Within Reason - #88 Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Why I Converted To Christianity

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American writer, activist and former politician. Once an advocate for the new atheist movement, she last year announced her conversion to Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Herssey Ali, welcome to the show. Alex, thank you very much for having me. It's been an incredible year for you, coming out as a Christian, dealing with the reactions and criticisms as a result of that. My first question is, how are you? I'm doing very well, thank you. I hope so. How is your life different from a year ago when you'd become a Christian,

but you were getting ready to talk about it? about it, it wasn't part of your public persona yet, how has life changed for you? Well, I think I was troubled in my heart, in my head, and I'm in a place of peace. I'm at peace with what I do, with where I am, with my work, with my family, and it's something new for me, so sometimes there's the sense that it will just disappear and I'll go back to that time of confusion and trouble but it's permanent

it feels permanent it feels more permanent and in fact every day I feel more and more attached I'll say attached and connected to God and that connection then gives me a much stronger connection

with everything else with my family and friends and relations and my work Has the way you feel about Christianity changed since publicizing the Christianity that you have? Has that changed the way that you approach it? I imagine that there are a lot of people trying to help you determine which denomination you might be or iron out some of the intricacies of your theology. How has it been since actually coming out, as it were?

Well, I have to always bear in mind, and I think maybe there's an advantage to coming to Christianity as an older person, is that you keep telling yourself there is Christ and his teachings and the gospel and the Bible and then there are the followers of Christ who are humans and they see things differently and they experience things differently and so yes I do get all these invitations of people saying join my denomination it's better than the other one and here's why it's better than the other one. I also really get a lot of people who say, I prayed for you for so many years, and my prayers have been answered. And of course, my answer is always Amen. But aside from that, I also get a large number of people who are delighted that people like me who are former atheists

and vocal former atheists are coming back and seeing there's something of value to religion in general, and Christianity in particular. So I get that reaction as well. And how do you feel about the fact that a lot of people are using your conversion to put a flag in a cultural moment? I mean, such a personal story as yours, which perhaps we can relate to those who don't know, becoming a political tool for so many to say, look at what's happening in the world, look at this former atheist, look at how she's become a Christian, putting you up on something of a pedestal, how has that been for you?

So I don't like pedestals because I don't think that it's a good way of doing things. Again, my attraction to Christianity is really more of the humility and the meekness and the fact that you're fallible over and over again, you sin. You admit that you're a sinner. So by so doing, you try your best not to judge others. But then in terms of people using me, I don't feel used, but I do sense and excitement when it comes to a rekindling of religion, not so much as politics, but the religious foundations of Western society, of America, of course, and then Britain and in the other places where Christianity was. was put down, was ridiculed, was likened to Islam and other religions was called irrational. People who are Christians mocked and called stupid and irrational.

And so I find that there's this excitement if someone like me can come back to Christianity and appreciate what it is, aside from even believing in God, just appreciating the outcome of this culture, I think it's a big step. And so I don't see it as a political, it may have something political, but it is fast and foremost, it's a cultural awakening or reawakening or maybe a cultural confidence that needs to come back. How much of your experience in the last few years of coming to Christianity has been a result of cultural considerations and how much a result of personal considerations or perhaps even theological considerations. Perhaps you can walk us through what it is that brought you to Christ. It's personal, completely personal.

I was in a place of complete darkness and crisis. I was terrified, I was confused, I was in this depression. It just felt this emptiness and darkness. And I resisted all invitations to spirituality. because I thought that's not me. And even at my darkest moment when, again, I was talking to one of many therapists who said, perhaps you're spiritually bankrupt

and you should try considering doing something about that. And I thought, not me. I left Islam. My associations with the concept of God was a god of punishment and a god of anger and a god in whose name so many terrible things were said and done

over centuries. So I wasn't up for that. But I realized that as human beings we are more than just reason and that there's more than the material and the rational. And that it's not either or, it's not that you either choose reason or faith. I think you can have both of them

if you understand to keep them separate. So it was 100% personal. But then, of course, I don't live in a vacuum. I look around me and I saw similar in many ways. I know my story is unique, but in many ways it's not that unique. There's a great deal of, I'll say, disconnection in our society. And people have left whatever it is that rooted them in their society and in their families and in their communities. And for many in the West, that was Christianity. And so I've come to see that it's not just the personal, but on a community level, even on a civilizational level, the throwing away of Christianity was, I think what was the saying,

throwing the baby out with the bathwater. and so you can be like Richard Dawkins and a vowed atheist and still appreciate the legacy of Christianity and the roots of this culture in Christianity. As Richard Dawkins does, I just joined him in Oxford as part of his tour for a show

and when I saw him, I told him that I'd been to Evensong the night before and I said it almost a little bit embarrassed as if to say to the world's most famous atheist You know, I did, I quite like the choir. I went to Evensong last night and you know what he said, me too. I just went to a different one at a different college. Yes.

When you came out as a Christian in unheard, the principal reaction that I saw from people is that here is an essay that talks about, it talks about Trump, it talks about Putin, it talks about China, it talks about politics and mentions the name of Jesus, I think, precisely once, mentions Richard Dawkins, mentions cultural factors. And a lot of people read this essay, Why I Am Now a Christian, and heard essentially political treaties and thought, is I am a Christian for essentially political reasons disconnected from the truth of the Christian doctrine? Since then, it sounds like your story has been much more personal. But people might still ask the same question, how much of this has to do with you believing that the doctrines of Christianity are true? That's also one of Richard's biggest problems or critiques is that we're all delighted to see that this has changed your life and transformed you and that you're happy again. I mean, that nobody can disagree about that. But people will raise this question mark. Do you believe that it's true?

Does that even matter to you? I believe that it's true and it matters very much. And I think also I got a deluge of emails and papers. are all asking the same question, you know, to what degree is this personal, is the political masquerading as personal, you know, in addition to the people who were saying, I prayed for you or come to my denomination. So, no, it is, it's, I believe it. What I will not do, which is, I think, hard for people like Richard is take my 21st century brain

and explain past century events. but I'm reading a lot I'm reading the Gospels I'm reading Old Testament, New Testament I'm reading the apologetics and a world is opening up for me that in many ways I find so fascinating and enriching

and I will not tell you that I can explain the miracles that took place in the past century I can't explain them but I do choose to believe in them and that's a completely different attitude and having that faith, I mean, faith, as you know, it's, you have faith, there's no, this is, I think, where it's important to separate reason from faith is I'm not going to prove it, and you don't need

proof, you believe. And so having embarked on that path, I find what I read strengthens that faith more and more each day. And it's a pity. And this is sort of a statement to my fellow atheists to lead a life of constantly fortifying yourself against faith. And then in that way you create a counterfaith and non-faith. And you don't allow even a tiny opening because you're creating these barriers around, you know, you don't allow any, we used to say I liked, but one thing I liked about the Enlightenment and I still do is don't prejudge, come, you know, to the table with no preconceived notions about what you're going to hear or see. And that's not what my fellow atheists were doing. They were doing, they were just really building, fortifying themselves against ever-believing.

and they had very solid pre-conceived notions and then that in itself became a gospel of its own and so there is the new atheism this is what we believe in versus the people who believe in God and yeah then again it has a bit of a of a tribal element to it where this is you know that's you and that's me people listening will think Well, no, atheism is just a disbelief in God. Here's a worldview that's being presented to me, and I'm saying, I don't believe it. What is, in your view, has formerly one of the most important figures in the New Atheist Movement, what can you now see as the gospel of New Atheism? What is that? What is New Atheism's Ten Commandments? What does it look like as a worldview? I think the reason why it was called New Atheism was that it had this, what do you call it,

evangelizing aspects to it, because yes, you're right, atheism, or to be an atheist, is simply to take on the attitude of, say, I don't think there's any proof, convince me if I see evidence of the existence of God, I might change my mind. So that attitude hardened into something along the lines of, there is no proof, there is no evidence, therefore I don't believe in God, And not only that, people who believe in God are wicked, they're dangerous, they're stupid, they're superstitious, and therefore we must evangelize against them. And I think, in hindsight, I'm speaking for myself, that was a very unhealthy attitude to take, because you close off so much. We'll get back to Ayan in just a moment, but first, do you trust the news media? I don't. And a lot of that has to do with the bias that inevitably seeps into reporting.

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I grew up as a Muslim. I'm a Christian now. They're completely different. So it was a huge mistake to throw them all in one bucket and say, make this general statement about all religions being the same. Number one, number two, I think that because of this attitude, religion is, you know, it's superstition, it's untrue, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's an intelligent. I think a false dichotomy was created about, you know, you can either have faith, you

can be religious, or you can be a man of reason, but you can't be both, and that, I think then created even more confusion, especially for young people, looking for role models, looking to answer the question, what's the purpose and meaning of life, why are we here, how do I relate to my fellow human beings, you know, what's the good life? So those are two major ones, and then three, I think, the organizing and then trying to mobilize people to choose atheism. with both of these points, you know, that I think then all it did was weaken and degenerate belief in Christianity and it strengthened other religions, it's strengthened Islam because it's consistent with what, for instance, members of the Muslim Brotherhood say about Christianity,

they say it's false, it's weak, Muhammad is the last word, and so you listen to the atheists and they say, they're saying it to themselves. And it also opened, I think, the door for other pseudo-religions. Many of us have been discussing what wokeism is. And in many ways, it has, I know it's neo-Marxism or its cultural Marxism, as some call it. But it is with religious zeal that some people believe in it. And don't question it. And there is this void, this.

spiritual need that people have and they found it in wokeism because wokeism insists on justice and young people seeking to do what is right and what's good and what's just now find it in these either false gods or

are in fact converting to Islam or are feeling quite frustrated with their own legacy they've been told Christianity is synonymous with it's the religion of the white man and the white man, the white heterosexual man is an exploiter, a slaveholder, a colonizer, is awful. And so you can't be Christian,

you have to be something else. And I think that in itself has created a lot of, and I think it's unintended, but anxieties, depressions, confusion. And so these are all things that we have to grapple with. There will have been a time when you believed that religion was not just wrong, but evil, a bad force for the world, wrapped up in this new atheist movement. You've had a personal change in conviction. You've had something speak to you and quite clearly transform you as a person. You said that you've been reading the Gospels, reading the Old Testament. When you come across these verses that you yourself probably would have once cited as problems with the Christian religion, when you read these difficult passages in the Old Testament that seem to

to be condoning all kinds of things, slavery and genocide. When you look in the New Testament at Paul's assessment of the position of women, the kind of thing that an atheist looks at and says, this is why Christianity, whether it's true or false, it's definitely evil. Outside of the sort of effect of the Christian religion, in other words, the doctrine itself, when you come across these verses, how does Christian Ian deal with that and react to that differently to how atheist Diane would have done? So atheist Ayanne would have come with that fortified closed mind of what I am reading is just an old text written by people who are afraid of the world and afraid of the dark, and you know all the other stereotypes.

And then New Ayan, having now really seen the key differences between different religions, is now curious. I come to it with great curiosity with, yes. So if these things are in the Old Testament, then what? And then what you see is this evolution, not just in the text itself, but also the adherence to the text. You see, and I find quite fascinating, the enormous fights that people had within churches. And what is the interpretation of this verse, of that gospel, of this chapter? or what was Jesus trying to say and the

constant battle with the human condition the recognition that is trying to understand the human condition maybe what's called a sin in the Bible is what in modern day life we call impulses and urges and character defects you know whatever you want to call them but the product then

is an incredible, really wealthy output of wisdom. And again, even if you don't believe in God, or you refuse to believe in God because you can't see it, it would be such a pity not to partake of this wisdom, not to consider it. I'll give you one example. In the years that I was in therapy, I would see, you know, there was all of these rational conclusions to, this is how you respond to a certain situation.

I was diagnosed with PTSD. Part of it was because Theo van Gogh was mad at my non-response to my trying to shut off that experience, but also a lot of what went on in my childhood and trying to shut that off. and the advice you get through the books and the study based on studies of the human condition and the conclusions they reach and the advice they give now is plainly in the Bible and it's for free and so there's a great deal of wow

what is it that you've find in the Bible that you would also find as a result of that kind of therapy one thing that therapists insist on when you come from a very damaged background and childhood like I did, is lack of being loved and the fear of abandonment and rejection. And now reading the message of Jesus, it's this abundant love. God gave you a life and he loves you, and his life is unconditional, it's an infinite. I think is it John 12.

And when you read, when I read that now, part of me thinks, again, processing this with a number of other patients or a number of other broken people, I think, you guys, you've got this for free. I mean, it's like, it's in your culture. You could have just gone to church. You could have talked to you. You don't need to be in this, you know, institution. to come to this conclusion, because when I was growing up, my idea of God was another God who loved you unconditionally and infinitely. It was a God who gave you a little manual of halals and harams. This is what's right and that's what's wrong. And veering away from what's right

and doing what's wrong, which is the human condition. Again, your impulses, your ardues, your eyes very rebellious. So you would be punished. And many times over on earth, in the hereafter and that's only strengthened the feelings of self-hatred and self-loathing and shame

and terror so you live in this constant state of terror life becomes unbearable so there's some of those things and when I tell you I'm going to try

and answer some of these questions in more detail in the book this is just a small foretaste of it is you have inherited a culture and a religious tradition that is much more suited to understanding and to empowering and enriching the human condition

with all its frailties, with all its brokenness, then the ones that millions and millions of other people are born into. And you can see why, even though on a personal level, yes I find I'm at peace with it I'm really really happy but then you look up and you look at the world

and everything you see around you are all these challenges and you just want to say it's really not that difficult we've made it difficult and it's not you don't have to choose between faith and reason you can have both of them and in fact I find Christianity a religion of reason

much more about reason than anything else. I want to ask you about the cultural impact of the Christian worldview, but I do also want to really press this idea that those problems that you identified in the Christian religion will still exist. Richard Dawkins, for example, thinks that the most evil idea of the New Testament is the idea that everyone is born in sin, the idea that there needs to be a human sacrifice in order to atone us when God presumably could have just forgiven us anyway, and he sees this as grotesque, and this isn't the Crusades or the Inquisition, this isn't something that the Christian Church has done, this is

something that's baked into the Christian religion, and I don't know if you would have said 10 years ago that you also thought that was an evil idea, but that idea is still there, still just as obvious and important as it was 10 years ago, when someone like Richard says, this is evil, This is a bad thing to be teaching children that they're born in sin and that they cannot be good without the help of a God who threatens them with eternal punishment if they refuse to love him or even just fail to believe in him. What do you make of those criticisms now? So I'd say some of the more complex layers of that I would leave to people who are much more immersed. theologians who can make the point for them. But again, I go back to this human condition thing, and we have free will.

I know that I'm capable of good. I know that I'm capable of evil and bad stuff. And here is a god, at least in the Christian God, as I see, to who says, you are free to do as you wish. Here are the laws. here's what it means to be a good person. And you choose what you want to do about that. And if I make terrible choices, I'm forgiven over and over and over again.

And I think that that recognition that good and evil are in us and that we have the free will to choose, that's a much more powerful message than if you had human beings who are then because again that begs Richard's question Richard's opposition then begs the question you know are we robots then

I mean we're now in this era of AI we could have been designed as just doing the right thing and and then not being moral beings and I mean I think

I think we don't want seven billion robots. What would even the point to be? Yeah, well, people are made very uncomfortable with the idea that we don't have agency that we're not in control in this way. But that was the big criticism that Christopher Hitchens made in the other direction. He said that God is a celestial dictator. God is somebody who is constantly surveilling you and watching you while you sleep and convicting you of thought crime and punishing you for even disobedience in your own mind,

presumably that's not the relationship you feel that you have with God. I think he read more of the Quran than the New Testament. I did wonder, one of the things I wanted to ask you is if you could sit down with Christopher Hitchens today or go back in time and speak to him, what would you say to him? What do you think he was missing? I think we would tour the universities together in America. And we would look at what's happening to young people today. And we would look at the effect of saying what it is that they're seeking and they're opening themselves up to.

And here I referenced Bert and Russell when he wrote the essay, Why I'm Not a Christian, where he then really goes on to say, if Christianity were to disappear, we would have, you know, reason would overtake. and we would have so much progress and so much humanity and so much reason. And then now we actually have the empirical reality where Christianity is waning and what we are getting in the highest temples of learning, the temples of reason, it's not reason. It's unreason. And I wanted to have a conversation with Christopher Hitchens. And when I brought this up with Richard Dawkins,

he did acknowledge it, and he finds it frustrating. And I understand why he's frustrated. But I think we have to go back to this idea of, as human beings, we are much, much more complex than just the material. You know, the atheist assertion, we're insignificant, we are nothing. I forget what Richard used to say about. We are so, he said, I forget the exact quote, but it amounts to...

Blind, pitiless, indifference. Yes, and we have no more, what was it, we have no more significance than some kind of organism. Right. And that's just not true. And anyway, I also want to point out in this reading journey that I have taken on, that there are more and more people, the more we discover about the universe, And the more we discover about the world, there are more and more scientists, especially on the hard science part, who are saying there is something rather than nothing. And I think that's sort of the conversation I would have with Christopher Hitchens.

The problem of the activism, the evangelizing of atheism, I think that creates a barrier. that robs one of curiosity. If you just shed that and you come, you know, and you shake that off and you think, I'm open to change my mind, then, you know, you could change your mind. You could see things that you wouldn't see when you say, I don't want to see it at all.

In other words, the accusation they level. against people of faith is also true for them. They really do believe in being atheists and not believing in God. And so that is why the whole conversation within the Christian West ended with let's agree to disagree until the world came into the West, until Islam came and other forces came in and that is why it's reopened. Well, the idea is that everybody worships something, everybody has their dogmas, everybody has things that they believe essentially without evidence, and the atheist message was always, we're people who analyze these questions, we're people who plug in those gaps in our knowledge, and if we can't justify something, we're not going to believe it. And with that, they levy this closed-minded accusation against the religious. And I guess there's one thing to say that they do it as well. Do you think that they do it more so? If you read the works of the apologetics, it's really this whole exercise in trying to grapple

with that where they're saying, we're not believing in something just because we believe in it and we're sticking to this really very serious attempts are trying to understand, to explain and there's a great deal of doubt and self-doubt. So I think it is really on the other side, where there is this certainty that there is nothing and then trying to get everyone to come to the belief that there is nothing. And so, and I'm not saying this is true for every atheist. Of course. Yeah.

I mean, it's a caricature to say that Christians just, they all just believe without evidence and without thinking. It's like, oh, have you read the apologetics? Have you read the gallons of ink spilled over debating and trying to justify positions? Now, of course, atheists will say that, well, we do that too and we do it better, but you're someone who's been on both sides of that. And I think when a lot of people, when atheists say, oh, Christians, they just believe it because their parents told them too. They're thinking of like their uncle at Thanksgiving. They're not thinking of the William Lane Craigs or the Alexander Prusers of the world.

They're thinking of someone that they know personally. But similarly, I know more atheists who are just atheists because, yeah, I've never seen any evidence, whatever, haven't given it much thought, than I know atheists who've sort of reasoned their way into that conclusion. I think it happens on both sides, in other words, but you're someone who's now lived both of those sides and interacted with both of those sides. And you said a second ago that you feel like it comes, more closed-mindedness comes from the atheist side than the Christian side. More class-mindedness comes from the atheist side and more certainty. Again, not for every atheist, but definitely if you take atheism and you turn it into an activist position, because then you're selling something. And that's what is, I mean, it's blinding, isn't it?

You become so confident. And I think even a little more than confidence, there's an element of arrogance. and this is it, there's really nothing more to know or learn or find out, we have it, there's nothing. I mean, people will say that that's what the Christians say. They say, I have my answer in this book. And I'm a humble Christian who has the answer to the biggest question of the universe and knows the truth. And there's no need for further inquiry because we have, we have the scripture. It tells us the way things are.

I'm sure. I'm sure that's the case. I'm sure that's the case for a lot of Christians, and I have to tell you on a personal level, it is wonderful to have the answer, to have this relationship with God, a God who's loving in whom I talk to and pray to and feel a sense of peace. But then on a more intellectual level, when you take the position, there is something. I think you are then much more involved, mentally. improving or even finding out.

The curiosity is very high. It's finding out, well, if there is something, what is it to them? And where can I find it? So I think that that opens up just a whole lot more in terms of learning and reading and finding out. And, you know, in the time that I became a Christian, I've also been approached by people saying, hang on, there is something, but it's not necessarily Christian. Christianity. It's something else. There is an energy and people are giving it all sorts of names. But that's, I think that stance, that mental stance, it provides for more curiosity than the position where there is nothing, I can't be bothered. Or I can only be bothered to tell other people that there is nothing.

You said before, I choose to believe. It sounded. to me as if you'd been convinced by your personal experience that there's something and Christianity resonated with you on like a moral level or on an existential level, then faced with this worldview that comes packaged along with it, that there was a man who was born of a virgin and died on a cross and exited a tomb, that you choose to believe that. A lot of people will look at that, Not so much with criticism, but with astonishment. I mean, my listeners know that I'm somebody who would love to be a Christian. I'd love for it to be true.

How do you choose to believe in something? Well, I think I probably chose with my feet to begin with, because I came for certain things when I came to the West, and I wanted to be seen as a human being. I wanted to make choices. I didn't want to be forced into a marriage that I didn't want to be in. I wanted to tell the truth. I came from an environment

ruled by fear and terror so you lie to survive you're always dishonest, you're always hiding what you want, what you really want because you're worried about the punishments. I came, so I wanted to be honest indeed an honest, transparent life, a life of integrity.

I wanted to have real, true fulfilling friendships and relationships. And so as I I say these are my values and then on a political level

political freedom which is institutions that seek to ensure that you can have this life of freedom and prosperity and so on and so honestly it is and this is the thing why I said Richard Dawkins is a Christian he just doesn't know it

is we're all living according to these morality that we inherited from Christianity, Christ's teachings, you know, we would go all over the place telling Muslims, let's separate politics from religion, and, you know, with the stoning and all that, we would say, if you cast the fast stone, if you have no sin, all of these things. I was living according to these values. All I've done really is find the humility. to come and you know and accept the source and I've been very fortunate in doing that and I'd say my personal suffering has brought me to a place where I've now got this consistency

and I don't live in the dissonance of thinking these are the values that I hold but Christianity is false or Christianity is just like Islam that feels like a different thing like there's the moral Christianity and I'm suspicious of the idea that all of my moral intuitions are a result of Christianity, but suppose that

were the case. The reason why I couldn't call myself a Christian is because I don't believe it's true. And to say I choose to believe something, it almost fills me with hope as if, ah, maybe that's something I can do one day, but it's such an extraordinary claim, the physical resurrection of Jesus, or things like the virgin birth that Richard likes to talk about. It's as if If you asked me to believe that that glass of water on the table was actually made out of spaghetti just with the appearance of glass, it's this extraordinary claim that I could try to choose to believe it, but if I'm just not convinced, I don't know how I can assent to that proposition, even if it turned out that believing that made my life better and it was more in line with how I was behaving and all of this kind of stuff, I believe that that glass is, is made out of glass and not spaghetti. And if you ask me to just choose to believe a factual statement that I found so extraordinary,

it wouldn't just be that I didn't want to. It would be that I couldn't. So there's that moral element, which maybe everybody's already living by, and they're already basically nominal Christians in that respect. But when it comes to the truth claims, is that something that you can just choose to think is true? Well, of course, I prayed.

And like I said, in praying, I felt a change, I felt an energy, I felt a sense of calm and peace, and I didn't leave it at praying, I pray, and again, I feel these changes, I wish I could share them with you, but then I also went on to read and when I read the Gospels, I know I can't, you know, the stories that are told. Again, these are first century accounts of things that were happening, and I'm using my 25th century brain to digest it and to understand it. But if we say miracles are really extraordinary things, because if they happen all the time, they wouldn't be miracles, then I choose to believe, and I choose with, the force that I feel, the calm, the peace, the stories, I see a great deal of consistency.

And then on top of that, it's watching, and for me, this is an empirical testament, is the communities, the societies that build their lives on that faith, and live by those laws, tend to to be happier, more prosperous, more connected. And, yeah, look, I've only been a Christian for two years, less than two years. So. To clear up for those who are familiar with your piece on unheard and hear your personal story, you do believe in those truth claims, in the resurrection of Jesus. I choose, I totally choose to believe in the resurrection, yeah.

And also the story itself and what it tells us. a God who died for our sins so that we are forgiven so that we can live and I think it's extraordinary it's such a beautiful and amazing story

I've got the chills talking about it and so I think our human mind is more than just you know show me the hard physical proof and if I don't see that it's not there it's like the way

you would appreciate poetry or great works of art, great music, you feel something, you feel something really strong. It's there. You just can't quantify it and you can't show any material evidence for it, but it's there. And so for me, these first century accounts are, yeah, they're true. I wasn't there to witness it myself. Again, if you you read some of the works on is there something rather than nothing and more and more people very skeptical of the Bible, very skeptical of religion in general, they're sort of tilting towards there is something and I'm reading on, I'm finding on, but like what I have now is really special and I wish I could share it with you.

Has anything in particular jumped out at you? Has anything surprised you when reading the Gospels, for example, anything you didn't expect to sort of leap off the page at you? I can only repeat the... this great insight into the human condition. that leaps out at me because, of course, I got my introduction into psychology. I heard my sister when I was 26, 27 years old, my sister had some psychotic episodes. She was only a year and a half younger than me.

And I plunged into reading works of psychiatry that were pretty, you know, the DSM books. and I remember thinking what a discovery that was because I had never viewed madness is what I call it in Somali it's just you don't have many different words for it you have colloquial words like crazy mad you don't call it psychiatric conditions

you don't have a word for psychosis you don't have a word for the different types of psychotic episodes that one can have so I dived into those books and now diving into the Bible, into the Gospels and into the commentary, what jumps out at me is that this stuff was known 2,000 years ago, and it evolved, and we continue to evolve, and we continue to build on that.

And so that makes it, for me, feel even more true than having to witness the miracle itself. we're filming this on the day of the presidential election in America you've made no secret of the fact that you prefer one candidate over the other do you think that would have been true for atheists ian as well yes absolutely absolutely again i don't even see this election as a contest between republicans and democrats

I see it as a contest between people within the Democratic Party so we have two major parties in the US one of them is a Republican Party one of them is the Democratic Party and within the Democratic Party this force of far leftist lunatics have completely hijacked the party

and they have, for whatever reason they seem to have cowed the moderates and when I talk about moderates I'm thinking of you know the Bill Clinton type of the proposition that the centre left which is sure we need a little bit of government

in more things to mitigate for the things that people are not doing themselves economically and for the weak and so on but you know we need a sensible border policy we need to balance the budget

we need for us to be good Democrats who are moderate, who are completely committed to upholding the American Constitution. These moderate Democrats have been cowed in this far-left group have come in with ideas that are revolutionary, that they couldn't win up until 1989, you know, Marxism was something people believed in and then it collapsed, but that was the economic argument, and now they have this cultural argument with identity politics, racializing everything, bringing in gender fluidity and other crazy ideas, maiming children, literally removing healthy body parts

from children. And that's then, across the board, in blue states, developing these laws that make it possible and legal to do something like that. I live in the state of California. It's just madness. And then And there's no The moderates

Just within the Democratic Party Don't seem to be able to push these people back Into the fringe And so Atheist Me would have Seen the exact same things And been angry at the exact same things And said what we need This party is hijacked

It's subverted And we need to push back against these people It's not coming from within the Democratic Party So naturally speaking, the way we have our system, you have the other party, the Republican Party, and now you see this realignment. So the rational Democrats are fleeing. So it's the blue-collar workers in 2016 all the way to Silicon Valley. The Tech brothers are now going for Republicans.

So it's this complete realignment of what used to be the Republican Party somewhere in between. either they remain Republican or their independence or some of them have moved over to the Democratic Party. But generally speaking, it's a very frustrated, a huge number of frustrated constituents of the Democratic Party who are going that way. And that's what we're seeing. And I think that's a good thing. I think the Democratic Party should lose and they should lose big and they should have to showdown amongst themselves and hopefully save the party and kick these people out. Yeah, I mean, I'm intrigued to know what you think of Donald Trump as more than just a response to and punishment of the Democratic Party. We've just been talking about humility.

Yeah. We've been talking about subtlety, not speaking on things that we don't know about and leaving it to the experts. These are not the kind of values which I see embodied in a man like Donald Trump. And so when you come out in fervent support of a political candidate like him, marriage to everything that you've you've told me so far on this podcast. Is there something about Trump that you like, or is it really just an attempt to punish the Democrats? So I know Donald Trump, just like you from publicist. I haven't met him. But the way he was portrayed in 2016, in the lead up to 2016, by the media led me to vote for Hillary Clinton,

even though I saw some of the problems, but I thought, no, I can't trust this man. First of all, he's never been in politics, but everything that was said about him just meant it was scary. And then he came into government and he governed. And his administration, up until 2019, before the pandemic hit,

the policies were just fine. I'm hugely impressed by something like the Abram Accords, hugely impressed by the way the economy was humming along. Yeah, he was holding a side show where he was saying things that were, yeah, sometimes entertaining, sometimes crazy, and sometimes I think also designed to provoke the media and the left, but keep himself, yeah, draw all attention to himself.

And, you know, I wish he spoke like King Charles all the time, but that's not Donald Trump. That's not him, and now we're used to the fact that he doesn't do that. But what you then saw, what alarmed me more than whatever was coming out of his mouth, was what the other side was actually doing. And that was to give them, so to cast him as this villain, calling him Hitler and demonic stuff, and then giving themselves permission to use the system, use weaponize the courts, the justice system, the media even, to do all the things that we all abhor and find undemocratic. And so I really blame the other side and say, if it is upholding the Constitution, his actions,

are consistent with upholding the Constitution. He's campaigning on let's bring back common sense. He's campaigning on making America greater again on with Elon Musk, bringing down the costs, this runaway cost. All this mischief is possible because it's paid for with taxpayer money without accountability. And he's saying, I'm going to bring accountability back.

I think given what we have seen in the last four years, I'm very much betting on him and his team, and his team is superior. I mean, I look at J.D. Vance. I look at Elon Musk. I look at some of the other people who are supporting him, and I think I would rather bet on this ticket to bring us back to what America is about rather than this ticket of Kamala Harris.

She can't say what she stands for. She did previously, and then she's confronted with it. She flip-flops, and now she's in this state of, tell you and I grew up in a middle middle class family what's all this and what's all of that and and that's not going to cut it because you know policy politics elections have consequences and in the last 16 years 12 of the last 16 years were democrats eight years of Obama followed by four years you know Trump and then four years of Biden and Harris and this large to the

far left is just strong. It is the wearing or the hollowing out of the national identity and more investing in global issues and globalizing America. And that just won't work because that takes that waters down the constitution to something unrecognizable. Some of those things that Donald Trump wants to do, one of the most important is immigration. Immigration policy is a top issue for many voters. It sounds very important to you, and you mentioned a moment ago about sensible immigration policies.

The idea of strict immigration, strictura immigration, is I know something that you're in favor of. I'm interested in how you square that with the Christian message that you've come to believe in. When you read passages about Jesus being essentially universal in his love, non-picky,

himself born in an understanding. unknown land, himself a foreigner, himself an outsider, somebody who teaches you that the Samaritan is your brother because he's the one that looked after you, not because he's part of your nation or your tribe. Reading those stories, I find it very difficult to square the idea of Christian nationalism, the idea of being a Christian and yet believing that there should be a choice that's made about who we sort of give our resources to, who we, who we allow into the country who we don't. Now, I think it's very sensible to do that too, but maybe that's part of the reason why I'm not a Christian, but I wonder how you put those two

together. I think one thing that Jesus Christ would oppose would be the commodification of the human being. And what we are now calling immigration is not immigration. It's deceiving poor people in poor countries into thinking that they're going to reach countries where they're welcome and they're going to have jobs and they're going to have shelter and healthcare and that they can send money back to, and that's not what happens. What happens is the people who are deceived to sell whatever they have and raise whatever little money that they can, give that money to smugglers, people smugglers and that are then exploited and taken advantage of.

There's a reason why almost 75% of the people who make it through these borders are male, Because women and children, by the way, have find themselves just in greater suffering than where they came from. You're scooping away the middle classes of these poorer countries, and their money is going to smugglers, and then they are exploited. They're raped. They're used in prostitution syndicates. They come out cheated, and then they come to societies. where they're left with no identity. They are told, you can't work here, you're not welcome here.

They meet with various forms of rejection. I'm not going to use the word racism because it's been overused, but I'm sure that there's also some racism. And so it would be, any, Jesus would be against any form of dishonesty. And I think what we are seeing now is this, cabal of moving human beings from one side to the other and I just think that's not going to work in the host societies

it's causing a lot you know the breakdown of social cohesion you're British look at what this and I call it mindless migration has done to Britain but also France the Netherlands Germany there's a great deal of turmoil caused in the host society And so I think that to be very honest, we can have immigration systems that are a win-win, that work for the immigrant and that work for the host society. But it's not what we have now.

What we have now is an abuse of the asylum system. There are large numbers of people who think that by coming to the West, they're going to have better jobs and better jobs and better incomes. These are people seeking to improve the economic well-being. but they're only using the asylum system. So the first proposal I would make is for Western countries to withdraw from the Geneva Convention and withdraw, you know, just shut down the asylum systems and then develop their own national asylum laws

so that they can choose who they want to take as asylum seekers which would always be a really tiny number and then develop... an economic immigration policy that again is a win-win for the people who are coming and the people who are here. A final question for you. I asked you earlier what you might have said to Christopher Hitchens, if you could go back in time or bring him here today. I've asked you what you would say to my atheist listeners or to other Christians. Just on a personal level, if you could go back in time and speak to atheist I am,

what would Christian Ayan say to atheist Ayanne 10 years ago? Christianity is radically different from Islam. Christianity is unique. Everything I love and care about Western society and Western civilization is a product of Christianity. And I would have then said to Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Richard. Dawkins, all of my atheist friends, how do you square this? Why would you be throwing, you know, the baby out with the bathwater? Is there nothing you want to retain? The baby out with the holy water.

With the holy water. Yeah. And I think I would have also been, I would have paid more attention to the Christian apologists at the time who were debating all of these things. And, you know, I owe them a huge apology. And I think a lot of us owe them a whole huge apology. Well, Ayan, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for sharing your story. As you say, this is a work in progress. And there'll be a book at some point when it's ready,

detailing more of what brought you to faith. But I appreciate that it's still somewhat up in the air. You're still learning. And so I appreciate all the more that you're willing to sit down and talk about. I'll bring sort of more concise answers and more well thought through answers than at this stage of discovery where I am in now. I think there's something wonderful about capturing that moment. I mean, it will be great once you have a thought-out theology and you've picked your denomination and you're condemning everyone else as a heretic or whatever it is that you might do in the future. For now, this moment where it seems like it's maybe the wrong time to speak because you're still working it all out.

There's something about capturing that moment that I think is so beautiful and also probably helpful to people in a similar. circumstance. So I'm sure they're appreciative, as I am for you taking the time to do this. Yeah. Thank you.