Tom Facchine – Fascinated by Islam

			A lot of people though in the West, they can tell that something's not quite right. They can feel
that something's off, they look around, they see people are depressed people are fractured both on
an individual level and on a collective level families are falling apart, not things beyond just the
economy, we're talking about the spirit of a people, right. And for a lot of people, they believed
so much in progress, that for a long time, they thought that the material progress that we were all
experiencing, we've got the internet, we've got this, we've got that we've got, you know, a level of
material comfort that no civilization has known, right. And it was tempting to believe that all this
		

			material comfort and all this material, quote, unquote, progress was also being accompanied by moral
progress at the same time, because we saw that these liberties were being watched, and those
liberties are being watched. And we, you know, we ended slavery, and then we extended the right to
vote and all these sorts of things. And of course, there were victories. It's not to say there
weren't victories. But the idea and the belief that a lot of people are starting to wake up to is
that maybe we're not just making progress, maybe we're going backwards in a lot of ways. Maybe, yes,
we have made some really, really important victories. And maybe some things have progressed, like
		

			with racial relations, and you know, some sorts of rights or things like this, but maybe still, at
the same time, something is fundamentally wrong with our society. And then you get all these
different people and they look to Islam, or they find something out about Islam, they're like, Hmm,
like, that's weird. But maybe it kind of sounds nice to go back to an older way of being the
original teachings, right, an older way of doing things where families used to be home, where
respect was hat, where freedom wasn't just the ability to do whatever you wanted, but freedom was
having virtues and having morals and having character, right. And people, a lot of people are
		

			starting to wake up to that they're realizing that the freedom that they were promised, or at least
let's say, some of the freedoms that they were promised, are actually a cage. They're not the
freedom that they thought it was the freedom to be able to have any substance, whenever you want to
have any sort of sexual experience whenever you want to be able to choose any sort of materialistic
pleasure or comfort or luxury whenever you want those sorts of things. And we thought that life was
getting better. And a lot of people are realizing that maybe that's not what life's about, maybe
that's actually making our lives worse. And maybe there's an answer out there somewhere, to bring it
		

			back to equilibrium, and where the human soul and where societal progress should be. Because we
accept cause and effect when it comes to the material world, right? We throw something up, we know
it's gonna come down. We push on something, we expect it to move, we lift something, we expect to
eventually get tired. But we have this whole disconnect when it comes to our spirit, or morality, or
moral choices. We can we think we think this day and age that we can choose literally whatever, and
it's not going to have any sort of consequence. And then we look around and we're not happy and
we're not satisfied, and the environment is getting destroyed. We're driving the world to
		

			extinction. And we're looking for this solutions and all the wrong places. You don't think these
things have consequences. Islam teaches that these things have consequences, just as there are
consequences to the materialistic decisions you make or the materialistic forces that you employ.
There are spiritual consequences. There are moral, unseen consequences to the decisions that you
make. And I think more and more people as we keep on progressing throughout history. If there is
such a thing as progress, I think more and more people are going to wake up to that reality. And a
lot of people have already started searching, they can feel they can sense that something's wrong,
		

			and they're looking for another way. Well, maybe Islam was that other way.