The Daily Signal - #406: From Atheist Marxist to Christian Conservative: Sohrab Ahmari Shares His Journey

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

Sohrab Ahmari grew up in Iran. Then as a teen, he immigrated to America, and became an atheist and a Marxist. But as a young man, his path took another twist: he found himself interested in Christianity. Ahmari, author of the new book "From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith,” joins us to share his complicated path. We also cover these stories:•President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen will testify to the House Oversight Committee today.•Trump is reportedly putting together a group of scientists to address climate change, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wants to defund it -- even before it’s begun.•Ivanka Trump criticizes the Green New Deal. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, February 27. And Kate Trankow. And I'm Daniel Davis. Surab Amari grew up in Iran under the Ayatollahs. There he became an atheist and later a Marxist. But two decades later, Amari had become a conservative writer and a Christian. Today we sit down with Amari to hear his story. And it's all recounted in the new book from Fire by Water.

And before we get to our headlines, just a reminder that if you enjoy this podcast, please mention it to your friends and families. Please subscribe and please. This one really matters. Leave a five-star review on iTunes. We are here to make sure that busy conservatives can get the news highlights and in-depth interviews they need every day and we'd love your help in spreading the word. And now on to our top news.

Well, Democrats and the Senate managed to block a Republican bill that would have protected newborn infants after surviving an abortion. Republicans gathered 53 votes shy of the 60 votes needed to overcome. a Democratic filibuster. Republicans in the House are now weighing an unusual procedure to try to force their chamber to vote on the measure. Earlier this month, Steve Scalise and Anne Wagner, both Republicans, said they would file a discharge petition, which could force a vote on the House floor if it receives the signatures of the majority of House members. The magic number there is 21 Democrats, meaning that 21 Democrats would have to get behind it.

The House voted on the same bill back in January, and then it obtained only six Democratic votes. Today, President Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen will testify to the House Oversight Committee. Citing an unnamed source, the Wall Street Journal, reported that Cohen will, quote, publicly accuse the president of criminal conduct while in office related to a hush money payment to a porn star

and recount racist remarks Trump allegedly made to him, including instances in which Trump allegedly questioned the intelligence of African Americans and criticize their lifestyle choices. End quote. Meanwhile, in a USA Today op-ed, Republican representatives Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows of the House Freedom Caucus, say that Cohen is an unreliable witness. The House members write, here's the problem. Cohen is going to jail in two months for several crimes, including, lying to Congress. Giving Cohen a congressional platform is a disservice to the public and a front to our democratic values and flat out offensive to anyone who seeks the truth. Well, when it comes to climate change, it seems President Trump just can't win. The president is reportedly putting together a group of scientists to address the issue, but Chuck Schumer wants to defund it. The Senate Democratic leader dismissed the potential group as a fake panel of cherry-picked scientists

who would intentionally sow disinformation about climate science. He said if the group is formally created, Democrats would introduce a bill to defund it. In a hearing Tuesday, Representative Ted Deutsch, Democrat of Florida, alleged that there exists a problem of sexual assault regarding unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody. With documents that have been turned over by HHS, that record a high number of sexual assaults on unaccompanied children in the custody of the Office of Refugee and Resettlement. Together, these documents detail in an environment.

of systemic sexual assaults by staff on unaccompanied children. He continued? Commander White, these documents demonstrate over the past three years there have been 154 staff on unaccompanied minor. Let me repeat that. Staff on unaccompanied minor allegations of sexual assault. This works out on average to one sexual assault by HHS staff on an unaccompanied minor per week. These documents tell us that there was a problem with adults, employees of HHS, sexually abusing children.

Health and Human Services spokesperson, Caitlin Oakley, told Axios, quote, The Safety of Miners is our top concern when administering our unaccompanied alien children program. Each of our grantees running standard shelters is licensed by the respective state for child care services. And background checks of all facility employees are mandatory. Oakley also said when any allegations of abuse, sexual abuse, or neglect are made, they are taken seriously, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement acts swiftly to investigate and respond. The national debt is $22 trillion, but the Green New Deal could cost over four times that,

according to a new study by the American Action Forum. They project that the Green New Deal, introduced by, of course, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would cost the country between $52 and $94 trillion over the next decade. The proposal calls for an economic transformation of the country and promises to provide housing, health care, and food security to all Americans, even those unwilling to work. Ocasio-Cortez also recently said that Americans might need to stop reproducing because climate change. Univision anchor Jorge Ramos was held in Venezuela a few hours after Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro didn't like a video Ramos showed him of the Venezuelan people searching for food. Here's Ramos recounting what happened.

So it is Monday night. We are already at the hotel in Caracas, Venezuela. And what happened is that I conducted an interview with Nicolas Maduro. I ask him if I can call him either a president or a dictator because as you know millions of Venezuelans don't consider him a president then we discuss the fraud that happened here in May 2018 also the reports of torture and human rights abuses and political prisoners and at the end I showed him a video that I personally took last Sunday of three kids behind a trash truck looking for food.

And he just couldn't stand it. He didn't want to continue the interview. He tried to close my iPad where I showed him the video. And then he said the interview was over. Ultimately, after being detained a couple of hours, Ramos and his Univision crew were released. But they never got back any of their equipment, and that includes the footage of the interview. And their release occurred after Univision alerted the State Department, which called for their release. The Univision team was then deported from Venezuela. Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pitching the Green New Deal, but not without significant pushback.

Some of it is, of course, coming from her own party. but now the president's daughter, Ivanka Trump, is weighing in. Here's how she responded in a Fox News interview with Steve Hilton that will air on Sunday. I don't think most Americans in their heart want to be given something. I've spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years. People want to work for what they get. So I think this idea of a guaranteed minimum. is not something most people want.

They want the ability to be able to secure a job. They want the ability to live in a country where there's the potential for upward mobility. Next up, we'll talk to Sorab Amari about his book from Fire by Water. What the heck is trickle-down economics? Does the military really need a space force? What is the meaning of American exceptionalism?

I'm Michelle Cordero. I'm Tim Desher. and every week on the Heritage Explains podcast, we break down a hot button policy issue in the news at a 101 level. Through an entertaining mix of personal stories, media clips, music, and interviews, we help you actually understand the issues. So do this. Subscribe to Heritage Explains on iTunes, Google Play,

or wherever you get your podcast today. Joining us today is So Rob Amari, author of the new book from Fire by Water, my journey to the Catholic faith, which details his life, beginning with his childhood in Iran, and ending with his conversion to Catholicism while living in England. So Rob is also the op-ed editor at The New York Post and a contributing editor at the Catholic Herald. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me, guys.

Okay, so let's start from the beginning. You write about being interested in the U.S. and Western civilization as a child in Iran, which kind of threw me. So why did you have that interest and how did it start for you? It started with things like those Ronald Reagan era action cartoons like G.I. Joe and the Transformers and the like. And also Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Obviously, all of those things represented what I found sort of refreshing about American civilization, which was its individualism. and in contrast to where I was, which was an Iran that had recently overthrown a relatively benign autocracy and replaced it with an Islamist police state. So I was growing up in this milieu that was, my parents were very, they're kind of

1968-ish liberal bohemians who had supported the revolution and then come to instantly regret it. So, you know, they hated the regime. And we had this contrast between our inner world of what went on inside the house and what went on outside it. And what went on inside it was very much pro-Western, surrounded, like I said, by Western books, movies, music, and ideas. And to me, in a very superficial way, the Western was better. And it came down to things like, you know, Western products when you could get your hand on them, you know, a Mars bar, you know, is just, it's, packaging, the way it smells is just sort of modernity. So it was this very shallow idea of

what's really best about the West. I still, by the way, have that same kind of instinct or intuition, but now, you know, what the West means to me today is completely something different at its best is not its sort of consumer's products. So you were living under the Ayatollahs growing up under that Islamic regime and you became an atheist as a teenager. Yeah. How did, how, what drove you to atheism. So when I was very, very young, I still had a vague sense of, it came naturally to believe in God and to pray the way children do. And I was even moved by some aspects of the Shiite Islamic faith, which is the official religion now under the Islamic Republic. You know, there is, for example, in Shiism, there's a great tradition of these martyrs who are

sort of revered as saints who laid down their lives for, let's say, their truth or what have you. I always found those bits deeply moving in a way that I couldn't explain, the mourning for rituals for the Shiite saints. But then by the time I was 13, I had had it as a whole with Islam. We'd had one too many encounters with what's called the Morality Committee, which is the morality police. And where we would be out with my parents and we would have alcohol on us because my parents liked it to have a drink or whatever.

And that's technically illegal. and those encounters made me think, okay, if God is just pure law governing every element of life and law in a way without reason or certainly without mercy on the one hand, and yet he also requires a police state to enforce his whims. And at the same time, by the way, the agents of that police state are so pliable. In other words, people think that if you get caught with alcohol in Iran and because it runs against Sharia law, you'll get flogged. And that's technically true.

And there are people who are unlucky who get caught with alcohol and get flogged. But there are also plenty of people who, like my parents, you could bribe the morality police, give them $20 and they sort of leave you alone. And the hypocrisy of that made me think, okay, you know, if this is God, I want nothing to do with it. So at 13, you know, I tried out saying, you know, I cursed God and I said, if I'm going to get zapped,

well, then he exists. But I didn't get zapped. So I was like, there's no God. Of course, I did get zapped in a less visible way over the 20 years that followed of living without God. But it wasn't cartoonish zapping. Interesting. So you came to the U.S. when you're around 12, 13? About to turn 14.

About to turn 14. And what did you think of the United States at first? Did it live up to your expectations or was it very different? So my expectations were that the United States is a place of. deep secularity because I always associated the secular with the Western as opposed to the society that I grew up in. And it would be secular and almost hedonistic. And so behold my surprise when we took a L.M Royal Dutch Airlines flight from Tehran to Amsterdam,

then we took another flight to a city called Salt Lake City. But we didn't stop in Salt Lake City. we then took a car ride with my uncle who lived there an hour and a half north to a town called Eden, Utah, population 600, at the heart of Mormon country. That came as a profound shock because contrary to what I thought about American culture, we were in a pocket of deep religiosity.

Now, it's true that America's elite culture is largely secular or can be very secular. But as you well know, there are these, again, these pockets of religiousity. of cultural conservatism, of communitarianism in various ways. And I just found that revolting. So my reaction was to pick up my rebellion against God, against authority, against, let's say, traditional morality, exactly where I had left it off in the old country and apply it here,

only now it was no longer directed at the mullahs. It was directed at initially the Mormon culture, but then later more broadly against the Judeo-Christian ideals that still in some ways shape American society. You know, those poor Mormons, I'm just thinking so different than the Iranian police, like these nice Mormon people and all this rebellion. I used to make a very obscene and unfair, morally obscene, because it's not

true. I would say, you know, I've moved from one theocracy to another. Of course, and it was true because, you know, yes, Mormons enforce their own kind of norms about drinking, about, you know, coffee and all sorts of other things, but it's all voluntary. It's all sort of Democratic, you know, it's not, yeah, there's no flogging. Yeah. As far as I know.

So, not only were you an atheist, though, he became a Marxist, or at least you dabbled in that. So how did that occur? Is that sort of, was that just kind of an intellectual consequence of your atheism? It was. It was. Okay, so I initially read Nietzsche, as many 17-year-olds do. And so I read thus spoke Zarathustra, and obviously that bit were early on, Nietzsche's. Genealogy of morals.

Yeah, the genealogy of morals. But especially the part where, you know, he proclaims God to be dead and that God, and especially the Judeo-Christian God, you know, Nietzsche says, is the product of slave-like men, you know, and men and women, who because they themselves aren't virile, aren't strong, their God prescribes virility and strength. And so, you know, therefore, all these sort of moral absolutes aren't really moral absolutes. they're created by different types of characters and different types of people depending on who they are or their strengths, they will create different kinds of moral rules. And I just thought, yes, and with Nietzsche, I have to sort of, you know, demolish those moral absolutes and create my own, whatever that meant. A little bit later, then I picked up Marxism because Marxism, as oddly as Marxism is deeply

egalitarian, whereas Nietzsche is very much elitist. Nevertheless, they both share this idea of, like, you know, you can create your own values because there's no absolutes. All kind of moral rules, the way people think in some ways just reflect material conditions or who they are. One last note is that Marxism, in a way, though, was also my ongoing search for truth in the sense that, and even for God, because although I had declared myself atheists in this very shallow way, Marxism, as you know, has this very religious structure in the sense that it has a predetermined, history moves in a predetermined direction, culminating in this apocalyptic event of the revolution that ushers in essentially heaven on earth, and history itself wipes every tier.

So as I write in the book, even as I had declared myself, myself an atheist, in some ways I was roping in the dark for God. Yeah, and you write in the book that you, I can't remember the name, but you actually found like a Marxist group in Utah. Yeah. And we're helping write a communist newspaper saying, equity, I think, the name was? I wasn't writing anyway. I was too junior.

I was just selling it on college campuses. And then later I changed universities and transferred to University of Washington in Seattle, which where the group had its headquarters. I went there to be with the group in some ways. Funny enough, though, I was also, you know, therefore through the transfer, I went to a higher-ranked university, and that was part of my goal, too. So in a way, I was seeking both the classless society and class prestige.

Nice. Well, one of the things that struck me is I think we all know high schoolers or, you know, young adults who say, I'm Marxist, and never do anything about it. And I was struck that you actually went to the trouble of joining a group and selling the newspaper. But you eventually left. So why did you become disenchanted?

I just became disenchanted because they're so humorless. And, you know, I had thought that on the far side of the death of God would be this freedom to do what you want. And then within a year or two, I had found myself enslaved to another group that had very sort of totalistic views about it claimed to have answers to nearly everything or everything. So my immediate excuse was that what I told them was I've been starting to read the postmodernist, and I've discovered that you guys, the Marxists, don't pay enough attention to race, gender, and sexuality. So you were saying you became too woke for the Marxists. Exactly. I became a kind of, which, by the way, you know, obviously leftist intellectual history made that shift in the 1960s and 70s.

As the Soviet Union became a sort of discredited process, they abandoned. and class struggle for these sort of more identitarian, you know, race, gender, sexuality. And I made that shift much later. I mean, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000s. Well, no, early 2000s. But nevertheless, I was following essentially continental philosophy from, you know, from Marx to post-Marxism to post-modernism.

And I was taking it all very seriously, yeah. So what ended that for you? I mean, clearly you began to get more exposure to Christianity, where was the turning point and what was going through your mind? One was I had a pair of Mormon roommates at one point and I just picked up their version of the King James Bible and I read the Gospel of St. Matthew. And that, you know, it's not like I read that and said, oh, I'm a Christian, but I just thought, okay, this is very moving. And it recalls for me my own childhood's shade background. Remember I said there are those saints who lay down their lives for the truth.

here is God himself making of himself the sacrifice. So this great reversal of the very, very powerful, in fact, the omnipotent, trading places with the very weak and allowing the very weak even to humiliate him. It said to crucify him. I found that very moving in a way that I couldn't put my finger on it. But then the more important thing initially was

after my undergrad I joined Teach for America, which is this program that brings recent college graduates to needy classrooms. and that first of all being responsible for other people's children has a way of kind of making you serious about the world. A lot of the nonsense that clouded my mind just went away just by having to be an adult responsible. And then I watched, I noticed, you know, I had colleagues who were incredibly good at what they did. They were also good human beings. And I kind of was looking at myself.

I was an only child, very much wrapped up in myself, selfish. and those contrasts made me think that there's a sort of objective morality that's true for all people. There are things that are true about all people. And there was this voice inside me that would constantly tell me that what I did was wrong or sometimes would encourage me to do good things, which was the conscience. And that began to make me think, okay, where does the conscience come from? I can agree with various sort of neuroscientists that everything in your brain is the product of synapsis firing, blah, blah, blah, but that explains the how.

It doesn't explain the why or the sort of origins questions. So, you know, I did essentially some growing and both real life and then reading of the two helping me along. And certainly I read some proper history of like the 20th century and was horrified by, you know, Marxism's real life effect. So I quickly abandoned that, yeah. So you've mentioned both the Islamic martyr and I think you wrote in the book that you're reading the gospel of Matthew and you just said now, like the passion, really, the passion

of Christ really affected you. And I found that so interesting because in some ways I think part of religion and especially Christianity's hardest cell right now in the West is the embrace of suffering, the reality that if you do this, you are going to suffer or have to endure suffering. And why do you think this appeal to you rather than alienated you? Well, because I think every society, both pagan and in monotheistic, has sacrifice. There's something embedded in us that needs redemptive sacrifice because we're aware of how lousy we are. So, I mean, as I recount a little bit later in the book, you know, in my early 20s, professionally speaking, I'm successful, you know, going essentially from strength to strength. in the material sense.

And yet I have these moments of either failure or deep personal need. And I need something to wipe away my shame or my sense of failure. And only a kind of sacrifice can do that. And there's no sacrifice without blood. I mean, I can't think of one. Whether that's obviously the sacrifice in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, whether that's Islam has, you know, the sort of sloth. of either the martyrs or symbolic slaughtering of the lamb.

It just, we need expiation. It's something that's deep in the human kind of condition that you need, sacrificial expiation for, I say lousiness, what I mean is sin. Yeah. So when was your first encounter with the church? The church was, so on one such occasion when I was feeling lousy, after sort of a disastrous weekend of drinking too much in New York City, I was then walking around, waiting for to catch a train at Penn Station.

And as it happened, there's a capuchin monastery and church right by Penn Station. So I kept circling about. And then I just went in as the Sunday evening mass was about to begin. And to secular ears, it'll sound crazy. But I have no better explanation for it than that I was providentially pushed to go in because I had otherwise, I didn't really know what the Catholic Church. teaches about the mass. I still at that point hadn't read the whole Bible,

and yet I went in and I found tremendous peace out of that experience and came to feel that there was a holy presence at the altar. And so my imagination in a way consented to God. My emotions had already kind of assented to God through my need for sacrifice. But it took me a few years after that. to intellectually say, okay, yes, actually, it's also compatible with reason to believe in the God of the Bible. So you mentioned that you'd had a night of drinking, and you talk about the drinking in your book, and you say that sometimes in college, and not judging here, I drank too much in college and afterwards at times,

but, you know, you would feel really terrible after having had a lot, and you would actually, that would be a rare time that you would pray. Yeah. And then you also talked about it, you know, I think in somewhat of a spiritual sense and other ways. So how did drinking play a role in, yeah, I mean, is this something that we should be worried about? I mean, I guess how much college kids are drinking or how do you think it affected your life? I don't have the statistics for it, but certainly, I mean, it seems to me like a crisis. And I think, you know, not just with alcohol, but I think all substances in a way are cheap substitutes for real communion.

You know, in the sense that, you know, you get together and you think that you're, trading profound insights, whether it's over alcohol or weed or whatever, you think that you're onto something. Usually you're not just, you're clouded. I'm just remembering certain college conversation. Exactly. Yes. Exactly.

And so, but so is there a link between the two? Yes. You know, drugs, among other things, there are lots of other cheap substitutes for God. Politics can become a cheap substitute for God. this sort of wellness kind of ideology, you know. Take, what is it AOC says about taking Alexandria Ocasia-C-Cortez, taking sort of wellness time? Haven't heard that.

I don't think she said wellness. Is it part of the Green New Deal? No, no, no, no. She says something like taking a self-care break. You know what I mean? An obsessive self-care, a sense of, like, taking care of your body, can itself become a substitute religion. as long as you don't have God, you're going to be, you're going to be searching out.

It's not like if you give up God, you don't end up worshipping idols. You know what I mean? You end up worshipping something. It just will be, you know, not the true God. Yeah, no, I just found it interesting that you said that that was often when you turned to prayer, if at all. And I mean, I don't know. I sometimes wonder if when people are drinking, are they looking for a kind of transcendence. Yeah.

So you also write about how you became, convinced of the fall of man. You mentioned a little bit about our lousiness and sinfulness. Just flesh out a bit more, how did that become truly believable for you that there was a fall that that is obvious from our nature? Because it really, I mean, Kate, I mean, we've talked about this. It really comes out in a lot of the controversies that we see these days of how we look at crime, you know, explaining things based on personal evil and responsibility versus other

like structural forces, like just all poverty causing this. How did you become convinced that evil is real and that man has fallen? First of all, reading the Bible itself. I finally, in my mid-20s, I sat down and read the five books of Moses, the Torah. And first of all, there's something, the Protestant theologians called it the self-attestation of the Bible. The fact that you read it and you're like, this is. is this is true. I don't need to take it to be literally true, but it speaks truth across 2,500 years or more. You know, so for example, when God says to Cain, what have you done? Your

brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. You know, you takes three concrete elemental things, blood and soil and the act of crying and transfigures them into a metaphor for conscience. again. And every one of us hears that that voice inside you in a way. I mean, we're not committing murder all the time, but you're still hearing. What have you done? What have you done? It just, that's a deeply human experience that is reflected really plausibly in the Bible.

And then, look, I just, G.K. Chesterton famously said that the fall is the only aspect of divine revelation for which we have constant empirical experience, both in yourself and in the world. So, yeah, I mean, part of my kind of moral growth and intellectual growth was to dispense with that worldview that you just described that takes away man's responsibility for various things that, like, you know, people do things because of structural oppression or people do things. By the way, there may be structures of oppression, but those themselves are created by men and women who have agency. I felt that I was free enough and therefore that I have responsibility. and yet I constantly fail that inner voice. And that is the story of the fall in a way. So why did you end up becoming Catholic and not returning to Islam or exploring another religious tradition?

Islam, as I write in the book, was ruined for me by the experience of living on the Islamic Republic. And I go into it in more depth, but for me, beyond a certain age, just started thinking about serious stuff, Islam for me was like a political problem of how do we humanely and intelligently come to terms with the Islamic world. By the way, sophisticatedly and not in a crude way, but at any rate, it wasn't something, it never spoke to me. But Catholicism, look, I had those providential, what I consider providential encounters with the mass. Then I read Pope Benedict's book, Jesus of Nazareth, which is really rich. I mean, it's a whole it's his attempt to convince you that what the gospel writers wrote is reasonable and credible.

And he does a masterful job of it for if you're at all skeptical, because he doesn't write with necessarily a believer's point of view in mind. So intellectually, my whole sensibility was sort of shaped by Catholicism. And then finally, when I took the decisive step, I was living in London at the time. and I walked by a Catholic church and it was attending an evangelical one before that and it's a church called the London Oratory which is very well known for its traditional liturgy

and I went and it just, the experience floored me and I thought that the beauty and the mystery of the liturgy was linked up with its truth. That's a very abstract thing, but which I impact, I think pretty well in the book, but it's hard to compress in a conversation like this. So I just said, this is it. This is all the one.

I don't want to seek anymore in life. So I went to what's called the oratory house, which is the rectory. It's where the priest lived and knocked down the door. And this wise and old priest opens the door with a very posh English accent. He's like, yes, I may help you. And I said, you know, I wish to become a Roman Catholic. And he didn't miss a beat.

And he said, very well, I shall instruct you. And so. Lastly, I just wanted to ask you, you know, lots of people know people who aren't Christian or who don't go to church at all. You know, I mean, we all see. the data. More and more young adults are not going to church, do not believe. Would you have any advice to people who are trying to reach out to folks who are atheists or essential atheists? It's hard to generalize. For one who's, I think of a friend who's

an atheist but somehow open, I think there's nothing like encouraging them to come to, you know, I'll say service, not necessarily mass. Whatever your denominations liturgy is called, think there is nothing wrong with inviting people. And you have to believe in the gospel that it will touch people. So don't, you know, don't assume that they'll think, oh, this is so awkward. Why am I coming along with it? You never know what level of need that person is at. They may be going through a personal crisis or whatever, what have you, and they'll be touched.

But for some of them are really hard, and I think you'd have to start at a different level. Like, you know, C.S. Lewis's books, I think, are very good for a, kind of young skeptic because he bats away a lot of the easy, stupid arguments against the existence of God and gives you some really good ones. I mean, so, for example, mine, which is, I came to believe that there is a personal God because of through the proof of conscience, which is one of several proofs for God. There are others. And C.S. Lewis articulates it really well that proof for God.

Which book is that he do that in? Mere Christianity. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. I think that's a really good for this, really, really good book for the very skeptical. The book is called From Fire by Water,

My Journey into the Catholic faith. Surab Amari, thanks for being in studio with us. Thank you for having. And that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio here at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes,

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