 In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, the Most Merciful. Dear respected viewers, thank you for joining me once more on this, your show, Back to the Basics. I am your host, Yahya Seymour, and of course we are live from the holy city of Karbala. It's my honour to be joining you once more, and insha'Allah to Allah, we will be moving on to a topic of, dare I say, it's been one of an interest of mine, particularly in previous years, of course. Sometimes like most other things, once you kind of exhaust a topic beyond your natural limits of interest, you pay to give it the attention that maybe you once did. And that's certainly how I find myself in this particular case. Of course, over the past few episodes, or rather the past two episodes, I briefly discussed deism. And because deism just fails as even competing as a worldview, in that it's essentially atheism with a little sly trick up its sleeve of claiming that, well, I believe in a God and therefore I can ground everything. Well, not really, because when you claim that there's a God who isn't concerned with the affairs of humanity, who has no relationship with human beings, then again, you strip life of all purpose and the same problems that we saw with atheism would apply to deism too. Namely, the lack of free will, the lack of objective morality and what have you. And of course, you can refer back to those two previous episodes in order to know that. But in summary of that too, deism was a whole project which claimed it was based upon what we can know via reason alone. What we can know via reason alone about the creator of this universe. Now, the problem with that is it goes against the very claim it's trying to set up, because if we can only know things by reason, where does reason tell you that the God of the universe is deistic? It does not. So the very canon of evidence you've set up fails you and it fails to reach that very assumption which you begin with. Now that is not to say that any other religion might even be better at demonstrating using reason all of its claims. But at the same time, we would say that other religions don't limit their canon of evidence, their sources of evidence, their sources of knowledge to merely human reason. There are other religions which allow human reason to work hand in hand with the sources that that religion claims or sources of guidance. For example, Islam, the religion that I'm espousing tonight. But we've moved away from deism now because it's not worthy of spending much more time on. Once we've discussed atheism, we would see that deism really is just atheism with an attempt to trick up its sleeve. And we saw the kind of argumentation that they would put forward. We addressed yesterday Stephen Law's argument for the existence of the evil God. And we found it not only failing at a apologetic or polemical perspective, but also failing at a rational and philosophical perspective too. So dear viewers, where are we heading from now? Well, as the name that you should see displayed carefully at the screen should suggest, we're moving on to Christianity. Now, of course, there might be some out there who are wondering why Christianity isn't at a big jump. We've moved from atheism, deism. Why then would we go to Christianity afterwards? Well, allow me to explain why I've taken the liberty to skip a few necessary steps in addressing worldview. You see, I believe firmly that when I say that this series ought to be respectful to both ourselves and others, that that means that we ought to address things as we would likely find them to be in the real world. In the real world, I don't meet people that believe in Zeus. I don't meet people that believe in Thor. I don't meet people that believe in... I know that this term isn't very popular these days, but I don't meet people that believe in polytheistic religions that believe that their religion is to be spread to the world. So generally, what I find with those who do believe in polytheistic religions is that they don't believe in absolute truth. Now, if you don't believe in absolute truth, then again, it's going to be very, very difficult to reason with you on anything because it will turn into a game of, well, that's true for you, but it's not true for me. Or that's true for us, but it's not true for them. And of course, these kind of claims only find themselves existing in discussions pertaining to religion. Why? Because, unfortunately, there are some who believe that we can treat religion as a giant joke. If you were to walk into a bank with such a claim, and you would attempt to withdraw $2,000 from an account that has $400 in it, and of course, the friendly gentleman who works at the bank would inform you that, sir, I'm sorry, I can't allow you to withdraw that much. Would you like to take a look at the screen in order to see how much you have in your account? You could never turn around and say, that's true in your world, my friend, but it's not true in mine. It would make absolutely zero sense. Likewise, with the exception of a few postmodernist lecturers and their classes today, you could never get through university with this attitude of, that's true for the professor, and true for every other expert in the field, but when it comes to me, this is true. Unless, of course, your discourse were backed heavily by documentation, evidence, and facts, and you weren't merely putting forward your view as an alternative within a world of relativistic views, each one being valid, but we're rather saying that your professor was wrong objectively, and these are the reasons why you believe he's wrong. So of course, when someone believes in pluralism and they believe in what we call relativistic truth, it's very difficult to engage in a dialogue. Now after that, you might be wondering, why didn't I start off, therefore, with Judaism? Well, you see, Judaism is not a missionary religion, and Jews will rarely ever discuss their own faith with you, even if you ask them to. That is not to insult them. I don't mean to insult anyone on this show. I'm not even insulting those who believe in relativistic truth. Rather, I'm just stating the actual fact that it's unlikely we'll ever be in a discussion with someone that is an espousing member and adherent of the Jewish faith who wants to have a conversation, but nonetheless, we shall actually reach some of the claims of Judaism, the primary reason for why we're focusing on Christianity, which is of course a newer religion than Judaism, according to the linear history that is given to us by academics of religion, although that's not necessarily our standpoint because we believe all the prophets of Benny Israel were, of course, Muslims in the sense that they were calling to one God and submission to him. We would see that Christianity differs radically, heavily, and emphasises a completely different nature of both revelation, God, knowledge, and the nature of humanity to what we find in the other Abrahamic faiths, namely Judaism and Islam. And so for that reason, I would like to engage with Christianity before we can even consider moving on to Judaism. Now Christianity, it's a very interesting topic, why? Because I know that there's a lot of Muslims out there. Perhaps dare I say I may have even been one of them when I first converted to the religion, who believe that we can take this really cliche, classical Generation X approach, and it's not really just Generation X, these things became popular in Generation X, but they have existed for a very long time of just taking the Bible and finding apparent contradictions or what we call the Texas Sharp Shooter fallacy, which is where we find anything in the Bible that looks like it fits our religion and we try and use it against them, not realising that the context doesn't really fit. No. This Texas Sharp Shooter fallacy only works to a certain degree. And of course it is something that proved to be quite effective to a certain level because we could demonstrate certainly that there were assumptions within the text of the Bible that were not in line with the theological claims of Christianity. But getting you to Islam after that was a very, very long shot and often required a massive leap of faith, one that could never be demonstrated from what we consider the corrupted text of the New Testament and the corrupted text of the Old Testament. Now of course what I mean by this is that there's many of us who think that it's just real simple. We just pick up a Sheikh Ahmadiyyat book, we pick up a Dr. Zakir Naik lecture and we go out and we discuss with Christians. No. You know, in the same way that we don't like it when other people use cheap and tacky polemics with ourselves, it's best not to use cheap and tacky polemics with others. Now certainly the late Mr. Didat was a person that reflected the time and the era he was from. His polemics were very indicative of an era in which Christians would go around doing the same thing with the Qur'an, go around doing the same thing with the Syrah of the Holy Prophet ﷺ and so his methodology in engaging with Christians isn't so strange or abstract for someone that understands his time, his culture and his context. But if you understand the time culture and context of Mr. Didat, you would also understand that with the exception of a few parts of the world where there exists this similar aggressive missionary type behavior coming from Christians belittling the Prophet, belittling the religion of Islam in such a very disturbing way, you would understand that with the exception of those countries where this very much still goes on, there are very few contexts where we would ever want to be applying the polemics of Ahmadiyyat. And so what do I propose as an alternative? I propose as an alternative that we get to understand Christianity as a religion. That we try to understand what Christianity claims for itself and that our critique of Christianity, our engagement with Christianity would be based again on this consideration of what a worldview is. Now for those of you that have caught the first episodes of this series, you would remember that I have defined a worldview as an interconnected set of beliefs that define and influence the way in which we view the world ourselves and interact with others. This interconnected set of beliefs is essentially the very lenses by which we understand all of reality. They are a set of assumptions which we make when looking at the world and they should, if we are following a worldview and taking it seriously, influence how we behave as well. Now I've stated that a worldview is to be analyzed in numerous different ways. But dear viewers, insha'Allah we're going to go for a very short break and when we come back we'll look at that. Wassalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Welcome back dear viewers, thank you so much for enjoying with us and we were of course discussing how one analyzes a worldview as an introduction to our discussion on the worldview of Christianity. Now some of the ways I have handled and discussed what we ought to discuss when it comes to looking at a worldview is number one, the concept of God. What is the concept of God that is possessed by that worldview if there is indeed any? And this would fall under the remit of ilahiyat. The second issue is of course what is the nature of man? And this would fall under ilmal insan. What is the nature of what it is to be a human being? And what is the nature of human beings in the eyes of God? And what is to be our view of other human beings? Now after that we would look at what is our knowledge of anything? What does it take to have ilm? Can we have ilm? Can we trust our minds? And of course this is again something very important to look at. After that we would look at the science of achlaq. And what it means to be good if there is indeed such a thing as being good? And what is the nature of good and evil? What is the reason for the existence of good and evil? And lastly what does it mean to be righteous? This concept of having iman, what does it all lead to? These are some of the things that we would discuss in terms of looking at a worldview. In terms of starting as a very brief introductory episode on Christianity what we have to understand is that Christians will base their religious claims upon a particular text and that text is known as the Bible. Now the Bible comes from the Greek word Biblios which means a library and the reason it's called this is because the Bible unlike the Quran is not a book which they believe was revealed at one particular point of history to one particular individual rather it is a series of books. Of course there is different claims as to when these books were compiled what the nature of these books are and we need to make that very, very clear. Many Muslims misunderstand what the nature of Christianity is in light of its claims. So what we want to make sure is that we don't understand Christianity on Islam's terms but rather we attempt to enter into a dialogue where we can understand what Christians believe about Christianity and the claims they would make about Christianity in order that we can look at it as a worldview and see objectively why this worldview is very deficient or at least fails to meet up to why we would follow Islam as a worldview. In regards to the nature of God we all know that, insha'Allah we all know rather that Christians believe in general as a majority today and allow me to try and give a working definition of what a Christian is for the sake of his show. I will define a Christian as one of the three major denominations and their offshoots which happen to believe in a particular set of doctrines and the reason I will define it as finely as this and as specifically as this is that I don't want to open up a can of worms on Christians that they would later on be able to apply to any other religion and not really take a definition or an understanding of anything seriously. So let me go into what I mean by these three churches. We discuss Christianity. What we mean by that is that religion which we find people practicing today. Now they will claim that that religion has a continuity going back to the earliest members of the church, namely the disciples of the prophets, Jesus. Although for Christians Jesus is far more than just a prophet. Now in their claim to that continuity that there was an early church and this church may have wavered and this church may have eventually become deviated throughout history but nonetheless there is this connection back to the early church in one way shape or form. You would find that generally all the major sects of Christianity today believe in what we call the doctrine of the Trinity. What is the doctrine of the Trinity? I'll elaborate more upon the doctrine of the Trinity at a slightly later point but just to give you a very brief understanding of what it is now. They believe that God's, that Allah Azawajal, that the deity is one being. This is the claim. God is one. And of course how else could they deny this? Because when you look at the Bible, what is the Bible? The Bible is not merely the New Testament and the Testament of Christianity and the early founding fathers that they now consider the predecessors of the religion of Christianity and those who established it after receiving the teachings from Jesus in their opinion. Rather Christianity according to them is the successor of the Jewish prophets and it is what the Jewish prophets were inevitably calling towards. So they argue that when you start off with Adam and you go all the way down through the Jewish prophets, you go through Moses, you go through Yusuf, you go through all these individuals, you go through Abraham, you go through Solomon, you go through David, all the way down to John the Baptist, well John the Baptist rather, yes this is a Christian claim so that's fine. All the way down to John the Baptist and ending with the seal which is Jesus according to them, you would find that they were all calling towards the same thing. Now for Christians the way they would explain the apparent discrepancies between Judaism and Christianity is to say that everything was foreshadowing. Everything was serving as an archetype of that salvation which was to come at the hands of Jesus Christ. This is what Christians believe. Of course the way they now get around these passages in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, especially in the Jewish prophets which state that Allah Azuzel or rather the God of the Bible is one, they would state yes we have no qualms of that, we believe in one God. However we believe that that one God is divided into three distinct persons and so this is what the Christians believe about God. They state that there is one God but this God is divided into three distinct persons. So allow me to elaborate more upon that belief ever so slightly and we will come and we will cite the creeds at a later point. I just want the viewers to understand what we are saying here. They believe that that God of course is one being. Yet within that one being there are three persons. Now do I mean this in the sense of modality? So a modal type being would be the following analogy. We could say that there is the basic essence of water. At one point water becomes ice and another point it becomes steam but it is nonetheless still all made up of the same substance. No, that's not what they believe in. They don't believe in the analogy of the water because the water at one point is always ice as in it's all ice. At another point it's all water and at another point it's all steam. They've never believed that their God was at one point only the Father. They've never believed that at one point their God was only the Son and they've never believed that at one point their God was only the Holy Spirit. Rather they believe that all these three persons exist at the same time. They are all God and yet God is of course a Trinity. So to elaborate upon that, they believe that the God's head is one being but that one being consists of three different persons who co-inhabit the being at the same time. So we're not talking about a schizophrenic person that has numerous different identities. No, they would say that each one has a unique inus to them. And so this is extremely confusing for anyone that comes from a monotheistic background like Islam. And indeed, dare I say, this is extremely confusing for the average Christian believer who has no idea what it means to speak of the Trinity and has no idea of the complex nature of the Trinity. Dear viewers, I was giving an introduction to the worldview of Christianity. Of course, I have not been able to do justice to that in one episode and we shall continue in tomorrow's episode. Thank you so much for joining me once more. Wassalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.