have hope again. But the thing is, I don't know if it's true and I don't know if I'm supposed to commit to something that I don't know is 100% true because this is what I do. And he actually, he stopped, he smiled and he said, I cannot tell you what he actually said, but I can only try. But he said that, that he read something in a, in a, in a, in an article or in an essay a long time ago, which was, I think, in the Will to Believe, which is available as a book. And it was about how if you go about your life and only make steps when you know that they are 100%

going to go into the right direction. You are not going to get anywhere. If you find yourself at a spot and before you there is just dust and mist and you don't know which way to go, but you have two paths to follow. You have to pick one. You can't just stay there for the rest of your life. You have to pick one. You can't just stay there for the rest of your life.

You have to pick one. You have to go into a direction. You don't have to know for 100% to 100% that one of these paths is the correct path. You simply have to pick one. You simply have to go with one. Yeah, and you might start walking down one of them and go, oh yeah, this doesn't feel right.

And then backtrack. Yes, yes, exactly. And it gave me something. And then backtrack. Yes, yes, exactly. And it gave me something. And then I went to church with my wife. She asked me one day, do you want to come to church? And she asked me several weeks, like, do you want to come with me? And I'm like, no, please don't. If I ever want to, I will tell you. Then one weekend I was like, okay, I want to come with you to church. So I went there and I tried it out. Second time I went there, I met an Orthodox Christian monk, it's an Orthodox church, and I sat down with him and I talked to him about

belief and faith and certainty and all of that. And he basically gave me something like that, but he made it much deeper about how- Then the psychopath did. Yes. And he talked to me about how much ego and arrogance there is involved in wanting to know for sure that something is true before you make a step toward it and how in the end you don't end up helping yourself,

you only end up hurting yourself. Unlike when you have humility and go toward what you may feel like is true. And it's very difficult for me to explain right now how this whole process happened. I feel like I can explain it better in the future, but weighing everything that is going on with all the practices and prayers, I felt like, you know what, I want to believe that

it's true and I love where this is going. At that point, I kind of deviated from my Catholic practices and went toward Orthodox practices and started doing like a morning daily prayer rule, which comes from certain saints, and I really started loving it, and I started loving the smell of incense. And long story short, at the end I ended up going to my priest at the church and asking him and I approached him, like this is the third person that I approached with the same issue. I said, hey, look, I love what I am seeing and I have been practicing for two months now. I've been

praying and I love it and all that. The thing is, I'm also an ice cold atheist and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to take a step. I don't know what to do really. Can you help me? And he is, he's of Greek origin and he knows that I'm of Turkish origin. And he said to me, listen, when you come here to church and you experience the things around you, it's basically like you're getting a smell, a little whiff of a kebab that smells very good. And if you decide to become a catechumen, you basically get in line to get one of those kebabs. Once you're in line, you can still decide whether you actually want to get one or not.

And I thought- That's, I like it. That actually makes a lot of sense. It does, yeah. Yeah, you can leave the line, just get it. Yeah, yeah. And so I was like, okay, if I look at me right now,

in your opinion, should I become a catechumen? And he's like, yes, I would be happy to have you. I was like, okay, then I want to. So he's like, then I'm expecting you next week. And then I decided to just go there. And I'm on my path now to be a Christian. I still haven't gotten baptized, but it's going to come. I need to ask a selfish question. How did you find my book?

Well, while I was practicing the rosary, and I was really loving it, I hope you'll continue to pray it. In fact, I have a gift for you. I bet you can't guess what it is. Oh my, oh, oh no. So there's a great group called Theotokos Rosaries. People should check them out on Instagram, but they made them. And so I know you've already got a pretty ball of rosary over there, but that's another one for you. Wow. They're beautiful. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. This is beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. I am going to continue practicing the rosary. I'm going to use this. Yeah, it's so beautiful. I mean, just meditate on the life of Christ. To answer your question, I love it. I love it. I occasionally, I started sitting down

and while praying the rosary, reading your book, Pocket Guide to the Rosary and making more sense of it. Did you just go on Amazon? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. I went to Amazon and found it. That's lovely. I was looking at books about the Rosary

to understand it better and all that. And I found this and I thought, that was good. And I got it. And the funny thing is a short while after I got your book, like I sit down, just that morning, I think I was using the book during the Rosary. And then Cameron Bertuzzi sends me a message and says, Like I said, just that morning, I think I was using the book during the rosary.

And then Cameron Bertuzzi sends me a message and says, Hey, Matt Fred wants to get in touch with you. I'm like, Matt Fred? Wait, the same guy? Yeah, that's great. So I love it. And I also asked my priest about this. I said, I have been practicing the rosary.

I've been praying the rosary and I love it. And I think it brought me closer to Christianity and all of that. And I said, what do you think about this? He said, there is no problem with the rosary. That's nice. He said, there are certain aspects that we generally may not practice or say in the very same way, but there is no problem with the rosary alone. In fact, there are saints that do it in different ways in the Orthodox Church, and you can try it in those ways, but you can also continue in this way. There is no problem with it at all. And I thought, that's amazing. So what I do nowadays

is in the morning, I do my prayer rule, and then I also usually add either afterward or during the same day, the rosary to it and go through the mysteries. And do you have children? Beautiful. Yeah. I find that the rosary is a great way to end the day with the kids. And it's for a couple of reasons, right? Like, it's one, because I want us to meditate on the mysteries of Christ.

It's two, because you don't have to be super creative. You know what I mean? You don't have to, like like come up with these interesting words. But three, it just practically just kind of brings everyone's energy levels down. And it's just a great way to, because there's something very rhythmic about it. And anyway, you know, I love rosaries. I got so many, I got several of them at home now. And so this is This is beautiful. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. I also had a gift for you. Yeah, I'm excited. I Got something for you. Where did you get that rosary this year? I found it on Etsy. Oh, it's amazing. Etsy's great Yeah, I don't know how much they take but in a day where there's so many mass-produced things. It's nice. It is a

Alright. Yeah. This is very lovely of you. I mean, I think it is. I hope. It could be, I don't know what it is. You don't know what it is yet, you shouldn't say. I shouldn't say it's lovely. You shouldn't say.

Did you wrap it or did your wife wrap it? My wife did. I thought that was your wife, yeah. Yeah. Like this is too nice for a fella. I can't do that. Oh, wow. Okay, I'm now realizing it's not a book.

No. Okay. Thank you. Saint Maria of Paris. Yeah. So this is- To the end and without exception. This is a figure, a saint,

an icon that I recently became familiar with and started to love. And it's also the first icon that I myself personally ordered and received as of Saint Maria Skopsova. She was originally from Russia, but she was a nun, and she helped the poor, the needy, and all of that. And when the Second World War broke out, and when the Nazis occupied France, she helped Jews who came to her place by sheltering them, issuing fake baptismal certificates to basically say, these are Christians, not

Jews, and to help them run away and protect them, for which in 1945 she was arrested by the Nazis and sent to a Ravensbrück concentration camp and she was gassed to death and was then canonized as a saint by the ecumenical patriarchate in Constantinople. And pray for us. Maria, yeah. It's beautiful. That's very kind of you. saint by the ecumenical patriarchate in Constantinople. And... Pray for us. Yeah. Maria, yeah. It's beautiful.

That's very kind of you, thank you. Welcome. So is your wife thrilled that you're going to Divine Energy with her? Yeah, she's very happy about it. She's very happy about it. And I think it brought lots of healing to us and to our family.

I think when we were going different paths, there was kind of some uncertainty to what's going to happen. And I attended my first Divine Liturgy with her and I loved it. And it's such a place now that I can't wait for the weekend to come that I go back and attend the Divine Liturgy again. It's just, it's beautiful and I love it. And I love participating in it and she is very happy about this and it changed us a lot and it brought lots of hope that was lacking for the longest time now. Yeah.

Do you have atheist friends? Cause I'm sure you made a bunch of kind of atheist allies, even if your YouTube channel wasn't explicitly atheistic. So what kind of pushback are you perhaps getting from some folks online? There is some pushback that I get from online atheists, from some people who don't personally know me very well, who have said certain things like, what is this? I became an atheist because of you. This is very disappointing.

I left Islam because of you and became an atheist and why are you now changing and so on. Some people are complaining and some people are saying, I'm not gonna follow you anymore and so on. But the thing is, actually to my surprise, most people from, even from the atheist circles have reacted positively, including with, hey, I'm happy for you, keep on supporting you and so on.

People that I know that I became friends with, that I became familiar with, some very close ones have said that they are very, very happy for me, for my new found path and that they hope everything goes the best way and that I should keep in touch with them and so on. People assuring me that we are not enemies now and all that. So much

of the reactions have been actually very, very good. So I'm very positively surprised about the reactions that I've been getting even from non-Christians. There are some Christians, there are some people who don't react to it very nicely. Muslims don't react to it very nicely. Muslims are very upset about this. Like, what? Now you're a Christian. Now you believe in something even worse and all that. Please. So have you come out on your channel talking about this or primarily on David's? I did talk about it on my channel as well. I made a video where I first explained that I went to church for the first time in my life to attend service,

and I loved it. And then I also later on explained how I'm getting closer to Christianity and that I basically took a leap of faith toward Christianity. And so I openly said it and defended it and all that. And there's always, the thing is, when you make a decision like this, from different circles, there's this expectation that now you will start fighting for this and fighting against the others who disagree with it and so on.

And I don't want to do that. And for now, I just want to focus on what I found and the beauty of it, the greatness of it. I want to learn more. I have so much to learn. I want to practice and I don't want to fight with anybody about this at all. Even when I was solely focused on criticizing Islam, I never went up to Muslims and said, hey, why do you believe in this? Are you stupid? So I don't feel the need to change people's beliefs

right now and I kind of don't feel the need to argue with people who come to me and to challenge and who challenge my beliefs at this moment. I'm going my own path and I'm very happy with it at this point and I just wish everyone else all the best. And this is also an issue with something that I encounter now within Christianity, among Christians. Unfortunately, there is some always some strife among a minority of Christians who start fighting about why did you go this direction? This is the wrong church.

This is the wrong way and so on. And then- I can't help but think that, well, first of all, I mean, I think it's right to help fellow Christians come to understand the fullness of Christianity, right? So I think that's good. I hope I do that.

I also think it might be a symptom of what we spoke about earlier about this. I need to be 100%, 120% certain. And I can't have anyone around me disagreeing with that because that'll maybe lead me to question it. So I've got to be really triumphalistic sort of about it. And again, that's not to say you can't know.

That's not to say we shouldn't, like as a Catholic, I want to invite people to become Catholics. I think it's the fullness of Christianity. But that kind of like, I don't know, that anger and yeah, like there'll be people in the YouTube section today saying like we should have tried to convert him. That kind of stuff. Yeah. First of, yeah. Anyway, I don't know what I'm saying. No, I get what you're saying. And it's, I see where people

are coming from and I, I love Catholicism. I love Catholics. I love the Catholic traditions and the Catholic way and all that. I love the rosary. I love the idea of Marian devotion and all these things. And I appreciate all of it. And in my heart, I still have this thing, like I want to be part of the Catholic tradition, basically. I went a different way for different reasons. Where I still believe, I still don't hold on to the idea that Catholicism is wrong or anything, just that there have been separations in the history of Christianity that I wish didn't happen.

I would love to see a future where the Christian churches, the Christian church can find a way to reconcile and to come together and to sort out their differences and be in communion with each other again. Wouldn't it be beautiful instead of focusing on fighting and saying, no, you are wrong. No, you are wrong. You are evil. You are astray and so on. What's the point of that?

Like is that? I think a lot of that that we're seeing online is the result of a new found fervor. Yeah. Like when people convert, they have this tiresome tendency of looking down their nose at everybody else and mistakenly thinking that their new tradition is a sort of Eden. Free of snakes and corruption. Like just give it five minutes and you'll realize it smells where you are as well. And that's okay. But yeah.

This is where I found, when I was looking into Orthodox Christianity, I encountered lots of trends online that made me think, that actually made me think not very, I wasn't really very fond of what I was seeing. There were lots of online trends that were very hostile, not only toward non-orthodox, but also toward other Orthodox Christians within. And so these were my first impressions of Orthodox Christianity, and it pushed me away.

And I thought, I don't want anything to do with it. As I started approaching it more further, I began noticing that this is mostly a trend that is restricted to certain sections inside Orthodox Christianity and also to online currents and online trends. Yeah, online trends tend, humility rarely goes viral.

Yeah. It's usually the loud, angry people. And that's why people will point to certain things within Catholicism, maybe about sort of anti-Semitism among certain Catholics or what have you, and it, or infighting or what have you. And it tends to be just a small, very, very loud group of people.

Like on X Twitter, there's a trend or a current of people who proclaim to be Catholics and to have like very, very weird messed up attitudes and viewpoints and all that. But these are just people that are usually anonymous. I know. And so easy to say disgusting things. You don't encounter these people in real life.

I don't. I mean, that's been my experience as well, right? When I'm online, the Orthodox I encounter tend to be quite hostile and belligerent, but the times that I've encountered Orthodox people, I just think these are beautiful people. This was my observation. I see the loud Orthodox online that seem very hostile and problematic.

Then I see the quiet Orthodox online that seem to be much better. And then I go to church and it's a completely different world. And it's beautiful. And I feel, and I love it. And I also went toward the... So I went to a Greek Orthodox church, which I also decided to then follow and become a catechumen of the Greek archdiocese, which follows the ecumenical patriarchate in Constantinople. And they have a history now of being, getting together and collaborating with the Pope, with the Vatican and trying to work towards reconciliation.

And are you familiar with Eastern Catholicism? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's all. Okay. That's cool. Yeah. I am canonically an Eastern Catholic, and so my family attended Divine Liturgy for the last several years. Wow. With probably the similar prayer rules and things like this. Now that we live in Florida, there's no real option for that here, so we no longer attend an Eastern Catholic Church.

It's beautiful. I have been looking at Eastern Rite Catholicism and also into... Western Rite Orthodoxy. Western Rite Orthodoxy as well. I found that the Antiochian Orthodox have quite some presence in America where they tend to follow the Western Rite. And it was very, very, very interesting to see how an Orthodox church practices, like, sings Catholic songs and all that. Yeah. Have you heard of the philosopher Peter Craeft? I believe so.

He's a Boston College professor. He's written over a hundred books. He's about 87 years old, one of my favorite people in the world. I've interviewed him several times. He's got this great line, and it has to do with Christians. He says, when a feuding, no, when a maniac is at the door, feuding brothers reconcile. And I think what it is you and I are saying is, okay, we can feud, we can disagree, and what we're not doing is like, hey, we're both right. No, if we believe contrary things,

then we can't both be right. We might both contrary things, then we can't both be right. We might both be wrong, but we can't both be right. So we do need to sort these disagreements out. But right now, you know, we've got Islam, atheism, the new woke right perhaps. Like there are different things that like we might have, we could perhaps work together as separated brethren while we figure these things out.

And I think that actually strengthens our witness toward the world. C.S. Lewis talked about this, about the importance of like, I think whenever possible trying to keep these as in-house discussions. That isn't to say pretending there's kind of a uniformity where there isn't, or to pretend that there aren't disagreements. But I mean, sometimes you go online to these Christian YouTube channels and it seems like all they care about is our differences. And I just think, well, how does that look to the to the non-believer?

And maybe that's not the point, right? Maybe the point is to win over people and fair enough. I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. I use it, my family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music, including Mylofi.

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could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Fred. I think it's important that we realize that as we speak about these things, as we disagree about these things, which we should, just to keep in mind that you've got like an atheist or a Muslim or someone else watching, yeah, sort of do so with charity. I see the impression, I saw lots of, I see people who get kind of pushed away by this,

by hostile attitudes among Christians toward each other. And I see that lots of people take advantage of this. And there are people online, often anonymous, who think, oh, becoming a traditional Christian, a traditional Catholic or traditional Orthodox Christian is the based thing to do. I think it's going to be five minutes until based is no longer a cool word. I don't want to be based. I just want to follow what I think is true and I want to be a friend of Jesus Christ. That's what I want to do. It's ridiculous.

It's this whole thing. Like I have lots of love for Jewish people and Jewish tradition and all that. And I still have so much respect for them. And I've seen nothing but love and goodness and kindness from Jewish people. And I see this whole trend by certain anti-Semitic people acting in very anti-Jewish ways in the name of Christianity, in the name of Catholicism, and in the name ofodoxy as well online. And my first reactions, my first impressions were that this is how traditionalist Christians act online. I quickly noticed that this is not really true. This is just an online trend. And in reality, when you look at the world right now, and when you look at what the Catholic Church does and what the Orthodox

churches do, they have been on a path of reconciliation and of goodness and of... Mutual understanding. Yeah. There is the Ecumenical Charter in 2001, which was... Which were churches of Europe get together and basically make a mutual declaration of working toward reconciliation and objecting to antisemitism and things like that. Yeah, I've actually just, I have a sub stack and I have a, I just wrote two articles on this,

on Judaism and antisemitism. I also, for those interested, have a long article on Pascal's Wager, which I'm sure you're familiar with. So people might want to for those interested, have a long article on Pascal's Wager, which I'm sure you're familiar with. So people might want to check those out. But yeah, I mean, I think I have lots of thoughts. I think that, I think for some people of goodwill, it seems to them that when they are accused of anti-Semitism, that this reminds them of how five minutes ago, everyone was accusing them of racism.

And they rightly perceived that the reason this was happening was to shut down debate. Because they're like, I have no ill will, I don't judge black people as a monolith, I do judge them as individual, you know. And so then, when people I think, and this is possible, right, can too easily cry anti-Semitism, perhaps because you want them to be Christian or because you criticize the state of Israel or because whatever, you have criticisms of certain Jewish people, fair enough.

But that isn't, but okay, but anti-Semitism still exists. So what is it? And I think it's sort of like an irrational hostility towards Jewish people as Jews. And it seems to me that on the right, just as on the left, there is this sort of tendency to spiral to the furthest edges to show just how committed I am to the cause and just how enlightened I am. Right, so if I'm all about like transitioning mice and babies and whatever look how cool I am I Think the same thing on the right right where it's like I mean what's the most? Egregious thing you could possibly say about the Jews. I'll take it one step further What's the most egregious thing you can say about women or what have you?

I'll take it one step further just to show you just how faithful and politically incorrect I can be. I mean, one of the beautiful things about being a Catholic, and I'm sure you have thoughts about being Orthodox, is that I can just look, I can look to the teaching authority of the church that condemns anti-Semitism and go, well, okay, this is cool. I'm really glad that you've got a platform and that you're very loud online, but the Second Vatican Council actually taught this, well, okay, this is cool. I'm really glad that you've got a platform and that you're very loud online, but the Second Vatican Council actually taught this, say. And so I'm gonna go with the church

and just you can keep talking. And it even goes way beyond that. Like the, I believe the Council of Trent, which was 500 years ago, kind of made this whole idea clear that all of us are guilty in killing Christ, for example. All of us, all humanity. There are people today who keep acting like this idea that only Jews are guilty, that this is a traditional idea and that we only

recently started fighting it. No. That's right. I mean, there were certainly there have been saints who have said things that the church doesn't agree with. But I think to be a saint isn't the church's declaration that one is infallible. It's the church's declaration that one is in heaven. Yeah. So there's probably a bit of that as well. Like the further back I can go and the more, and the more, yeah. But the thing is, even among some of the saints and the church fathers who are perceived as the most, as the most anti-Jewish.

And this is like where a big problem comes in. Like people will bring up, for example, St. John Chrysostom and his writings about the Jews. And he wrote his writings specifically in a context of Judaizers, of Christians at that time, still partially attending synagogue and looking at the Jews as totally correct and to the law as authoritative and all that. So he goes into Antioch and says, stop this.

And he starts blasting the synagogues and the Jews in very, very harsh ways. And coming into this, I feel like, okay, the language there, I just, I can't agree with that, but I see the context of it. And the thing is, when I look at the same father, when I look at the same Church Father, St. John Chrysostom, I recently came across his homily on the Gospel of Matthew, where he talks specifically about the section where the leaders among the Jewish population, when asked why they want Jesus crucified, the line, his blood be on us and on our children. He actually speaks in his homily on this, and he says that they were so,

fervent, so messed up, basically, in my terms, in their craziness that they were even wishing evil upon their own children, but that the lover of men did not fulfill their desires. I haven't read that, amen. but that the lover of men did not fulfill their desires. And even upon these people, saw them as worthy of all the good things, so much that Paul himself was one of them. And so many of them came to believe and so on.

So these are St. John Chrysostom's words in his homily on the Gospel of Matthew. But this is completely ignored by Jew-hating people in our time who want to use church fathers and others to say Jews are evil and so on. There is a big problem going on in the world. And when we talk about anti-Semitism, you're right, there are some people who might simply see this as a false accusation and all of that, but there is lots of actual anti-Semitism going on. There are those who are on the extreme left, who are primarily against the existence of the state of Israel.

And then there are those on the right who are primarily against Jews in general and very dehumanizing against them. And the thing is, much of it is just based on baseless. I mean, look at this, because this is the people that I'm criticizing aren't public figures. The people I'm criticizing are the people who show up in my comment section.

And I show what people are saying just to get like, this is why, so someone said, so we would talk, I had an interview with Dr. John Bergsma who pointed out that the way Luther justified removing the deuterocanon from the scriptures was by pointing to Jewish tradition. And someone in the comments said, I swear it's the effing Jews every single time. And then someone else says this, like someone responded to what I had to say, where they said, they do run the world though, and you know it deep within. I don't think I do know that deep within,

but thank you for telling me that. That's the kind of thing that it's like, my goodness gracious. Well, wait, I don't understand. So Martin Luther did it because of the Jews. Right. But Martin Luther is also the same guy who wrote one of the most horrible pieces in history about Jews. And that's another comment someone said. They said, you all should have taken what Luther said about the Jews though.

Like that's the one thing you Catholics lack. It's that kind of stuff that I find needs to be objected to it's ridiculous. You actually accuse a people who are At most 15 million people in the world of whom most are not even religious or anything Zero point what zero one percent of the world's population or zero point one percent of the population you accuse them of running the world Of being in charge of everything. So basically what what people saying is that humans are so dumb that they are unable to run the world and they are being run by this very, very small group of people that are actually so brilliant and so advanced and so smart that they have an evil grip on the rest of the world. It's so tiringly exhausting. It's ridiculous.

And I mean, you find evil people in leadership in every sphere of they're Jews, they're atheists, they're Christians. I mean, if Joe Biden was a Jew, that would be part of their ammunition. Like, look at this dirty Jew, they would say, pushing for abortion. It's like, oh, actually, he's a Catholic. Ah, well, that doesn't count. Like, he doesn't count against us. actually he's a Catholic. Ah, but that doesn't count. Like he doesn't count against us. The same thing with, since I talk about Islam and Islamization and all of that, there are some people who say, but look at who are those who want mass migration of Muslims into the West. They are the Jews. If you look at the actual data of the organizations that support mass migration and refugees into the West, the top 10 are mostly secular organizations, and then a Catholic organization, and a Protestant organization,

and there's one religious Jewish organization that was initially founded to protect Jews in the Second World War. So there's one Jewish organization that was initially founded to protect Jews in the Second World War. So there's one Jewish organization. The majority are secular, and there are two organizations that are Christian that are actually bigger than the Jewish organization. But these anti-Semitic people, they want to ignore all of this and just say it's the Jews. This is the irrationality of the Jew hate that is poisoning so much of the discourse in the world right now, especially online, usually coming from anonymous accounts. Yeah, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but it almost seems like there are certain certain

states or certain interests that fund these activities to to division and all of that. I think that's right. I think there's a lot of like, I think there's a lot of Russian bots, right? And who are not bots, but actual people who are being paid to spread these certain things. I would say Russia probably has a big finger in all of this.

They don't like what they're seeing in the West, so they want to cause division and hatred among people. I would say that there are also elements like Qatar. Qatar is a country that is not being talked about, but that invests lots of money into infiltrating and steering Western institutions, university campuses, online narratives that is paying and employing very high ranking influencers and all of that. Having purchasing shares in social media platforms and steering where they go and so on.

There are different Islamic countries that also have a finger in this. I mean, oil rich countries that have too much money and that they want to spend some of that money onto influencing how we think and how we speak in the West. The downside of having a very free society where, you know, capitalism, free capitalism runs deep and where everyone can say whatever they want

without being checked on and persecuted and all of that is that it is also very much open to people taking advantage of this and paying lots of money to saying the most horrible things without being cracked down on. And I'm sure that there are certain state interests that take advantage of this kind of stuff. It's very, very bad.

And among those are, of course, also those who want to push the narrative that Islam is a religion of peace, for example, which is what I have been dealing with. We have institutes among universities that are directly purchased, paid for for and run by Islamic countries in the Middle East, in high and very respectable universities across the Western world, in America, Islamic institutes and so on, that have professors who are invited by governments, including the United States government, and who want to preach

ideas such as that Islam is a misunderstood, peaceful, lovely religion, and that want to crack down on people who criticize Islam. These are things that are going on, and we need to be aware of this. We need to stop fighting among ourselves, stop fighting each other, stop giving into bots and influences from different places, stop focusing on our disagreements and focus on the fact that there are forces in the world that are much more problematic than all of these problems that you can endlessly talk about. We have Islam.

We have an ideology that is far from a religion that pushes toward expansionism, that to this day is represented by Muslim apologists online with over a million subscribers who say things like, in their ideal future, when they have the numbers, they will take over the UK and other Western countries and start imposing their Islamic laws upon them. We have YouTubers like Ali Dawah for example, one of the most popular Muslim YouTubers. I think he has 1.2 million subscribers right now. He said in a video years ago in response to me that in their ideal Islamic state when

the time comes, people like me, he was speaking to me, who leave their religion and who spread corruption by telling people to, you know, that Islam is wrong, that people like me will be put to death and that Muslims like himself will be proudly watching. The video is still up. He published this years ago. YouTube didn't take it down.

Police didn't do anything about it. It is still up. If you said something only like half as bad from a Christian perspective, YouTube would take it down. They would ban you. If you did this in the UK, the police would come after you and lock you up and so on. We are allowing Islamists to spread their poison while fighting among each other about nonsensical things. What would you like to see or what would your advice be to people watching

who would like to get into apologetics against Islam, say? Watch David Wood. Watch certain channels like God Logic. God Logic? Yeah. Okay. As a new rising YouTuber who is doing a phenomenal job, God Logic, there are certain other people

I know of, Testify Apologetics, a new channel that is rising, that is making, getting tons of views. We were doing this, there are now lots of people who are doing this as well and who are doing a fantastic job, watch my channel. Look into the history of Islam, look into what Muslim apologists themselves actually say.

Don't listen to those who make excuses for them. Look up certain YouTubers like Muhammad Hijab or Ali Dawah that aren't the most popular, approved off by the average Muslim. Look at how they represent their religion, how they say that once they have the numbers, they want to impose Islamic laws. Recently, a Muslim scholar, very much respected,

also a teacher in the UK named Adnan Rashid, said that the plan should be by Muslims to within the next 50 years have at least three Muslim prime ministers, three Muslim prime ministers across Western nations including the UK, Canada and Australia. I'm sure they'll succeed if things keep going the way they're going. And what they would do if they have that is to, and what he's basically saying is that within 50 years they want to take over, they want to

start running these Western countries. They want to start running these Western countries. And once they start running these Western countries, they want to run them the same way these leftist idiots or even the conservative idiots run it. They want to turn things around and want to impose their own laws. They want to make it illegal to criticize Islam. They want to make it illegal to draw cartoons. They want to make it punishable, to ask questions, they want to impose strict laws on men and women. There's just so much. What can you say? What would be a couple of

excellent debates to begin with if someone wants to see a Christian do a good job responding to a Muslim. David Wood? There's actually one debate that I would recommend people watching, which is between Sam Shimon and Jay Dyer against two Muslims who were, I believe, Daniel Hekikachu and some other little weirdo guy. But it was a Christianity versus Islam debate that I would recommend checking out. It was phenomenally done. Why was it done well?

It was mainly about doctrine, about belief and all that, but also diverged into discussing morality. About doctrine about belief and all that but also diverged into discussing morality And it is a it is a brilliant display in the intellectual gap between Christianity and Islam So Sam and Jay yes, I'm sure that they not only understood the Christian position But they understood the Islamic position in order to refute it. Yes. It wasn't just it wasn't just bluster It wasn't just people yelling at each other. It was no No, it was like they did a fantastic job in breaking down and exposing the ridiculous aspect of Islam and how Christianity is so much better in comparison. Then there are debates which discuss, I just recently had a debate about Islam with a Muslim apologist named Central Dawah. It became scandalous

because in the middle of the debate he started threatening me and even did this to me like what and said your blood is 100% halal he said which means colloquially in Islamic terms you are 100% permitted to be killed by Muslims. He said this to you in a filmed debate. Yeah. And it's online. It's online. And they won't take it down. I'm sure you're glad they weren't actually.

No, I'm actually happy. They aren't. I'm about to publish. I published a clip of it myself and I'm about to publish the debate as well. That doesn't doesn't make you look more convincing when you have to resort to threats because your logic isn't working. The funny thing is the way it unfolded was, he was being very disrespectful and weird. And he also was kind of shocked because he was expecting to go into the debate with like

a Muslim versus atheist. At that point, I'm kind of in a phase of changing and I'm wearing a cross. And just because he started attacking my atheist aspect and like trying to be a Christian and all of that, he was like coming off as a complete jerk in his opening statement. And he wasn't looking at me, so I thought, you wanna play it that way?

So I just, like in the middle of it, I just did this. So once he comes back with his opening statement, he suddenly sees me wearing a cross. And he's completely dumbfounded. And he starts attacking me personally and attacking Christians and others and so on. And at some point, somebody brings up the question of executing apostates.

And he says then, then yeah you deserve to be 100 percent you deserve the apostasy penalty like okay fantastic good so since he disrespected me from beginning to end and also now said that i deserve to be killed i basically took out a a ripped out page of the quran in the shape of an L and put it on my microphone and he got really really upset about that and started threatening me and making death threats and saying, your blood is halal and so on. Blamed it on that.

And then eventually he said, if I don't take it down, then he will leave the debate. And the moderator is like, do you wanna take it down? I'm like, no. So he just left the debate. Yeah. And when was this? This recent, I gotta watch this. Yeah, this was, uh, I think in February, February. Wow. So how many debates have you engaged in?

Quite a few. Really? Quite a few. I'm sorry. I didn't, I didn't know that. As I say, I'm kind of, I'm new to you and your channel. So I have to check it out. You should, you should have a look at that. It's, I mean, I'm happy that stuff like this is making the rounds and is being, is getting more attention because people need to see this, you know.

People need to see what we actually deal with. When I sit down, when people like me and others sit down and talk about the threat of Islam and how bad Islam is, lots of people who might not be familiar with this might just perceive this as, I don't know, like fear mongering, bigotry, Islamophobia and things like that. You need to see the truth of it. I'm not saying that Muslims are evil, that all Muslims are evil people. Muslims are the first victims of Islam.

I was a victim of Islam myself. It is Islam and I don't encourage to treat Muslims badly. I encourage to help make Muslims realize that Islam is nonsense and it's false and they should leave it and probably become Christians would be much better for the world. Yeah. Did you see the debate?

Is it Michael Jones from Inspiring Philosophy? Did you see the debate he did with that fella who was okay with sexual relations between a man and maybe a seven-year-old girl? Yes, yes. That's actually another one that I'm glad you reminded me of this, I should have mentioned that as a very, very, very, very glaring example of how Islam is represented. So Mike Jones, inspiring philosophy, he had a debate with Daniel Hekikachu, who is a popular Muslim apologist, known as Muslim skeptic. And the debate was about child marriage. And the Muslim was argued in favor of child marriage and at some point Mike Jones who is also a very good friend, he said to him, he asked me if he knows about

precocious puberty which is where puberty can kick in too early. And so Daniel, the Muslim apologist says yes. And it eventually leads down to the Muslim apologist saying that even if a child shows signs of maturity at the age of four, it would be okay for a man to marry and have sex with her. God have mercy. Amen. And then he mentions the three year olds olds and the Muslim apologist says it's not really possible. Mike says it is possible. I have evidence here that it goes as young as 11 months upon which the Muslim apologist says well it would be up to the parents to decide whether she's ready or not. So imagine in a situation now where the parents are

deluded enough to agree that it's okay. Wow, wow. Now that Daniel fella, he looks pretty white. Is he a convert? No, he is actually... I might be misremembering. No, he is a convert, but not... It's difficult. He comes from a Shia Muslim background. Okay. But his family is like their secular, non-religious people.

I'm sure they're very proud. And he went, yeah. He went the direction of becoming an Islamist who loves pedophilia. So he's like the foremost pedophilia defender right now. And he is very popular among Muslims. They love him. They think he's one of the best. I had debates with him. You know, you, we were just saying earlier, and I think you agreed that this is like,

just like this work spiraling, this tread spiraling, where you say as full-throatedly as you can, the most kind of grievous thing. Is that, is that at play here? No. Can you? I don't mean, I don't mean that it isn't justified under Islam. I mean that people are celebrating him. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that is. When I say no, what I mean is just that the things are a little bit different here because among Christians you have like people who say really crazy messed up things. This is usually limited to a minority of people, people who are not very religious,

who don't really go to church or who are anonymous and so on and people cheering this on. With Islam, you have the people who are the best representatives of the religion, who are religious, who are devout, saying this with their names and being celebrated by other Muslims. So this is just the mainstream in Islam. saying this with their names and being celebrated by other Muslims. So this is just the mainstream in Islam.

It's not the radical population that is just doing stuff like this. This is the problem. This is also the problem with being an atheist who views all religions as equally bad or similarly bad. With Christianity, you may have with your posts or progressive attitude certain things that you might not agree with with Islam it's not quite like that it's a it's it goes far beyond any of that you have sex slavery also defended by Danly Kikichu and others. Slavery, fighting, forcing people to convert or to pay protection money and be killed. Wife beatings, you have pedophilia.

The whole pedophilia aspect is also because it's not just something that they happen to defend or do. It is because Muhammad himself, the prophet of Islam, he married many women. He had at some point nine wives, according to a different report, he married many women. He had at some point nine wives, according to a different report, he had 11 wives. And one of the wives was a child. Aisha.

He married her when he was in his 50s. So he was a 53 year old man and she was six years old. She reached the age of nine upon which he started having consummating the marriage with her and having sexual intercourse with her. Now, of course, you have Muslims being asked about this and defend this. How I'm sure that there are Muslims who deny this. There are some Muslims who deny it. So how do we know they're wrong and that you're right when you say that she was seven when they were married and nine when the marriage

was consummated, quote unquote marriage? Well, it is because of when you have reports about the things that Muhammad did, you have even by Islamic standards, these are graded as authentic, as good or as inauthentic. Among those that are graded as authentic, as good, or as inauthentic. Among those that are graded as authentic, because you have multiple different people corroborating the same thing, we very, very clearly have the knowledge that Muhammad married a six year old girl and started having sex with her when she was nine years old.

So this is directly by Islamic standards considered authentic. By Islamic standards, it is directly by Islamic standards considered authentic. By Islamic standards, it is authentic and also if you look at it from the outside, the only the most authentic reports about Muhammad that you have say that he was a pedophile. By the same standards by which Muslims verify the authenticity of the Quran, where they also go back to the narrations to figure out how it was put together. We also have to conclude that Muhammad was a pedophile.

So you either agree that it is actually true and he did these things, or you disagree with it, but then you also have to put your doubts on the authenticity of the Quran itself and then the entire religion. You know, it's, you can't really get out of it. You can, what you should do is to condemn it and to reject it. And we're not just talking about a figure who did something back in a different context in a time and you're just supposed to accept it and move on. We're talking about Muhammad as the perfect example for all humankind.

This is the Islamic doctrine, the Islamic belief. So Muslims are supposed to follow him as the perfect example for all humankind for all times. And he's a pedophile. All right, AP, we are gonna take some questions from our local supporters. So for those watching, we are gonna take some questions from our local supporters. So for those watching, if you wanna become a member of our locals,

go to matphrad.locals.com. You'll get these episodes one week before they hit YouTube. You'll get to ask our guest questions. You'll get access to our courses. Father Gregory Pine has bi-monthly spiritual direction. There's a ton of stuff we do over there, matphrad.locals.com. spiritual direction. There's a ton of stuff we do over there. matphrad.locals.com. Naseem Hajir says,

in your opinion, is Muhammad a prophet, lunatic, or liar? That's a very good question because it goes back to CS Lewis and his argument in mere Christianity. Prophet, lunatic or liar, it's very difficult because over the years I kind of asked myself the question whether Muhammad was indeed, whether he knew that he was making things up, whether he was deliberately misleading people. I think I came to agree more with the idea

that he was actually deluded himself by certain things, that he was mentally ill, that he had hallucinations, that he was plagued by hallucinations, he wasn't, he didn't really know what he was plagued by you could say maybe he would maybe it was demonic maybe it was something else but The thing is while he was initially taken over by Delusions and hallucinations. I would say he did also start adding lies to it

deliberately But it could be entirely possible that he justified adding lies to it deliberately. But it could be entirely possible that he justified those lies to himself and began lying to himself. But if you want to pick one, I would say he was deluded, lunatic. Yeah. Natalie asks, what arguments slash evidence played the biggest role in you considering becoming Christian? I Would say I would go for the the aspect of the meaninglessness of the universe and of life versus the

meaning That I find in Christianity and the leap of faith that I take and the pleasure I take in following Christianity. Ish of Arabia, who actually has been on the show and is a convert from Islam, he grew up in Egypt, says, what is something you admire about Islam? Next question. It's a very difficult question, but I would say it might be the sense of unity that it, at least on a surface level, gives Muslims. Unfortunately, it quickly turns into infighting and killing each other.

That's what you respect about Islam? Maybe the initial shallow image of unity, that's what I expect, or respect. And then the violence internally that follows afterwards is what I expect. Fair enough. Timothy says, have you read any good books on the subject of Christianity, particularly Catholic Christianity, or would you like recommendations? Yeah, I have this book here. This is amazing. It really does seem like I'm paying you to do this.

No, aside from, of course, your book on the Rosary, which I really loved, one of the books that I began to love as I listened to it and also read it while listening to it was The Imitation of Christ. I don't remember the author's name. Yeah, Thomas Aquempus. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I really loved that book. I have to read more. Yeah. I want to tell people about this. I mean, this is a app, an AI app that me and a few fellas founded. It's called Truthly.

And it's like if chat GBT became a catechumen, got baptized and then became obsessed about evangelizing and was always Orthodox. So I would point people to that, download that app. Right now it's only in the app store. We're gonna get it to Android soon. But it's, yeah, we've, you know, a whole year in the making of making sure

that its answers would be in line with Catholic teaching. And so just like, you know, maybe five years ago, someone would ask you a question, you didn't know the answer to it, you go get a book off the shelf, you'd learn it, you'd come back. That's the whole point of Truthly, just in case you were wondering.

Wow, very nice. I'll give you a promo code after, so it's free if you want to download it. When did you notice the strong pull towards Christ? Difficult to tell, but I would say once I started practicing the rosary and engaging in certain prayers, there's especially one that I really loved, which is I think not always done universally, but it's also part of the, oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell. Mm-hmm, lead all souls to heaven, especially those most near the mercy, the fatima prayer.

The fatima prayer, yes, exactly. I really loved that and I feel like whenever I did that, I felt a closer connection. It's very difficult for me to right now point at exactly where and when and how. I'm just glad it happened. What, says Zachary, is the most beautiful thing about Christianity to you?

Or something you misunderstood perhaps? The story of, I mean the whole, the entirety of Jesus the low to take on his role here to defeat sin and death and to rise and which the whole aspect of how, you know, of how that relates to a human and the indescribable power of God doing that is something that is just beautiful. Fi says, here in the UK there are multiple cities with Muslim mayors and city councillors, including my own city. What is the best way to pray for conversion to Christ, and does the type of Muslim make a difference? I have a friend from a Bangladeshi background who had heard entirely different stories about

Our Lord and Our Lady than another friend from an Iranian background. I guess you could answer the prayer aspect better than I do, but I would say that there generally needs to be more effort in the UK to tackle these, tackle the influx and the stream of Islam and to go out and do more, to put more effort into actually speaking about it and acknowledging the problem. In Europe, it is strangely such a weird thing

to point out that there is an influx of Islam and that this is a bad thing. It's perceived as, oh no, that's bigoted, that's racist. Yeah. No, you have to address it. It is not only bad because Islam is bad, it's bad on a societal level, on a spiritual level, on a on an intellectual level, on an on a developmental level. It's just bad in every aspect.

That's why I loved your line about Muslims, the first victims of Muhammadism. Like, I like that tactic, because it you're using compassion, you compassion, while attacking the false religion. Yeah, you can, I mean, you need to, it would be useful to go out to Muslims and to show them that the fact that they are in the UK, the fact that they are in Europe, that they left bad countries and came to a much better world,

as a result of them having a culture that is given to them by a religion that brings nothing but suffering. And there is a better way. They came to the better way, they just are blinded to it. And they need to open their eyes. I wanna throw this question out to those who are watching. Leave us a comment below and tell us of channels

that are combating, I call it Muhammadism. I'd like to know what they are and maybe just say here's a good channel and let us know so people can, I think it's really important. Okay, final question from P2C, which aspects of Christian culture, as you understand it, are appealing to you and which aspects push you away?

Wow. I think Christianity taught people a lot about the value of the human being, of every individual human being of every individual human being. I was actually kind of surprised to go to the early church fathers and to find that St. Basil, for example, wrote about how fighting and killing is necessary, but it's also an evil and that those who end up killing people in war should probably by his recommendation spend time in repentance and maybe abstain from communion or something like that which is like a very very very very unthinkable punishment for a religious Christian but where killing people is seen as a as something that is that is

just evil in and of itself and where there is an aspect of compassion toward humanity in general, love for humanity in general, and I don't know, just humility, understanding for your fellow human being, instead of fighting, making sure that the other side understands where they are wrong. Instead of fighting and telling people, I am right, you're wrong, having humility.

And uniting and finding the truth and all of that. I think these are values that are very Christian that I never saw and never found in the Islamic culture that I came out of, which was more a culture of backwardness and of intolerance and bad stuff. So this is what I really like. What I have some problems with, in all honesty, which is going to be kind of paradoxical, considering what I just said, and a little bit ironic, is that Christians often tend to be very, very naive and blind toward the evils that come from others and from other ideologies.

And they tend to have a very forgiving, an overly forgiving, and overly naive approach, cheapish approach, often to threats that come from the outside. And it is good to be forgiving. It is good to be understanding. It is good to have this positive, to have this good, this humble attitude, but you have to recognize that the wolf is out there to still eat you.

So, you know, be better, be better, be smarter. I tell it to myself and to everyone else. Thank you very much. And thanks for coming, AP, all the way here to be on the show and, you know, just packing a bag and getting on a plane. It's very exhausting. I don't know if it's because I'm older now. I'm just like, why would you do that?

But thanks so much for coming on the show. I love traveling, but sometimes it's very difficult. But I'm so glad, I'm so happy that I'm here. I'm so happy you invited me. And it just came at a beautiful time. Good. I'm so glad. Tell people where they can learn more about you

and any final thoughts. Yeah, they can find me on, so you can find me on Apostate Prophet. That's the YouTube channel name. And also the handle on Twitter or X is at apostate prophet where I share all my My my unwelcome thoughts That's where you can find me and Yeah, I hope that we will have

Great times and I hope to talk to you again in the future and I love what you do Thank you, and I want wanna tell everyone my final line, which is stay away from Islam. Very to the point, I like it, thanks.