In this episode, I sit down with author and atheist-turned-non-believer, Ayaan Ali Abdurrahman, to talk about her new book, The Atheist Muslim: How To Be An Atheist in the 21st Century. We talk about what it's like being an atheist-in-chief in the Muslim community, and why it's so hard to be an atheist in the modern Muslim community. We also talk about how to be a feminist Muslim, and what it means to be non-believing in a modern Muslim world, and the challenges that come with being a Muslim in a secular, secular, non-Islamic world. And we talk about religion and religion, and religion and its impact on our lives, and how to deal with it. It's a good one, and I hope you enjoy it! If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts and we'll read out your comments and thoughts on the next episode. Thank you so much for your support, and your support of the podcast, it means the world to us. Timestamps: 1:00 - What's your favorite religion? 2:30 - What do you believe in? 3:20 - What does religion mean to you? 4:15 - How do you feel about Mormonism? 5:40 - What are you a believer in God? 6:00 7:00 -- What is your religion's role in your life? 8:30 -- What are your religion s role in society? 9:20 -- Is religion a religion? What is it like? 11:40 -- What would you like to see in the world? 12:00 | What does your religion do? 13:15 -- What religion do you think of Mormonism have in the Bible? 14:30 15:30 | What would your religion be? 16:50 -- Is Mormonism better than Mormonism better? 17:10 -- What does God do in the bible? 18:00 Is there a religion better than Christianity better than Mormonism? 19:00 Do you have a religion you would like to join a cult? 21:40 | What kind of religion you're not allowed to own a church? 22: What is a religion that doesn t have a temple? 23:40 Is it better than a church that you don t want to recognize it?
00:02:36.000So how does one justify that or rationalize that in their head?
00:02:40.000I think what's happening is the Muslim community that's in North America.
00:02:44.000In Canada, the United States, they're a little bit more progressive.
00:02:48.000They're sort of going through what all of the other religious groups went through when they came here.
00:02:52.000The religion part is really more of an identity issue.
00:02:57.000They have broad beliefs, like they'll believe in God, they'll stick to some traditions, but a large part of it, they're integrating pretty well.
00:03:08.000It's very different in Europe, it seems.
00:04:45.000It's because people are cool with religions as long as they're really old.
00:04:50.000As soon as you know who made the religion, even Mormonism gets looked down upon because Joseph Smith, although he lived in the 1800s, there's a historical record of Joseph Smith that's pretty easy to track.
00:05:30.000Virgin births really happen, but this fucking Mormon shit.
00:05:38.000It's kind of funny when you look at it.
00:05:40.000I saw this comic where there were these two religious groups fighting.
00:05:44.000They were running against each other with swords.
00:05:47.000And one of them was screaming, 2 plus 2 equals 5. The other one was saying, 2 plus 2 equals 3. And they were about to fight about it.
00:05:54.000And that's really what it's like sometimes when you look at it.
00:05:56.000Well, did you see the anger from the people that were upset at Neil deGrasse Tyson for tweeting about Isaac Newton who was born on December 25th?
00:06:09.000Was it Darwin or Newton that was born on December 25th?
00:06:43.000I mean, it really does become something like that.
00:06:45.000And when you're talking about American Jews or Muslims maybe perhaps that don't really follow all of what's in the Quran, they just decide to cherry pick.
00:06:56.000It's kind of a similar thing you're dealing with.
00:07:12.000It says, you know, if there's two men and you find them, you know, together in the way that a man should be with a woman, then they will be put to death.
00:08:21.000Well, people forget about this, about Joe Biden, but, you know, not to...
00:08:25.000Everybody makes mistakes, and I'm sure it probably wasn't his fault, but in the 1980s, he was running for president, and he plagiarized a huge chunk of John F. Kennedy's speeches.
00:08:36.000And we used to do Joe Biden night at Stitches, and Joe Biden night would be like, we would all go up and try to remember each other's acts.
00:08:44.000Like, I would try to do my friend's act, and he would try to do my act.
00:09:21.000It didn't come up during the debate, but during the campaign, there were people who tried to bring it up.
00:09:25.000But I think that it had been so long, and he had done so much more since then, like with foreign policy, with the violence against women legislation and so on, that people were willing to...
00:11:43.000There was some artificial method of pumping blood through his body, and if you checked his pulse, it didn't exist, which is probably in the Bible somewhere.
00:11:53.000You know, a guy who causes the death of millions.
00:11:56.000I mean, he's directly connected to the death of at least a million people, and he doesn't have a pulse.
00:13:06.000It's almost like if you were a conspiratorially minded person, if you're the type of person that believes black helicopters are circling in your house every day, taking scans of your phone and Yeah, I am.
00:13:19.000You would say, okay, it's almost like we're creating this monster that's so unbelievably horrific and so impossible to feel any sympathy towards.
00:13:34.000That's like you want them all wiped off the face of the planet.
00:13:41.000They're so evil and their acts are so horrendous that it's the perfect instigating The perfect method of instigation.
00:13:53.000If you were an evil dictator or the evil head of some sort of government and you had this desire to go to war with another country, what you would create would be ISIS. You would say, all right, we need some bullshit CIA propped up organization.
00:14:39.000This whole idea that they're a fringe and that they don't have a lot of support.
00:14:45.000It is one thing that, yes, they don't represent all Muslims.
00:14:48.000They don't even represent the majority of Muslims and everything.
00:14:52.000Unfortunately, I think they have a lot more support than we'd like to believe.
00:14:56.000Everybody who comes out and says that they're just a friend, just a group of guys who are doing this stuff and nobody really follows them, that's not true.
00:15:36.000I mean, I hate to say this, but they do occasionally have good points.
00:15:42.000And one of the good points was after they beheaded one of these guys, I forget which guy, I think it was a journalist that got beheaded over there.
00:15:50.000It was one of the American guys they beheaded.
00:17:14.000You know, like the Yazidis that they killed, right?
00:17:16.000Or the Christians that they're killing in Mosul or the poor people, the women and the gay people, they're throwing off buildings and, you know, crucifying and stoning to death.
00:17:24.000These are not people who are oil hungry.
00:17:27.000They're not people who have been sort of invading their lands or anything like that.
00:17:31.000These people have nothing to do with it.
00:17:44.000Or they're, you know, they're a Christian, they're non-Muslims, they're infidels who are not going to subscribe to the, you know, the ISIS philosophy.
00:17:51.000They're not going to pay that tax, the jizya that they want them to pay.
00:17:54.000So, like, you know, I think that the foreign policy thing is an excuse, specifically for people like ISIS. It is, like, it helps them recruit people, for sure.
00:18:07.000It doesn't hurt, but I don't think that that's the primary motive.
00:18:12.000What do you think the primary motive is?
00:18:14.000I think there's a lot of primary motives.
00:18:16.000I think, you know, like the U.S. foreign policy is one thing, too.
00:18:18.000But this is actually part of the religious belief.
00:18:21.000And you've had Sam Harris here, you know, he's talked about this as well, like beliefs and behavior.
00:18:25.000And most of the time, you know, when they're You know, when you have an entire world and you're seeing these guys and they're, you know, accurately quoting the Quran, I mean, there's a couple of verses in the Quran that say, behead disbelievers, you know, 812, you know, you can Google that,
00:18:40.000like Surah 8, verse 12 and 13. 47-4 is another one that says, you know, behead disbelievers.
00:18:47.000So they actually quote this stuff and they say Allahu Akbar when they do it and they call themselves the Islamic State.
00:18:55.000And they don't just target, you know, People who are involved in U.S. foreign policy or anything like that.
00:19:04.000They actually target poor people, Yazidis, minority groups, Shias, gay people who are in Iraq and Syria.
00:19:27.000When you're supported by the religion that you've sworn allegiance to and sworn your life to, when you're supported by the text, it really...
00:19:37.000I mean, that's sometimes all you need to justify horrendous, horrible acts.
00:19:42.000You just need to know that you're doing it in the name of God.
00:19:45.000Well, the text is the religion, in this case.
00:19:48.000Like, the one thing that's universal...
00:19:50.000You know, people say Muslims are not a monolith, and they're not.
00:19:53.000I mean, there's 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, so they're obviously not all the same.
00:19:56.000The ones in Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, they're all very different from each other.
00:20:01.000But the one thing they all have in common is the Quran and belief in the Prophet Muhammad.
00:20:06.000So the Quran, again, you know, has different interpretations, but it's supposed to be an immutable text.
00:20:12.000And unlike a lot of Christians and Jews who don't believe that they're, like, You know, like with Christianity, if you say that the Bible is a literal word of God, you're part of, I think, just 30% of the US population.
00:20:27.000I think it is 30% that is considered fundamentalists, where they believe that it's a literal word of God.
00:20:34.000Islam among Muslims, among the vast majority of Muslims, that is a fundamental requirement to believe that it is the literal word of God, like the idea of scriptural inerrancy, that anything in the Quran, it can't be wrong.
00:20:48.000So you'll have the more progressive people who try to justify it, they'll never say, well, you know, that verse in the Quran, I don't believe in it, I don't think it's right.
00:20:58.000They'll try to justify it by saying, at that time it was okay, Or it's being mistranslated, or the word kill actually means embrace, you know, whatever it is.
00:21:06.000They look at the Arabic roots, you know, just find other justifications for it.
00:21:13.000But unfortunately, to the rest of us who can read it now, you can Google it in all kinds of different translations and interpretations and, you know, commentaries.
00:21:24.000You just find it online, and when you see the words, the words are what they are.
00:21:30.000I want to be real clear here that I'm not justifying what they're doing or not trying to exonerate them from the horrific nature of what their crimes are, but what I was going to get to was that, is that dissimilar?
00:21:46.000This belief that you can kill people because of the Quran, because they're not following the word of the Quran.
00:21:52.000Is that dissimilar than this belief that you can launch drones into these non-specific areas where, you know, this idea of surgical targets is pretty preposterous at this point.
00:22:04.000When you look at the number of people, the overwhelming number of people that are innocent, that are killed by drones, Versus the number of people that are guilty.
00:22:13.000If you look at that and you look at this being sanctioned by the United States government, the Constitution, our ideas about law and justice and war, Those are also just things that are written down on paper.
00:24:12.000It's sort of the different groups that are in that area, in like northwestern Pakistan, the Pak-Afghan border.
00:24:19.000And she said that the locals over there, a lot of times, you know, they feel like they're caught between the Taliban that's sort of taken over the whole area and they, you know, they go out and they put, they're shooting young girls in the head for going to school and they're, you know, doing all this other bullshit.
00:24:35.000And then on the other hand, there's the Pakistani military, And they're coming in with their planes, and they're trying to bomb, and that's even more nonspecific.
00:24:42.000So they feel a lot of them are actually in favor of it.
00:25:41.000If you have a sniper who's going around killing, you know, hundreds of people, and you want to stop him, and, you know, he's around a place, and you have a choice between, you know, targeting this guy and taking him out, and that may kill a few civilians, whereas if you don't do that, it'll go out and, you know, he'll kill hundreds more people,
00:26:04.000But when you're running countries and when you have a foreign policy, when you have to do something about something that's happening, then it's a call that you have to make and it's a choice between bad and worse.
00:26:17.000It seems so intensely archaic, doesn't it?
00:26:19.000One of the articles that I pulled up was talking about an attempt to kill 41 men resulting in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people.
00:26:31.000So the drones, in their attempt to kill 41 different people, have killed more than 1,147 people.
00:26:43.000Well, Farhat Taj, she talked about this too.
00:27:00.000Now the army's in there because they're fighting against them recently after the Taliban has been, like, really focusing all their attacks within Pakistan.
00:27:15.000But before, when a lot of these figures were coming out, she said that there's no UN people, there's no independent sort of watchdogs or agencies that are looking at it.
00:27:29.000Even the police, the Pakistani police, is scared to go in there because it's just completely ruled by the Taliban, all these sort of militant elements.
00:27:36.000So A lot of these numbers, like if you look at the, I think there was a report, detailed report from Stanford, and they talked about how these numbers were arrived at.
00:27:57.000But I think during Bush's time, when he just carried out a few drone strikes, they were relatively non-surgical.
00:28:04.000I think Obama, one of the reasons that he decided to go ahead and continue the drone strikes is that he found it the most surgical and the most accurate compared to all of the other options that they had.
00:28:15.000That's pretty scary when you think about, well, it makes sense.
00:28:18.000It's the bad, choosing bad and worse, right?
00:28:20.000But it makes sense when you look at the numbers of innocents that have been killed in the Iraq war.
00:28:24.000Like, I mean, it's arguable that it's close to a million humans, rather.
00:28:31.000I mean, that's an insane amount of innocent people that have been killed by feet on the ground, missiles, bombing campaigns, all of the above.
00:28:39.000And when you compare that to drone strikes, that's the only way, kind of, like, what they're saying, like, it's more surgical than that way.
00:28:49.000Then, you know, sending a bunch of tanks and a bunch of troops into an area is less surgical.
00:29:07.000But if you're of the view that sometimes it is necessary to prevent even larger atrocities, and sometimes you need to do it to stop it, I think...
00:30:02.000The Taliban seem to be more upset about the drone strikes than anybody else.
00:30:06.000That means that it is kind of hitting them.
00:30:08.000They do know that the world has a lot of sympathy for civilian casualties.
00:30:13.000They know that And that itself, just the fact that they know that they can use these civilian casualties to their benefit, that automatically shows you that there is an ethical difference between both sides.
00:30:30.000Well, you're saying that meaning that they do it on purpose, that they have areas set up in high civilian population areas, knowing that they'll get hit in those areas and it will cause civilian deaths so that those civilian deaths will be used to sort of promote their cause.
00:30:51.000I mean, think about if you were one of those people and you knew that, you know, that a lot of people don't agree with you.
00:30:58.000Everybody thinks that, you know, you're back in the stone ages and so on.
00:31:00.000But the one time you get a lot of sympathy is when there are a lot of innocents killed.
00:31:04.000And then, you know, everyone, all these powerful political figures and journalists, everything around the world suddenly start, you know, sort of coming to your side against your enemy.
00:31:27.000Well, I can certainly see that, but I can also certainly see the argument that one of the best recruiting methods for the Taliban or Al-Qaeda is having your family blown up by a drone.
00:32:20.000He predicted, he was this political scientist, and in the 90s he wrote this paper and later expanded it into a book, and it was called The Clash of Civilizations.
00:32:28.000It was sort of a prophecy about the future and what kind of conflicts people are going to get into, and he said that it wouldn't be ideological.
00:32:38.000And he said it won't be ideological, it'll be cultural, and it'll be between religious groups.
00:32:45.000And he actually talked about the Islamic world and about seven or eight other civilizations and how they're going to get into cultural conflict.
00:32:54.000And he was conservative and a lot of people criticized it.
00:32:59.000And at that time I thought it was kind of I wasn't completely, completely in line with it.
00:33:04.000But now, as time goes on, every once in a while I go back to To revisit the paper.
00:33:10.000And it seems to make more sense, almost like he kind of knew what he was talking about.
00:33:14.000Have you ever tried to look objectively, like if you were the engineer of modern society or modern civilization, and you tried to look objectively, like sit in a high chair with a desk above the earth, and go, all right, how do I fix this mess?
00:33:29.000How do I stop all these silly monkeys from blowing each other up and shooting rockets from robots that fly above their cities?
00:33:42.000Have you ever tried to see, like, is there a way, like a long-term, short-term, any-term way, to sort of engineer this away?
00:33:50.000I think the long-term, I think we discount the role of ideology and belief when it comes to this.
00:33:58.000And I don't know how to solve it, but I know one way to move closer to solving it, and that's just being honest about what the problem is.
00:34:07.000You know, a lot of the problem, like for example, the Islamic State, you know, they're yelling Allahu Akbar, you know, quoting the Quran and everything.
00:34:14.000I mean, this is weak, but, you know, cartoons, people making cartoons and then getting shot up for it.
00:34:20.000Like, you know, these are all things that, you know, there is an identifiable issue.
00:34:26.000There's a root cause here that everybody seems to deny, like including all the prime ministers and like this has nothing to do with religion.
00:34:34.000I grew up in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan.
00:34:38.000I didn't come to North America until I was 24. I grew up in pretty much Muslim-majority countries and some very conservative ones all the time.
00:34:47.000Whenever I hear people say that this has nothing to do with religion, it just doesn't make any sense to me.
00:34:53.000Is that like an American liberal, convenient thing to say because it makes you look super sensitive and very Noam Chomsky-esque?
00:35:37.000What's hilarious to me is that a lot of quote-unquote progressive, very left-wing people will openly mock Christianity while defending Islam or by labeling people Islamophobic or conservative.
00:35:51.000Yeah, I mean, you gotta stay consistent.
00:35:53.000If you're a true liberal, and everybody's saying this, well, unfortunately, not everybody's saying it.
00:35:59.000But, you know, if you are, for instance, opposed to killing gay people, you should be opposed to killing gay people, whether it's in the KKK manifesto, or in the Bible, or in the Quran, or in the Republican Party, you know, or in Uganda.
00:38:31.000If you look at Mecca, you see like the people that are in Mecca, you'll see red-headed people, red-haired people that are walking around with the traditional garb on, circling Mecca.
00:38:41.000Yeah, and there's, in Turkey, so, you know, Turkey's a big Muslim country, Egypt's a big Muslim country, there's Indonesia, there's Iran, where everybody's Persian, There's the Arab world, and there's South Asians.
00:38:52.000It's just racially incredibly diverse.
00:39:19.000You don't even know if it's a man or a woman.
00:39:21.000These are knee-jerk liberal ideas that are promoted in universities.
00:39:25.000The hyper-sensitive, hyper-progressive atmosphere that literally eliminates objective thinking and reasoning.
00:39:33.000Because you are already automatically expected to behave in a certain way, or think in a certain way, because that is the progressive manifesto.
00:39:41.000Your ideas, like you're not supposed to criticize Islamic people, it is Islamophobia.
00:39:46.000The idea that we're supposed to be in their land, that this is Islamophobia.
00:39:51.000And that word is just so fucking thrown about over the last decade or so.
00:39:56.000And I was trying to give the example of myself, is that if I went back to Saudi Arabia or any of the countries where I grew up, and if they knew the stuff that I write, then I have reason to be Islamophobic.
00:40:08.000Because by their Islamic laws, it's just not something I like thinking about, what could happen to me.
00:42:11.000The problem with the word Islamophobia is that I think it's an injustice and it's actually an insult to the struggles of Muslims who have genuinely been victims of anti-Muslim bigotry to use their pain and their experience and exploit it to stifle criticism of Islam.
00:42:30.000Yeah, I would say that that makes sense.
00:42:33.000You know, sort of the same way anyone who disagrees with feminist ideology is automatically some sort of a woman hater, a misogynist, someone who's just a bigot in some way against the female gender.
00:43:21.000And I think a lot of times, you know, you don't even have definitions for these terms.
00:43:25.000When you say Islamophobia, if you ask, you know, someone, a Muslim, a liberal Muslim in Boston, you know, what Islam is, they'll give you a very different definition.
00:43:35.000Than someone who's in ISIS or the Taliban.
00:43:43.000You can talk to 10 different feminists and they'll give you 10 different definitions.
00:43:46.000Well, there's a real problem with groups in that sense, ideological groups in that sense, whether it's men's rights advocates or...
00:43:54.000I mean, men's rights advocates are some of the most fucking hilarious people online to read their websites and their discussion groups and...
00:44:02.000Just a bunch of angry fucking weirdos.
00:44:34.000And what really sucks sometimes is that When you have a certain agenda associated with just a really radical, insane group, then even if they have legitimate viewpoints about something, supposing they have one or two points that are legitimate.
00:44:52.000I guess if you're talking about the men's rights.
00:45:41.000I was talking to a friend about this yesterday, that I think when you have movements, when you have, like, organized movements, it's something that you want to achieve...
00:45:52.000Being in opposition to something just makes a lot more sense and it's more unifying than standing for something.
00:46:17.000I mean, to say it feminist, it just identifies you very specifically with one gender, and that's the issue.
00:46:23.000But I'm saying supposing feminism was defined as that, as something that's in, it's a movement that's in, or an ideology that's in opposition to gender inequality or patriarchy or whatever it is.
00:46:36.000But the moment it starts standing for something, like, okay, you're not a feminist if you're not pro-choice.
00:46:40.000You're not a feminist if you believe that Males and females are not exactly the same, you know, psychologically.
00:46:47.000Or if you don't subscribe to this, like, sort of gender sociology theory or, you know, whatever it is.
00:46:53.000The moment you start excluding people based on that and you start talking about what feminism stands for rather than what it stands against, then you start getting fragmentation.
00:47:02.000And I kind of feel the same way with religion and a lot of atheists.
00:47:06.000I like the anti-theist position that when you're opposed to You know, the idea of religion and faith and believing things without evidence.
00:47:15.000You know, we're doing things for no other reason apart from the fact that it was written in a book, you know, 2000 years ago.
00:47:22.000If you're opposed to that, you have a lot of people, you know, who will be part of your movement.
00:47:27.000But the moment you start saying, well, atheism stands for being, having this political stance on something, where it means that you have to like what, you have to agree with what Glenn Greenwald says, you have to be in a social justice, then you start excluding people.
00:48:02.000And attached this idea, it was just a lack of belief in a deity to, on top of that, all these things that anyone with any ethics ordinarily, automatically believes in.
00:48:16.000Sexual discrimination, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, all those things that moral, ethical people already disagree with, they've attached that to atheism and called it atheism plus.
00:48:34.000It's essentially, in a way, like a religion.
00:48:36.000Because to ascribe to atheism plus, you have to be someone who, you know, these people that go to these conferences and you listen to their speeches, These fucking droning, boring...
00:48:52.000Because anyone who's intelligent already thinks, yeah, of course, if you're a balanced person, you shouldn't believe in racial discrimination.
00:49:00.000Of course you wouldn't support sexual discrimination.
00:49:02.000Of course you wouldn't support, you know, fill in the blank.
00:49:06.000You know, of course you would be pro-women's rights.
00:49:08.000Of course you'd be pro, you know, there's a whole group of desires that they have or ideological desires that they've attached.
00:49:22.000I think that's exactly, that was a point I was making, that the moment atheism starts standing for something beyond just not believing in a god, the moment that happens, you start, you know, there's this fragmentation that starts to take place.
00:49:37.000And I just think that it's better, like the anti-theist position, just the idea that, okay, It's been many many years and now this whole religion thing like respect for religion and all the stuff that's being done in the name of it this is kind of enough so all of us rational people I'm going to take a position against this.
00:49:56.000Find something else to guide your actions apart from these sort of archaic social and legal codes.
00:50:05.000And if we had that position, you could have people from all kinds of...
00:50:09.000subscribe to all kinds of belief systems.
00:50:26.000Well, that's why they call it atheism plus in their ideas.
00:50:30.000But if you listen to the talk, it's a lot of these really weak guys who just are looking for social brownie points and trying to get women to love them by standing so powerfully and strong in favor of equality.
00:50:41.000It's like there's a certain aspect of feminism that's sort of in...
00:50:47.000Sort of engaged themselves with atheism and they've kind of embedded into it and these radical feminist ideas have also like become a part of atheism plus and it's very strange to listen to what they say and completely intolerant of other people's ideas and aggressive in attacking and doxing and going after people who disagree or who they think have you know in some way or another just You know,
00:51:14.000stood out against what their ideas are.
00:51:38.000I mean, look, religious ideology, especially radical religious fundamentalism, has done horrible damage to people, and there's a lot of people that grew up in that, and they have an extreme backlash against it, and so they're angry because of that.
00:51:55.000I mean, if I... I had the life that Ayaan Hirsi Ali did, where I grew up and underwent genital mutilation and all these things, as a woman.
00:52:06.000I would be angry, too, if I was oppressed by it.
00:52:10.000Raif Badawi knows about the blogger in Saudi Arabia.
00:53:40.000You know, just talking about the double standard.
00:53:41.000So how many lashes has this guy received so far?
00:53:44.00050. And it was supposed to continue every week, but he had a medical review and the doctors said that he's not fit to be lashed the next week, which is fucking bizarre because basically they said that his wounds haven't healed enough yet.
00:54:54.000And she just said, she's like, you know, I don't think he's going to survive it.
00:54:57.000And he's, you know, like when you talk to him, he's just like a very gentle, very nice, you know, thinking kind of guy, just very sort of, you know, introspective.
00:55:08.000And he's like really more of an intellectual kind of person.
00:55:11.000I mean, he's not very physically robust or anything like that.
00:55:19.000He just wrote sort of like liberal things.
00:55:21.000He started talking about how religion and politics should be separate, just the basis of secularism.
00:55:27.000There was one post that I liked that he wrote that was about astronomers.
00:55:33.000There was some Saudi cleric religious leader with a lot of influence.
00:55:39.000You know, who was essentially saying that, you know, I think he said something like traveling to planets is haram or, you know, he was saying something about astronomy.
00:55:58.000I didn't know these Sharia astronomers existed, and we should just forget about what all the scientists are saying, what all the telescopes do, and we should just listen to these guys because they have knowledge nobody else has from centuries ago.
00:56:10.000So he would write sort of sarcastic things like that.
00:56:13.000He never openly challenged religion being wrong or anything, but he was just an advocate for secularism.
00:56:50.000And I always tell people this, that the month that James Foley was beheaded in August 2014, that same month, Saudi Arabia beheaded 19 people.
01:00:11.000In August, the month that James Foley was beheaded by ISIS, the Saudi government, our ally, the one that Obama just recently went, you know, to pay respects to the king.
01:00:23.000And Fareed Zakaria actually asked him, he asked Obama about, he's like, are you going to mention the blogger that they have jailed?
01:00:32.000He's like, well, you know, right now I'm just going to pay respect to the king, you know, but with human rights abuses, you know, with our allies, it's very tough to have that dialogue.
01:00:41.000What kind of fucking allies are there?
01:00:43.000That's like having a friend who has a slave.
01:02:29.000So they can't do that even with permission of a male guardian.
01:02:33.000Pretty much anything else, whether it's working or traveling or any of that stuff, they can't do it without express permission of a male guardian.
01:02:43.000So they spoke out about it, because their guardian was their dad, who was a king who they barely even knew, and their mother, she's also female, so it really restricted a lot of things that they could do.
01:02:58.000So they started talking about gender discrimination, issues, The situation of women in Saudi Arabia.
01:03:05.000And they did an interview in 2013. And it's online.
01:03:08.000It's with Russia Today, with RT. I think that's what it stands for, Russia Today.
01:03:15.000And they were able to get a Skype connection and do this interview.
01:03:29.000So here's where my connection happened is I went to a school called Manar al-Riyadh, which was like an English medium school for foreigners and Saudis as well in Riyadh.
01:03:42.000And I knew these two girls who were in the girls' branch who went to school with her, who were good friends with one of the daughters, the youngest one.
01:04:09.000And it's just, the whole story is crazy because Abdullah is being, you know, Cameron, Obama, everybody's been praising him as a reformer and all the things that he's done for women.
01:05:35.000That's why it's hard when you're there and you come here, and when you hear the Noam Chomsky thing or the Glenn Greenwald thing, You know, we need to...
01:06:16.000Like, the same way people are so terrified of Islam that when this Charlie Hebdo thing came out, no one, no one on the left, like, actively criticized it or published those images or, you know, put it on the front pages of their magazines.
01:07:11.000There was this woman who was interviewing, like when they did the reprint and they put the cover of, you know, they put Muhammad on the cover again, you know, crying and so on.
01:07:22.000So she was interviewing somebody about that.
01:07:25.000And then the woman that she was interviewing started pulling up the paper and showing the cartoon.
01:07:54.000Well, it just means that when you make fun of it, when you draw cartoons, when it's insulting, then it's different.
01:07:59.000And I understand where she's coming from.
01:08:00.000But I think mockery is super important.
01:08:03.000If you think about the interview, the Seth Rogen movie, you have all of these journalists and everybody writing all these inquisitive, biting critiques of the North Korean regime.
01:08:19.000And all it does is, you know, because Kim Jong-un wants to be taken seriously.
01:08:23.000And he gives him, you know, he's like, okay, I'm legitimate.
01:08:25.000Everybody's criticizing me and, you know, they don't like what I do.
01:08:29.000But when you make a movie with, like, dick jokes and, you know, the kind of thing that the interview was, and you make fun of it, he goes apeshit.
01:08:39.000Well, how come they didn't go apeshit over the Team America movie?
01:09:21.000When you have this kind of mockery, like the dick jokes and the cartoons piss these people off a lot more because they want to be taken seriously.
01:09:31.000They can't do it through ideas because their ideas are all bullshit.
01:09:37.000Women can't drive or you should be beheaded if you leave the religion or change your mind about what you believe and so on.
01:09:43.000Those aren't the kind of things that you're going to get people flocking to you with through rational discourse.
01:10:01.000What we know today, like the oldest civilizations that we're aware of that we can track is like 6,000 plus years ago, which is Mesopotamia, right?
01:10:13.000Those areas, that's like where we believe Civilization sort of began, and those same areas have the most archaic form of religion and social justice.
01:10:25.000Their ideas are so barbaric in a way, or so old.
01:10:31.000I mean, the idea that women have to cover themselves in veils, and these oppressive ideas, it's the exact opposite of where the world is heading, especially because of the internet.
01:10:42.000There's more and more openness, The exchange of information is quicker than it's ever been before.
01:10:47.000And it's really hard to hold on to a really stupid idea today.
01:10:58.000The momentum of the past is so strong.
01:11:01.000Well, you know, one of the reasons for that...
01:11:03.000That's where I think our role comes in a little bit.
01:11:07.000Or the role of the West, the U.S., is...
01:11:12.000You know, the reason that the Saudis are lashing right for the reason that they're beheading people for sorcery has nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy or Western imperialism or really anything like that.
01:11:24.000But the reason they've been able to maintain it, the reason they can actually, you know, keep those archaic legal codes in place and not really have to do anything about it is because, you know, they're very rich.
01:12:10.000So you had that, and then a few years later when Obama, his first year of his presidency, he was at the G20 summit in London, and there was a controversy where everybody thought he bowed to the Saudi king, which he sort of did, right?
01:12:25.000When he met him, he shook his hand and he bowed.
01:12:29.000So that's kind of, that symbolizes where the U.S.-Saudi relationship is.
01:12:36.000It's not just, you know, we can blame the leaders for being allies in Saudi Arabia, but, you know, it's sort of the same thing that you see when, you know, people driving around their SUVs, filling them up with gas.
01:12:47.000And I will say that, you know, Every time we fill our cars up with gas, we're all bowing to the Saudi king.
01:12:52.000We're all doing exactly the same thing.
01:13:40.000It's not like they're providing some sort of service or manufacturing any kind of goods or they've got any even cultural elements that are going around all over the world that is able to monetize.
01:14:29.000You change it when you have to, right?
01:14:32.000When you have to move on with life, when you can't maintain that.
01:14:36.000If the rest of the world is moving on and you are not able to stay in that bubble, when you need to have international trade relationships, when you are dependent on diplomatic relations with other countries and you can't just get away with the shit that you do all the time, then that's how countries evolve.
01:15:44.000It's kind of like the people who live there and come stay there for a little while and go away, all the expatriates, it's like they're running a hotel.
01:15:56.000It's like a family running a hotel and it's got all its money and sort of American accounts, Swiss accounts, you know, wherever.
01:16:03.000And people just check in and check out all the time.
01:16:07.000You get paid according to your passport.
01:16:09.000I met a dude, I don't want to say his name, who's a prince in one of those places who listens to my podcast.
01:16:16.000We had a long conversation about MMA. Well, I hope he's listening now.
01:16:22.000It was weird talking to this young guy who's probably...
01:16:25.000We didn't discuss his finances, but I'm assuming he's insanely wealthy.
01:16:29.000But he just wanted to sit down with me and talk about the UFC. He's a big fan.
01:16:34.000We had this weird conversation about, you know, strategies and tactics and fighters and the trends and where things are moving and changing.
01:16:43.000But, you know, I'm talking to, you know, a guy who could one day be the head of one of these gigantic governments.
01:16:52.000I mean, I guess you call it a government.
01:17:19.000That part of the world, it's almost impossible, I think, for a lot of people who are apologists for that part of the world to rationalize it or to understand it the way you do.
01:17:34.000It's really unbelievable, and I understand that now.
01:17:37.000When I was there, Just explaining the way that things happen there to people over here, it's just so removed and so alien that people either shut it out of their mind or they don't believe it.
01:17:56.000What I'm doing in my book is when I talk about these things, I try to bring personal anecdotes into it before I go into the topic in detail because it helps It helps people to relate to it.
01:18:11.000So this is something that happened when I was in fifth grade.
01:18:13.000So I went to the American school there, which is kind of why I talk like this.
01:18:18.000And when I was in fifth grade, we made snowflakes during the winter.
01:18:43.000And there's a Ministry of Education guy who used to come in and he used to check the school to make sure everything is operating correctly.
01:18:49.000You know, like you had to say winter holidays, you couldn't speak about Christmas, you couldn't have red during Valentine's.
01:18:55.000So he saw the snowflakes and started yelling at the teacher in Arabic.
01:21:24.000You live with that as a kid who's, even if you're a foreigner, even if you're going to an American school, you know, you have these ideas around you.
01:21:33.000And the kids who are in the Saudi schools, which are separate, like foreigners are not allowed to go to Saudi schools.
01:21:41.000Their textbooks are just insane, the kind of stuff they have about Jews, about infidels, and everything.
01:21:48.000They actually teach this stuff to kids.
01:21:52.000In the UK recently, there was a Saudi school that was in the UK, and they were using some of these textbooks, and there was a big brouhaha about it.
01:22:24.000It's stuff that's so unimaginable and things that you wouldn't even think of.
01:22:29.000I watched a documentary once on these suicide bombers and there was a school that they were running where they had these images in this children's school of these kids that had blown themselves up and they had images of them,
01:22:47.000you know, these holy images of them covered with their explosive vests and they had a saying on the wall above them that said, The children of today are tomorrow's holy martyrs.
01:23:02.000And it's just like trying to wrap up Yeah.
01:24:24.000I don't know how that ended up, like what we're named after, but anyway.
01:24:28.000So what happens is you have these two different lines, and there was a conflict about, you know, people were, they couldn't decide who the successor was going to be.
01:24:38.000Some people kind of flocked to the caliphate, which was Abu Bakr and the other caliphs, and others flocked to the imams.
01:24:56.000Well, that became incredibly confusing to Americans when the Iraq War went on and we realized that, oh, okay, there's a war going on now that we killed Saddam Hussein between the Sunnis and the Shias.
01:26:18.000So in Indonesia and in a lot of Southeast Asian countries, you know, Indonesia, where Reza Aslan says that women are 100% equal to men, I would say, yeah, when it comes to circumcision rates, they are.
01:26:30.000More than 80% of men and women there are circumcised.
01:26:34.000Well, circumcision for a man, though, is not nearly as brutal as circumcision for a female.
01:27:22.000Like, you know, you have jihadists who will actually go out and they'll carry out these martyrdom operations.
01:27:28.000And you have Islamists who agree with political Islam, but not all of them are necessarily going to carry out these operations.
01:27:36.000And then you have Moderate Muslims, and a lot of moderate Muslims are extremely conservative, and they do believe in all those conservative things like, you know, being gay is not a good thing, woman should cover herself.
01:27:47.000So a lot of moderates will believe this, but they reject the political ideology of Islam.
01:27:53.000And then you have liberal and progressive moderates, and they're different as well.
01:27:57.000So it's a very, you know, it's 1.6 billion people.
01:30:33.000After that, he was running around over all kinds of different countries until he finally got refugee status in the U.S., and he came here recently.
01:30:43.000He's full of stories about Iraq and how complicated it is.
01:30:48.000Some of the other people I've talked to, they say that the reason Saddam Hussein was so effective is because he ruled with an iron fist, and he kept all of these sort of religious rivalries.
01:31:13.000Yeah, that's what it seems like from our point of view, from our...
01:31:22.000Confused point of view when all that was going down.
01:31:24.000There was a very strange moment where most Americans were standing back going, wait, wait, wait, what's going on?
01:31:30.000Like, they're competing against, they're fighting with each other?
01:31:36.000No one knew that there were rival factions of Islam.
01:31:40.000This guy Reza Aslan, he is a very interesting sort of polarizing figure.
01:31:48.000Some people think that he is an interesting historian, a voice of reason, and other people think he's completely disingenuous and not just incorrect about certain things, but that he's full of shit.
01:32:17.000Because my friend Duncan is enamored by him.
01:32:19.000My friend Duncan read his book on Jesus and he's just, he said it's an absolutely fascinating book and just really thinks the guy's very interesting.
01:32:27.000But then I talked to Sam about him and Sam said that he had some really dishonest dealings with him, some conversations with him where...
01:33:54.000And one of the things that he said, for instance, is that he actually wrote, he's like, these books, the Quran, the scriptures, they don't mean anything in and of themselves.
01:34:06.000It is a people, like a misogynist, violent person will bring their meaning out and they'll see in it what they want.
01:34:12.000Like as if the book is full of Rorschach texts.
01:34:14.000It's like inkblots that you can interpret and these words don't mean anything.
01:34:20.000And I was just thinking about the implication, and I wrote this for the Richard Dawkins website, is, you know, if he's saying that, like, these people, they didn't get their ideas from the book, the book has nothing to do with it, then he's saying that all the people in the Muslim world are disproportionately inherently violent and misogynistic.
01:34:39.000Because if the words don't have any meaning, then they've just chosen to behave this way.
01:35:04.000It's like because they're just like that.
01:35:06.000So to me, that's a much worse position to have.
01:35:10.000It's a much more bigoted position to have.
01:35:12.000And to neglect obvious causes, like, you know, when we talk about root causes, anytime someone says, Allahu Akbar, if they do something, or they say, Jesus made me do it, we always kind of ignore that.
01:35:32.000So if I tell you I did something, a horrific act because it was my political beliefs or because I played a certain video game or I liked a certain band or...
01:35:42.000I was pissed off about U.S. foreign policy.
01:38:16.000I'm trying to remember all of it, because there were some really important elements of what he said that gives us insight into how they think.
01:38:22.000Yeah, and then he said the reason that we blow ourselves up, he's like, you know, we're killing ourselves.
01:38:26.000If death was such a bad thing, we wouldn't do it ourselves.
01:38:28.000But we know where we're going, and we know where we're taking the kids as well.
01:38:32.000So we just don't think of it in the way that you do.
01:38:35.000And most Muslims, you know, and he was talking about all the Muslims condemning it.
01:38:40.000He's like, most Muslims, their faith isn't as pure.
01:38:44.000Really believed that there was a heaven.
01:39:33.000Well, they said that the moment you demonize your enemy or the moment you call your enemy the devil, You're not going to be able to understand them.
01:39:42.000The moment you've decided that they're the other and that this is just pure evil, you'll never understand their motivation for why they do what they do.
01:40:41.000And they're all too willing to kill themselves and kill others.
01:40:46.000The Charlie Hebdo thing confused the shit out of me.
01:40:50.000Not that people were willing to kill people over the cartoons, I kind of already had that idea in my head, but the reaction by a lot of left-wing progressive people in the United States condemning the racism of those cartoons.
01:41:03.000I was like, what the fuck are you even talking about?
01:41:06.000You're talking about a massacre, a horrific, murderous massacre, and you've chose to condemn the quote-unquote racism of these cartoons.
01:41:39.000That apologist thinking, that weird sort of thinking that's embodied by a lot of those really progressive left-wing, like really radical left-wing people.
01:41:50.000I think there's a sensitivity to hurting people and hurting their feelings.
01:42:47.000So coming here, I just don't think when it comes to the cartoons or the movie, the interview, people are saying, well, it's a shitty movie anyway.
01:42:55.000But when they start talking about the content of what is being criticized or attacked, I just think it's completely irrelevant.
01:43:04.000In the context of what's happening, it doesn't matter what was in the Charlie Hebdo paper.
01:43:10.000Do you think they're doing that because they're terrified of retribution and they're so terrified that they're willing to side with the murderous Religious fundamentalists because they're almost worried that they're going to get attacked themselves.
01:43:25.000They're like, well, you know, I mean, those cartoons were kind of really racist.
01:43:29.000And I mean, I'm not saying that the murders were cool, but I'm saying like, hey, why are you promoting like horrible racist cartoons?
01:44:07.000Yeah, people are more upset about, it's not, there's this value, the value of freedom of speech, okay, which I think is extremely important.
01:44:16.000Taken for granted very much so by Americans in some cases.
01:44:20.000That's something that I, and Faisal, the guy from Iraq I told you about, he says the same thing, you know, when he came here.
01:44:26.000A lot of people are sort of apologists about it because there's a freedom of speech and then there is this sort of political correctness and not to offend anybody.
01:44:34.000And people will say, one thing I've been hearing a lot is freedom of speech doesn't mean the freedom to offend.
01:44:45.000There's no point of freedom of speech.
01:44:47.000And it means you have the freedom to talk about being offended by that freedom of speech that other person expressed.
01:44:54.000Yeah, everybody can say the fact that you can have this conversation about what freedom of speech means is that's what freedom of speech is.
01:45:00.000And if the whole reason it's protected so strongly is because it means the right that all of us have to offend other people.
01:45:10.000Right, which is why I have a huge issue when people say something that other people deem to be offensive, they automatically go after their employers and try to get them fired.
01:46:10.000If you don't like the way someone expresses themselves, talk about the way they express themselves and what specifically you find incorrect about it.
01:46:24.000You can see where a person comes from.
01:46:27.000Even if you don't agree with it, you can see where a person comes from.
01:46:31.000We also talked about hate speech because I think one of the biggest problems with France and Europe and a lot of European countries is that they have laws against hate speech.
01:46:42.000In the US, you have laws against hate crimes, but hate speech is protected as part of free speech, and I think that's right.
01:46:50.000Remember the Westboro Baptist Church ruling, where the Supreme Court voted 8-1 to allow them to picket funerals?
01:46:57.000And as much as that idea is abhorrent, or anything the Westboro Baptist Church does is abhorrent, That is their right, and they should be able to do it as long as it's not a crime and it's his speech.
01:47:10.000But, you know, they have, in France, they've got Holocaust denial laws.
01:47:14.000They have rules against, you know, attacking, you know, like, let me put it this way, the very same things, same rules, that their hate speech laws were actually used by the government at times to warn Charlie Hebdo.
01:47:31.000Like, you know, what you're doing is you're engaging in hate speech.
01:47:33.000So the same hate speech laws that actually protected the killers, right?
01:47:39.000Protected their right to express themselves and to say, okay, do everything from subjugate women to, you know, impinge on gay rights, for instance.
01:47:51.000Like, all of those same things, the same hate speech laws were used to warn the Charlie Hebdo people.
01:47:56.000I mean, they had that fashion designer...
01:47:59.000Who was arrested for anti-Semitic remarks that he made in a bar.
01:48:05.000Yeah, so if you have hate speech laws, if you have things like that, then that causes a lot of issues.
01:48:10.000It doesn't work very well for people who are making the cartoons, like Charlie Hebdo, and actually ends up protecting their attackers and their ideology.
01:48:18.000When I look at the apologists, especially in America, I often wonder whether or not It's a case of people, it's like very similar to people almost like winning the lottery and becoming spoiled and not appreciating the earning of that money.
01:48:35.000Or someone who inherited millions of dollars and you usually find them all fucked up and drunk and become drug addicts.
01:48:45.000They're so spoiled by this freedom that they don't appreciate it.
01:48:50.000It's almost like we've had so much freedom and it's gone on for so long with no consequences that until you actually see personally the effects of those consequences of free speech, you don't appreciate free speech for what it really truly is.
01:49:03.000You may disagree with someone, but if you disagree with their ability to express themselves, you're a part of the problem.
01:49:24.000Maybe if I spoke French and I understood where they were coming from, I would think it would be funnier.
01:49:29.000But to think that there's something wrong with them doing it to the point where you're bringing that up instead of a mass murder on a magazine.
01:49:39.000Shooting the cartoonists, and the thing you want to discuss is like, well, those cartoons are really racist.
01:49:45.000Yes, the merit of the content has nothing to do with it.
01:49:54.000And there's this idea that supposing we said that the cartoons were hate speech, and they were criticizing an ideology that a lot of people found, a belief that a lot of people were very sensitive about.
01:50:06.000Or like a historical public figure who's been dead for a long time and, you know, that people are sensitive about.
01:50:11.000So, supposing you had that, you know, again, you know, sort of even the competition there.
01:50:18.000You know, pull out, they used to lampoon religions, all the religions, it wasn't just Islam.
01:50:23.000So, you know, pull out the Bible, pull out the Quran, open it up to certain things and, you know, there's more hate speech in those books than there could ever be in the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
01:50:36.000If you're talking about incitement to violence, you know, killing infidels, apostates, you know, go to Deuteronomy.
01:50:42.000And if you go to Deuteronomy 20 and you read it, it reads like an ISIS rulebook.
01:50:48.000It says, you know, go into the land, you know, put the sword to all of the men, you take the women and the children as slaves.
01:52:36.000But I would say that, you know, you'd have a reformation.
01:52:39.000And after the reformation, that would get you to secularism, where you separate religion and state.
01:52:44.000And then you move to a point where, you know, people can actually have that conversation and they can, you know, reject irrational beliefs entirely.
01:52:51.000But the step before Reformation, in order to have a Reformation, you have to, especially in the Muslim world, you have to reject the idea of scriptural inerrancy.
01:53:01.000You know, you have to stop taking the Koran literally, not just justifying the stuff that's in there, but just saying, okay, you know, there's this in here, we don't believe that anymore.
01:53:11.000And stop thinking that it's the literal word of God, which is a very tough thing to do.
01:53:16.000The Jews did it and the Christians did it.
01:53:18.000What becomes the basis of your ideology then?
01:53:21.000It seems like people want an ideology.
01:53:24.000They want to have some sort of a very rigid set of rules and patterns of behavior.
01:54:31.000But see, when you say all of that stuff...
01:54:35.000And when we were talking about Mormonism and Scientology earlier, I mean, this stuff sounds so much more insane than Mormonism and Scientology.
01:55:04.000And the more we become illuminated about the actual true nature of matter, of biological life, the process of atoms, and the subatomic particles, and when we get deeper and deeper into the very nature of reality itself,
01:55:20.000the more we can explain, the less religion becomes valid.
01:55:23.000And the more it becomes pretty obvious that someone in a very distant time where there was no science and there was no There was no base of knowledge where it had been accumulated over thousands of years of people slowly but surely measuring things and figuring things out and coming up with newer and better ways to measure things that were based on the discoveries of people before them.
01:55:43.000And we're all, all of us, I mean, the reason why we celebrate guys like Isaac Newton or Darwin is because we've all piggybacked on their discoveries and learned more.
01:55:52.000And every scientist and every biologist and every anthropologist has dug up bones.
01:55:57.000We've added another little piece to this puzzle that's constantly evolving and growing and changing.
01:56:02.000And then something like religion comes along that says, stop all this fucking learning.
01:57:09.000Now I'm going to work backwards and see what I can do to strengthen my belief.
01:57:12.000It's two completely different dynamics.
01:57:17.000Yeah, I mean, the idea that the two of them can coincide, it seems less and less viable as time goes on.
01:57:23.000Yeah, just the basics, when you look at the basics, the way that they work.
01:57:28.000And it also seems like as time goes on, because of these ideas being less and less compatible, the opposing factions, science and religion, are more vehemently opposed to each other.
01:57:40.000They're more aggressive about their denial, or they're more aggressive about their Non-accepting of these fundamentalist ideas.
01:57:50.000Scientists today are more aggressive about their ideas that atheism is the way to go and that these religious fundamentalist ideas that are being pushed on people are a form of ideological poison.
01:58:04.000They fuck with the mind because they give the mind these very rigid Patterns that you're expected to adhere to and conform to and if you do not I mean the idea of like if you don't believe or you fall out of faith You should you're supposed to have your head removed.
01:58:20.000I mean that should tell you right there What is what do you think you think with your fucking head?
01:58:25.000So we're gonna cut your fucking head off Don't think you need to abide by this shit that was written down on parchment Back when they thought the world was flat and the sun was 17 miles away.
01:58:36.000Like that's what you need to abide by because otherwise you're gonna fuck up our party.
01:58:42.000Yeah, it kind of brings you back to the whole community thing that I think a lot of people they want that identification and they want that sense of identity and you know group identity that religion gives them.
01:58:54.000They need it so much that that's why they take just attacks on Their ideology, personally.
01:59:01.000Yeah, and they cheer when there's reprisal for these attacks.
01:59:20.000Like, within our own living room, we're sitting there, you know, educated uncles and aunts who had, you know, been overseas and they'd studied overseas, they came back, you know, when...
01:59:31.000Something like 9-11 would happen or, you know, any kind of attack against America would happen, even with civilians.
01:59:36.000You know, be completely supportive of it.
01:59:38.000But, you know, when they'd go out and they'd talk to their white friends, they'd be like, you know, yeah, this is terrible.
01:59:58.000Unfortunately, not particularly in my house, but...
02:00:00.000Extended family, family friends, I mean, just on a daily basis, we're surrounded by it.
02:00:05.000I mean, when the Salman Rushdie Fatwa came down, you know, a lot of my extended family, a lot of my friends, you know, teachers at school and everything, they all supported it.
02:00:56.000I guess the way the Quran was supposedly revealed was that Muhammad got these revelations from above and at one point he got these revelations that said that certain elements of idolatry are okay.
02:01:11.000It was like these three idol gods and you know, okay fine, we can respect that or people that follow them, they're okay.
02:01:18.000And then later on he's like, no, no, that was Satan talking to me.
02:04:58.000I can't talk too much about what happened.
02:05:03.000But most of the time they come from overseas and some kids sitting in villages with a laptop or a cell phone and sending threats.
02:05:12.000But there's always a chance that one or two of them are real and this is obviously a real issue.
02:05:18.000But generally, it's a lot worse for women than it is for men.
02:05:22.000Because there's this idea, especially among conservative cultures and a lot of the Muslim culture, is that if a man decides not to follow religion, that's a separate thing.
02:05:36.000But if a woman decides not to follow religion, she's lost all morality.
02:06:17.000I mean, the word archaic, I keep using it, but that really is the word.
02:06:22.000It's such an ancient version of thinking.
02:06:26.000It's almost like an operating system that's so outdated, like you're trying to fuck with DOS. You know what I mean?
02:06:33.000You're trying to get on Twitter, but you're only using DOS. It's like, god damn.
02:06:38.000The operating system of fundamental religion is so fucking broken.
02:06:43.000A lot of times they think that they have the updated software.
02:06:46.000We have the most recent religion, you know, like Islam came after Christianity, it came after, and then we had this great civilization, which they did at one point.
02:06:58.000And why are we in such bad shape in all over the world?
02:07:05.000Sorry, I watched this speech once where this guy was talking about He was asking questions or the audience was asking questions about certain aspects of Islam and how do they know whether, you know, if one religion says one thing but Islam says another.
02:07:20.000And his answer was, it's very simple, because Islam is the truth.
02:08:16.000I think that, like, and this is one of the things I'm exploring in my book.
02:08:21.000I think, like, with Jews and with Christians, they were able to, like, have a genuine reformation where they're able to bond and come together on a sense of community rather than ideology.
02:08:35.000Like, you know, if you're Jewish, you can be an atheist Jew, you can be an agnostic Jew, you can be a secular Jew.
02:08:40.000You can be an Orthodox Jew, but nobody's ever going to say, okay, you're not a Jew anymore.
02:09:07.000I mean, they are not interested in hearing that.
02:09:10.000There's a strong faction of Christianity, fundamentalist faction of Christianity, that they are incredibly upset at the word atheist or atheism.
02:10:22.000Belonging to a religious group gives you.
02:10:24.000Which is a benefit for a lot of people.
02:10:26.000That sense of community is so huge for a comfort to people, providing people with this group that they can rely upon and they feel connected to and joined with.
02:10:41.000The idea that it has to be attached to some archaic belief system To some ridiculous old shit that was written down when people had a very poor understanding of reality.
02:12:13.000We don't identify like Albert Einstein's achievements as something, and he wasn't even, Albert Einstein wasn't even religious.
02:12:23.000So with this, the fact that there were Muslims in a certain part of the world that were engaging in a lot of scientific inquiry, and they were really moving forward, and they were being progressive, and they're making new discoveries.
02:12:36.000This is something that is more of a testament to science and to free thinking than it is to the religion itself.
02:12:49.000That's similar to the fact that Darwin, when he was proposing his theories, the predominant scientific community was Christian.
02:12:57.000Most of the people that he told his ideas to were in opposition of these ideas initially because It went opposite of their Christian beliefs.
02:13:07.000We think of scientists today as being almost universally secular, or at least the ones that we pay attention to and respect, we think of them as having, at the very least, an agnostic religious base.
02:13:20.000But back then, they were predominantly Christian.
02:13:27.000I think what we do is we sometimes look at it the other way around.
02:13:32.000When you had all that scientific progress happening in sort of the golden age of Muslims, then that was happening again, like it was happening despite the fact that it was Islam.
02:13:46.000Now when you have all of these, all the terrorism, all these things happening, there's a direct relationship between words and the scripture and what they're doing.
02:13:55.000So what we do is now we say, okay, just because they're Muslims, you know, they just happen to be Muslim.
02:15:15.000But it is unfortunately linked, like, you know, the words of the Quran, the scripture, it is linked to a lot of the violence that you see, a lot of the subjugation of women that you see.
02:15:26.000And that connection It's something that should be acknowledged.
02:16:00.000Like, I've just noticed that when someone says something like that, or if there's a Quran burnt or cartoons drawn, there's just, like, a lot of outrage.
02:16:06.000But it's just not the kind of thing you see when people...