A Journey From Christianity To Buddhism To Islam

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AI: Summary ©

The speaker discusses their personal history with criminal behavior and their desire to be a Christian, but did not want to join Islam. They also talk about their search for the truth behind their church and their initial confusion with their church. They emphasize the importance of control and forgiveness, and criticize the use of religion in media. They stress the need for structure and rules in order to achieve freedom and emphasize the importance of testing one's faith in God. The segment ends with a mention of a local peace event.

AI: Summary ©

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			Bismillah Alhamdulillah Salam aleikum, which means peace be unto you. Welcome to another episode of
the deen show, which is a way of life we try to put out there for everyone to see helping you
understand Islam and Muslims. And if you were just flicking through watching a TV and you heard
Islam and Muslim, don't think anything's about the blow up. We're here to educate you on Islam and
Muslims. And thank you for coming to the source. My next guest is going to talk about his experience
before Islam, and then why he chose to enter Islam. So I'm sure you're here, you're eager to hear
his story. Let's bring him out without further delay.
		
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			There's only one
		
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			is His Messenger.
		
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			I'll do green, Jesus.
		
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			So why Islam, you got Christianity, you got Buddhism, this ism, you got things blowing up over here
people associate in Islam with everything bad. If you go to a social event, you might get divided
again, if you're a Muslim, why Islam?
		
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			Well, if you're the sort of person who cares about stuff like that,
		
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			then I don't think it would really matter what I say.
		
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			Because what is important is the truth, not the consequences of accepting the truth. And the truth
is something that is virtuous in of itself. And for me, the simple. The simple answer to your
question is why Islam? Islam? The reason is because the truth is it. The Quran is the word of God,
and Mohammed is the final messenger of God. And this is the way of life that God has ordained for
the benefit and for the mercy of all the human beings. And that's why it's lambreaux. concise, to
the point. And it's simple. You want to know that you you found out what the truth is, and you
submitted to it, you didn't care what people are thinking what they're going to say you were
		
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			sincere, and you came to it correctly. That's about it. Now, I'm sure you've told this story a lot
of times, several times. But
		
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			for the people who've never heard this story, and now they're getting to hear for the first time,
and they wonder, okay, what led you to this before? What kind of life did you leave? Before you were
a Christian? What did you believe? And first of all, a bit about my background background? Yes, sir.
I come from what we
		
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			what we would call in England, an upper middle class family, England, is a lot more of,
		
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			you know, England has a sort of strata of clauses, maybe a lot more than, for example, the United
States of America to have like a butler service. I'm not and I don't mean like that. But I mean, you
have the aristocracy, right, which is the Queen and the relatives of the Queen and the landed gentry
and people like that. So you have the aristocracy, and then you have the upper classes who are, you
know, in one way or another connected with with the aristocracy. It's not just about wealth. You
know, it's also about, you know, it's also to do, I suppose, it's also to do with culture is to do
with, you know, what you might call breeding backgrounds, there's a lot of things that come into,
		
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			into that. So
		
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			you know, I mean, for example, My my, my father was a colonial administrator in the British Empire.
I was born in Tanzania. He was born in Singapore. My great grandfather was a high court judge in
Bombay.
		
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			So we have this colonial background.
		
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			And anyway, so that's the sort of background that I come from. I was sent to a Roman Catholic
monastic boarding school, which is basically a school that was run by monks, my mother because she's
polish.
		
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			She wanted me and my brother to be brought up as Catholics.
		
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			So she sent us to this very well known boarding school. in UK we call private schools, public
schools.
		
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			Okay. Private schools are called public schools. And public schools are called government schools
are comprehensive. Gotcha. So when someone says I went to public school, it means they actually went
to a private school.
		
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			I'm not quite sure why that is. Because in when schools started, the only schools were the private
schools, or it may be that they were the public schools, but because they're so old, and they're so
part of the institution, they
		
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			became the private schools. But
		
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			anyway, so I went to this Roman Catholic monastic school, it's a public school, as I said,
		
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			very well known.
		
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			And because the, because it was a monastic school run by Benedictine, monks, the whole religious
ethos of the school was quite strong.
		
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			So in that sense, I had a quite religious as you can say, upbringing.
		
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			You know, we had a lot of, you know, Bible studies, Christian history studies, and so on and so
forth. But for me, I had some deep questions about Christianity.
		
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			You know, amongst the first questions that I ever started thinking in my head was, you know, the
Catholics have a prayer called Hail Mary. Yeah. And you know, Hail Mary, Mother of god bless it out
there amongst women. And I thought, well,
		
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			how does God have a mother? You know, God's not supposed to have any beginning or end? How can you?
You know, how can God have a money? Yeah, you know, what does that supposed to mean? You know,
Mommy, yeah, Mommy, Mommy, no more, you know, MMA, whatever. And, you know, it's just didn't make
any sense. And I thought, you know, as a little kid, I was thinking, well, if God has a mum, then
you know, this man must be a bigger God than God.
		
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			Right? I mean, this is how you try, you know, because you don't think that, as a kid, people are
teaching you full suit.
		
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			Right? You tend to trust the people around you, and you tend to trust what the society is telling
you. And so these questions come to your head, but you try to find an explanation for yourself.
Because at the end of the day, you know, you know, you trust your environment, that's what you tend
to do. But I guess if these questions are often enough, and they're persistent enough, and they're
deep enough, and they're confusing enough, you ain't, you're not going to be able to ignore those
questions. And so that's how it was, for me, I have to say, it was a sort of jewel thing. It wasn't
only me questioning the religious aspect of, for example, you know, what does it mean? Mary's the
		
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			Mother of God, why do I have to go and confess my sins to a priest? Why can't I just ask God, to
forgive me?
		
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			You know, what is this Trinity? What is how can God be one of the three at the same time? I mean,
what is that all about? It wasn't only that it was also
		
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			it was also the whole materialistic philosophy, the whole idea that, you know, the purpose of life
was to make as much money as possible to have a good job, and you know, to have to get a good
degree. So you get a good job. So you got a nice cars, you got a nice house, you know, and that was
the purpose of life Was that supposed to be the reason for our existence? just didn't seem to me
that. That's, that's all there was to life, there must be something more. And so then I started to
begin to look into different religions, and different philosophies. And you know, Buddhism, for
example, I studied Buddhism for a while.
		
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			So that was how my sort of search began through different religions and different ideologies. And,
you know, I was trying to find the truth. Now, did you have or did you feel? Did you feel you had a
connection with Jesus? Now, because you said that you left off
		
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			to go study Buddhism. But so at that point, you were done with Christianity?
		
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			It wasn't that simple. Uh huh.
		
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			Are you just inquiring, you're inquisitive? And you were out there? You want to? Well, I mean, first
of all, Buddhism. Yeah.
		
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			You know, some people would argue that Buddhism is not a religion, it's a philosophy. And you could
follow any religion and be a Buddhist at the same time. Yeah.
		
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			Because Buddhism doesn't really deal with whether there's a god or not.
		
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			At least certain aspects. Buddha says that, you know, you should find your own path to salvation.
And so if it helps you to take something from this religion or that religion, and, you know, then
you can do that, like a buffet now? Well, I think it certainly, uh, no, it does. I mean, to be fair,
it has some core principles. Yeah. But it lays down some core principles, but
		
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			as core principles, you know, you I suppose they could fit into many religious traditions.
		
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			But anyway, generally, by and large, we could say that Buddhism is considered to be, you know, a
religion in and of its own right. But I mean, although Buddhism never deals with the issue of God, I
never stopped believing in God. While I was a Buddhist. Yeah. I you know, I was practicing yoga.
		
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			I was trying to apply, you know, the principles of the Eightfold enlightened path of Buddha.
		
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			You know, I was I was, you know, practicing meditation and so on and so forth, I sort of tried to
adopt a form of vegetarianism. So there were certain things that I was trying to adopt.
		
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			And I found that Buddhism, to be honest was, you know, well, it did have a positive effect on me, it
had a very,
		
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			you know, it did have a positive effect for me. But at the end of the day, it still wasn't answering
the fundamental questions. Why are we here? What's the purpose of life? What's the reason for our
existence? You see, Buddha teaches that life is suffering.
		
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			And although there is suffering in life, you couldn't say that life is suffering.
		
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			And so if, if your whole philosophy is based upon something that's really not true, because this is
what he says, life is suffering, and the suffering in life is caused by the ego, it's caused by the
self.
		
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			So what he teaches is that you need to annihilate the self, this is what Nirvana Nirvana doesn't
mean, you know, bliss or paradise, it means annihilation, self annihilation, that you annihilate
your ego, you annihilate yourself.
		
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			Which if you take it to a certain, you know, extreme, it sort of means that you almost become
lifeless, you become. I mean, they would look at this as a virtue. I mean, it's very hard for us to
understand in the West, because we have in the West, the culture of the individual, you know, the
individual is so important and character and personality, and that's driven into us about having
character having personality. But in Buddhism, in Buddhism, the idea that everyone's just the same,
and everyone is just, you know, it's not, it's a virtue, because your ego is destroyed. It's not
about you anymore.
		
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			However,
		
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			I wasn't really convinced by this.
		
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			As I said, already, I wasn't really convinced that life was suffering, no doubt there is suffering
in life. And no one's ever really convinced that all the suffering in life is caused by the ego. Is
it really necessary to annihilate the ego? Or is it actually the problems in life? Are they because
we don't control our ego? In other words, the ego is good. It's cool is good. What is bad is that
when we take it beyond certain bounds, and this is ultimately what Islam is teaching, yeah, Islam
teaches us to purify our knifes, which is the Arabic word for self, your ego, it's about
purification of the self, it's about controlling the knifes the knifes is like a horse. In fact, the
		
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			knifes is essential. It's, it's your knifes, your that makes you feel hungry and thirsty, and makes
you want to love and so these passions are not in and of themselves bad. It's only when we allow
them to control us rather than us controlling them. That's the issue. That's when it becomes a
problem, you see. But anyway, Buddhism was working to a certain extent, but I still didn't find
satisfactory answers in it. And then I began to look through, you know, everything I could. And
that's, that's when I reached this shopping market, you know, the supermarket state? Yeah, I was
taking a bit of this and a bit of that, mixing all together, you know, and I actually invented my
		
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			own religion, my own religion, which was sort of a mixture of Christianity and Buddhism and
Hinduism, and you know, what, psychosomatic yoga and magic and, you know, whatever I read about and
studied and philosophy and, and I just put it together in the self made religion.
		
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			That was the worst
		
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			of all the experiences, you know, spiritual experiences I've had, that was the worst. And I realized
that
		
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			I got to the stage, I thought,
		
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			maybe there is no religious truth. Maybe there is no big answer. Maybe there is nothing more to life
than having money.
		
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			And being rich, maybe my problem was that it was that I didn't have enough money. I wasn't rich
enough.
		
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			So I started thinking to myself,
		
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			who are the richest people in the world
		
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			who have done the least amount of effort in order to get their money? Because that's what I thought.
If I want to enjoy my life,
		
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			I need maximum money. And minimum effort. Yeah, right. So I started thinking and I thought about the
British and industrial revolution. I thought, too much hard work. Americans are rich, but you know,
the American Dream is you know, you dig yourself out of the gutter, gutter, numerous
		
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			You become a self made millionaire. And there's way too much hard work the Japanese.
		
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			Back in those days, they were famous. That's all they did. Japanese just work. They didn't do
anything else except work. So I thought no. And then it came to me. I thought, Wait a minute, those
Saudi Arabians have been sitting on accounts for, I don't know, 1000. However, many years ago,
Allahu Akbar, and the goal was money. I said, That sounds good. No work lots of money. I said, Well,
I started thinking, What's the key yet? What's the religion? What's that book was that.
		
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			That is what made me go down and pick up a copy of I went to the bookshop, picked up translation,
and started reading it and studying, studying it. And then reading it and rereading it. And it's not
an easy book to read. It's not like, you know, a novel. It's not even like the Bible begins in the
beginning and ends at the end. Well, it's not like that. It's it's a very different type of book.
		
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			But I wanted to understand what it had to say it wasn't contentious to read it, I wanted to
understand what it had to say to me. And then it hit me.
		
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			I realized that if I had ever read a book that was from God, this was
		
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			from all the books I had read all the religions I'd studied. If there was one that was true, this
was the true religion. This was the true book, this is the one that was from God.
		
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			I guess. And in a, in a real sense, that's when I became Muslim. That's when I accepted the core of
what Islam is teaching, that there is one God, and that the Quran is the word of God, and that
Muhammad is the Messenger of God. Now, before we go into that area of Islam, let's just reverse
again, and tell us, you mentioned Mary, you couldn't grasp that she got had a mother. But what about
now that God was a man or that he had a son or that Jesus died for your sins? How can you elaborate
on this a little bit? Well, I think all of those things, at the end of the day, you know, we,
naturally, human beings, understand that God is transcendent. God is not like anything in this
		
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			universe.
		
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			God is infinite, God is eternal. God is self sufficient.
		
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			What does it mean then to say that the infinite became finite,
		
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			the eternal, became temporary, the self sufficient, became needy, and still stayed eternal, and
infinite, and self sufficient. That doesn't mean something can't be eternal, and temporary, both at
the same time. It's an impossibility. It's not a paradox. It's not something that seems to be a
contradiction, but isn't really it is a contradiction. It's the very definition of contradiction.
And of course, from the Islamic point of view, every single Prophet came to warn people away from
making God like the creation or imagining that the creation was like God. This is the message of all
the prophets, that God is one God is not like any created thing. That's why the first commandments,
		
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			okay, the first commandment, thou shalt love the Lord your God, right, and you should love him and
worship God. But the second is, you shall not make any graven image of anything in the heavens and
the earth, and you shall not bow down and you shall not worship them. In fact, there's two
commandments. The first commandment is the prohibition of making any graven image of any living
creature.
		
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			That's in the Bible. That's the second commandment. And then it says, and you shall not worship
them. So here it is very clearly nothing in the heavens or in the earth is God. Nothing in the
heavens on earth should be worshipped.
		
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			Because God is not a creative thing. God is not a man. It actually says that in the Bible, in Hosea,
it says, For I am God, not man.
		
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			So this is a blatant contradiction. it contradicts the message of all the prophets. it contradicts
reason it contradicts common sense.
		
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			And it actually supports the idolatry that all the prophets have been fighting against, since the
beginning of time. So the claim that Jesus is God, or that he is God incarnate, or that he is a co
equal with God re as part of God, any claim that a human being is equal to God is an insult to God.
It is disbelief in God it is making the one who is great, like something insignificant.
		
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			God is not a human being. That's very clear and very obvious. So then who is Jesus and did who sins
did he die for? Jesus is a prophet of God and Jesus didn't die in die for anyone sins. I mean,
		
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			Again that the idea that you know, the idea
		
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			that God needed. I mean, there is straightaway,
		
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			something that you cannot attribute to God. You can't say God needed to do something. But Christians
say, God needed to sacrifice Jesus in order to be able to give you forgive human beings for their
sins. God doesn't need to do anything. God just needs to say be in it is, if God wants to forgive
your sins, you can forgive your sins. Why does someone need to die? All you need to do if you want
your sins forgiven is to call upon God, to believe that God is one not to make any partners or
equals with God from anything in this creation, whether it's Jesus or anyone else, and ask God
alone, to forgive you for your sins. And if you're sincere, and you mean it, and you feel bad about
		
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			what you've done, and you really commit yourself not to repeat that sin again, not only will God
forgive you, but God will give you good deeds nearly as great as the evils you did to replace it.
Now, that's the mercy of God. That's God's forgiveness. Simple, simple, and so simple. No one needs
to die on the cross, no sacrifice needs to be made. And this claim that God cannot forgive sins
without sacrifice. No, that's not true.
		
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			God can forgive sins with sacrifice or without sacrifice. If you you know, in Islam, we have
sacrifices in Judaism, you have sacrifice, but actually, both Muslims and Jews do not believe that
sacrifice is a condition, an absolute condition for God's forgiveness, even if I'm not able to
sacrifice so even if I don't make sacrifice, I can still repent to God and get God's forgiveness
without that sacrifice. So
		
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			the idea that somehow God needs the sacrifice and you know, in order to be, it's just, it just
doesn't make any sense. And sorry, from another point of view, is, what does it mean that someone
else is being punished
		
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			for your sins? I mean, if if I go if I have some kids, right, and this kid, you know, kid, number
eight does something bad, right? So I take my I take one of my other kids and stick them on a cross
and crucify them, and say that so I can forgive you for the bad thing you've done? What sort of
nonsense is that? Anyone who said that would say that person is an evil tyrant. Okay, because you
punish the guilty, the people who should be punished the people who committed the crime? Not a
perfectly innocent human being? Is it right to punish an innocent human being? for the sins? Not at
all?
		
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			Okay, so then what does it mean to say that because Adam ate from the tree, I'm punished, you're
punished, everybody's punished? I didn't eat from the tree? Did you eat from the tree? Not at all.
So why should I be punished? And you'd be punished for something that you only never did? Does that
make any sense either? Not at all? Well, you know, I'm not saying that God couldn't do that if you
wanted to. But we couldn't say that the person or the one or the being that did that is just it
doesn't fit the description of justice.
		
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			Not at all. Not at all. So I don't think we can I think it's actually How can anyone attribute such
a theology to the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and then label this as God's love? Right? Is
I'm sorry to say it's just, you know, it's absurd. It's absurd. So you pass through this, that
innate nature that you have inside rejected it, you didn't get dogma ties, and somebody drilling
this in your head? Yeah, you I did, I was joking with them. But you got out it was drilled in my
head. But I have to say, you know, fortunately, someone did sit down with me, and had a really good
conversation with me, and exactly about these things about the Trinity about all of this stuff that
		
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			we've been talking about. He was a Muslim. And he said, he wasn't being aggressive. He wasn't being
rude. He's being perfectly polite. And at the end of this conversation, he said to me, so you
believe Jesus is God? I said, Yeah.
		
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			And he said, Can you believe that Jesus died on the cross for your sins? I said, Yeah.
		
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			I said, so you believe God died.
		
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			And it's like,
		
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			you know, the lights went on, the penny dropped. You know, it was just a moment where I just
suddenly realized that everything I had been taught as a Christian, made absolutely no sense
whatsoever, but no one had ever spelt it out for me. There it is. If you believe Jesus is God, and
if you believe Jesus died on the cross, you believe God died. And I knew that I didn't believe in a
God that could be killed. I didn't believe in God that dies. I didn't. I realized I didn't believe
		
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			God died on the cross. Because God is the EverLiving, who never dies. And then I just realized that
the whole doctrine of Christianity was false. Now for someone saying, you know, I see a lot of
confusion here, all these religious making the claim that they're the truth, they say what I don't
want to follow any organized, really, I still believe in God, I'm gonna do good, I'm not gonna hurt
nobody. You kind of fill in that trapping, and you start to take from here, take from there. What do
you got to advise someone who's going down that path? You know, I, you know, I mean, say, for
example, you had a disease? Yeah, you had a disease. And you know, you have a bad experience with
		
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			one doctor. And you have a bad experience with that doctor, because, you know, he's a bad doctor, he
was pretending to be qualified. And he wasn't, say he was lying about his qualifications, or maybe
he was a qualified doctor. But he was claiming that he had a skill in some area, which he didn't
have. Does that mean, you're just going to give up on medicine? Does that mean you're going to give
up on it altogether, and just like, you know, do a bit of witchcraft and a bit of Voodoo and a bit
of acupuncture. You know, just mix it all up, you know, you're not gonna do that, right? You're
gonna realize that it's not medicine, that's a fault. It was this doctor who was lying about some
		
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			aspect, and it's your fault for not checking him out properly. You just accepted what everyone else
said. But God's given you a brain, you know, you've got the reasoning ability, you can check out
this person's qualifications, you can see for yourself and think for yourself, Is this true? Or is
this not true? So just to claim that, you know, you don't like organized religions? I mean, you
know, there's lots of things we don't like, you know, but I'm not liking it has got nothing to do
whether with whether it's the truth or not. The only question is this. Did God revealed the Quran is
Mohammed, the Messenger of God? is Islam the way of life that God has ordained for human beings,
		
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			you've got a simple choice. You either follow that.
		
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			That's what you need to deal with? is Islam true or not? If you can prove to yourself in your heart
and your deepest heart of heart, and you can prove to me that it's not true, that sits between you
and God.
		
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			Right, but just to make claims like that is just nonsense. You just, you think a person who says
something like that just thinks they will. They're making their life easy. They want to, as we say,
you want to keep you want to eat the cake and keep the cake. You can't keep the cake and eat the
cake. Right? You know, the moment you take a bite of it, a piece of it is missing. Okay, that's it.
Yeah, you can't have both. You can't, you can't. So but people want that I believe in God am a good
person, they say, you know, whatever. Right? And that's it. They want to, they want to, they want to
have the advantages of believing in God, but they don't want to take any of the responsibility that
		
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			comes with it. And the responsibility that comes with believing in God is that you follow God's
commandments, you follow God's guidance, you follow the religion that God has revealed. The core
answers, show me any book that says, Do what you like, show me any book, any guidance from God that
says, Do what you like, it doesn't exist.
		
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			Okay. And if you think that's what religion is about, you just invent your own religion, you end up
just doing whatever you feel like. So the point is, is that, you know, there was a philosopher,
Roman philosopher, his name was Cicero, he said, that the only way to true freedom is by submitting
yourself to laws. It's only by submitting yourself to laws, that you're able to find true freedom,
because that's the nature of the human being, we are limited. And because we're limited, we need
structure. We need organization. We need rules, right? Imagine you said, and you live in a country
and you said, I don't believe in organized law, I don't believe in an organized country. I'm going
		
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			to take what I like and leave what I don't like, I'm going to do what I feel like and don't do what
I feel like imagine every day everyone I did that in America, you'd have chaos, right? Why is
religion any different? Why should it be any different than the way you live your life and in
respect to God? Why should it not be ordered? Why should it not be structured? Why should it not be
organized? You want to make a cake? Right? You have to put the ingredients in the right way in the
right order. If you don't put the ingredients in the right way in the right order. It doesn't work.
The cake doesn't rise, it doesn't taste right. And it's all lumpy. It's the recipe. So God has given
		
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			us a recipe for success. That is recipes from his perfect knowledge. He has given us laws, which we
live by and the truth is if we submit to the laws of
		
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			God, then we will find the true freedom. The true freedom comes from submitting oneself to God, not
by submitting yourself to your desires. And this is the thing people are, the devil has fool people
into thinking that you can do what you like, and you're free. No, that's not the case. Because
you're not free, you're only now a slave to your desires. It's only now your desires are telling you
do this and do that. Doing what you want means obeying my whims and my desires. So you become a
slave to your desires, and who is more astray than a person who is a slave to their passions and
their desires. Who is more straight, no one's more straight than that. Okay, so this claim that, you
		
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			know, I don't want to follow organized religion, bla bla, bla, bla, bla bla doesn't, there's no
logic in that. There's no rationale in that. It's just pure desires. That's all it is. And it will
lead nowhere and will never lead to any modicum of happiness or success in life. You got their
attention, male or female, and you know what, everything they're grasping is making sense. But they
got this misconception to hear some, some falsehood from the media, they're associating Islam with
some terrorism, they want to take the step, but you know what they think, Okay, I'm gonna become
like, this person who's in Afghanistan, or this person who's blowing something up, and they, what do
		
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			you have to say about this? Well, I could say 100 things about that. I mean, one of the things I
could say, imagine everyone judged Christianity by David coration. But, you know, the Seventh Day
Adventists, who followed him in that siege in Waco in Texas, or imagine everyone judged Christianity
by the Oklahoma Obama, who was a right wing christian fundamentalist? Imagine everyone judged
Christianity by Adolf Hitler, and said, Well, you know, imagine some people and whoever in the world
said, Oh, that's Europe, they're all Christians. And off Hitler, therefore, must be a Christian.
Therefore, that must be Christianity. I mean, no one with three brain cells would really come to a
		
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			conclusion like that, right, if you bothered to use them. So just looking at some things that some
Muslims do, and then coming to the conclusion that that is Islam is not
		
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			an intelligent way to behave. You can't judge Islam by what some Muslims do, or even to tell you the
truth, even by what Pete most people who call themselves Muslims are claimed to be Muslims do. Okay?
Islam says don't drink alcohol. If all Muslims you find them drinking alcohol. Do you blame Islam?
Do you say Oh, Islam is a religion that allows you to drink alcohol? How do you know I saw Muslims
drinking alcohol? Yeah, but the short answer is don't drink it. The Quran says don't kill women
don't kill children don't kill old people don't attack the civilians. This is what the prophet
Mohammed told us. Okay. Yes, the Quran does teach us about fighting. And there is a time and a place
		
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			to fight in defense of your land of your religion, whatever. But you never allows you to kill women
and children and civilians, for example. That's what Islam teaches. So an intelligent person rather,
would want to know, what does the religion teach? What did the prophet of Islam Mohammed, what did
he do? What did he say? You know, then you really know what Islam is. But you can't judge Islam by
Muslims, any more than Christianity could be judged by, you know, the Spanish Conquistadores or the
Spanish Inquisition, or Hitler or, or whatever. Okay. So I don't think that the judge is slammed by
those criteria, you know, is the right way to go at all. But just from another angle, I just want to
		
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			come at it from a totally different and I hope, I hope everyone listening is intelligent enough to
be able to understand what I'm trying to say here. Okay. Even if Islam said that you should go and
blow yourself up.
		
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			For the sake of God, even if I'm just it doesn't, but let's just say it did.
		
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			What does that got to do with whether it's true or false?
		
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			Because every Christian out there, and every Jew out there knows that God told Abraham to sacrifice
his son. What sort of religion is that what God tells a father to slaughter his own son, if you're
going to judge
		
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			Islam by that, which is not true anyway, but just say it was true, then you might as well forget
your own religion. Because in your own religion, Abraham's told by God to kill his own son. In fact,
according to Christianity, God kills his own son in order to forgive you for your sins. Right? So
whether it's Islam or Christianity or Judaism, the truth is a lot of killing going on because the
sad fact is, that's just the way the world is. But what are you fighting for? Are you fighting for
truth? Are you fighting for justice? Are you fighting for the right thing? you when you fight, do
you fight in the right way? Do you fight in the ethical way? Okay, this these are the real
		
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			questions.
		
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			So I mean, it was not my intention in any way, shape or form to try and justify terrorism. I'm not
it's not right. Okay. But I'm saying that even if that was the case, it still wouldn't have anything
to say about whether Islam is the truth or not. And that comes back full circle to where I began,
what everyone out there needs to investigate is the simple thing. is Islam the truth? Is it from
God? Did God reveal the end? is Mohammed the messenger, you can't pick on some things like, oh,
Mohammed married more than one woman. And you know, the end says this or, you know, some aspects of
morality, right? That's not the way to judge it. Is the Quran consistent? Does it agree with itself?
		
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			Doesn't it say things that no one could have known 1400 years ago, by way of science and history and
a whole range of subjects? Where did this information come from? How did Muhammad the Prophet
Mohammed know things that we're going to happen in the future and we see them taking place right now
today? Okay. I mean, there are so many things that we can look at, that could make any intelligent,
reasonable person know that the Quran is from God, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God. You
know what they gotten past all this, they see some of our shows, this person won the lotto lost
money, this person doesn't have peace, you know what he's ready to submit to the creator alone
		
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			without any partners, not his desires, not to a man, a monkey, a cow, any of these things. Tell them
what they need to do to get to paradise, to live this life that God wants them to live. The key to
Paradise is to testify and to bear witness, that there is truly nothing worthy of worship except for
one God, the Creator of all things, and to testify and bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger
of God in Arabic, they say the quote of the Shahada, I shall do and La ilaha illAllah. Wa, Shadow,
Mohammed and Abdullah surah when you say that you're a Muslim, that's a shadow in La ilaha illAllah
Muhammadan rasul Allah,
		
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			simple. That's done. And then from there, continue on, and then you do your best to worship God and
to pray and to fast and to live that life because that's what it is. Islam is that program, it's
that recipe. It teaches you how to live a life that is centered around god, it's centered around
goodness. And I want to emphasize that Islam is about goodness, it's about being good to other human
beings. It's about doing good. And that's that that's so important in Islam, not because your good
deeds get you to paradise you hear some people say all Muslims believe that you get to paradise
through you know, you get to paradise because God is merciful to you. But good deeds are evidence of
		
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			your of your faith. If you're really a faithful person, you will good deed do good deeds, and if you
do good deeds, it increases your faith and increases your closeness to God. So, you know, that's
where the proof is. It's in you personally. By doing good that's how you get close to God. So that's
what a person has to do once they become Muslim they say those simple words. Then it's just about
you know, walking the walk, you've talked the talk now live up to it live up to the action speak.
Yeah, the checks just suck. Hello, how to thank you very much for being with us on the D show.
Pleasure. And like to thank you for sitting through another episode of the deen show. You heard the
		
00:38:13 --> 00:38:33
			message. There's one god worship Him alone. That message has been the same since day one. All the
messenger brought the same way of life, submission and surrender to God alone and not his creation.
If you can dig this, then you can dig Islam. It's as simple as that. We'll see you again next time
on the deen show. Until then, I set out more local peace beyond to you.
		
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			There's only one Mohammed is His Messenger.
		
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			Jesus was his messenger.
		
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			There's only one Moses was his messenger.
		
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			There's only one