Why I Left Christianity Part 1

Chad

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How's everyone

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matter who wins Torino who wants to throw on all the villa human surely and fusina wanted to say it I'm Melina, my yellow fellow Manila, manual, Allah, Allah. Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah. Allah, Allah.

Muhammad Rasul Allah, Who am I that I want to get in straightaway to the story in Charlotte to Ireland, because it's somewhat long. And I'm happy to be back, I guess I think in Fulham by Margaret, so in Charlotte Island want you to get the whole story, so I'm just going to get directly into it.

As the brother introduced me, in sha Allah, Allah, maybe a little too too praiseworthy or hungry, Allah, may Allah make me better than people think I am.

My name is Lucia Evans.

My birth name is Joshua Evans. So when I came into Islam, I did not change my name. Yeshua is just the Arabic equivalent. After the Prophet you should have been known. And this is what my mother named me after Prophet Joshua from the Bible. So it's a good name, or hamdulillah. So I kept it.

I was born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, and I was raised by my grandparents. And my grandparents were very conservative Southern Christians in the South Carolina is the deep south. It's in definitely in the south, right, bordering Georgia and North Carolina. And then you have Mississippi. So you're talking about the deep south.

My grandparents weren't very political. But if they were, you could consider them right wing conservative. My grandfather was full blooded, Native American Indian from Cherokee tribe. And my grandmother was Irish, and my mother's parents were German, German immigrants. So this is somewhat of my background. And we are very religious. And we were very religious in the sense that we went to church on Sundays when to church Sunday evenings and when church on Wednesdays, and the pastor used to be at my house of our church many times, when my grandparents were ill, he used to visit us all the time. So we were extremely involved in the church.

I was involved in the church just through Sunday school as a kid, that's all I knew was went to Sunday school, and you learned about, you know, Noah, and the flood, and we learned about Moses and splitting the Red Sea. And you know, we learned about Moses in the children of Israel and Pharaoh and wandering in the desert and all this and that. We knew the story of David and Goliath. You know, the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, the story of Jesus feeding the 5000 fish in the loaves of bread. And this was the crux of everything that have no bar my religion growing up was what I learned in Sunday school. Because the regular church service which you went to after Sunday school was the most

boring thing I had ever been to in my entire life. Because in Methodist, denomination of Christianity, United Methodist, it's not like televangelism like you see jumping and shouting and screaming, and none. There's none of that. You listen to the pastor, and then you stand up and you sing a song, you sit down, you listen, you stand up, you sing the song, you sound you listen, you stand up and sing the song. That's that's how I win.

So this was my upbringing. very conservative. My grandparents. My grandfather was like the patriarch of the family, he had extreme conservative values. And he didn't play games. He told me, he's the kind of person I was raised with the ideology that I, when you're told wants to do something, that's your only chance. The second time you learn, you learn the hard way. You don't repeat mistakes more than twice usually. So I had this type of conservative, you know, tough upbringing.

All of this began to change as far as my religion and etc. When I was 14 years old. When I was 14, I was invited by my neighbor across the street, who was the youth pastor at the church. And when I became 14, I was able to go to the youth serve youth service on Saturday evenings, you had to be 14 above. So when I started to go to the Saturday evening Youth Services, we played volleyball, we played basketball, we played dodgeball, we played everything you can think of. And we ate, we ate pizza and cake and all that stuff that you know, kids like, and then at the end, the youth pastor would give us a 30 minute sermon or lecture on religion, God being close to God, you know, etc, etc,

etc, you know, abstinence and staying away from all the evils that then young people fall into.

And this I liked, I enjoyed this. And not only that I enjoyed because I was able to

be around my peers and my friends, and my circle of friends, but also my friend Benjamin, who was the youth pastor was very good.

talking to us and our language. You know, he was, at that time he was a junior in high school, he was able to talk to us in our language relate to us. But yet he was very strong in his biblical principles, he would always be coming from the Bible with what he talked about. So that to me was very influential upon me. So, at this point, when I became more interested, when I started high school at the age of 15, I started to ride to school with Benjamin, who at that time was a senior, which is a prestigious thing for a senior to ride for freshmen to ride to school with a senior period, from not only that he was the class president, and he was very well respected in the school.

And when I started becoming more friends with him, our friendship started to build, he started to invited me to invite me not only to the Saturday night Youth Services, but also a lot of other services that were going on throughout the Upstate of South Carolina in the Piedmont area of North Carolina, which is a organization called young life. Young Life is a conglomerate of youth who organize events, who organize services, who organized camping events, etc, etc, etc, for Christians, and it's all run and organized by the youth. And the people who were pastoring through young life are all people who were in our age range, they were all people who were very motivated, they spoke

very

eloquently based on what I thought at the time was strong biblical principles. And they weren't like the Methodist boring services that I went to growing up, these were more evangelical holiness, Pentecostal type of services where there was, you know, a lot of raising of the voice, a lot of screaming, a lot of, you know, the straight up, if you don't believe in Jesus, you're gonna burn in hell believing in the Trinity, they, you know, Jesus God, God is God, the Holy Spirit is God, the only way to be saved is to believe in that in for the Holy Spirit to live inside of you, etc, speaking in tongues, laying on hands and healing people, you know, I mean, this was the real deal,

you know, real deal here. And that was very interesting to me, because it's,

I mean, it was action. And I mean, when you're 15 years old, you know, I mean, that's action, especially, you know, being the fact that it was based on biblical principles. This is how it's being portrayed to me. So at this moment in my life, I became emotionally attached to Christianity. And I, I like to describe it as emotionally detached, because this is the beginnings of going astray of all human beings, is their emotions. I became emotionally attached to Christianity so much, that later on some of the things that I should have seen before I saw them,

I did not see because of my emotions, emotion, someone can be so emotionally attached to something that they can blind themselves to all the negative aspects of that that thing. This is why people ask me, How can Christians read the Bible, see all of these things that you see, read all of these things that you have read, but don't don't see what you see, I say because they're emotionally attached. And when you're so emotionally attached to something, it blinds you, it will blind you to everything. And that's the same with any negative thing where if you can emotionally attach yourself to something, you blind yourself to everything else. For instance, a boy who gets involved in an

illicit relationship with a girl, once he becomes emotionally attached, he's gone, man, you know, most of the times you're gone, you don't care how bad that relationship may be for you. You don't care how sinful it may be, you don't care how bad this woman may be in and of herself or the woman for the men flip side. When you become emotionally attached you you don't see that. You don't see that until the emotions are gone. And then you're left with a reality. The same way with a drug addict, someone who was addicted to drugs, they're so emotionally attached and dependent upon these drugs, that they don't see the negative effects, even though they know the negative effects. It does

not affect them, because their emotions will override that your emotions, when you let them get too far gone will override your thinking every day of the week, every day of the week. If you don't keep your emotions in check, they will override you. So I was emotionally involved. And of course, I this is something I know now for a fact, because I am a student of psychology and have been for about the past seven years.

So I was emotionally attached at this time and I fell in love with my religion.

And I knew what I wanted to do, I started to understand what I wanted to be in my life because I was looking up to these young men, they're all going off to Bible College. Some of them were, you know, going off to moody Institute in Chicago. Some of them were even going off to Princeton

seminary school, and my friend Benjamin who was my you know, my,

I guess you can say my role model. You know, he's someone I looked up to I was as apprentice I wanted to be like him.

When he graduated, I became a sophomore he graduated he started to attend Bob Jones University in in my hometown. Now, my hometown is not that big, but Bob Jones universe.

is a university there's no nationwide and worldwide to Christians, Bob Jones is one of the most ultra conservative, biblical based universities in the United States of America. It's so conservative. Even when it comes to gender relations, there are men and women don't sit with each other in class, the dormitories on the other side of the campus, you don't get caught with a woman that's not your wife alone, at night, and theano, etc, etc, etc. It was very, very, very, very conservative. And his major was textual criticism is what he wanted to focus on along with his other theological studies, he wanted to major in textual criticism. Now, Textual Criticism would take

another lecture that would keep us going just to explain to you what textual criticism is. But to give you the kind of nutshell, a textual critic takes all of the documents that we have left of what is now known as the Bible. And his focus was in the New Testament. So a textual critic has to take all of the documents of what we now know as the Bible, and try to decipher those documents to obtain the most original form of what may existed of the book. And this is difficult for many reasons. The first reason is that all of these documents are written in languages, that some of them don't really even exist anymore. And they're in that form. And the ones that do exist don't exist in that form.

You got to learn the textual critic, especially dealing with the New Testament, first of all has to learn ancient Greek, which is not exactly the same as the Greek that is spoken. Now. It's it's similar. But syntax is quite different. There's a lot of things that are different. He also has to learn at a maic, which is a language that very few people in the world still speak I was even watching today, there's a city, I think it's called mala, mala, or something like that, in Syria is one of the very few places where this language is still existing in the world, he has to learn ancient Hebrew, Semitic Hebrew, which is not the same as you see spoken Hebrew today. This is the

Hebrew this using the synagogues. Also Latin old land

has to be learned as well, because this is where you find some of these documents most of these documents in. And then after he learns those languages, he has the task of sorting through 1000s, and 1000s, and 10s, and 10s and 10s, of 1000s of documents of the same book, and trying and the problem with that is that 95% of them do not agree with each other. The majority of the documents that we have left of the New Testament, do not agree with each other, they say different things. Not only that, but there's no originals to check. There are no originals left for us to check and see, okay, what was the original book? What did the original author originally say, there's not even any

really second copies, or third copies or fourth copies most, most of the time, we the best thing we have is something that traces a few 100 years after the original was wrote. So you have, you know, some substantial gap here. And these books, all written in different languages, some of the oldest existing books that we have of a certain, let's say, Matthew, so you have the book of Matthew, there might be 1000 different variations of the book of Matthew that we have now. And they're in they're in all different languages. And it might be that the oldest one we have is not even written in Greek might not even be written in the original language that Matthew may or whoever wrote Matthew, which

was not Matthew, would have spoken, it might be in Latin.

So this is what a textual critic has to do. He has to decipher all of this craziness to try to piece together, not what the original book said, because you cannot do that. If there's no original, you'd never know. But they tried to find out what was the author originally trying to convey in the message of the book that they wrote. And that's very difficult. That's why when you look at the Bible today, it has so many problems because of this methodology that was going through to bring these books about.

So this was his field of study, and as being his apprentice as being his understudy, I guess you can stay. You say, as my sophomore year of high school, I decided to enroll in Bob Jones University. It's a long waiting list, small school. And I wanted to be a textual critic. This is what I wanted to do. I wanted to study Textual Criticism at the age of 16. If you had asked me, What do you want to do the rest of your life? What do you want to be when you grow up? You know, they always ask you that in school, what do you want to be when you grow up? I said, Well, there's a few things. I wanted to be a pastor, ordained minister in the in the church. I wanted to be a missionary. I wanted

to be a Bible scholar, because I wanted to be someone who preached the gospel of Jesus Christ, not only from from rhetoric, but I wanted to know what I was talking about. When I told you a verse in the Bible. I wanted to break it down to you on the most miniscule of levels, so that I knew what I was talking about. I wanted to be rooted and grounded in my faith. So this was my life goal was to work for the gospel to work in the church. This is what I was going to do with my life figured out. And probably they probably played baseball in college, because I had been playing baseball all of my life. And, you know, I guess I was given a natural talent at baseball because in my sophomore year,

I was promised that if I graduated with a 3.0, I had a full four year scholarship to Clemson

University, which I was going to go play baseball for them and still attend Bob Jones, I was going to work it out. You know, as they say, with God, all things are possible in the Bible, whatever.

All of this changed in the summer of 1996. In the summer of 1996, my friend Benjamin came to me. And he asked me a simple question that that led to a not so simple thought process for me. He asked me, have you ever read the Bible? I'm like, man, why are you even this this? You know, kind of silly question. Oh, and I've left out right before this point, that at the age of 16. My friend Benjamin was very involved in his studies. So he went from being the full time youth minister our church to kind of part time, and I started becoming the youth minister, our church during the Saturday evening services. And I also started filling in for him at a lot of young life services. And I guess, you

know, they say, some people are

blessed with the gift of the gab, as they say, you know, they they got a good talk or whatever. People liked what I said. So they started inviting me to other things. So I became very involved in doing some preaching already. He came and asked me, have you ever read the Bible? I'm like, kind of silly question is that, you know, I'm doing your job. If I don't remember if I if I recall, right now I'm picking up your slack and doing your job. And you asked me if I've read the Bible, what kind of silly question is that?

And I'm like, What do you mean, have I read the Bible? He said, you know what I mean? I'm like, No, I don't. He said, If I asked you if you've ever read Stephen King's new novel, have you read Stephen King's latest novel? You know what I mean? You have read the book from beginning to end. You know, how it begins, you know, how it ends, you know, the storyline, you know, the primary characters, you know, the major incidences that happen, and you know, the plot, and you know, the purpose, you know, what the author was thinking when he wrote the book with Stephen King, that might be a trick because half of us never know what Stephen King is thinking when he writes anything, but you understand what

I'm getting at.

I was like, you know, I don't know anyone, I have never met anyone who has read the Bible like this, and can do this breakdown of summary for you. Maybe our pastor could, but I didn't want to put him on the spot. Because I didn't think there was many people read the Bible, because the Bible is unlike the Quran. The Quran is a very fluid read. And you know, it's very easy. It's more of an easy read the Bible because of its how its came together, and it's all this mumbo jumbo, it's a difficult read, you know, sometimes it is just a read that will put you to sleep. And it's a big book, you know, you're talking about a huge book. So I've never read it in that way. And it's very, very

difficult to read it beginning to end like that. So he told me,

how is it that we can run around telling people we're preaching them the gospel? We're teaching them the good news. We're telling them that the Bible is the acronyms bi bl E, meaning basic instructions before leaving earth. And yet we don't know the book like that. We can't tell what how it begins and how it ends in the middle and all the the the characters and the plot and the storyline, etc, etc. What would you know, what, what good are we? I said, You're right, he said, so let's take the summer of 1996, and read the Bible beginning to end open at Genesis one, one and read it to Revelation.

And he said, let us see what God says to us. Forget about everything else, forget about all the stuff that you know, and see what God says to you. Because we both believe that we had the Holy Spirit living inside of us, which was part of the Trinity. We had part of God living inside of the land. But this is the belief. So therefore, God's word should be able to speak to us through the Holy Spirit, which God has given us as a gift for believing in Jesus Christ.

I said, that's, to me, I took the challenge, because that was an amazing challenge to me being that this is what I want to do with my life. So this seemed like a good place to begin to be able to say that when I was 16 years old, you know, as a young lad, I went through the whole Bible and did this kind of study this how I began, my ministry seemed like a very good place to start. So I took up the challenge, and I started to read the Bible beginning to end. There's a lot of things that happen too much for me too. I'm too many things for me to give you all of them in the time that we have. For those of you who want to have all of them, they're going to be some materials outside where you can

see all of the stuff that went through.

I'll just give you the major points. The biggest thing for me the biggest hang up for me in the Old Testament, I'm gonna have to split the Bible because the Bible split into Old and New Testament, the Old Testament, the biggest problem with me and the thing that began my dissension from Christianity and ascension to Islam, was the stories of the prophets. This was my hang up, because all of my life, I had this vision of my mind when I thought about no one when I thought about Moses, when I thought about David, when I thought about Solomon, when I thought about all these prophets, was that these were amazing people. These were people who were the best people. They were the best of

creation. They had to be their God's prophets. They were the people who guided us to how to live a right life before God and they were the best human beings that ever lived.

amazing people this is this is my thought process, not only from what I learned in Sunday school, but this is just the default process when you think prophets.

As I began to read the Bible, I began to see that this is not really the way it is, in the Bible.

One of the first stories that I got to was the story of Noah, on La said in, in the Bible, it says the Noah, preach for night over 1000, almost 1000 years 900 plus 50. over almost 1000 years, Noah preached to come back to God, the oneness of God. And we know that this is one of the first patriarchal messengers was no was no one because between the time of Adam and he sent him as a Muslim, we know this now, it's not clear in the Bible from the time of Eid MLA cinammon time of No, they were just Muslims. There was no people were the first ones to create deviations and began to do shark shark came up with the people of No.

So Noah wrangled with these people for not 1000 years, and God decided that it was time to wipe away this creation that he created and begin it again. Except for those who believe that Noah, they would be saved because he commanded Noah to build a boat, a big boat, and to save what is good if humanity in this boat, and he was going to destroy everything else.

This is this totally agrees with this land, all of these points. There is another story about Noah, this not so prestigious, there's not so praiseworthy, that's not really even worth anything. And the Old English in the Old English, which is what I was reading from the King James Version, that was it. That was the that was the standard version. I was reading from the King James version, which is written in Old English from the Anglo Saxon.

It says that Noah was a drunkard. This is the word that is used. And I think that word is still used here in the UK, and we don't use them the states anymore. We use alcoholic, but no was a drunken No, it was an alcoholic, as a description in the Old Testament of knowing that he was someone who was given to alcohol, he would be passed out sometimes in the Old Testament and in it'll be passed out and God was somewhat have to kind of shake him to wake him up like no, look, man, you think I'm playing games, you're laying here drunk to destroy everything. You know, you need to get on this art, you know, of course, there's my emphasis added.

But that caught my attention because I thought to myself, wow, no one was an alcoholic. Hmm.

And I know from experience, I have seen the effects of alcohol, how it's destroyed someone's life that is very close to me. And I seen it, but it's not something I just read, I have seen firsthand in my life, and even at that time, how alcohol can destroy, utterly destroy someone's life. And

now I know for sure, as a psychologist or trying to be a psychologist, firebrick, and get out of college when I was traveling around the world.

My field of focus is mental illness. And I know for sure that alcoholism is a mental illness and a mental defect even though it's not classified as one because someone is doing it willingly, you cannot be classified as a defect according to the law. But according to reality, it is a mental defect and is a mental disease. Someone given to alcohol, an alcoholic can barely hold down a proper social life, they can barely live a normal functional life, they cannot hold down a job. alcoholism is actually one of the major roots of new all the illnesses that the so societies of the world suffer from, believe it or not, alcoholism leads to

homelessness, alcoholism leads to disease, alcoholism leads to suicide, alcoholism leads to broken families, and leads for spouses to abuse each other for children to get abused. Alcohol, lism leads to

gambling and all other types of illnesses can be traced their route back to alcohol. So I knew that alcohol was a very, very bad thing. And here we have one of God's profits. One of his early profits is an alcoholic.

It's not good. To me, that's not good. And I thought to myself, and kind of a way to relieve myself of the shock of what I was seeing. I said to myself, you know what? Now I know why no one listened to Noah. Noah was an alcoholic. He was a drunken when people don't listen to drunkards. If you see a guy out here in in, in the city center, and he's drinking all day and urinating on himself in the night, and you know, he's running around asking people for money on you know, the alcoholics, I don't have to describe them. And the next day you see him, he's standing on this same bench telling you that God has chosen as a prophet, and he's going to destroy humanity. And the only way you're

going to be saved is that if you come I'm going to build this big boat and in London Stadium, and if you get on this boat, then you'll be saved.

Are you going to be destroyed? How many of you are getting on the boat?

Nobody? Come on. Realistically, nobody's gonna be like, Man, you need some help, says you need to put that bottle down. You know, nobody's gonna listen to this man, you know. So I said, Maybe that's why no one listened to know he was an alcoholic, you know, maybe if you put down the bottle more people to listen. But this

this really caught my attention because this is not good. I was having trouble wrangling the two that no one could be a profit alcoholic.

So I continued to read while this was in the back of my mind.

And I got to the story of a lot. Or a I said then, all of a sudden, oh, look

at the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, where he destroyed the citizens of Sodom Gomorrah for the homosexuality and the abuse of the profits. And and this is in the Bible, this story is in the Bible. There's another story about lot. Not so prestigious. And honestly, for the sake that we have young children, I have to find a way to tone it down. Because it's not even pG 13 seriously isn't I would say you need an ID to listen to the story in its full full context. It means show me some ID.

It says that a lot was an old men, and he had no son. He had no sons. So he had no one to continue his lineage. his two daughters worried about this, his two daughters were worried that their father was going to die without a seed without a someone to carry on his lineage. So they decided to fix the problem themselves. And the way they decided to fix the problem was they got him intoxicated. One night, they got him intoxicated, and the oldest daughter slept with him so that she could become pregnant by him. The next night, they got him intoxicated, and the youngest daughter slept with him so that she could become pregnant so that there would be a chance one of them would have a son to

continue his lineage.

And now I'm like, wow, you know, this is getting out of hand. You know? I mean, now we have a prophet who's an alcoholic. And now you have another prophet, who's committing incest with his daughters sleeping with his daughters

is getting worse by the prophet. You know, I mean, this is what I'm looking at is getting worse by the prophet but this now not only is it perplexing me and it's starting to affect me inside. It's intriguing me, I want to know more now I want to start reading more profits.

What else did these profits do? So I'm reading I'm reading I'm reading there's more things. for time sake, I'm gonna get to the two major ones.

The the ones that you can say, you know, broke the straw that broke the camel's back.

The first one was, I got the story of Solomon, also a man Allah He said in Solomon in the Bible is known as the greatest, one of the greatest kings of Israel. He's the one who established the Temple Mount to establish the temple Solomon, which is

what the Jews are trying to destroy the Master eudoxa for now to rebuild that very same temple.

And Solomon did major things he's the one who built the temple and and and established the Ark of the Covenant in there that was held the commandments in the staff of Moses stuff like that. That's what they say they're looking for why they're trying to dig match it officer from under.

But the parallel story about Noah,

I mean about Solomon, is quite, quite, quite quite, quite less prestigious. Solomon is attributed in the old testament to having fallen back from his faith and worship idols, committed shirk, worship sticks and rocks and stones and statues, he worship idols.

This is the Prophet Solomon in the Bible.

Now Allah subhana wa Allah does make mention of this in the Quran, where he freeze and clear Solomon of this charge where this the ayah we know where is Allah Subhana with Allah says it was not Suleyman, who just believed, but it was the shayateen who did this believe. So Allah clears that right away. But this is the the Solomon of the Old Testament that he did, but he came back and repented and get straight. But for a while he was committing idolatry he was committing shirk the unforgivable sin.

This is a big problem. And you know, we have this is getting out of hand. And then right after that you have the story that really did it for me, was the story of David, or the story of Buddha he said, and

how many of you know the story that would come in everybody? hands? The story of David Wedgwood, David and Goliath, one of the most beautiful stories in the Bible.

One way, it's a beautiful story, if you if

there's some say that, but even if you look at the story in the Bible,

the discourse that happens between David and Goliath is so beautiful man, David just shuts them down. You know, I mean, they, you should go read it. I wouldn't say read all the Bible if you want to read a story. This is the story. You know, when when, when when Goliath is laughing at David and they

It really tells them what to watch for,

and then kills them.

And this is when David was a young boy as a teenager, a little kid. But there is a parallel story about David in the Bible that is not as prestigious. It is nowhere near as prestigious as the story of David and Goliath. And that is the story of David and Bathsheba. David and Bathsheba. Bathsheba was a woman who was known for her beauty. And this time, she was known as one of the most beautiful women of her age. And David saw her one day on her porch, and decided that this woman was so beautiful, he could not resist himself, and he had to have her and he had to sleep with her. And he did. He slept with her that day.

The only problem with this is that she's married. She's married to a man named Uriah who happens to be one of the commanders of his army.

So David has just committed adultery, a sin worthy of death in Judaic law.

And David decides not to repent to God and seek forgiveness. And now he decides to fix the problem. How does he fix the problem? He writes a letter and sends it to his army. And the letter says that whenever the battle becomes fierce, because the armies are fighting the turn of Israel, fighting the armies of Philistine in this time, and Philistine, he said, whenever the battle becomes fierce, abandon Uriah, leave him by himself. Why, so he killed so they left Uriah, he was killed. Now David is able to have Bathsheba and nobody can say a word about it.

So David just committed adultery, followed by conspiracy to commit murder.

And in Islam is just is murder. There's no such thing as conspiracy to commit murder in Islam, you plan the murder, you guilty, you, you're the one who did the murder you guilty is all murder. So now we have profits. And this is why I said enough is enough. This is quite enough. Because now the profits that I thought all my life with the best of people are now the worst of people. I thought they were the guidance for humanity and come to find out they're alcoholics, they commit incense with their daughters, they commit idol worship, they commit adultery, and they commit murder.

These are the worst of the worst of people. These are people who you would see on, you know, the show here cops with criminals or nightwatch crime, you know, crime nightwatch, or whatever the show is. This is what you see these kind of individuals, or in this in the states America's Most Wanted, you know, john Walsh will be after these these dudes right here, you know, they would have rewards out for them, or they will be in jail for the rest of their lives for these incidences. So how now can I look at these people and think that they are prophets, when now they have lost all of their credibility? They have no credibility, to tell me anything about God, you are some of the worst

criminals against God's law. Not only that, but they are so untrustworthy, I would not leave my children alone with him. I would not let David babysit my son.

I would not for sure, let law anywhere near my daughter. He came around my daughter, I'm beating him down the street.

I'm gonna put him in the hospital, man. Seriously. These are the people that you have in the Old Testament as prophets. So I'm saying to myself,

there has to be a problem here with something, either there's a problem and, and I'm, I knew when I thought this to myself, I was heading down a bad rule. Because I said either there's something wrong with these profits. There's something wrong with this book. Or there's something wrong with God's judgment on the belief. But I said it has to be one of these three things. Because if these stories are true, then how does God pick his profits? If these stories are false, then what's up with this book that I have all my life believed was the inerrant Word of God, which means the Word of God without error. So I began to commit the cardinal sin in Christianity and I started to ask too many

questions. This is sin number one, Christianity. You can believe whatever you want to believe. Don't ask too many questions.

So I began to ask questions. I asked my pastors, I asked them youth pastors, I asked a couple more people I even got the chance to ask one of our best friends in the States. The evangelists Benny Hinn, how many of you know Benny Hinn well loved by the Muslims and we love him. No, that's that's sarcasm. We don't like him he doesn't like us. You don't get no no Benny Hinman, the televangelists from from from Ramallah who speaks the Arabic and tries to you know debate with the Muslims from Iran from the Arabic He can say the Quran unquote and all this and that

man was virtually the guide him or destroy him.

But they all told me the same thing.

And they they all kind of told me the same thing that

don't let a little

bit of knowledge, right your faith. Don't let a little bit of knowledge that you've now gained wreck your faith because we are not justified in Christianity by knowledge, you are justified by faith. And this is the teaching of Paul the apostle, that it is faith in Jesus Christ which justifies us unto salvation. This is justification. And this is actually Paul's whole mission in his life is to prove that justification came through faith and not the law, that knowledge and following the law and all this other stuff does not bring one onto justification, what brings one under justification, and salvation is your faith in Jesus Christ.

So do not let a little bit of knowledge wreck your faith. That wasn't really an answer. That's more of a diversion, which if you will ever notice if you debate with Christians, they have a lot of diversions. They don't really give you answers. They give you diversions. This is their, this is their trick. This is how they do it. This is how they're taught. They give you diversions. You ask one thing they answer another thing.

So I said to him, yeah, but this still does not make sense. This is not making sense to me. He says since does not lead you to justification again, your reason because and then he quoted me Proverbs, lean not unto thine own understanding.

So he told me that number two, you're dealing with the Old Testament, who is God's, which is God's covenant with the children of Israel, and he had a special covenant that he dealt with them, they had their own issues, they were crazy, they were rebellious. So it was different how God dealt with them. If you want to know about the reality of God and His nature and Christ and justification and salvation, you need to go to the New Testament, because we have now passed over from the Old Covenant, and God's way of dealing with people has now entered into the new covenant and is entered into the new way of dealing with things. So I asked them So you mean that the method has changed

from the way God dealt with people in the Old Testament? And the way he deals with people now? He said, Yes. I told him, I said, but this is against God's own teachings of himself, his nature, he doesn't change. The God of the Old Testament does not change, actually. And I told him, actually, this weekend, man, actually, I said, the final book of the Old Testament malikai, because I finished the Old Testament before I started asking these questions, which was not far beyond where I was at Molokai, the book of Molokai, which is the departing book of the Old Testament, one of the last verses of the book of Molokai says, and this is supposed to be God speaking, it says, I do not

change. Therefore, the sons of Jacob are not consumed. Basically layman's terms, God says, because I made a club covenant with you that I would not destroy you. And I don't change my mind. I'm not someone who changes from day to day, I do not change. And that is the reason you have not destroyed you. Basically, he's warning the children of Israel, that you better be lucky with all of your rebelliousness, that I don't change my mind. Because if I could destroy anyone, it would be you. If I could change my mind on anything, it would be you and I would destroy you. He said, but because I do not change this the reason the sons of Jacob are not consumed, he may curse them. But he did not

destroy them and wipe them off the earth.

So I told him, God doesn't change. He said, Look, you're going down a road that's going to lead you to destruction. You need to go and focus on the New Testament. If you want to focus on somebody, focus on Jesus. David can't lead you to salvation, Moses, Abraham, lat. All these people you're telling me about, they cannot lead you to salvation. Only Jesus Christ can lead you to salvation. I was like they didn't know Jesus. But I didn't say that. I was like, if only Jesus can happen all those people, they didn't know Jesus. Anyway. So I decided to go read the New Testament, I decided to do what he said, because I did not want to lose my faith in Christianity. This is all I knew.

You're talking about a boy who has his whole life figured out. And now there are cracks in the foundation. The cracks are starting to show in the Foundation, and the water is starting to leak through at this point. So I wanted to fix them up and patch them up.

So I began to read the New Testament. But before I did, there were things from the Old Testament that I did know without a shadow of a doubt. These were clear, even those things I didn't understand these were clear. The number one overwhelming fact of the Old Testament, that is reiterated more times that can be counted is that God is one. This is very clear in the Old Testament God is one in the most unique of senses. He is one. Number two, God is unseen. This is the belief of the Old Testament. This is the descriptions of God about himself that you cannot see me. You cannot understand me. You cannot compare me to anything. You cannot know me except for that which I let you

know about me. This is it.

Even when Moses wanted to know God, he said, Who are you God, he said, just know that I am, that I am. That's it, I am gone. That's all you need to know. And whatever else I will give you. And we know the story about when Moses asked to see God in the Old Testament, which is also in the Koran, but also very clear from the Old Testament, that salvation, justification, whatever you want to call it, if you want it to go to heaven. It was only by one way, worshiping God and following his law. That's it, you worship God, and you follow his law. And then when you make a mistake, you become remorseful for that mistake, and you repent to God. And there was different ways of repentance and

Old Testament, you repented. And then you also weren't, you know, people made, made altars, and then did sacrifices, you know, to show themselves that they were repentance, God, we still uphold that tradition of sacrifice, but not in that sense, the way the Jews had to Jews does. This is how God made it for them. He made things so strict for them that just if they wanted to make tau, but they needed to build this, the altar thing, get an animal sacrifice it, you know, burn it in, you know, they had to do all this crazy stuff, just because this is what God made it for them, because of their rebelliousness, that this was salvation. And actually, if you read the first, how many of

you've heard of the 10 commandments? Yeah, I'll be sharing the 10 commandments men, Law of Moses.

Amen. Oh, what was the first commandment,

thou shalt worship no God, but me. There's different translations. A lot of times, you'll see that thou shall have no other God before me, or thou shall have no other God beside me. This is not really the correct connotation of the the phrase that is used here. What is used here in the Old Testament, is God is saying to the turn of Israel, that you should not make anything equal to me, is what he's saying, you should not have any other God along with me, meaning you don't make anything equal to me. You do not give what is belonging to me, meaning worship, meaning sacrifice, all of those things that you give to me, you don't give it to anything else, it belongs to me alone. And

this is what we say when we say $100 bill, I mean, and a lot a lot, that there is nothing worthy of given that you've added to accept a law. This is the same phrase that is found in the first and greatest commandment of the law of Moses.

So I knew these things, and I'm going to read the New Testament. And now I want to see, what does Jesus say? What does Jesus do? How does he live his life? How does he go about doing the things that he does? And without going into all the other issues of the New Testament that there's so many that you could do two years worth of college study on the problems that the New Testament has, beginning with the fact that we don't know who wrote

any of the four gospels about Jesus Christ, we have no idea who wrote them.

I don't care what people try to tell, you know, for sure, without a doubt, it can be verifiably proven that we don't not know we do not know who wrote them. And there are no originals exist. And there's so many contradictions. This is the biggest problem with Christians is the how they read the book is the biggest problem Christians have how they read the book, because the Christian will tell you in some of you may have heard that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and john are all the same story told from four different people, it's just different versions of the same story. You know, somebody sees a little bit different instance. And, you know, if you ask for it, they'll tell you this, if you ask

for people to describe to you one thing, they'll tell you something a little bit different about it. This was the Old Testament, and wrong. This is not, there's not it when you study the New Testament, the way it's supposed to be studied, you come to the realization that it's four completely different stories told by four completely different people who saw and thought completely differently about Jesus. And and many times those books not only differ with each other, but sometimes are in direct contradiction with each other. And that they all mean something different. And little do Christians know I even tried to tell Christians, that you believe salvation lies and all this and that when the

book of Luke, the book of Luke, who also wrote the book of Acts, does not even believe that Jesus's crucifixion meant salvation. This is quite interesting. They'll be shocked. Like you're crazy. Go read it. That's all I tell them. Go read it. Just go read Luke by itself and then read x. Jesus crucifixion was not a mean to salvation to the author of Luke and x. It was a means to repent to God and then obtain salvation from that God. So. But anyway, I started to study Jesus life. I didn't know all of this. At that point. I'm just studying Jesus life.

And what I come to find out was Jesus, I wanted to know what did he teach about God? What do you think Jesus in the New Testament teaches about God? He teaches that God is one. When he was asked about the commandments, which commandment is the greatest commandment he said, Well, the first commandment is to Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. And the next commandment, the greatest commandments are to, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength, and then to love your neighbor as you love yourself. The rest hang on these two. So he said that the law lied in two basic principles. God is one first, and that the two principles

were that you give God he

rights. You give him your worship you give him your heart, you worship him sincerely, that's his rights. And then you give the rights to the creation which is how you treat them as you would want them to treat you this to any Muslim they should not be unfamiliar. We have the rights of the Creator, and we have the rights of the creation. And this as the everything else is is revolving around these two basic fundamental principles. So this what Jesus taught