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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: In Her Own Words || Conversation with Glen Scrivener || SLP520 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Ayan Hersy Ali was born in Somalia in 1969.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_02: She escaped fundamentalist Islam and an arranged marriage, finding asylum in the Netherlands in 1992.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: After 9-11, she turned decisively against the Islam of her upbringing and became a leading voice in the new atheism, decrying religion.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_05: It's a form of madness.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't regard Ayan Hershi as personally crying.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's why it shocked everyone when last year she appeared on stage at the art conference with Jordan Peterson, John Anderson, and Oz Guinness.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: First, she said that the West is Christian.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: Then she said that she is Christian.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_05: I am proudly of a Judeo-Christian religion.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: But what did this mean?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Richard Dawkins had his doubts.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: He saw it as a cultural Christianity adopted for political reasons.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think for her, Christianity is a bastion against something worse.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: But there was evidence that something deeper was going on.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: For Ayan, our cultural values have been the fruit of a spiritual movement.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_05: The Enlightenment is a child of these Judeo-Christian traditions.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: A true history of the West shows faith at the heart, not politics.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_05: Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, I think has Dan a very detailed historical background.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: But even more personally, Ayan has spoken about a heartfelt conversion.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_05: I went through a period of crisis.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_05: Nothing helped.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_05: And then I think it was one therapist who said to me, I think Ayan, you're spiritually bankrupt.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: She went into more detail in a dialogue with Richard Dawkins held in May.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_05: Having reached a place where I had absolutely nothing to lose, I prayed desperately.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_05: I felt like I had died and I was born.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: In this interview, I talked to Ayan about Richard Dawkins.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I love Richard.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: We talk of the new atheism.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_05: The biggest mistake we made was to equate Islamic Christianity.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: We talk about her conversion.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: We talk about the failures of atheism and of Islam and the fundamentally different vision for life which Jesus Christ gives.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: This is Speak Life.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: Ion Hersey Ali, your story has involved you leaving or entering perhaps the three religions that care most about people leaving or entering them, those being Christianity, Islam, and the new atheism.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: You now describe yourself as a lapsed atheist.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: What does that mean?
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_05: And I don't think atheists would think of themselves as religious.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Oh wait, I did that very deliberately, yeah.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, uh, even though yes they do display some religious um uh characteristics.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_05: Uh why do I call myself a lapsed Christian uh lapsed it's obvious why I am a lapsed Muslim.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_05: Uh lapsed atheist is I think atheism wasn't enough.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_05: And I think at the core of atheism is is a negative.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_05: It's just the statement that I don't see any evidence of God, there I therefore I don't believe.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_05: But atheism uh it doesn't offer a system, it doesn't offer a um a framework for the good life, except a call to um to exercise your reason.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_05: And I think uh in doing this, there is a childishness there in the assumption that uh human beings are you know reasonable uh and that if you just simply shed superstition or God or faith in anything invisible for which you can't um you can't present falsifiable or verifiable evidence, then um human beings will just be wonderful enlightened or wise um and they'll be led by their reason.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_05: And now I think we can see all around us that the exact opposite is happening.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_05: We haven't had uh in human history as much knowledge at our fingertips as we do now, as much science, we've never been more open to reason, we've never been more prosperous, and yet the people in the ivory towers of the world's greatest universities and centers of science and learning are displaying some of the most irrational behaviors of all time.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, just the proposition that there are multiple genders, that sort of thing.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_05: This isn't being said just by teenagers who want to provoke society or people with gender dysphoria.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_05: This is being said in in in the centers of science.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_05: You know, there are communities within uh the the world of science who are actually trying to um uh trying to, you know, they're doing it.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_05: They're uh operating on young children and transitioning them from male to female or from female to male.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_05: So this is how irrational we've become.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so a couple of pushbacks that Richard Dawkins had at the dissident dialogues where where you um discussed with him, it was very cordial, it was very respectful, full of love, began with a hug, ended with a hug.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um you were very personal on stage, and I I loved your little sort of shrug at the end.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: You sort of told your story to Richard, and you're here I am.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: And and it was it was a wonderfully cordial um dialogue.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think two pushbacks that that Richard's I I can discern from Richard on on that point was one was, well, if atheism doesn't provide these existential answers, so what?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then the other response was a belief that enlightened secular rational philosophy will get us to the place where where we can answer some of those questions.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: How would you respond to that?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_05: Well, the affection, first of all, is real.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_05: We are friends.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_05: I love Richard, uh, I admire Richard, and so I think the for me it's amazing that you can be, uh you can see the world completely differently, or you can change your minds without then saying, well, now I've changed my mind about things, now I don't like you anymore, you're not my friend anymore.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_05: That is also some of the stuff that we are seeing around, which is which is a terrible development.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, but no, I love Richard, but I disagree with him, and I see things differently now.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_05: And I think on that stage it was clear uh that uh Richard's expectation was, and I quoted um Burton Russell.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_05: When Burton Russell wrote that essay, he ends with Um Let's if if we shed uh Christianity, uh he wrote an essay called Why I Am Not a Christian.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_05: And so if we cast Christianity aside, what's going to come in its place is going to be reason and enlightenment and knowledge and so on and so forth.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_05: And that doesn't happen.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_05: And I think uh Richard, being uh intellectually honest, is very much aware of this phenomenon now, where we were in New York and the protests in Columbia University were going on at NYU and Harvard and Yale.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_05: Look, these are the temples of science and reason and enlightenment.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_05: And if they are churning out young people who can't tell the difference between right and wrong, who are displaying the most irrational behaviors, then I think that sends Richard and people like Richard back to rethink what is it that we're doing wrong?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_05: What is it that we're not getting about human nature?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: About human nature.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think that that is probably the fatal flaw in the new new atheism.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: As a Christian, I think they get God wrong, obviously, but I think they get human nature wrong as well, that we are not these sort of rational individuals coolly, calmly collating the data and coming up with theories.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: And and actually, I I wonder whether that the kind of new atheism that's really a it's a rebrand of logical positivism from a hundred years ago, that around the time of Bertrand Russell, that they would make claims like the only kind of truth is scientific truth, which is a self-refuting statement because it is itself not a scientific statement.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it's, you know, if it's true, it's false, and if it's false, it's true, you know.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: So so I I I think it's self-refuting in itself, but it also doesn't take account of what a human person really is and what a human person really needs.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_05: So my take on that is the positivism of a hundred years ago and the reaction to it by Christians and people of faith, those conversations happened.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_05: And they happened in the West, and I think they were put to rest, and at least we had reached a place of all right, let's agree to disagree to each his own.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_05: But if you walk into any modern library, if you walked into a library before 2020, you would still find, you know, either ends of the library, the faith end of the library, the science end of the library, filled with all the work.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_05: I think those things were settled.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_05: And then in comes Islam.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_05: And back in the day, and this is when I got in with my uh atheist friends, this is how I met my atheist friends, it was a reaction from the atheist um corner to Islam and to the irrationality that Islam was displaying that they thought had been put to sleep.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_05: And I think part of what happened is they wanted to compose the criticism, which is really a replay in some cases of the criticism against Christianity a few hundred years ago.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_05: But now it is against Islam, a religion that belongs to a minority.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_05: And you know what?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_05: In the 1930s and the 1940s, we there was another minority, a Jewish minority, that we had sent to the gas chambers.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_05: And so there's this delicate interplay of we do want to criticize the religion of the new minority, but how do we do it without offending or without inciting hatred against them amongst the population?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_05: Why don't we start with criticizing Christianity, equating Christianity to Islam?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's the background of it.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_05: I don't think that the two Christianity and Islam are the same to begin with.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_05: Um but that explains the, in my view, the rise of new atheism.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_05: It wasn't, new atheism wasn't a rise against Christianity.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: To what degree was 9-11 behind the new atheism?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_05: I think it is, yeah, it was a reaction to 9-11.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_05: And it is, and and in uh in some ways, I find the new atheists and um you know they were better than many other communities in uh looking at Muslims and looking at them as individuals, uh individuals endowed with reason and trying to appeal to them and saying, here are the ridiculous things about your religion.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_05: So in that sense, I think they were actually heroic.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_05: They were doing things that uh you know other members of society were not doing.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_05: They were condescending.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_05: I remember being very critical of these so-called interfaith dialogues, where the dialogue wasn't a dialogue, it was a one-way dialogue.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_05: And the Christian side and the Jewish side, the rabbis and uh the bishops and the pastors were really afraid of touching on the sensitive things.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_05: Whereas the atheists were not doing that, you know, Christopher Hitchens was really spelling out what was wrong with Christianity, sorry, Islam, why it was not credible, why it was violent.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_05: And if you're a good person and a Muslim, these are the things that you needed to change.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_05: And I admired that.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_05: I still admire it.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but yeah, I think we also, you know, back in the day, I think the biggest mistake, I don't know to what degree it was deliberate, but the biggest mistake we made was to equate Islam with Christianity.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: Is is there an alternative universe in which 9-11 did not happen?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: And Ayan Hersy Ali is in the Netherlands, and in a in a sense, I'm imagining that growing up within a Muslim framework, you pretty much saw the West as Christian to some degree.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you were encountering a very different kind of culture based on some very different values.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: You were encountering believing Christians who were working with the refugee communities and Christians who lived differently.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: Was there ever an alternative universe in which Ion doesn't have the atheist phase and goes from Muslim to Christian?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_05: I think so.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_05: I think I probably was actually living uh the life of a Christian.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_05: Um I my friends who are Christians, and you know, when I first went to the Netherlands, uh I was in an asylum seeker center, and the people who some of the people who volunteered to come and work at the asylum seeker center were Christians.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_05: So I was very quickly acquainted with Christianity and fascinated by Western life without giving it to the Christian identity.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_05: It's after I went to university and became friends with people who had shared their Christian faith that I led, quote unquote, a post-Christian life.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_05: But to be to be honest with you, I think this is hypothetical.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_05: If 9-11 had not happened, I would have continued to believe in God because for me, faith in God was first challenged after 9-11.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_05: I was saying these things that, you know, these 19 men they acted in the name of Islam.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_05: And very quickly, in my own thoughts, it was well, so do I agree with them or not?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_05: And then you take that thinking to its logical conclusion, which is, do you then believe in God yourself?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_05: And so the God, my reference point was the God of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_05: Um but I believed in God.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_05: So if 9-11 had not happened, I think there is a scenario that is uh you can think of where I I might have at a later age uh come to acknowledge uh yeah Christianity and Jesus Christ as my savior, and it was all around me.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_05: And it is uh, like I said, um I I led the life of a Christian anyway.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: I guess those sorts of years in in the sort of late 90s, early 2000s, in one sense, I think we weren't ready for Tom Holland's Dominion thesis yet.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think we were we were still sort of living off the fumes of we're at the end of history now, and we and and rationality has arrived and Western liberal democracies are ascendant.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think if Dominion had been written 20 years earlier, I think we would have applauded it for its its wonderful prose and and thought it's an interesting idea.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: I think when it's written in 2019, we start to read that thesis a little bit differently.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um when you first encountered Tom Holland and his work and the Dominion thesis, how was it striking you?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_05: So I was looking for an explanation.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_05: I was frustrated by wokeism, and I I was trying to understand it and um looking at different uh observers, different commentators on the subject, and that's how I encountered Tom Holland's work.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_05: He was explaining the woke as uh a perverted manifestation of a form of Christianity.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and then I laid my hands on it and I thought, you know, uh the way you read Tom Holland, the way I read Tom Holland is not from cover to cover.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_05: But I started with that chapter on wokeism and then started going making my way through uh what ended up becoming um an overview of 2,000 years of how Christianity influenced uh politics, philosophy, science, uh everything that we call Western civilization.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_05: And my conclusion is I think akin to his, which is Western civilization is a product of Christianity.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_05: And he shows that.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, and not only him, I think you and I have uh just touched on a number of other apologetics.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_05: And that then I then I wrote that article, this was um what eight, nine months ago.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, November 2023.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_05: October, I think it was October, November.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_05: And uh I got feedback from everywhere, and suddenly this world of Christian apologetics came into my life.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_05: And I think I think they're it's wonderful.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_05: I think it's so enriching.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_05: I'd even like to share with my atheist friends and say, even if you don't agree with it, just you know, take a look.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like what?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: What what sort of things were?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_05: Well, we all love, yeah.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_05: I'm now reading Nick Spencer.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_05: Um and he makes it more, you know, Tom is a bit more scholarly.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_05: Nick makes it more of a sort of a talking point type of thing.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_05: It's a small book that brings together some of these key concepts that we all love: uh human dignity, the rule of law, um, even women's rights and their origins in Christianity.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_05: And so uh Tom's book and Nick's book and your book, I don't think it is convert to Christianity or else.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_05: It's just acknowledge the legacy itself.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and I think it's very important to acknowledge that legacy, even if you're going to rebel against it, you have to know what you're rebelling against.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_05: And I keep thinking it's not fair to younger people who have never been introduced to Christianity and who find themselves in a state where, because they're living in a Christian culture, uh, they find this appeal.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, you know, do something great with your life, uh fight for justice, fight against what's wrong, and they're doing all of these things, but they don't understand where it comes from.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_05: And so it's a failure of the older generations who who knew what they rebelled against to transmit, uh, which is the only, I think, most important thing you do uh as a generation is you leave the world literally a better place than you found it.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_05: So by not teaching the Bible, uh by not uh by um eliminating Christianity, attempting to eliminate Christianity out of uh cultural life, I think the older generations uh did a disservice to the younger generations.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_05: And that's really why it's easy for all of these crazy ideas to take root and for these um external predators, the Islamists and so on, to come in and and seed these young fertile minds.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I think Tom Holland gives a very good explanation for why that has transpired.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in a sense, Christianity has been too successful in that these faith positions about human dignity and equality and compassion have occurred to us nowadays as obvious and natural and universal when they're nothing of the sort.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: They are the fruit of some very particularly Christian ideas.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so when Tom Holland says, you know, if you believe in human rights, you may as well believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is seated at the right hand of the Father, he's not just saying you may as well believe one arbitrarily out there idea as believe this other arbitrarily out there idea.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: There is a profound link between why we believe in human rights and the facts that if Jesus is God and if he's been raised from the dead to the highest place, then you could not have a higher, more exalted view for humanity.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: Humanity as such is exalted in the Christian story, and to the degree that we walk away from that Christian story, I'm just not sure how we can have humanism.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure how you how you can have that human dignity.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_05: Exactly.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_05: Or walk away from the most essential part of it, to say I'm just going to run away with, and that takes me again to Os Guinness with the cut flower part of it.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_05: I'm just going to run away with what I like.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_05: You know, beautiful flower.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_05: Um this beautiful concept of human dignity and freedom and these institutions that I found, these are now mine.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_05: But you know, the origins, the roots of that, they're too marky and uh incomprehensible by the standards of today.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_05: And so I'm just going to throw that out.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_05: And I think that is part of the part of the uh you know, the picture is this i what what that does if you cut that off is you distort the picture and we have this distorted civilization.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_05: It makes it easier to keep distorting it and disfiguring it.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: So what I loved about at the at the art conference where Os Guinness was on a panel and he said we're you know we're in a cut flowers society and you said but we have seed packets.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought that was a wonderfully hopeful twist on the analogy.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: I've I've I've long you know um admired Os Guinness and and and have lived with that framework in my head yes cut flower civilization and I've thought well how do we graft a flower back in but no we we sow the seed which is a very biblical kind of idea you know the first parable Jesus tells is you you sow the seed of the word of God.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah and there's a fascinating parable in Matthew chapter 13 where to begin with the the birds are pecking at the seed because they're so much bigger than the seed and then the seed grows into the mustard tree that is the biggest of all trees so large that even the birds perch in its branches.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: Which I think is a fascinating image that the those forces that were against the word of God end up enfolded within something that the word of God has has kind of grown.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I think one thing that Tom Holland as well helps us to understand is the reason why we've gone away from Christianity is for Christian-ish reasons.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: Because the church is not equal enough compassionate enough progressive enough free enough.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: And we're we're sort of hurling Bible verses back at the church.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: We've just forgotten the references.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_05: I think also so I think Tom is right in that but we're not Christian enough in the sense that we stop sharing the core values of Christianity.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_05: It's swirling around in the West but people outside of the West people who haven't been uh introduced to Christianity are somewhere else they're far away and I know there's been a lot of effort to seed Christianity in different parts of the world um but those attempts at doing that have been condemned as um colonial imperial and so now you have Western Christians who are inhibited by that they don't want to be colonial and so it all stays within um within the perimeters of or within the borders of Christianity.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_05: Then you have people coming from those parts of the world coming into the West and they're told you can share the products of Christianity the peace the prosperity all the way down to the gadgets but the ideas itself to share that is to be condescending it's to be Eurocentric it's to be racist and so on.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: And to be unchristlike in that sense right to be unchristlike yeah to be colonial is to use your power to dominate rather than to serve and shouldn't we all be more Christlike is actually anonymously kind of the criticism.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah so I see what home uh sees this going around in circles where you're trying to please you're trying to you know be um trying to do good trying to do right what's right and yet you can't because you've been told you know you you can't sharing the message of Jesus Christ is the message of Paul even the message of Tomaholland now is sharing that of the patriarchy and of white male superior.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_05: It's just so you allow all of this um the the warping um the disfiguring of the message itself to seep into you because you in you don't you're not inoculated against this because you really haven't been taught properly.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_05: So they don't know what to say in return.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_05: Young people have not I I was reading recently that up until the 1950s there was a Bible in everyone's home in America and now it's nowhere to be found or not not in every home.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_05: And so what happens to those uh which is now we're talking about at least three generations who've had a watered down and then an even more diluted all the way to members of Gen Z who may never have been acquainted with anything that has to do with Christianity.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_05: So how do they defend their legacy?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yes so the seed sowing therefore that we must do needs to be quite particularly Christian doesn't it needs to be quite particularly you know here's the Jesus Christ of the Bible.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_05: Yes and you have to be brave about it and you don't have to be bothered by your skin colour and your gender and all of these in my view irrational attempts at trying to snuff out the Christian roots of Western civilization.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_05: If you snuff out the Christian roots of Western civilization you're left with nothing.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah it's going to it's like this beautiful house and it's going to crumble at some point and come apart.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_05: And I think you have to keep on I like I love the word restoration is to keep restoring what is good and what's true and what's beautiful and what's real and do it for the next generation.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_05: So then they can pass it on otherwise we fail.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: At Speak Life we try to see all things through the lens of Jesus and if you like this kind of content why don't you subscribe to the channel and there's plenty more where this came from and if you want to go deeper with the Christian story we've got a great course for you.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's called 321 you can go to 321course.com you start an account with us and there are eight videos that you can do there's a chat community you can get involved with and plenty of bonus content.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: We'd love to see you at 321course.com.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's a deep thoughtful way of seeing life again with Jesus at the center.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_05: So if that thesis is correct that Western civilization is this cut flower we we need the the seed of the word of God I think we need we need something like a Christian revival wouldn't you say I would say that and I think that again you've got to do it without um do it with humility but do it without um this constricting self-doubt that we've been going through yeah I say that because we don't have time again we are now entering I I was shocked by the young woman on TikTok who announced that she had found the truth in the letter that Osama bin Laden had written to America.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_05: That went viral yeah that went viral yeah when I say we failed I mean we failed her and we failed her followers because for her to reach that conclusion it's a testimony of the institutions of education it's the testimony of the institutions of faith the churches it means people we we've basically abandoned these young people.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: Do you see yourself as in any way being a pioneer of this this kind of thing?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: You've long been a kind of a cultural influencer I guess since October November of last year um you've started to be a spiritual influencer.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: How does that sit with you?
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_05: No I don't I actually don't see myself as any of those things.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_05: I see myself as someone who who came from a world that is tribal and um and dark and um a world that was torn apart by violence by prejudice in my lifetime uh there was the Rwanda genocide when I came to the Netherlands I was in an asylum seeker center with people from Sierra Leone that had completely broken apart Liberia, the former Yugoslavia, Iran, Iraq look that's what the world is and war and tribalism and disease these are things that we all care about and we want to stop.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_05: And having come to the West I thought and I saw and I experienced that Western countries that were prosperous had the right formula.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_05: And at first I was naive and I thought you could just take the formula the model and transplant it anywhere in the world and it's going to lead to the same outcomes.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yes you and US foreign policy you both you both had the same idea just transplant Western liberal democracy wherever wherever it will just take root.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_05: Well I I think about in terms of policy issues the issue of immigration there are millions of people who want to come here they want to come to the West and so many of my I don't know colleagues when I was in politics in in the policy sphere it is let's do you know our foreign policy our military policy our foreign aid policy we only speak in terms of material things.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_05: And I remember back in the Netherlands there was a minister of development aid and he was called Jan Prank and before I went into politics before I was anyone I remember just thinking you know stop giving us money and material stuff just give us the values tell us you know where all this came from and maybe we can apply that and I didn't realize at the time that I was saying give us Christian values but of course over time now I realize that and I think if you give people this the core values so conflict is one of the biggest problems we talked about human nature it's embedded in human nature you look at the model for conflict resolution that Islam provides it doesn't work it just leads to more conflict that I think Confucianism provides doesn't work.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_05: Buddhism doesn't work and then you get to the non-religious the socialisms in the communist it is just one big conflict it's pure nihilism.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_05: And so why not admit that there really is a way to understand human nature even if you call yourself an atheist I don't care what you call yourself just the empirical acknowledgement that the message that Jesus gave of humility turned the other cheek that that actually works.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_05: Those teachings work and if human beings find themselves in a state of less conflict it's not that conflict is going to disappear but it's channeled towards other things then they at least have enough time to build something and then when you get to the next point of teaching about collaboration and about the addressing of human pride those things are very very helpful.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_05: Those are the ingredients that you need for people to internalize uh the self-loathing the self-hatred the shame okay God has created us in his own image and loves us all and this profession of complete and unconditional love for you as a human being that's a very very powerful message I've never had it anywhere else.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_05: I didn't know you know growing up I don't think I understood the word love because it was always conditional.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_05: It's either the clan or the faith or um and you'll always be punished unless you do this or the other.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_05: But the concept that you're loved anyway whether you do right or wrong yeah that's a very powerful do not kill.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_05: Love your neighbor as you love yourself.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_05: These are they they sound quaint and sentimental and but they're very very very powerful and very meaningful things if people actually internalize them and it is the the best introduction to human nature much better than psychology books.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well you mentioned conflict resolution and I I mean the Christian gospel is basically conflict resolution you know like if we're disconnected from the life of heaven what does what does heaven do in response?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well Christ comes and ultimately turns the other cheek to us and we you know we we strike him we strike him on the cross he rises up again and turns the other cheek and says peace do you you know do you do you still want me and and and therefore it's not simply a value it's it's a story that we inhabit and it's a God who has loved us first and who has absorbed the conflict in himself first in order to bring us peace.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I think as we internalize the story I think then the values come out.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_05: And when you internalize the story and you understand that you can't attain it that you're only human and that you keep failing that it's okay try again I think that's even more powerful.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_05: And you keep at it.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_05: Yes so I'll give you an example of I go to church every Sunday what occurs in church you pray and you praise God and you sing you know the hymns of praise and there's a collection the charity aspect of it now some people find that incomprehensible and to be honest with you in the beginning of course I didn't understand any of it or very little of it but now I'm getting more and more of it and finding it very beautiful and peaceful and rewarding.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_05: But at the end of the service we have coffee we have tea a few bites here and there and and then you have the community that starts to get together and that's how you know what's going on in your neighbor's house what's on with you they know what's going on in our house and we know what's going on with them.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_05: And that sense of community that exercise of doing it on a weekly basis that gives you I think the remedy you are seeking now for all this um atomization that's going on.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_05: Yes um these individuals who are lost in social media who are broken and who it's you really need to bring back or or advertise why the church is a better place to go.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: So what would you say to people because the there are so many people as as you say there are just generation after generation it used to be grandma that went to church and now it's maybe great grandma who went to church but Ion started going and Ion found it s baffling and bewildering to begin with and someone is thinking to themselves I'm not sure what I'll find on a Sunday I'm not sure I believe any of the mumbo jumbo of the creeds what what advice would you give to somebody I would say just sit through it.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_05: The sons are beautiful not all churches are the same I've I've gone to I attended churches that were ranting on about Trump and I didn't go again.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_05: So find a church where the vicar or the pastor the bishop is actually true to the teachings and of Christianity not distracted by politics and by the things that are going on around them today.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_05: And that's the community find a community you want to be a part of and and then become and participate become a part of it.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yes yeah yeah and of course I understand in the beginning you go and sit in the back and think what the heck is going on but then what what then what then happens I've got a friend Paul Vandercle who's also a YouTuber he says if you want to believe something find a group of people who believe it and join them.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: But there there is something about plausibility structures isn't there and there's something about communal embodied paying attention to something that actually awakens you to something that's that's already there.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: Has that been part of your experience?
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_05: My experience is my awakening spiritual awakening was preceded by suffering depression um just really mental agony and that that's unfortunately what led me to my spiritual awakening but maybe what led me to the mental depression was the shutting off of spirituality and you know the declaration that I'm an atheist I can do all things by myself.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_05: Maybe that's I mean I don't know you can say was it the egg or the chicken that came fast?
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah yeah but right now I think that for me it was it's the mental suffering that took me to a place of humility and this this spiritual awakening and after I've experienced it and I'm still experiencing it it is an awareness my life is changed it's it's transformed.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_05: I can only share that I can't say you know some people have all sorts of wonderful magnificent things that they talk about lights and dreams and visions and I didn't have any of that I don't think I would be credible if I said any of that because I didn't but what goes on you know I had these thoughts these incessant constant thoughts my my head was constantly full of these uh ideas uh worries um I was terrified of things I uh and tried to treat that with medicine with um consulting therapists and psychiatrists with alcohol and none of it worked and simple um basic prayer and surrender worked and so I pray every day I pray in the morning and I pray at night and I'm at peace and those awful thoughts are gone my head is clear I'm more productive I'm a better person um that for me is all the evidence I need that's a a beautiful um picture you use the word surrender yeah um growing up within Islam in which submission is uh you know the the name of the game yeah um how is Christian surrender different to or similar to um Islamic submission Islamic submission presents you with a manual of do's and don'ts and that's what you are supposed to surrender to and if your own conscience conflicts with the manual you have to surrender which makes it into a power play it's about power and the way I experience Christian submission it's a submission to love to God's unconditional love and stop resisting that and the whole humility of I can't do it my I couldn't get rid of these thoughts myself and the surrender is help me God please get rid of them and that's a completely different concept the concept of love is the very opposite of the concept of power Muhammad was all about power especially in his years in Medina and afterwards and the reason why Islam continues to be a problem is because at its heart it's about power it's submission to the will of the strongest.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_05: So when the the Imam in Iran ayatollah when he got political power which is what Islam seeks he called himself the supreme leader I don't think that there is any Christian nation or any kind of political entity that is founded on a human being calling himself the supreme leader that is the that's the key difference.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_05: And I really want to make it clear that most Muslims are actually just like you and me they're peaceful people.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_05: They want to get on with their lives and many of them are horrified and uh resist the actions of fellow Muslims who draw on Muhammad and the Quran to to do terrible things.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_05: The one thing they haven't done which is the challenge and again here's where the two religions are really different is if you are a Christian like Martin Luther during the Reformation and you disagree with what the church is teaching and you find it that it is ungodly you stand up to that and you hark back to the roots you go back to the message of Jesus you say I'm not going to have the church read the Bible for me I'm going to read the Bible directly we're going to democratize this thing.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_05: When you do that with Islam and you go straight to the scriptures you find something different.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_05: And so Muslim leadership today who resist the radical Islamists the violent Islamists they also resist going back to the core because Because they don't like what they see there, but they haven't come up with with a different formula for remaining Muslim and remaining peaceful.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_05: And that I this all it all has to do with the submission aspect of it.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_05: You know, what are you submitting to?
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: And as we go back to the source, uh the God who is love within the Christian scriptures, you know, if God is a father loving his son in the joy of the spirits, you've got a very different doctrine of God from a monad who is by himself, Allah, who has no partners, and and to have a partner is to commit the worst kind of blasphemy of shirk.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, I mean I'm I'm I'm a big fan of of uh of getting the doctrine of the Trinity out there and and sort of saying God is Father, Son, and Spirit bound together in love.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore love is primary.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, we're stuck and we need that help and you've experienced that help at your lowest, you know, ebb and and and we're we're ac actually intended for a oneness with Jesus.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_02: We're actually intended for friendship with God.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: We're actually, you know, not not to submit as a slave, but to be a child of a father, which is an incredible privilege, isn't it?
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_05: Which is an incredible privilege.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_05: And if you then take the story to its next level, who sent his own son and sacrificed, and that's the expression of his love and the extent of his love.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_05: And it's boundless and it's limitless.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_05: And that I think is a totally different story from the submission of the do's and the don'ts, the halal and haram.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_05: That which is permitted and that which is forbidden.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_05: And then if you take that to its logical end, it is some of what you know, these obligations that you're submitted, if you're a man, if you're a Muslim man, the Muslim Brotherhood says it is your destiny to die for the sake of Allah, converting others to Islam.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_05: If you are able to persuade people to come to Islam and they really take you up on that, that's fine.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_05: But if they don't, you're to do it by hook or by crook, and you're to do it by force.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_05: And that can't possibly be.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_05: It can't be.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, that that's an act of power.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's not an invitation at that point.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_05: And and that is justified with the reward in life after death.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_05: And life after death as a Muslim, what awaits you is a lot of material pleasures that you are not allowed to have on earth.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_05: And so to enjoy any, you know, any of the material worldly pleasures, uh, you're to forgo that you'll enjoy them later on, but first you have to die and kill.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_05: And that reduces it to a death cult.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_05: And I think that is some of the big, big problems that face Muslims, peaceful Muslims.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_05: Like, what do they do with the concept of the hereafter?
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_05: What do they do with the concept of the moral framework that Muhammad left behind, his own biography?
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_05: What do they do with that?
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_05: How do they how do they live with that?
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_05: That's a problem for Muslims, Sharia law.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, either you apply it and you're a good Muslim and you're causing all of these horrors, or you refuse to apply it and you live in a state of mental dissonance.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, it goes on, there's another concept called commanding right and forbidding wrong, which means um you have to constantly tell your fellow Muslims to stay within, you know, the halal and the haram, the permitted and the forbidden.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_05: Uh I mean, how do you how can you be a good Muslim and carry on pestering people?
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_05: So they these are big I I wrote that book, Heretic.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_05: You know, Islam needs a reformation and it needs it right now.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_05: That's these are big, big questions and big challenges facing Muslims.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_05: Good Muslims.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, exactly.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_02: I I very much appreciated your your heretic book and and saying that the there is not an equivalent issue for Islam to get back to its sources as for Christianity to get back to its sources.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_05: So reform in Islam would mean a modification.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_05: Whereas Islam reform in Christianity means get back to the roots.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: Get back to the roots and keep spreading those seeds.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um Ayan, you've been so generous with your time.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um how can people keep up with you online?
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_05: Restoration, go to my Substack, uh Restoration Bulletin.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_05: And I try to um, you know, put my ideas out there.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: And there's the is the the AHA Foundation uh AHA Foundation.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_05: That is the 501c3, that's the charitable foundation.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a YouTube channel, right?
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_02: There?
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_05: There is no YouTube channel yet.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_05: We're working on all of those things.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_05: We're working on we've sent out on the restoration platform two podcasts.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_05: We're working on more restoration substack.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_05: Please subscribe.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_05: Follow me on Twitter.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_05: There you go.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_05: I haven't quite submitted to the social media, you know, Instagram and so on.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's fine.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_02: You didn't call it X, so that's the right thing.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: You called it Twitter by its by its true and proper name, so that's yeah, that's absolutely right.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_05: I love Elon Musk, so I will call it I'll call it X.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's just been bombshell after bombshell in this conversation, I am.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, if he wants to call it X, we'll call it X.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, all right.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_02: Ion Hersey Ali, thank you so much.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, you're welcome.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Speak Life Podcast.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Thomas Thorrogood, media producer at Speak Life.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: You were just listening to Glenn Scrivener talking to Ion Hersey Ali, and we're so grateful to Ion for coming on the channel.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you'd like to watch this conversation as a video, it was filmed in high quality at a lovely location, so you can go to youtube.com forward slash speaklifemedia.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: Can I also recommend episode 517 of the Speak Life Podcast just a couple of episodes ago, in which Glenn does a bit of a deep dive into the Iron Hursiali Richard Dawkins conversation, which was referenced in what you just heard.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're new to Speak Life, this is what we do basically.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: We have conversations and we engage with current issues from a Christian perspective, and we try to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're so grateful to you, whoever you are, wherever you're listening from, we're so grateful to you for choosing to listen to this podcast.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: And if you could leave us a rating and review and subscribe, all those usual things will really help us to get seen and heard by more people.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well that's all for this week.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: We will be back soon.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: God bless, and goodbye.