Part 2: Answering Islam w/ @TheAlMaidahInitiative

Hello everyone, this is Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co -hosts here at Kultish. I want to give you a heartfelt thanks for those of you who have generously given and supported our ministry the last few months.

It's been very, very helpful. We do, however, need additional support as we head into 2025.

Currently, we are operating roughly around 35 to 40 percent of what we need to operate on a monthly basis.

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All that goes directly towards helping us create more content. It'll allow Andrew to support his family as he is also a pastor up in Utah, and it would allow us to continue this important mission to engage the kingdom of the cults.

So all that being said, enjoy this next podcast. All right, welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Kultish.

My name is Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co -hosts here. We are here in part five, technically like 5 .1.

We were recording. We thought we were recording. We were going for about 20 minutes only to realize that Gabe walked in and said, hey,

I just didn't realize you guys had started again. So we actually, this is the new new version of five point of part five, part two.

That being said, I'm here with Andrew. Good to have you back, man. Officially on the record, unlike last time.

Yeah, it feels great. I'm excited to do this. Islam 5 .1 theology proper. Let's go.

Kultish and Al -Maidah, part five, Tokyo drift. Yes. And as we know from the last episode of how

Muslims relate to their sources, the Islamic sources aren't more powerful than family.

Yes. Vin Diesel has entered the chat or Dom has entered the chat.

So, yeah, but we are going to be talking about a very important segment. And also, we're joined by Mack, by James and Ibarra.

Thank you for having back with us. Let's jump into it. We're going to talk about the distinctions between Islam and Christianity.

And so we are going to be going to go over some very, very important categories. So let's jump right into it.

Jesus, how is he viewed in the Islamic world? What do we need to understand about how Islam understands and relates to Jesus?

And what can we understand to relate to them and to be able to connect with them as Christians? Yeah. So one thing you'll hear all the time, actually, once you get to know

Muslims, is that they'll say, you know, we love Jesus. We believe Jesus is one of our prophets.

So the other day I was in my local coffee shop and I was talking to this guy who overheard a conversation

I was having and was asking a bunch of questions about Al Meida. And I said, I wanted to make the person of Jesus clearer to Muslims.

And this Moroccan woman said, excuse me, what do you mean by that? That seems strange to me because we Muslims, we love

Jesus, we believe in Jesus. And I asked, okay, well, what's the thing that Jesus said?

And there wasn't an answer there. And part of that is because a lot of Jesus in the Quran is kind of an argument against what

Christians believe about Jesus. But it's a little more complicated than that. Now, the

Islamic narrative about Jesus, I don't want to call it a narrative, actually, because the

Quran doesn't have a narrative. You find this from sort of scattered places and I've been going through this this last week.

But one of the sort of where I'm going to start from is everything it's saying about him is actually chapter

Surah Maryam in the Quran, which is a whole chapter about Mary and the birth of Jesus.

And Islam and Christianity basically start in the same place, which is the angel

Gabriel appears to Mary. In the Islamic version, she thinks he's sort of a single man.

She's like, no, get away from me. I'm like a pious chaste woman.

I'm not coming near you. And he's like, no, no, no, no. I'm just a messenger from God come to give you a message.

And the message is that you're going to have a child that God will teach him reading and writing and wisdom and the

Torah and the gospel. And yeah, we'll perform miracles, right? So, we're at the same place basically at this point.

And most people realize that Islam does not believe Jesus is God. Islam does not believe in the crucifixion.

But the differences actually start much sooner than that. And what you see is the differences actually start with the birth narrative of Jesus itself.

So, in the Bible, Mary goes to Bethlehem with Joseph to have the baby.

And what I'm finding is that most Muslims have no category for Joseph, right?

They believe that Mary was just kind of a single mother with no partner.

They don't realize that she had a fiance at the time who was also visited by an angel and told to kind of look after her.

So, in the Quranic narrative, Mary goes alone to a date palm tree outside of her village, gives birth, and then comes back carrying the baby.

And then everybody is like, you've committed adultery. You've done an indecent act. And they want to stone her.

But then she points at the baby and they're like, why are you pointing at the baby? It's just a baby. You can't say anything. And then the baby starts to speak and vindicates

Mary saying, I am a messenger from Allah sent to perform miracles. Blessed is the day

I am born. Blessed will be the day I die. And blessed will be the day that I am raised to life.

So, then that's how Mary is vindicated.

Whereas, of course, the biblical account, the community doesn't even know that Mary's pregnant out of wedlock because Joseph marries her.

Then they go to Bethlehem. Then running from Bethlehem, they go to Egypt. And from Egypt, that's when they go back to Nazareth, showing up with probably a four or five -year -old

Jesus, not like a baby. So, it's much subtler the way that God vindicates

Mary in the biblical narrative to the point that everybody thinks that Jesus is actually

Joseph's son. And so, the Islamic narrative is different there.

And there's also an account where Jesus, as a child, turns a clay bird, breathes life into it and makes it a real bird.

And what's interesting about both these stories is speaking from the cradle and the clay birds being turned into real birds, is they're present in what's called the sort of infancy gospel of Thomas, which is a

Gnostic work that comes after the rest of Christianity, the New Testament.

And we know this, by the way, because it quotes the gospel of Luke and borrows from it. And it has

Jesus speaking from the cradle. Yeah. Let me ask you this. What would be the, when it comes to the influence of the different Gnostics or other gospels, like we had a whole series with our good friend,

Wes, kind of talking about the different gospels, whether it's the gospel of Thomas, the gospel according to Peter, and all these ones that have these really weird, really strange stories about Jesus' supposed childhood.

Was the appeal to these as Muslims may have been just that this is what they would have had exposure to?

The gospels came in their hands around the time when this was formulating their idea and theology of Jesus? Or was it kind of like they formulated their idea of who

Jesus was and then kind of found the Gnostic gospels to kind of back them up? Like that fit in within their prejudices, or is it a little bit of both?

It's a little looser than that. Yeah. So the way to think about the religious milieu before the

Quran comes about is, again, there's lots of Christian sects around. There's lots of Jewish kind of voices around.

And there's all these stories that are just kind of like floating around the ether, told around campfires from generation to generation.

And so what you see with a lot of the sort of references back to what's supposed to be

Jewish scripture in the Quran is actually referencing back to the Talmud or the

Midrash, and stories we can find pre -existing Islam, for example. So the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, for example, in Jewish folklore ends up becoming a story about Abraham being thrown into a furnace by Nimrod.

And in the Quran, they reference this Jewish folktale about Abraham getting thrown into the fire by Nimrod.

And a lot of places where the Quran is referencing the Bible, it kind of combines a lot of stories into one.

So there's one place where it's talking about King Saul, and it basically combines the story of King Saul with Gideon, where King Saul is leading the army to fight the

Philistines. And he needs to figure out who his men were. And the ones that lap water like a dog are the ones that go with him.

And then David is the one of Saul's men who kills Goliath. So it just kind of blends everything together.

And there's lots of things like this in the Quran, which can be kind of demonstrated historically.

And we're going to be producing a video on that this year. Now I'm committed. And probably this will be already be released.

Now I'm really committed. And so it's not that Muhammad is kind of reading these

Gnostic Gospels, is that anyone hearing stories about Jesus is going to hear all these stories.

He's going to hear Mary being visited by Gabriel. He's going to hear baby speaking from the cradle.

He's going to hear clay bird turn into a real bird. And so that's kind of what it becomes.

I don't think there's any kind of formal measuring of the written accounts and Muslims saying, yes, the

Gnostic Gospels are the real ones. The biblical Gospels are the fake ones. No, it's not that cut and dry. It's just kind of which stories are kind of adapted.

Other stories are much more directly, you're just kind of confrontational about Christian theology.

But Jesus is still described as somebody who performs miracles, who raised the dead, who cleanses lepers from their sins, not from their leprosies rather.

And it also, it says in the Quran that Jesus removed some of the restrictions that have been put on the people of God before him as well.

So the Quran saw Jesus as somebody who made the rules easier. Another point of deviation is this really interesting story in Surah Al Ma 'idah, the same name as our ministry, means a table full of food and conversation.

And the end of this Surah has some surface level parallels to John 6, because Jesus is recorded as being with his disciples.

And they ask him to prove himself by calling down a table spread from heaven so that they can all eat.

The only time it's like this is in John 6, where people are asking Jesus to bring down bread from heaven.

Whereas in the Quran, Jesus does bring a table of food down from heaven, but it says, once this happens, you will have no excuse other than to believe in me.

Whereas in the Bible, Jesus doesn't bring food down from heaven in response to that. He says, I am the food that comes down from heaven.

So it's actually a great way to draw the distinction. So in Islam, Jesus is somebody who brings us to the table of God's goodness.

In the Bible, Jesus is that table of God's goodness for us.

So after that, the Quranic Jesus predicts another messenger is coming named Ahmed, supposed to be pointing to Muhammad.

And then what you start to get in Surah An -Nisa, which is the fourth Surah and Surah Al -Ma 'idah, the fifth

Surah, is this contention that Jesus is not God, that he never claimed to be

God. It says, Allah will ask Jesus, son of Mary, did you take, did

I say, take my mother and I as gods in degradation of Allah? And then it also denies the crucifixion of Jesus as well.

So it says that Jesus was not killed, nor was he crucified. It was only made to appear that way to him, to them.

Again, that is not a new idea. That probably comes from the Gnostic sources as well. There's something called the discourse of the great

Seth, which makes that exact case. I was reading that last week. I've never read anything that reads more like the direct words of Satan than that specific

Gnostic discourse. But that's basically the idea is that the crucifixion was an illusion of some kind.

Most Muslims believe Judas was put in Jesus' place. And so they believe he was then taken up to heaven.

And once you get into the Hadith, that Muslims believe that Jesus will actually return one day to kill the

Antichrist, but he'll return in Damascus. And what the Hadith says is he'll break the crosses and kill the swine.

Meaning he'll make Christians and Muslims one entity on earth, and then the end of the world will come.

And then on judgment day, it says that he will not intercede for anybody. People will go to him and ask him to intercede for me, but he'll say, go to Muhammad and ask him because his sins have been forgiven.

And that's basically everything the Islamic sources say about Jesus. Wow. Ivar, what would you want to web tie in to that?

I mean, he's covered quite a bit here. Everything he's saying, what comes to mind for you? I mean, growing up for us

Jewish, Jesus was just a political idea, right?

So, you know, growing up Turkish, Jesus was just something that Christians did.

And Christians kind of always had an agenda, right? My dad had a hard time connecting with Christians because of his

Islamic faith. But, you know, what I've tended to notice in dealing with Muslims now is that they have a really hard time reconciling the continuity of Scripture with who they think

Jesus is, like everything that you said, right? So when you start talking to them about Jesus, they have all of these preconceived ideas.

But then when you start having these conversations, it turns into, well, you know, he was

Jewish, right? Like he was born in Bethlehem. He was a rabbi, right?

Like his followers were Jewish. The disciples were

Jewish. He went to the temple. He did a lot of things that you wouldn't be able to do if you said that you were not

Jewish. So it's like the progressive revelation of Scripture, right?

It starts in Genesis and it goes all the way to Revelation. And Jesus comes along and carries the story of God forward and brings forth, you know, he's the

Messiah, right? And it just becomes like a mishmash of ideas, right? Where, you know, I had mentioned in the last episode,

I had a two -hour conversation with somebody who thought that Jesus was a Muslim because of certain passages, one of them being

John 10, right? In John 10, Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and he says, go tell your

God and I'll go tell my God, right? I mean, and Jesus is just making a point of discussion between how they perceive

God and who God really is. But this Muslim looked at it and said that it's actually two different gods.

And Jesus is referencing, the word he uses for God is Elijah. And he says, that means

Allah, right? And we spent like two hours talking about that and topics like that, about how that just couldn't be possible based on, you know, the life that Jesus led.

So yeah, that's what I would add to that. I mean, in the sources, you know, they believe that he's not divine, right?

But as Christians, we believe that he is. And part of the reason we kind of get here is, you know, often when we talk to Muslims, we feel like they're always taking

Bible verses out of context, which is 100 % true. But the reason for that is they're not really even trained to think in context, right?

The Quran does not come in context. The information comes to people piece by piece, you know, morsel by morsel.

So, you know, you learn these things as you're sitting around the dinner table with your family, and you just, you know, you hear these things from place to place.

So, you know, the foundation of their logic becomes these things they have repeated over and over again. Like, you know, there is one

God who has no son, and that is the most logical thing in the world. And so, when they read say, you know,

Numbers 23, where it says, God is not a man that he should the son of a man, that he should repent or change his mind.

Then they say, look, see, your book believes the same thing that our book believes.

And they have no interest in the context of that. Not because they're deliberately trying to be insincere, because they're not used to thinking in context.

And if they did, they'd realize that God has already appeared in human form several times up to that point in the narrative.

And it's not saying that that passage does not forbid God from appearing physically. It means that God isn't manipulated by people or isn't a lie.

They also, you know, view the Christian view of Jesus's conception, for instance, as, well, then you must believe that God came and had sex with Mary, and then they had a child.

And that's what you're saying, but they don't believe that God can exist in the physical realm, first of all, and then why would he do that second of all?

But yeah, we don't believe that either, right? We don't believe that that happened either.

But the Quran pretty heavily implies we do believe that. So it's very difficult for them to get around the idea that we don't.

Andrew, real quickly, what's on your mind here, Andrew? Yeah, I'm just wondering, what are their scholarly consensus on the importance of the virgin birth?

Like, why emphasize the virgin birth? Does it have any theological significance within Islam?

Obviously, we know within Christianity why the virgin birth is so important. But what about in Islam? What's their scholarly consensus for that?

Why hold on to that? It's really just a display of God's power. There's not really, it's nothing really other than, look at how special and significant this person is.

This sort of, you know, through line of like original sin and the prophecy to the woman is just not, it's just not there.

Because again, Islam does not think in this terms of grand narrative and context in the way the

Bible does. So it can't really make those kind of connections. It's kind of like, well, I'll give you that he had power.

I'll give you that he was a prophet. I'll give you that he did things that, you know, no other prophet did.

But, you know, clearly he wasn't God. And here are our reasons why. Right.

Right. You've got it. He clearly needs to, because Jesus is such a significant figure that he needs to acknowledge him.

Yeah. And like, you know, many other systems of belief do, you don't delete him entirely.

You take what you can, what you can kind of fit into your worldview, and then you twist it to become what you want it to become.

Right. Also in, you know, in terms of his return, right? Like you have to explain the fact that he's coming back.

Right. You have to explain the fact that he has all of this authority and, you know, is essentially the one that God sends to judge the world.

So, yeah. Yeah. And again, there's a lot of, there's a lot of debates and we could probably do a whole level of podcasts just on the distinction between Muslims and Christians and how

Jesus is viewed. There's a lot we could go over. Just one other question I have before we kind of go into some other good topical points is that when you look at a lot of the

Gnostic gospels, underlying Gnostics had a wonderful underlying worldview that the flesh is bad.

So because of that, that came in direct conflict with the nature and reality of the hypostatic union,

God taking on flesh. So with Muslims, like what's their view of like the nature between like the flesh and the spirit?

Like, who are we ontologically? Are there presuppositions that they have? And maybe it's difference if you're like Sunni or Shia, like on what the nature is of like human nature or the flesh, is the flesh good?

Is there emphasis on the spirit? And does that carry over between, maybe it seems to be some prejudice towards like the

Gnostic writings. Like I remember being, this came to mind, I remember being in community college and I remember

I had a guy who was a guest speaker who was Muslim and he was advocating for the swoon theory. And I remember like, come on,

I was just getting into like the case for Christ apologetics and all that sort of stuff. And I was like, how you're an intelligent guy.

Can you honestly, like who, and I was actually majoring in criminal justice studies. I'm like, this makes no, like for nobody would make, create a forensic report like this.

Like, so anyways, that's, that's where I'm going with this. Are there underlying presuppositions that would make them aim towards like the

Gnostic like writings or those belief systems? No, I mean, so the thing is, what's interesting though, is the logic in Gnosticism of why

Jesus couldn't have a physical body. Right. It's actually pretty much the same logic in Islam is why

Allah cannot take physical form because Allah is pure light. He's Nur, the

Arabic word for light. And so he can't, he doesn't enter physical form. He can't do that. And that's what the

Gnostics believe. Jesus was a pure light being that couldn't have had a physical body. So the logic, the underlying logic is the same there, but except Jesus has moved from the super God category in Gnosticism to the not

God at all category in Islam. So it's, in other words, it's a stumbling block to not only have him take on flesh, but then on top of that, have them be humiliated and crucified.

Right, right, right. And like the thing is, I'd say again,

Islam takes from a lot of different sources. So they don't believe in the evil of the physical world, but what they do believe is that Adam and Eve were created in paradise and then they were sent to earth because the story is the same, except instead of being sent out of Eden, Eden's on earth in the

Bible, it like paradise is in a different dimension and they're sent to the earth as a result of that.

It's called the Dunya. So the idea is here is a temporary dwelling place that will eventually be, you know, destroyed.

Whereas in the Bible, you know, the Meeks will inherit the earth, right? The earth is our eternal home once it's made new.

In Islam, that's not the case. They do talk about the resurrection, but exactly what the nature of that is, is a little bit more, you know, more nebulous in some ways, more specific in other ways, like what the rewards are.

But it kind of approaches it both ways. Yeah. Okay.

All right. Well, I think that's a good category and I'm sure you have a lot more on your YouTube channel that people can check out. I think that's a good starting point to see some of the unique distinctions.

Now let's go move on to God, who the nature of God is. So the, obviously

Jesus is God, but the only, I know the things we have from a starting point, what we have in common, monotheism, there is only one

God. So far, Christians and Muslims on the same page. However, now there's a distinction between Allah, whether or not he's,

I understand that whether or not he's a personal as in the Christian God and also him being triune, that's where immediately against a fragment and separate, be distinct from each other.

So I'd love to hear from both your perspectives, like, would you want to go first? Like, yeah, let's have you go first.

What do you say are the main distinctions when the nature of God between Christians and Muslims? I mean, when we were growing up, you know,

God is distant, right? He's in heaven and he doesn't talk to you.

He only talked to Muhammad, right? He only, he intervenes in your life and, you know, but he's there in more of like a judgmental sense, right?

He's a judge and he's watching you and he wants to see what you're going to do. And if you do something bad, there's punishment.

And, you know, that comes in the contrast with the Christian view of God, right? That God wants to be intimately involved in your life because he's your creator and he's trying to draw himself back to you.

You know, Muslims don't believe in original sin. They believe you're born a good person and that outside influences corrupt you, right?

They take you away from this idea of what Allah is. So, you know,

I think there's an inherent difference in that. I think that there's also, you know, the way that we look at God as Christians is through the scope of the

Old Testament and how he reveals himself. And I think that the way that Muslims view

God is the Old Testament is merely like a support structure for Allah and Muslims really pick up the story the most with Jesus, right?

It's, you know, a lot like replacement theology, right?

So, you know, the Jews are no longer the people of God. It's the Christians. The Christians are no longer the people of God. Now, it's the

Muslims, you know, and the Mormons and so on and so forth. So, I think it's easier for them to go back to the story of Jesus and, you know, accept the explanation, right?

That he's not divine. And then, therefore, that justifies Muhammad and the things that he said.

Mm -hmm. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. Would you have any things you want to web into that?

Yeah, Ayyubaz is right, except that just to give some more nuance to this, the

Islamic sources definitely talk about God in kind of both ways here. So, it certainly talks about, you know,

Allah kind of, you know, being removed from, you know, earth and intervention. But it also says

Allah is closer to you than your own aorta. And so, you kind of have, you have verses that say both.

So, sometimes you will find Muslims who try and kind of hang on to this idea of, you know, Allah's closeness, but there's not really a kind of, like, theological framework to kind of, like, take those disparate things and kind of unite them.

The one that I've heard the most is when Allah protected Abu Bakr and Muhammad from the people who were chasing them and how he hid them, right?

Like, there's an instance of them being involved, but that's, you know, probably the most potent example

I've heard. Yeah. And so, there's one hadith which talks, for example, in eternity, Allah will descend to paradise every

Friday for Jumu 'ah prayer. So, it's kind of like a once, so there's kind of, what you're kind of really getting in the long run is kind of a once a week during prayers relationship with God.

So, you will actually eventually see him to some capacity, but not, but even in a way in a certain, it's kind of like the front of the crowd when it's distant, when he's distant kind of thing.

And then there's also things like, you know, on the day of Arafat, which is, you know, part of one of the sort of Islamic holy months, this idea that Allah comes closer to the earth than on any other night and answers everybody's prayers on that night as well.

So, there's lots of different ways it's formulated for Muslims, but, you know, one thing that is consistent is that they believe that God is absolutely unitarian.

They don't believe that God, you know - That's a good point. Has, the Trinity is completely out of the scope of that, you know, realm of thinking.

And they don't believe God can take physical form. And so, they believe that God is one being, one person, absolute monotheism.

And that's the kind of basic objection they have to the idea of the Trinity. I mean, part of the justification for them saying that he wasn't crucified,

I think just kind of ties into this idea that righteous people don't do anything wrong and God protects them, so nothing happens to them.

We had a conversation with a friend of ours who's a Muslim and very knowledgeable, but he couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that David sinned, like, or anyone, any of the prophets,

Jonah, that they would do anything that was outside of God's will, that they were, like, supposed to be perfect, near perfect people.

Yeah. And I think that that colors, you know, how they view the idea of a Christian God. So, the way that we approach it is that, yes, he was sinless, but he took our sin upon himself and that he was, you know, bruised and afflicted for what we did and that he atoned us, like, he atoned for our sin.

And I think that's just such a foreign concept for them. When you look at it and you say, well, you know, God puts these people on a pedestal, you know, essentially for the rest of us to be able to look at them as an example.

Yeah. Andrew, do you have any questions or what comes to mind? No, yeah.

It's hard for me to wrap my head around some of the Islamic beliefs in terms of trying to, you know, deal with Jesus, but then have

Jesus not be God when the New Testament so clearly teaches that Jesus is God and the Old Testament clearly prophesies of God coming in the flesh.

So, it's hard for me to wrap my head around how I get the monotheistic

Unitarian idea of just one God that they have and they want to reject

Christ, but for some reason they still have to deal with Christ. And since they have to deal with Christ outside of the context of the

New Testament, it's just a different Jesus, really. Because when we talk about, well, who is God?

We have to in turn talk about Jesus because He's the monogamous Theos. He's the unique and only Son of God who has made the

Father known to us, John 1, 18, right? No one has ever seen God the Father except for the Son who's at His Father's side.

He was revealed unto us all the way back from the Old Testament in the garden. It was the pre -incarnate Christ who sacrificed the skin of the animals, to cover

Adam and Eve as their mediator, even back then before the Father, to actually then when

He takes on flesh and dies, the death that we deserve. I don't know if it's too early to segue into the next part, but how do they deal with sin?

Is there sin within their worldview? How does that work? How is there human evil within their worldview?

I don't know these things, so I'm truly asking to understand. Let's move to that. Before we do,

I think, again, going back to this point, that Muslim thinking is generally very out of context.

When we think of things as Christians, as we think of the overarching narrative of the

Bible, and how every part of Scripture fits together, and Jesus believes in that narrative and puts

Himself in that narrative, we can connect those dots. But if you're just dealing with the

Bible as points of disconnected data, the way that the average Muslim, and honestly, most serious

Muslims are going to do, then it's easy to make it say whatever you want to say.

If you're Mormon or Jehovah's Witness, what you have to do is you have to take another authority over the

Scriptures, and you make that authority the context of what the Bible is actually saying, rather than allowing the

Bible to be its own context. That is exactly what Islam is doing from this.

It's essentially plot armor. Yeah. What they're doing is they're reading things completely out of context.

They're taking their beliefs, which come after Christianity, retconning themselves back into Christianity, and acting like what they believe is perfectly logical, and it's always been what

God's people believed, even though there's not real evidence for that outside of their own sources.

Then when they come into contact with the sources that disagree with them, they have to allege the corruption of those sources.

But if you read God's words from the beginning, starting with Genesis, we see

God functioning in different ways right from the beginning. As Andrew was saying, we see this sort of mediatory sacrifice early on.

We also see Abraham sitting with God in his tent and sharing a meal together with God, eating and drinking.

We see in Exodus 33, there's this fascinating part where it says, God used to speak with Moses face to face as a man speaks with his friend.

But then 11 verses, or nine verses later, it says, you cannot see my face for man shall not see my face and live.

Right. And then the chapter before that, it talks about someone being filled with the Spirit of God. So when Jesus says in the

Gospel of John, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father, all it's doing is calling back to the way that the prophets have always talked about God, and it's perfectly logically connected to all that material.

But what Islam has to do is make what they were saying outside of it, it appeals to what's come before it, establishes his own thing, and makes his own thing the basis for sort of logic and reason, and then uses that logic and reason built from that to dismiss what came before it.

Hmm. No, that's good. That's good. That's very, very helpful. So, I thought we could, so human nature.

Yeah. That's... The sin and human nature and the problem of sin. Yes. Yeah. What did they do with that?

Because I think, and this is just something as well too, I mean, it seems to me that a lot of, all of us, all of us are made presuppositionally, we're all made in the image of God.

All of us have a conscience and we all have, all of us have like guilt, right? And what do we have to do?

Well, we have to do something with our guilt. So, it seems to me just instinctively that the average Muslim, like just in doing the things that they do, like they know that they have things they have to atone for.

Is that sort of like carry over into how the human nature or even Muslims you dialogued with, with them, you know, doing, following the five pillars and going to, if they're going to the mosque on Friday and praying towards Mecca, does that sort of tie into that with how they view human nature or what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah. So, human nature is a pretty, you know, major point of disagreement that rarely gets touched on.

And I would say this is almost one of the most universal things I encounter with Muslims.

So, in the Hadith, Muhammad says, every person is born in a state of fitra, which means nature.

It is their parents that turn them into a Christian, a Jew, or a Sabian. And so, he kind of makes the argument, the animals come out, you know, born perfect, and then they're defaced later.

So, the idea in Islamic theology is that everyone comes out essentially pure, essentially

Muslim, and then it's external influences that make you deviate from that.

As opposed to what Jesus says, is that nothing outside of a person makes a person unclean.

Evil comes out from within a person's heart as per Mark 7. So, this basically means the

Muslim life is about removing bad influences from yourself and making sure you have good influences.

So, reciting the Quran out loud, going to the five daily prayers, attending

Jummah prayer, doing good deeds, right? Listening to wise scholars. Basically, this is kind of like, you know, filling your soul with good, and you want to be avoiding things which fill your, which you're projecting of evil and disinformation into your soul, you know, like, you know, other religions, like, you know, certain movies or TV shows or, you know, stuff like that.

And so, the whole idea is about transforming your world from the outside so that your inside gets transformed as well, and then you do good deeds, which has major contributions to the way politics work.

Because if you believe everyone's essentially good, and if you just have the right environment, then people will be better.

Then you're very much incentivized to try and control the environment around you.

And this applies to parenting, and to politics, and to basically every area of life. Right.

That seems to be sort of a commonality then between, like, Islam and the left. Absolutely.

Which is why it's so easy for them to work together sometimes. Not that they have similar goals, but they have, you know, a similar, you know, thought process.

I'd say even a similar view on authority. Like, and how it's supposed to be used.

Yeah, right. So, this makes it a very easy marriage for certain sects of Islam and, you know, certain sects of left -wing thinking.

Because everybody agrees that people are basically good, and in order to get to the world we want to see, we have to tear down the existing system and replace it with something better.

Right. So, the sort of Islamic thinking and left -wing thinking agrees on that.

Yeah. What they don't agree is what they'll build up in its place. Right. Right. You know, you can get to that later.

But, yeah, the average secular Seattleite I'm interacting with also believes in the fitra. Yes. In less words.

So, it impacts absolutely every area of your thinking to some capacity. Hmm. And it's interesting too, and you can give me your thoughts on this.

Do you know David Horowitz? He's a sort of like a right -wing thinker.

He's written a lot of books on the American left. I've heard the name. Yeah. So, this is like back, you know, this is like 2004 and sort of my right -wing neocon days.

But I remember reading this really interesting book by him called Unholy Alliance. It was called Radical Islam on the American Left.

And a big opening segment of his book is that he was talking about how when the attacks with 9 -11 happened, there was an immediate move amongst a lot of leftist college professors at the time to try and sort of understand or just explain or even justify like the attacks.

And there's almost areas in which he sort of made a case that there's almost like a similar, like they haven't somewhat of like a similar worldview where it's almost like sort of subtly joined sides.

So, I mean, the fact that you acknowledge that just was very, I mean, it's interesting. It's the concept of ummah, right?

Versus its relationship to say like a proletariat. Ummah is community, right?

And how much of Islam is based around, you know, the way that the ummah behaves and thinks as a collective and how that translates to the individual

Muslim. And communism and socialism are the same, right? Like there's a working class that supersedes things like capitalism, you know, supersedes things like, but, you know, the flip side of that and I too am a reformed neocon, you know, and you can see these points of marriage and these points of intersection that they have in regards to how authority is supposed to play out.

You know, in communism, it's the state is the ultimate authority. While, you know, in Islam, it's a strong figure at the top and a strong government and a strong government that imposes its will, you know, in the name of God.

Right, right. So, at the disposition then is that you create sort of the perfect and ideal society that then has the person conform to that society and that allows them to transform from within.

Yeah, exactly. Now, there's obviously smaller scales of that, like, you know, what kind of friends you let your kids hang out with or, you know, who you spend your time with, right?

It's not like the only solution is the government, but that's definitely part of the thinking and that's certainly part of Muhammad's thinking.

So, is that where the concept of, is that sort of the meeting, sorry, the meaning and intent behind Sharia law?

Yeah. Now, when we talk about Sharia law, and you see these polls all the time being like, yeah, 75 % of Muslims say they believe in Sharia law.

Right. But Sharia law is nebulous. It's like asking an American if they believe in liberty. Right.

Everyone's going to say yes to that, but different people mean different things by that, right? Right. So, the idea of the

Sharia is the rule of God's laws and orders on earth.

Right. And how does that formulate it, right? So, a Sunni is going to formulate that very differently than a Shia is going to formulate it.

And different Sunnis will, you know, formulate it in different ways. Because again, there's not a Sharia code somewhere.

It's the rulings that are made by scholars drawing from the Quran and the Hadith. And there's lots of conflicts about those things.

And again, just to jump in, and you can jump in here as well too, but I mean, it's just, in all transparency,

I feel like a lot of times I'm approaching these different topics and conversations with my own sort of prejudice and biases from just, like I being a former neocon.

So, even like when I think of like Sharia, I'm viewing it specifically through the lens of like Western media during the quote -unquote war on terror, where a lot of the propaganda to get us to quote -unquote fight over there so 9 -11 doesn't happen was, you need to do that or otherwise you're going to have

Sharia law imposed. Like, do you want your wife to be forced to wear like, you know, a head covering?

Well, then you need to make sure that you support, you know, our foreign policy and vote to put

Bush back in office. My frame of reference for Sharia is the Taliban, right?

The Taliban, you know, practice their own form of the Sharia and how they, you know, execute judgment on the people that they have control over.

And the Taliban also are responsible for killing most of my relatives in Afghanistan.

So, you know, when I hear the word Sharia, right, like I understand intellectually what it means, but there's an evoking of a response from inside of me that's like, they're going to take everything over.

Yeah, the Western definition of Sharia, spooky Middle Eastern music plays and someone's hand gets cut off.

Right, right, right, right, right. Or, you know, terrorists, right? Like, beheading Daniel Pearl or something like that.

I mean, we can't deny that those were powerful, impactful moments on how we view Islam through the scope of history, but particularly post 9 -11.

And you're like, well, those guys, you know, when you say Sharia, right, like you must be talking about those guys, you know, and how they do it.

Right, right. Andrew, what's the wheels in your head turn? What's on your mind?

So what's like the problem and the solution within Islam, like within Christianity, we would say we are separated from God.

We are sinners. The wages of sin is death. God spoke to us in former times through the prophets as a mercy and grace to point to the

Messiah because left in our sin, we would do nothing but destroy ourselves. Jesus Christ takes on flesh, the second

Adam, perfect sinless dies, the death that I deserve reverses that curse as the sacrifice blood was spilt for his people so that I can have peace with God.

So I have a problem, solution. There's distance between God and man. So in Islam as well, there's a distance between God and man.

Why is there a distance? And how is that problem solved? So the distance between God and man,

Islam is more of kind of a, you know, what you are versus what he is. He is your creator.

You are a creation. Therefore, there is distance. And the reason we're on earth, the

Quran says, I've created, you know, I've created this world to test which of you is best indeed.

So they basically see this world is a test that you either pass or fail, basically.

That's why you're here. So you start off in a good situation. You're pure on the inside.

Even non -Muslims, by the way, start off as Muslims, according to the sort of Islamic sources. So it's your parents' fault that you're not

Muslim. It's the Messianic's fault Oh my gosh, don't even get me started.

After this podcast, I'm going to call my parents, like, Mom, Dad, we need to talk. Yeah. And so the test is to find the truth, the right religion.

The Quran says if anyone desires a path other than Islam, it will never be accepted for him. But when it gets to the

Hadith, it's, you know, the idea is you're supposed to live a life of doing good. And that's the test, right? And in the

Muslim formulation, it's not supposed to be the kind of the hardest thing. So in the Hadith, Muhammad says, you know, whoever thinks of a good deed and fails to do it,

Allah will count that for him as a single good deed. If he thinks of a good deed and does it, that will be counted as 10 good deeds.

If he thinks of a bad deed and does not do it, that gets counted as one good deed. And if he thinks of a bad deed and does it, that's counted as a single bad deed.

And so it's supposed to be this test, and you're supposed to be, you know, possible.

So it also says, you know, if you take one step towards Allah, he takes 100 steps towards you.

If you go to him walking, he comes to you running. It says, Allah says,

I am whatever my slave believes in me. So you're supposed to trust Allah, you're supposed to follow

Islam, and you're supposed to strive to do good deeds. And then if you do that, you know, the pure nature that's within you will be in conjunction with the mercy of God, because everybody does sin still, and everybody does, you know, mess up and have things they have to pay off, then you will be with, then you will go to paradise for passing the test.

If you get like a C, you might go to hell for, you know, 10 ,000 years, be punished in your grave for a little bit, and then eventually go into paradise if you're

Muslim. But then if you're non -Muslim, then you will go to hell. Wow.

Any last thoughts from any of you all before we jump over to the last segment? That's really good and holistic.

It shows you there's just a lot that's good to know in order to really bridge the gap, which we're gonna, in the final segment, we're going to talk about specifically how to take all this and how to engage with Muslims, knowing the distinctions.

Any last thoughts about the distinctions, whether it's anything related to specifically human nature and salvation?

Any last thoughts? Yeah, so the basic thing is, if you're talking about this as a

Christian, you need to start with human nature. Because if you're basically good, and you just have to do good deeds to maintain that good, then it makes absolutely no sense why someone would need to die for you.

You do good, good things will happen to you, is the kind of basic formulation. And again, Muslims believe in mercy.

It's not entirely a reward system. But, you know, Muhammad said to his wife

Aisha in the Hadith, no one would enter paradise by his good deeds alone, except for the mercy, except that Allah would wrap him in his mercy.

And Aisha said, not even you, Prophet. And he says, not even I. So it's a mixture of works and faith to get into paradise in Islam.

And that's how you kind of pass the test, basically. But in their formulation, because of human nature, there's no need for the gospel in their mind.

Right. And we can also look at things like the way that we perceive sin based on the scripture and, you know, let's just say, like,

Western tradition versus the way that they see it. We see gossiping, right?

I've never encountered a Muslim who, well, my mother's age, right, who would be like, gossip is bad.

We're not gossiping. You know, there's not really a conviction there. We're just talking. Right. We're just having a conversation.

So I think from the outside, looking at things like the way that they perceive mental health or the way that they perceive, you know, where tax money goes and all this other stuff, so much of it is based on that kind of worldview.

And it's so foreign and alien to us. Yeah. Right. But it's things that we would view negative.

They don't necessarily view them as negative. Yeah. Andrew, you have one last thought before we jump to the next segment? One last thought.

I might just open up a can of worms here. But according to Muhammad with his first vision, he thought there was a jinn.

Maybe that was overcoming him. Is there Satan? Yep. There's Satan. Not within, but there's

Satan. Okay. Talk about that real quick. How do they view demons or Satan and things of that nature?

Yeah. So they believe all angels are good, right? They don't believe in fallen angels in that sense. They believe that there is an invisible race called jinn, which are basically just like people.

There's good jinns and bad jinns. There's Christian jinns, Jewish jinns, Muslim jinns, and pagan jinns, right?

So they're kind of invisible creatures with free will like us. And they believe that Satan was the greatest of the jinn.

And when Adam was created, God demanded that all the jinn bow down to Adam.

And Iblis, as he's referred to as well, refuses to bow down to Adam because he was created from fire when

Adam was created out of mud. And that's how he became Satan. So they do believe in invisible forces that try and tempt you.

For Ramadan, they believe that Satan is chained up for the whole month of Ramadan.

So for that one month, you're to blame for your own actions all the time. And yet that's an opportunity to work on yourself.

And then he's released again at the end of Ramadan. So there's no good or bad angels, but Satan is still bound, even though he's morally ambiguous.

Yeah, he's not an angel, he's a jinn. So there's good and bad jinns, but Satan is not an angel, he's a jinn.

Oh, okay. And he's definitely bad. Yeah, he's definitely bad. Okay. Makes sense. Yeah.

Wow. All right. So one last segment, the historical reliability or the lack thereof of the

Bible, this definitely plays in as well. So where do they stand? Do they sort of embrace the typical objections?

We covered in other episodes, the Bible's put together at Nicaea. Do they kind of take like a

Bart Ehrman approach where they say the Bible's corrupted, but Jesus was real? Or do they take an extreme example?

Where do they actually land when it comes to the Bible's corrupt? Because there's levels to it. Yeah. And here's the thing.

So the Quran certainly alleges the corruption of Christianity and Judaism as a whole, right?

Whether it's talking about the corruption of the actual texts, there's plenty of debate over that.

But it's nevertheless a conclusion that Muslims kind of have to come to at some point, right?

Because in Surah Al -Maidah, I think it's 62, it says, you know, let the people, oh people of the book, you don't have any ground to stand on unless you hold fast by all the revelation that has come to you from your

Lord, the Torah and the gospel. Yeah. So the Quran affirms the Torah. There's which is the

Psalms and then the Injil, which is the gospel, right? But obviously the gospels teach that Jesus was crucified and was raised from the dead.

And there's zero ambiguity about that at all, right?

It's not ambiguous that he's God either, but if you squint your eyes a bit, you can miss that. You cannot miss the crucifixion.

So since the text says that, and Islam says that didn't happen, then the only place

Muslims have to go is two ways. Either Muhammad was not really speaking on God's behalf and the

Quran is not the word of Allah, or the previous scriptures are corrupted.

So that really gets formulated more as Islam starts expanding into territory with more

Christians. Like for the first 100, 150 years, it's all conquest and battle and nobody's really debating anything.

Once people start debating it, that's when these things start to get formulated. And so what you'll find is that in early

Islam, they allege the corruption of the scriptures, but they don't give a detailed analysis of what exactly has been corrupted and what has been corrupted, which means that Muslims are basically forced to try and figure out the how from everywhere else.

And most modern Muslims who are doing this online, basically borrow their ideas from the

German liberal scholars in the 1800s. And that's not speculative. So the most prominent guy on the sort of Muslim YouTube that talks about the corruption of the

Bible would be someone like Zakir Naik, who gets all his ideas from a guy called Ahmed Didat.

Zakir Naik calls himself Didat 2 .0. Ahmed Didat gets his information from a book called

Izzah al -Haq, which is written by an Indian Muslim scholar refuting

British missionaries in India. And what this guy does is he basically borrows all the works of these

German higher critical scholars who believe the Bible contains contradictions and says, oh yeah, this is why the

Bible is unreliable. Look at all these contradictions. The problem is when they do that, they are stepping outside of their own

Islamic worldview to do that. Because the mindset of the higher critical scholars from Germany comes from the philosophy of Christian Wolff, which comes even further back from Anaximander of Miletus, the first Greek philosopher we know of that believes life comes without divine intervention.

And they believe that because life does not come through divine intervention, then how did life develop?

Well, we have hunter -gatherers that become farmers, that become city dwellers, that then invent religion.

It starts as polytheism, then later becomes monotheism. So the German scholars believe that the

Hebrew scriptures contain this kind of Elohist source and Yahwist source, that you've got these polytheistic

Israelites earlier, and then you have these monotheistic ones later that go back and change things. So they see the things where God is personal and interactive as this remnant of this earlier polytheism.

And they see the things where God is distant as this later monotheistic add -in that comes during Babylonian era.

So they take those glasses and they see contradictions because of their presuppositions, their naturalistic presuppositions.

So Muslims ignore the presuppositions there, namely, there is no

God that speaks to humanity, which have been used to come to those contradictions, and they borrow all the arguments.

And those arguments don't fit with their own presuppositions. Because if you went to these higher

German scholars and you said, oh yes, we agree that Christianity is corrupted. Yeah, absolutely. If you say, and Allah spoke to us through the prophet

Muhammad, peace be upon him, their answer is nine. They absolutely do not fit together, but because Islam has not spelled out concisely how

Christianity has been corrupted, they have to just borrow from everywhere. German scholars, the Da Vinci Code, Bart Ehrman, you name it and they'll use it, despite how much it would completely refute their own actual position in this.

Yeah. Well, it seems that also, I mean, just going over the first three episodes we did, is that you see so much syncretism in the advancement of Islam.

It would make sense too that there'd be also syncretism in the advancement of their theology. Right, right.

Because Christianity is the biggest problem Islam has to overcome.

They're saying there's one God, he has spoken, and he has given us this world to lead and conquer and sort of be the stewards of.

And Christianity is, oh, we have one of those at home. It's like,

I've already got one, you see. Yeah. That German scholar thing was funny. It's always like, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine.

Yeah. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I think this idea of inconsistency is something you can see.

There are people who go to college campuses and they start talking and debating with college students all over TikTok and Facebook and everything.

And the most common thing that I've watched in those encounters is this confrontation based on inconsistency, right?

Like, well, it says one thing in Mark, but it says another thing in Luke, right?

And how come they don't say the exact same thing? I think that Islamic theology expects everything to be the same, right?

And that's what makes it inconsistent. It expects everyone else's things to all be the same.

Right, right. Which is so crazy. I mean, the word that I want to use for all of that, everything you just said, it's cherry picking, right?

It's very easy to sit there and pull out verses that support your position and then easy to pull out verses that make the other person's position easier to distort, right?

So it's very common for Christians to do this too, right?

Different denominations do it, different cults do it, right?

They all take these ideas and they make them fit whatever they want it to fit. But the truth is in Islam, as we know,

I mean, we read the Quran as a staff every Monday. There are a ton of inconsistencies, right?

Right. But when you turn that back in a conversation with a Muslim about the inconsistencies in the

Quran, and then on top of that, the inconsistency of how your average Muslim relates to the

Quran and how they live or what they perceive that the Quran says, it's pretty staggering.

Wow. Yeah. Man, there's so much to unpack and there's a lot more we could probably continue and go on.

But what we're going to do is we're going to wrap up part five. This is C5, Coldest Part Five.

Is that what you called it? Yeah, we can call it that. Yeah. So we are not done yet. We're going to jump into a part six.

So if you all have enjoyed this episode, definitely let us know what you thought. We're going to really be talking about this last segment.

We discussed, you know, the historical origins. We also kind of discussed some distinguishes, understanding the

Muslim and just how they relate to sources and their cultural demographic, how they relate to the world. And we talk about some of now the theological differences.

What I'm excited for is we're going to kind of really dig in to like how to actually take this information and engage with them.

Because that's really been a focal point of your ministry is, like I said, just getting into the arena of ideas and actually dialoguing and actually meeting them where they are to actually discuss these differences.

And knowing this already, I feel like for me, I already feel like a lot more just confidence from when

I officially, I felt overwhelmed when I first thought about putting something like this together. For me, personally,

I feel a lot more confidence to just like, hey, I can really take this information and be able to have a conversation with someone about these things.

If anybody wants to follow up on this direct conversation we're having here, I'd recommend two videos on our channel.

So find a playlist called Almida Academy, which is more sort of structured discussions of these things.

And two videos on that. One is called Muslims in a Christian World, which is kind of talking about the sort of bad presuppositions that Muslims rely on to criticize

Christianity. And the other is Why Christianity Makes No Sense to Muslims, which is talking about how the sort of out of context thinking is formulated, basically.

Awesome. We'll put links in the description for that so people can definitely check those out. All right. All that being said, we'll talk to you all in part six of this special long extended series on cultish.