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Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion || SLP485 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and thank you so much for downloading this episode of the Speak Life Podcast, episode 485.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Thomas Thorrogood, Media Producer at Speak Life, and today we have a special episode about Iron Hersey Ali and her journey towards Christian faith.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: So have you heard of Iron Hersey Ali?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of people are talking about her at the moment.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: She has a very interesting journey where she converted out of Islam and was a big fan of the new atheism movement, people like Richard Dawkins.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And now she has written an unheard article titled Why I Am Now a Christian.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: So Glenn will be getting into that in the first part of this episode, talking about what it tells us about our current cultural moments, Tom Holland's Dominion thesis, the impact that that has had on Ayn Hersey Ali and so many others, and the roots of the values that we prize, things like human equality, human rights, compassion, consent.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So that will be the first part of the episode.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: In the second part, Glenn will be talking about Ayn Hersey Ali at the ARK Conference.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know if you've heard about the ARK Conference that stands for Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of people met together, including figures like Jordan Peterson and Miriam Cates and others, people, many of whom we've had on this podcast, Louise Perry.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so there was a very interesting panel discussion involving Ion Hersey Alley at the ARC conference.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so in the second part of this episode, Glenn will talk about that.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope you enjoy, and I will catch you in the middle.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: In 1927, Bertrand Russell delivered a lecture entitled Why I Am Not a Christian.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: 96 years later, Ion Hersey Alley has written an article called Why I Am Now a Christian.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: So what's happened in the last 96 years, and what does it tell us about what's been happening in the West?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Ion Hersey Alley's uh article on Unheard released just this weekend, and it has set social media on fire.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of Christians are now thrilled that uh she seems to be embracing the faith on some kind of level.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of secularists are feeling threatened.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, many other Christians are feeling like uh this is just bandwagoning of the worst sort, and why should we uh why should we be interested at all in Ali's uh conversion?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a conversion?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's been lots of debate about that.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: First, we'll have a look at the unheard article.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and she starts out by noticing uh Bertrand Russell's uh 1927 lecture, Why I Am Not a Christian.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now that is something uh that I I know is responsible for many people becoming Christians, actually.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: There are a number of people in my life who have said that they've become Christians either after reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion or reading Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and it's a case of seeing the case against Christianity and figuring out, oh my goodness, is it really that thin?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Bertrand Russell uh plays some some sort of philosophical arguments and basically says that uh Christianity is held in place by fear.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then Ian Hersey Ali talks in her article about the way she grew up in fundamentalist Islam.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, the Islam that she grew up with to begin with wasn't particularly fundamentalist until the Muslim Brotherhood uh got involved, and then it became very much a fear-based thing.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so when she rejected the Islam of her youth, she was rejecting very much a fear-based theocracy.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: You might know her story.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: She uh got out and and went to the Netherlands, and uh there she writes about this in her book, Infidel.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, she also made a film with Theo van Gogh, and um tragically, Theo van Gogh was murdered, uh, and the the jihadist who killed Theo Van Gogh left a message for Ayan Hersy Ali that she would be next, actually, and um just uh an absolutely horrific thing uh to happen to her, and she goes to the States, and she around that time and in a post-9-11 world gravitated very naturally towards the new atheism and became great friends with uh people like Richard Dawkins and especially Christopher Hitchens.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so she was on the not quite on the very inner ring of the the new atheism, but um she was very much associated with the new atheism, and she very much identified whatever God talk there is with the fundamentalist Islam of her youth.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: But now she writes an article entitled Why I Am Now a Christian.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: So what changed?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: She writes this.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Why do I call myself a Christian now?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Part of the answer is global.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Western civilization is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin's Russia, the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilize a vast population against the West, and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fiber of the next generation.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so she points to various geopolitical changes.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this has led some people to cynically kind of put on Twitter, you know, Ion Hersie Hiley says, Why am I- Why am I a Christian?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Global politics.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think that would be to misunderstand the essay and the importance of the moment.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: But she does absolutely point to uh geopolitical forces as defining the moment that we are in.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, does that mean that her turn towards something Christian uh is entirely cynical or hypocritical or sub-Christian?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it it could be any of those things, obviously.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I put it to you that anyone who shows up in church on a Sunday will have mixed motives.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it's me, whether it's a professional Christian like me, whether it's um Christians who've been Christians for for many years, or whether it's your average secular person showing up trying to give church a go, guess what?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Their reasons for showing up in church on Sunday will not be I just want to worship the living God.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: Guess what?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Their reasons will be my marriage has just fallen apart and I'm I'm I'm I'm all out of ideas and I'm just gonna give this this church thing a shot.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Or they'll come and and they'll talk about depression, they've fallen flat on their face face in depression, or um redundancy has struck them and they've wondered what it's all about.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Or they actually fancy a girl and they're kind of coming along with their girlfriend and that you know they're not really sure about it.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Or the sense of community that they've seen in church is far greater than anything they've seen outside, or you know, or even if you come to church and you say, Well, actually, I don't want to go to hell, so I want to figure out whether I can get out of hell free with this Jesus figure, guess what?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: That is also to some degree uh a prosperity gospel.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: It just has a much longer hor time horizon, right?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: As a prosperity gospel.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: You've got much more delayed gratification with that kind of prosperity gospel.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: But even if the only reason you're coming coming to church is so that you can deal with the judgment of God and instead escape to heaven, guess what?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: That that is not the highest reason to come to church either, right?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: The highest reason to come to church is Jesus, right?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: I I want to worship Jesus, I want to hear his voice, I want to belong to his body.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now, those those would be um ultimately the reasons that you come to church.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: But be honest, even if you're a Christian, is that the reason you go on a Sunday morning?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone comes to Christianity for mixed motives.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that needs converting is even our motivations for becoming a Christian.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: So Ayan Hirsi Ali talks about geopolitical reasons and looks out at the world and the sinking sand of the world, and a lot of the reason why she has fled to the rock of the church, or at least civilizational Christianity, is she's seen the sinking sand in the world.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, is that a lamentable, regrettable thing, or is it more just an unavoidable thing?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say it's an unavoidable thing.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: No one comes to Jesus for pure reasons at the end of the day.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: So Ali goes on in her article and she talks about the formidable forces that she's um discussed that are swirling around in the world.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: And she says, But we can't fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question, what is it that unites us?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: The response that God is dead seems insufficient, right?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um so Nietzsche is not going to help you build uh a new society.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: But then she says, so too does the attempt to find solace in, quote, the rules-based liberal international order.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, we can't return just to classical liberalism.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: We can't just return to John Locke and imagine that that is a sufficient foundation for Western civilization or any kind of civilization.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: We can't just go back to rules-based liberal international order.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating to me.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: She says the only credible answer I believe lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: So she's saying we cannot just return to classical liberalism as the foundation, because the true foundation for that was the Bible, right?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: The Judeo-Christian tradition is what is what she calls it here, but let's just say the Bible, right?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and what's fascinating is there's a lot of people who, you know, they get scared of like what they call woke ideology, and they run back to what they think will be a sturdier foundation.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: So they they run back to rules-based, liberal, international order.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: But that itself is not the root of our culture, our civilization.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: That itself is the fruit of something else that is the root, and Ayan Hersey Ali is absolutely identifying what the actual root is.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it's well, she doesn't say here it's Jesus, but I would say it's Jesus proclaimed to us in the scriptures of Old and New Testament.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: She calls it the Judeo-Christian tradition.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I think she is absolutely identifying where the true foundation lies.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom, and dignity from the nation-state and the rule of law, to the institutions of science, health, and learning.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms of the market of conscious conscience and of the press find their roots in Christianity.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so the root is not the enlightenment.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: The enlightenment was one distorted fruit of the true root.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: The true root is Christianity.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so I've come to realize that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: The wood is the civilization built on the Judeo-Christian tradition.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: It is the story of the West, Warts and all.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Russell's critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't just say that Bertrand Russell's critique was too narrow in scope.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: I would say his critique was actually blind to the ways in which his critique was already Christian.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Russell's critique of Christianity was already profoundly dependent on Christianity, but claiming not to be.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that that was the the the real issue with Bertrand Russell.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Later on in the article, Ali says, To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilization.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: It does not come naturally to man.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: The dominion thesis that Tom Holland puts out there into the world is to say what we take for granted is not natural to humanity, it's not obvious to reason and logic, and it's not universal if you do anthropological studies around the world and down through history.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: It is very specific to Christian civilization.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I wrote my book called The Air We Breathe, because it says the international rules-based order or human rights, or freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, these might seem natural and obvious and universal to us, but that's only because they are utterly pervasive in the way that air and oxygen is utterly pervasive to our lives.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's invisible to us, but we are nourished by it and we are dependent on it every second of our lives.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so really Ayan Hersy Ali has been Tom Holland pilled, really, right?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know about the red pill and the blue pill in in The Matrix, you know, Neo is offered, you know, if you want the red pill, you get the truth, okay?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And people talk about being pilled in lots of different ways.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: But the Tom Holland pill is is really doing doing a work on a number of different people who are recognizing that what they take for granted is not obvious.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: It is thoroughly Christian-ish.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And if we like it, if we want it, then actually to embrace the Christ who has given it to us is closer at hand than we might have imagined.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: We might have imagined that faith in Jesus is a completely bonkers thing that only faith heads do.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, once we see that we are exercising faith in all sorts of things, like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and universal human rights and human worth and dignity and equality and compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, progress, all these things, um, we are believers in these things.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: And we might not have thought of ourselves as people of faith.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: But none of those things are the results of reason and evidence, and all of these things are the results of the Bible and Christianity and the Jesus Revolution.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, once you're awakened to the believer that you already are, you're also awakened to the possibility that you could embrace Jesus in that same way.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: As Tom Holland has said, you know, if you're going to believe in human rights, you may as well believe that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and sits at the right hand of the Father, because both of those are theological declarations.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it does not come naturally to man, says Ayan Hirsi Ali.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: These virtues, these values that we hold so dear in the West, they are the product of centuries of debate within Christian and Jewish communities.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstition, and built institutions to to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I I just think that's a really interesting comparison that Ali is making between the Islam of her youth and the Christianity that she is beginning to embrace.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think it's a simply a case that Islam was very dark dogmatic and Christianity outgrew its its dogmatic phase, because both Islam and Christianity have dogmas.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: They both have dogmas.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, what we really want is not to outgrow dogmas, but to have the right dogmas.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: And within Islam, their doctrine of God absolutely excuse excludes the human, just like from the outset.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: So the number one prayer, the first prayer that Muslims say every day in the five prayers that they pray is a quotation from the Quran, Surah 112.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Say Allah, he is one, he does not beget, nor is he begotten, and there is none like unto him.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's this verse that says, Allah is alone, he is a monad, he is a mathematically singular entity, and there are no partners to Allah all by himself, and he he does not beget, that is, he is not a father, and nor is he begotten, he is not a son.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: The Quran is utterly anti-Trinitarian, and it finds disgusting the idea that Jesus would be the Son of God.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: And partly that's because uh I I think Muhammad mistakenly imagined that Christians had some kind of carnal generation of Jesus going on, that somehow in the Bible, because he's the Son of God, um, somehow there's a there's a fleshly begetting of Jesus, which of course is not what any Christian has ever believed.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: But partly in the Muslim imagination, Jesus the Son of God is a kind of a carnal, fleshly monstrosity.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: But but also it's they they they believe that associating any partner with Allah, even a partner as exalted as Jesus Himself, um, would be anathema.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: And and and the very nature of Allah excludes that possibility.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the Christian begins their thinking by by turning to Jesus and seeing in him not only the perfect man but a perfect God revealed to us.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that the father-son relationship is the very heartbeat of what it means to be divine, that the father-son relationship in the spirit is what it is to be God.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we look at Jesus, we are seeing the truest picture of humanity and the truest picture of God all at once, and therefore there is something profoundly humanistic about Christianity.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say your one shot at humanism is Christian humanism, because who could possibly guarantee the supreme status of humanity except those who believe in God the human?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus is God the human who has taken human nature to himself forevermore and will never relinquish human nature.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: God the human, Jesus Christ, gives us the most exalted vision for humanity it is possible to have.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Get rid of that foundation for humanism, and what do you have?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: We're just clever apes who somehow are trying to cling on to inalienable human rights.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Does that make any sense to you?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: Are we clever apes with unlosable human rights, unalienable human rights?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Does that make any sense?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't make so secular humanism, I'm always saying this to my secular humanist friends, secular humanist, pick one.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot have both.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: The secular story, the godless story, is that I am a DNA replicating survival machine clinging to an insignificant rock, hurtling through a meaningless universe towards its eternal extinction.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: By what virtue am I the possessor of inviolable worth and dignity and rights?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Why should I be free?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Why should I not be property?
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Why should I not be the slave of somebody else?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Why should I be shown compassion and provision and protection, especially if I'm weak and holding back the rest of the tribe?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um none of these humanist values that we prize, none of these humanist values make any sense on the atheistic worldview, but but also none of them make sense on the Muslim worldview either, right?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because there is no there is no special um and unlosable dignity to the human within Islam because the the human is simply a slave of Allah and some are better at submitting to Allah than other humans.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: And Christians and Jews, for instance, in the Quran are called the worst of creatures, like we're worse than dogs, okay?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: And and and dogs have a pretty low position within the Quran.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so, how are we going to hold on to the liberal rights, the human rights, the dignity, the worth that Ayan Hersy Ali has has come to find so dear?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: You won't find it in atheism and you won't find it in Islam.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: And Christianity at that point is not the via media between an Islamic theocracy and Nietzsche, right?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: It is the original vision from which societies have degraded.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, let's never forget that Islam is a seventh-century Christian heresy.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's a it's a subordinationist heresy to say that Jesus is not equal to the Father, but is very much subordinate and he's just an exalted prophet.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: That is a form of Christian heresy, subordinationism.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: But if Islam is a seventeenth century heresy, then I I guess the Enlightenment is a 17th-century heresy, an 18th century heresy.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um and what we're doing by proclaiming Christianity is not saying, oh, Christianity is is just meeting in the middle between atheism and Islam.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: We're saying that the atheism and the Islam that we encounter in the 21st century has degraded from an original source.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go back to the source.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think to read Ayan Hirsi Ali uh at her best is to see her as actually returning to the source.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's the way that Ayan Hirsi Ali frames it.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: But she says it it became increasingly clear that Christ's teaching implied not only a circumcised role for religion as something separate from politics, it also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: There is compassion baked into the Christian story because here we all are the ones who require God the Son to become God our brother, and and for him to close the gap between deity and humanity all by himself and all in himself, just to meditate on the nature of Christ who is God and man, is to understand who we truly are.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Exalted with a dignity and worth that is far above anything that secular humanism can ever imagine, but also needy, also um morally corrupt in the gutter, requiring that condescension from on high to meet us where we are.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, here's what's fascinating about the article.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: For those who see Ion Hose Ali as just embracing Christianity for civilizational reasons, you know, why am I a Christian?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Geopolitics.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what she's written.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Check out this paragraph.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realization that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed, very nearly self-destructive.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: There is an existential reason why she is turning to Christianity, to church, to Jesus, right?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: And again, when somebody shows up in your church for the first time, will they have mixed motives why they're there?
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, they will.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: But isn't a wonderful reason why they're there on a Sunday morning?
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't isn't it a wonderful reason if they just say, I have found life without this unendurable?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: Where is the meaning?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: I need meaning, and I'm seeking for it among the people of God.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: If somebody turned up at your church like that, would you not embrace them with open arms and be overjoyed?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's there's a little bit too much cynicism among some Christians when they read articles like this.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: Especially, notice how she finishes.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Here's her final paragraph.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um not only has she had to deconvert from Islam, even more she has to um deconvert from atheism.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and and isn't it interesting?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: She's a lapsed atheist, beautifully put, because she is zeroing in on the fact that the secular humanism she embraced was a faith position, right?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: You've heard of lapsed Catholics, right?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'm a Catholic that's fallen.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: Lapse just means fallen.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's this sense of like a lapsed Catholic is someone who no longer goes to mass anymore, and maybe they sort of believe in Jesus, but um their beliefs have waned significantly.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: And now she's saying, I was an atheist and I'm a lapsed atheist, right?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: I no longer believe.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the way Tom Holland talks as way as as well.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: Tom Holland um talks about, yes, he surrenders to the story of Christianity, but but a major step along the path of surrendering to the story is he says, he has lost his faith.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: He's lost his faith that human rights have any foundation in and of themselves.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: The great 19th century critique of human rights is that they are nonsense on stilts.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because if you get rid of the stack of Bibles that that are the foundation for believing in human rights, then you really are hanging mid-air.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um so Ayan Hussey Ali is no longer considering herself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Beautifully put.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: I love that posture of humility.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like she's not coming in um as somebody who's gonna tell the church what it needs to do, and here are the 12 things that the church needs to do because do you not see that the world's going mad and woke and you know, Putin and China, and therefore here's what here's how the church needs to be.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: She's coming in to learn, and then she says, I discover a little more at church each Sunday.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Didn't that warm the cockles of your heart?
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: As a Christian, that warms the cockles of my heart.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: A little more.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: She discovers a little more as she learns coming to church each Sunday.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: And what a what a beautiful vision, I think, for for all those who might be, they might have been Tom Holland pilled, and they might they might have seen what Tom Holland has seen, they might begin to be seeing what Ian Hersey Ali has seen, and they might think, what do I need to do?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Oh gosh, she is pioneering the way for you.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: Just head on to church and you will discover a little more each Sunday.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you will put yourself in the way of the scriptures, you'll put yourself in the way of worship of Jesus, you'll put yourself in the way of the people of God who can like carry you and help you.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: You put your way yourself in the way of the sacraments as as you see the bread and the wine taken, and and perhaps you will embrace baptism yourself and come forward and be fed and nourished, and you will learn a little more Sunday by Sunday.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then she goes on, but I've recognized in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now, how do you respond to that?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Here's how I respond to that.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like, this is not bandwagoning, okay.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh a whole bunch of Christians get upset at this, and they say, You're doing exactly the same thing that really cringe Christians do.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: When Justin Bieber went to church, did you know that Justin Bieber goes to church?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, which church did he go?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's fantastic.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: He's famous and a Christian, see?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: You can be cool and a Christian, just like me.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, it's not bandwagoning.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: And people rightfully point out, you know, when Kanye comes out with his album Jesus is King, like there were a bunch of like Christians kind of bandwagoning and think, oh, isn't it isn't it cool?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: And a cool guy is a Christian.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then it turns out like he kind of goes off the deep end in all sorts of ways.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: And are we really hitching our wagon to famous people?
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Look, for me, it's got nothing to do with hitching your wagon to famous people, it's about noticing the journeys that people are taking towards faith and thinking, oh, that's interesting because I've met people like Ion Hirsey Ali.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've met people who have taken the Tom Holland pill and have found themselves in church.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm I'm used to talking about such people.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I see Ayan Hersey Ali not as a representative of, oh, look, the cool kids are Christians.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, we're we're on the inside of cultural cachet.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: I like I see her as a soul precious to Jesus who seems to be heading in the right direction.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: And hooray for that.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: I also see her as representative of a movement.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: And are our churches ready for Ion Herssi Ali's to show up in our midst just to discover a little more each Sunday?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Or are we going to insist that they come into our churches only for the right reasons?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then we're gonna determine what those right reasons are.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there's been some cynicism around Ion Hersiale from Christians.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's been um there's been some pushback from fellow traveler humanists.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: So Stephen Pinker, um, you know, well done to him.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: He he kind of links to the article on Twitter and he says the brave and brilliant Ion Herssiali is one of my heroes, but I disagree with her here why I'm now a Christian.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: The alternative to theistic morality is not atheism, but humanism, the use of reason to enhance human flourishing.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, Stephen, she deals with that in the essay, right?
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um she's she's been there, done that.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: She's she's tried the humanism.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: His second tweet, he says, enlightenment humanism works, but is invisible and unappreciated.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: When a disease is eradicated, a government changes peacefully, a famine averted, child mortality plummets, a war ended through diplomacy, a billion escape extreme poverty, there's no icons, myths, scripture, messiahs to credit.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it's still worth embracing and defending.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then he plugs his book Enlightenment Now.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: And what I find fascinating about this is he's saying to Ayan Hersiali, Um, you have been the beneficiary of an invisible force that has given you the humanism that you prize.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you just need to awaken to the true source of the humanism that you crave.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that true source for Stephen Pinker is um you're like 18th century enlightenment philosophy.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what's hilarious to me is Stephen Pinker is blind to the actual foundations of that enlightenment philosophy, and Ion Hersey-Ali is the one who's pointing out that the air we breathe, Stephen Pinker, with all its humanist values, does not rest upon Immanuel Kant but on Jesus Christ.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: And and so Stephen Pinker just thinks we just need to return to enlightenment values.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: But that's precisely what Ion Hersey Ali said won't work.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: She says, just returning to classical liberalism is to return to the fruits as though it is the root.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: And those enlightenment values are the distorted, detached fruit of the real root, which is the Jesus Revolution.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: So Stephen Pinker made that kind of response.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Tyler Cowan on his blog um just wrote a really short little article said classical liberals are increasingly religious.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: And he is noticing that there is a movement of people that are on the Tom Holland train, ending up in places a little bit like Ayn Hersey Ali.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: He says, uh not too long ago I was telling Ezra Klein that I had noticed a relatively new development in classical liberalism.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: If I meet an intellectual non-leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean compared to days of yore.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: But if they are classical liberal instead, typically they are religious as well.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: That could be Catholic or Jewish or LDS or Eastern Orthodox, with some Protestant thrown into the mix, but Protestants coming in last.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting, we might have to deal with that in another uh video.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: The person being religious is now a predictor of that same person having non-crazy political views.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: Classical liberalism, thus, whether you like it or not, has become an essentially religious movement.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Many strands of libertarianism are being left behind, and again, this is a positive rather than a normative claim.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: It is simply how things are.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that is his reaction to Ayan Hersy Ali announcing that she is a Christian.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um in the article, it points to a tweet by Ayala who is interesting.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: She she grew up um the daughter of an evangelist homeschooled in Idaho, and she deconverted around age 19 and is apparently one of the biggest only fans content creators going and like into the sex positivity movement now.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so she's deconverted from from Christianity, and she tweeted out uh when uh Ian Hersei Ali's article came out the neo-trad movement gets Iane a frowny face.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: But seriously, this seems to be a real trend.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of otherwise smart, successful secular people I know have been going religious, but it's not in the same way people used to go religious, it's much more cultural now and less about belief.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting, she wrote that, and then Claire Lehman, do you know Claire Lehman?
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: She founded Quillette, uh, she's an Australian journalist, interested in in kind of um heterodox ideas, and she's the sort of person who sort of says, you know, I didn't leave the left, the left left me.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um but she says, I had an argument with an actual Christian when I said that I identified as a cultural one.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: I was told that I couldn't be Christian without a belief in the supernatural.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: So back to normie atheism I go.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: But these are the sorts of trends that are happening.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: There are lots of people who would identify as classical liberals, and they are recognizing that the roots are foundationally Christian.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them are embracing Christianity simply for geopolitical and civilizational reasons.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um but many are taking the route that Ion Hersey Ali takes.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I think Ayan Hersey Ali goes further, and she seems to be embracing something personal and existential.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: Great, so that was the first part about Ion Hirsi Ali's unheard article.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: We're now going to transition to Glenn talking about the ARC conference and the panel discussion that featured Ian Hersey Ali, Jordan Peterson, Oz Guinness, and John Anderson.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: She was on a panel discussion, Jordan Peterson was chairing.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: She was flanked by two prominent Christians, John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, and Oz Guinness, a Christian and the author of many, many Christian books.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, on this panel discussion, who is it who names Christianity?
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's Ayan Hersey Ali.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what's fascinating to me is because Ayan Hersey Ali has copped a little bit of flack from Christians who are saying she is not sufficiently clear in the the heart of her Christian convictions when she says, Why I am now a Christian.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: And sure, um perhaps she has not articulated the Christian gospel as clearly as an evangelist like myself might have wished.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, when she is asked to publicly identify the better story at the heart of Western civilization, she is the one who names Christianity, and the two Christians on either side of her do not.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see how she talks about Christianity when Jordan Peterson first asks her about it.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_03: So I would ask you, Ian, like how how do you now, we haven't spoken for years, how do you now conceptualize the difference between, let's say, the truth that Oz is pointing to and power itself?
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_04: You accept that there is a power transcendent above us.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_04: And that idea that there is something above us, a higher power, I think that that is rooted in Christianity, it's rooted in the Judeo-Christian traditions.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: She says it's rooted in Christianity, and then she sort of corrects herself and she kind of does the does the cultural civilizational Christians speak.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's rooted in Christianity, it's rooted in the Judean Judeo-Christian heritage.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: But her first instinct was to say it's rooted in Christianity, which I think is interesting.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_04: And in many ways, it is superior to the nihilistic initiative atheistic theology.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: Atheistic theology.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: She's absolutely right.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you you have to have a power that is transcendent of the human that gives the human worth and dignity, or you descend into an atheistic theology.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting, she uses that phrase that is like Nietzsche.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because if there is nothing above man that gives man dignity, well then man gives himself dignity.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: But then you've got to ask the question, well, which men give themselves dignity?
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: And you end up being, well, the elite ones, right?
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: And they become the overmen and the weak can be cast off.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: You need to have a higher power, transcendent source of value that that gives to humanity its inviolable worth and dignity.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: Without that, you do descend into into Nietzsche.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Fascinatingly, Steven Pinker wrote once about how you could construct a morality from merely looking at the human person.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he once wrote, look, if virtue is equated with sacrifices that benefit one's own group in competition with other groups, then fascism is the ultimate virtuous ideology and a commitment to human rights is the ultimate form of selfishness.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: We're just looking at my tribe competing against your tribe so that we can outcompete you and evolve.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um why wouldn't you plump for fascism and why wouldn't you identify human rights as the problem rather than the solution?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: If we are just looking at the human person, we do not get to us a sense of the humanism that we all prize.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: So Ayan Hersy Ali is absolutely right that without God, you don't get humanism.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I I think she's outflanked and outmaneuvered Stephen Pinker.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't think I don't think she has failed to grasp what humanism offers.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think Stephen Pinker has failed to grasp what humanism is grounded in.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_04: It is superior to the nihilistic initiative type atheistic theology that human beings can do and they can create everything and they can they can manipulate.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_04: And it's also superior, I would say, to the faith that I grew up in, um with a God and a theology and a story that gives individuals a sort of one-dimensional purpose.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_04: Go and do this, make everyone a Muslim, and if they refuse, kill them, and then the day of judgment will come and life will be over.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_04: That's a simple story.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_04: But it's it's an abiding story, it's been around for 1400 years.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_04: The Judeo-Christian tradition that it is not up to the human being to do that.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_04: But all we can do is civilize and continue to civilize and question.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the whole Islam thing.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: So she's doing exactly the same thing she did uh in the article.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder if she even had written a draft of the article by the time um she went to the art conference.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was only two weeks in advance of the unheard article being published.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: But it is, it's the same thing.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: Like, are we gonna go Nietzsche?
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: Are we gonna go with Muhammad?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, actually, Jesus stands upstream from both of those perversions, right?
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he is here's the source of the values that we prize.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: But then what do you do if you don't actually believe in God?
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um ten minutes on in the interview, and Ion Hurstley Alley addresses that very question.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think that the the in the West we made this mistake of having a debate about uh is there a god?
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_04: Is there a God?
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_04: And then having everybody weigh in and twisting ourselves into pretzels, there is no God, there is a God.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_04: Which is, I think, and and I've come to realize over time that is a waste of time.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's not in the least helpful.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_04: I think what we should have done instead, what we should do instead, is compare the different concepts of God that humanity has come up with, and the different stories that humans have told each other about that what is transcendent.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: That is fascinating to me.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you might hear her saying that and think, oh, okay, so she just wants to be a cultural civilizational Christian and she doesn't want to be a theist in any sense, she doesn't actually want to encounter God.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: I she's not saying that.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, she's just told you that Nietzsche was a theologian.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: She's just told you that you can have a kind of an enlightenment humanism that has its own theology because it has its own concept of what is highest in life and what is transcendent, even if it is not God in the classically scriptural sense or God in the classically Quranic sense.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone is dealing with faith.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, we all need to interrogate what is transcendent, and we all need to have a look at the stories people have told that actually give us a sense of what is transcendent.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: She's not saying you can be a Christian atheist.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, she's showing up in church Sunday by Sunday.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: She is very aware that everybody has a God.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: She's telling us, do not have a discussion about is there a God?
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: She's telling us which God is there, right?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: Which God are you going to have?
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because you've got to serve somebody.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_04: And what I find appealing, for instance, about the Judeo-Christian story is that it that transcendent power ends up being a story about freedom, about tempering power, about establishing institutions and establishing teachings that give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, that you know, don't matter, don't basic, maybe universal human decency, then becomes that that's your religious, that's how you worship your transcendence.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_04: That story is superior to a number of other stories that I know.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that's the story we should be having.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_04: And if you have that story, and if you have that legacy, you've inherited that, then you not only appreciate it, but you also fight to preserve it.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: So that I think she's on a journey, and she I think I think there's more to come on this journey, because I th she is saying, okay, if you can't wrap your head around the transcendent, well, what is the story in which that human dignity is preserved?
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it is really only preserved in the story in which God takes flesh.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: The story of God the Human is the story in which you have a transcendent value to for humanity and in no other story.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: And if you think that you don't have a concept of transcendence, you're wrong.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody has a theology, everybody has a transcendence.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: But here here is a way into investigating the the various stories rather than having an abstract debate about whether there is some kind of creator out there or not.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and to that degree, I would I would agree with him.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: I found it very interesting.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: J.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: Richards on Twitter kind of formulated this argument as a philosophical argument.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he said on Twitter just the other day, imagine walking someone through the steps of this argument.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: You just say, number one, I'm far more certain of the truth of my moral convictions, A, B, and C, than I am certain that atheism is true.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, like, if you believe in human worth and dignity, equality, that compassion is a virtue, no people are property, there's freedom of the individual, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: You believe in progress, like whatever it is, okay, come up with these um moral convictions, and I outline seven of them in my book Um The Air We Breathe, but take any three.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just just take human rights, okay?
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm far more certain of the truth of my moral conviction in human rights than I am certain that atheism is true, okay?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what what do you think is more true?
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: Are you absolutely certain this is a godless universe?
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: Or let's try on a different conviction for size.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um every human being is valuable.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: And just because you're rich doesn't make you more valuable.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: Which are you more committed to?
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like which do you which which do you believe more strongly?
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm absolutely certain this is a godless universe.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: Are you can are you certain of that?
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: Or or or what about what about the belief I think we are all the moral equals of each other, no matter your race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, no matter no matter what, we are all the equals of one another.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: Are you more sure of that, or are you more sure that this is definitely a godless universe?
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think most of my friends, even if they're not Christians, they they they are m they are more sure of those those moral certainties, those moral convictions.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: So then, here's the argument from Dr.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: J.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: Richards.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: He says, well let's take let's take that, these moral convictions, as given.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: Alright, if that's the thing you're most certain of, and you're not gonna you know you're not gonna get mathematical certainty about any of this stuff, let's just take that as given.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: Step two.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: A, B, and C don't make a lot of sense given atheism.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: You're the moral equal of everyone else.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because we're all just clever chimps in the struggle for survival.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, it doesn't really work, right?
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: We we are descended from apes, so we must love one another.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: No, it doesn't make sense, okay?
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: So A, B, and C, these moral convictions don't make a lot of sense given atheism.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: Step three, A, B, and C are consistent with and seem to follow from the truth claims of Christianity.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: Historically, that's where I think they did come from.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: Logically, I think that is the only place where they are properly grounded.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: Then step four, A, B, and C historically emerged from a broadly Christian culture.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: They did, and if you don't believe me, just read Dominion.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, get Tom Holland pilled, and that will help you with step four and then five, given one through four, the truth of Christianity seems more likely than the truth of materialism and atheism.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, interestingly, like on Twitter, I like I said to him, Look, I I love that argument.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: What's step six?
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like, like even if you get to step five, okay, the truth of Christianity seems more likely than the truth of atheism.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: Now what?
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, now I think you do what Ion Herssey Ali does and just go to church Sunday by Sunday to discover more.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: Or you crack open the Bible, or do both of these things, crack open the Bible and get to know the Jesus who is the root of all these other things.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: But that's that I think I might be misreading things entirely, but that I think is the kind of journey that Ion Herssey Ali is on.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you have a mirror to hold to the other st the other gods that are presenting themselves as omnipotent and powerful and I I just I just really I really enjoy that as a way of thinking about don't don't think don't think whether God exists.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: Think which God exists.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: That is a far more interesting and fruitful line of inquiry.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: And she's absolutely right that the new atheists just just had the wanted to have this argument, and then a whole bunch of Christian apologists agreed with him that that was the argument to have about whether God exists.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, let's let's all recognize that we're all theologians, we all have a concept of the transcendent.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: Which God is it who is really God?
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly, Jordan Peterson points to a a similar kind of route towards some kind of religious devotion.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, let's let's let's see how he puts it at about the 38-minute mark.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_03: Our civilization is predicated on the assumption that we have a certain set of rights, let's say, and you might think of those as resting on the assumption that we're of intrinsic value, right?
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_03: But if you don't hypothesize the existence of some transcendent domain in which ethics itself resides, that's a good way of thinking about it, then you're stuck with the problem of trying to understand on what do those rights rest?
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_03: And if there's nothing that's outside, if there's nothing transcendent and nothing outside the state, then your rights become dependent on the state, and then it seems to me that the state de facto becomes God.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I think that's a fascinating theological point.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: At the end, he sort of makes it into a political point, and I think there's this there's certain um political points that might flow from it.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: But first and foremost, it it is a it is a theological and an ethical point.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um either human rights are trans transcendent and belong to the realm of the transcendent, in which you're basically giving a transcendent value to the human, and like you you literally can't do that unless you've got God the human.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you if you you like those human rights, do you?
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: You like them?
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: You need Jesus, right?
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: You absolutely need Jesus, and it's Jesus or the pit.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: It absolutely is Jesus or the pit.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean that that that is the the outcome of all these kinds of arguments.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: What's fascinating is that this um panel discussion was was all about the better story.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: What is the better story that we should tell?
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the art conference was entitled The Better Story because um I mean it was run by Philippa Stroud, who picked up this phrase from evangelical Christian Glenn Harrison and his wonderful book The Better Story, right?
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was an incredibly Christian conference, like like 85% of people there when they were asked, like, Are you a Christian?
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: They put their hands up, and yes, they were.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like, um, and yet on the platform there were a heck of a lot of Christians.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, probably predominantly there were people of faith on the platforms.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: But so often when the story was meant to be articulated, we just went back to a kind of a classical liberal like idea.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: We just went back to, you know, secular humanism and a rights-based international order, okay?
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: And there were missed opportunities.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and interestingly, Oz Guinness in here, he you know, he he talked about like why are we in the position we're in?
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're a cut flower civilization, and it's a phrase he's always using, we're a cut flower civilization, but he doesn't talk about what the root was, doesn't name Jesus, the Bible, the scriptures, the church, Christianity.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: We're a cut flower kind of civilization.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: And and so Osgenis, a another out and out Christian, and yet he's not really naming what the true root is.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem with that with with when you don't name what the true root is, then you're you're always gonna invite people to come back to the fruits, as though the the real way of coming back to the source of the the values that we love is to get back to the 18th century and to get back to but that is the fruit, that's not the root.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: We need to get back to the root.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: And and what was fascinating is after Oz Guinness said we're a cut flower civilization, which like if you don't round out that thought, you might imagine that all we need to do is just get back to the eighteenth century.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: Or even if you you might just think we just need to get back to the 15th century, you might even just think we need to get back to the fifth century.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it's going to be uh a conservative project if you don't round out the thought.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what have we been severed from?
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've been severed from Christ, but what did Christ give us?
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't give us a cut flower and say make the best of it, he gave us seed, seed to sow.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: And Ian Hersey Ali finishes with a beautiful extension of that analogy, an extension that is far more Christian than the analogy that the Christians on either side of her used.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_03: So you early in your life, relatively early in your life, you moved away from a um a totalizing religious view of the world.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't exactly know into what you then moved, whether that was a secular humanism, but what I'm hearing from you now, and and I I believe this is also the case with your husband.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: That is amazing.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so basically Jordan Peterson has outed her husband, Neil Ferguson, who is a very um famous historian and uh a great public intellectual in his own right, you and your husband.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: So when you imagine Ion Herselli like sliding into a pew on Sunday morning, like probably imagine her husband, Neil Ferguson, with her.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: This like something's happening, don't you think?
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: Something's happening.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_03: You have come to a new understanding of the existence of the transcendent per se, and also of your relationship with it.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_03: Now, first of all, do I have that right?
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_03: And second of all, like is that is that the movement that you have made, and if so, why?
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_04: So I rebelled against a transcendent, a concept of God, of a god that now manifests itself in you know the Iranian regime, um Hamas, ISIS, that was the God I grew up with, that was the story that I grew up with.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_04: I rebelled against that.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_04: And then when I uh was bold enough to say, and this was in the Netherlands, um I don't want any of that.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't convert to Christianity, I didn't convert to another religion or another God.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_04: I carried with me this idea.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, the you know, the three-letter word of God stands just for evil.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_04: And my best friends became Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, these are people I still love and adore.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um and I think over time, I'm now 53, and so when I made this, when I was in this state of rebellion, it started for me when I was 32 years old.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_04: Over time, I've come to realize, and I wish Christopher was alive today, to comment on what we are going through, was we were actually having a conversation about, in my view, the wrong conversation.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_04: Does God exist?
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it was the world built in six days, uh, do we believe in fairy tales?
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_04: And that was the wrong conversation to have.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_04: The right conversation to have, as I said earlier, was to compare what we as human beings, the transcendence that we have imagined and developed over centuries.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_04: And so now I can say I am proudly of Judeo Christian religion, without having to waste your time about do I really think that the world was built in six days?
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_04: Do I really believe every word in the Bible?
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_04: No, but I do believe that that's Judeo-Christian tradition and what it has brought forth is those are the values that I aspire to, the values by which I live.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_04: I was called a Christian by Roger Roger Scruton in 2008, and I said, Roger, no, I'm not a Christian.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_04: And he said, But you act like a Christian and you behave like a Christian, therefore you are a Christian.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that is that's exactly what I would like to say to Richard Dawkins.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_04: It's you act like I've been to, you know, coddling music with him, which he enjoys very much.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_04: And he's one of the most Christian people I know.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_04: And so I think we've been having this, uh we've been having this uh time-wasting debates, and you know, you grow up, I matured.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_04: Here I am.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: So isn't that brilliant?
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's just um a really helpful way forward for people who got mired in the new atheism.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: They had a conversation about whether God exists, and really they should have been having a conversation about which God exists.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because everybody has a theology, everybody has a sense of the transcendence.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: She's just said that.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody has a sense of the transcendence.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: Which God is really God?
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: The question is not, is there a God, but which God will be God for you?
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: And when you look at the fruit of what the Jesus Revolution has brought to us, then that is a decent argument for taking seriously the root who is Jesus Christ.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that is not the sum total of what Christianity is.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_01: The sum total of Christianity is not the human rights that it's given us and the rights-based international order and all that sort of stuff.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: Those are one kind of fruit that has come off one part of the tree.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the the true nature of Christianity is to go back to Jesus Christ, but it's it's not a bad way in.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: By their fruits you shall know them, says Jesus in Matthew chapter 7.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a bad way if you can like pull at those threads and find the source of them in Jesus Christ.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's not a bad way to come to faith.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then at the end of this panel discussion, she's surrounded by Christians, okay.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: Jordan Peterson, I don't know about Jordan Peterson.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'll do a video about him very shortly.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: But um, to her left and to her right, there is John Anderson, who's a Christian, there is Oz Guinness, who is a Christian.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: Neither of them have named Christianity in the way that she has on this panel.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's all about the better story that we can tell and where the West has come from.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: They haven't actually named Christianity.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you might prefer that Ian Hersey Alley had named Jesus and said, Jesus is the source of all this, and I believe in God.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: You might have preferred that, I might have preferred that.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: But the actual Christians who are on the on the panel with her didn't name Christianity either.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: She actually goes further than either of them.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: Oz Guinness talks about how we've come from a cut flower society.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: We're a cut flower civilization, and we can't have the bloom without the roots.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now that that is true, but you need to put it in its proper context.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_01: What are what are the roots?
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: The roots are Jesus, right?
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Jesus is the roots of the of the fruits, and you need to actually get connected to him rather than just conserve a dying flower, rather than just get back to where wherever you think the cut the flower was cut.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: And some people might think the flower was cut in 1963, and other people might think the flower was cut in 1776, or they might might think the flower was cut in the 1700s, or they might think the flower was cut in 1517, or they or whatever it is.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a that would be to put it in a radically just conservative frame, and all we want to do is get back to the past.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think Ian Hersey Ali puts things in a very Christian frame because she says, you know what we need?
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_01: We don't need to preserve a cut flower, we need to scatter seed.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that what Jesus said?
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is how she rounds out the whole discussion.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_04: You know, Western civilization is a cut flower, and cut flowers die.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_04: That is true.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_04: Cut flowers do die, but what we have in terms of Western civilization is a lot of seed packets.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_04: And I want to send you off with these seed packets which you find in libraries, which you find in, you know, w wise people.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_04: The Bible like Roger Scruton, like all these other people that I mentioned.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, in statues, we have the remnants, the symbols of Western heritage, and their seeds.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_04: And all we have to do, those of us who inherited it and enjoy it, is to go and seed them, grow them, nurture them, water them, and when they're attacked, fight for them.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: And she gets a big and she gets a big round of applause.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, now the seed really is the word of God, according to Jesus in Matthew chapter 13, and that is the seed.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: But that if we have that understanding that our our goal is not get to not to get back to some kind of civilizational moment, but to appreciate the transcendent value of God, the human Jesus Christ, and that He has given us a living seed that has a life of its own and that will bring something else about.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, who cares about the West at the end of the day?
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: The West is not inevitable, the kingdom is inevitable.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: The West is not.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: The West will come and go.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_01: The kingdom of Jesus Christ is forever, and it's built on the seed of the Word.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Ion Hersy Ali, I rejoice in the journey that you're on, and I rejoice that you are um learning more Sunday by Sunday as you as you go to church.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um keep getting into uh that seed packet, the word of God.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: Keep encountering the Jesus whose revolution that we are living in.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is not about bandwagoning.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is about a precious soul who is discovering truth and somebody who is emblematic, I think, of a certain movement.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: We've gotten tired of the new atheism, and we've recognized that the question whether God exists or not is much less important than the question which God actually exists, because we're all believers, we all have a transcendent, we are all theologians.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: We just need to ret r return to the true word of God who is Jesus Christ.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: As I said, I'm gonna do uh more videos perhaps about this ARK conference.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to do a video about uh Jordan Peterson's final talk at ARK and uh try and figure out this cultural moment and and what these guys are all on about.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: But um, if you want to find out more about the true seed that has actually given rise to uh this civilization, then uh you gotta get back to the Bible.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd crack open a Bible, or we've got a tool to help you.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's called 321.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_01: You can go to 321course.com and you can have a look at how Jesus planted this revolution in the soil of this world, and the results of it have been absolutely breathtaking.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: But let's go back to the source and figure out who is Jesus, who is God, what's the world like, what are you like according to Jesus.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: You can go to 321course.com.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, why don't you subscribe to our channel?
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_01: We'd love to see you again on the next video.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining us.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: Bye-bye.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there we go.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: That is this week's episode of the Speak Life Podcast.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_00: Do let us know what you think about Ion Hersey Arlie and her article and her art conference panel discussion.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: You can email us info at speaklife.org.uk, and we will read some of your emails out on the show.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: Do subscribe to the Speak Life Podcast if you haven't done so already.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, rating or review uh always help, especially on Apple Podcasts or iTunes, as it used to be called.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think it is still called that in some parts of the world.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, thank you so much for listening, and we will be back soon.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: God bless you.