 Hey everybody, today we're debating Christianity versus atheism, and we are starting right now with AP's opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us, Apostate Prophet. The floor is all yours. Thank you so much, James, for having me. Thank you so much, Stuart, for agreeing to this debate, to this conversation. I just noticed that I haven't turned on any timer. I should probably know how far I am. I already am because I usually lose track of time. But yeah, okay, here we are. So today we want to talk about the belief in God and atheism versus Christianity. I think what you will hear from me will be very different from what you usually hear from atheists in a discussion between Christianity and atheism. And that's because my background and my goals in this regard are quite different. I am not a regular atheist or anti-theist who is on a mission to debunk or destroy or refute and disprove religion. I am not here to disprove Christianity. I think my main mission here is to figure out why a free thinker and an atheist like myself would, why I should accept Christianity as my religion. Now I come from a very different background from what you usually see here. I am from a Muslim background. I didn't grow up with Christianity. I didn't really grow up around Christianity. I did grow up in Germany, which is a post-Christian or Christian society within a very religious Muslim family. I lived in Turkey for quite a while and my parents are extremely religious Muslim people. If you ask them about different beliefs, it will be very obvious to them. Islam is of course the only religion that is true. Anything else is not even a question. I mean it's not even something that you argue. It's not even something that comes up whether Christianity or a different religion is true or not. It's all very obvious. This is a no-brainer to them. Islam is of course the truth. Anything else is just perverted, corrupted nonsense and they feel bad for others to be honest and this is the average stance of the average Muslim. When it comes to me, I of course throughout my life confronted religious beliefs and ended up not believing in the one God, which is why I technically call myself an atheist. But if I today converted to Christianity, for example, and if I shared this development with my parents, with my father or my mother or others, their reaction would be shocked and all they would think was what went wrong? Why does our son believe in this strange religion, which is of course nonsense? Now he will have to go to hell. They will not even think about converting together with me because to them that's obviously nonsense. The issue here is that my parents like many others are conditioned by their environments and by many factors that they have no control over into believing in a certain religion that is the best available religion in their own environment and which was brought down to them, given to them by their ancestors. For them it is Islam. For them Christianity is a set out of the question. Now why would I have to believe in Christianity? Why would I end up believing in Christianity? In the world there are so many different interpretations, so many different philosophies and religious beliefs and ideas, so many explanations of the origin of the universe, the origin of us, what happens after we die and so on. Among all of these Christianity is currently relevant to us because we are in a culture where Christianity is dominant or where it is relevant. Why do I not go for Buddhism for example? Why do I not go for Taoism, for different religious ideas, for different philosophical ideas and beliefs? Why is it Christianity? I want to talk about one specific reason why I find it unreasonable to believe in Christianity. This is not very specific. It's actually very vague. I'm sorry for that. But that is that there is simply no convincing reason why I would believe in Christianity. I care about Christianity. I study religion. It is something that I like and something that I like to think about. But when it comes to Christianity we are confronted with ancient writings which are disputed very much. The authorship of these writings are disputed. The books are sampled and ordered in such a way where we are supposed to trust a specific collection, a specific narrative about this collection of books. We don't know if the authors of these books are the people that we think they are. We don't actually know who these people are. We don't know even if we did know these people. These are some random people that we have no reason to trust. We don't trust people around us. Why would we trust them? The scriptures tell us about a lot of things. The vast majority of them are not verifiable. So we have to trust certain people who in ancient times in the past wrote and created certain scriptures. And then we are to believe in their religion which they preach and thereby determine our entire life and base our entire life, the rest of our life choices, on this specific idea, on the specific decision to believe in that certain religion. Why would we do that? Do we have any reason to believe in that? Do we have miracles in the world? We have miracles which we see in those books, in those scriptures, but miracles that supposedly happened but which cannot be verified. Miracles don't happen today. We don't see very strange things happening like a severed leg of somebody coming down from the sky and attaching itself magically to a human body. Miracles as we have them today are so are very small things like personal experience or somebody with an illness who is healed. Nothing that the public can together observe and verify and point at as a miracle. Most of them are simply up to personal opinions and personal beliefs. Why would I choose Christianity? At the time of Christianity, when Christianity was on the rise, there was a different religious belief on the rise which was manichism for example, a religion which had a completely different understanding of the cosmos, of the world around us and of good and evil, of morality altogether. Like many other dualistic or gnostic beliefs, the view in manichism was not that there is the one God who wants to save us and we just have to believe in him and follow him and all that. It was more a system of the greater good side and the lesser evil side or maybe they were even equal in power, but there was a struggle between those two going on and we are supposed to disavow the worldly filth and know the true light and devote ourselves to that. Why did we not go with that? Why would I not believe in something like that, for example? The evidence that that is true, there is no evidence that that is true, but there is also no evidence that Christianity is true. The only thing that we have is that people like Stuart, not in an offensive way, when I say people like Stuart, it sounds a little bit offensive, sorry. What we have is that people like Stuart and other Christians and Christian apologists will simply tell us, well Christianity is true for these and these and these reasons, it makes sense, but all that requires, but what that requires again at the end is a leap of faith. We don't actually have clear evidence, concrete evidence which shows us the absolute truth that Christianity is true. We only rely on certain lines of reasoning by certain people and in the end, we are left to make a leap of faith into believing that Christianity is the true religion. Now, even if the Christian texts and even if the Christian sources and teachings were highly reliable and verifiable, there is a major problem about the entire concept of the afterlife and God's creation of humans, which I have a big problem with, something that I think needs to be solved before we can talk about believing in Christianity or not. The Christian idea is generally that God created humans for some strange reason. God was the perfect eternal being, the creator. He is perfect by definition. He has a perfect state and what is perfect? You can't even describe it. Perfect is something that has nothing lacking and suddenly out of nowhere in the middle of nothing, God decides to create humans just because and he apparently creates humans because he wants to create beautiful beings who experience his glory and who feel good things and then he creates limited lifetimes for these humans. He lets these humans do good things and bad things. He lets these humans have pleasure and suffer. He gives these humans a limited lifetime. He keeps himself hidden. He sends vague scriptures that can be interpreted in so many different ways and then depending on the end of our lives and what we have believed during our lives, he then rewards or punishes us. What exactly is the point of that and how exactly does it work? What is God exactly punishing us, rewarding us for? Didn't he create us in such a way that we would eventually live exactly that specific life that he designed? Don't we live by our nature, by our neurological, by our environmental conditioning? Don't we do most of the things that we do in life based on factors, as explained earlier, that are mostly out of our control such as our nature, how our mind works, what our intelligence levels are, how the religious beliefs in our environment are, what culture we are born into. If my father, if I today as said at the beginning, converted to Christianity and I told my father about why I converted to Christianity and if he then found that ridiculous and sad and he rejected Christianity and rejected me as well, would he be held accountable for that? If not, why not? He was very much familiar with what Christianity is just as maybe not as much as I am, but to a certain extent. If he cannot be blamed because he didn't know enough about Christianity, then where exactly do we stop? How do we judge whether somebody will be rewarded or punished? If there is no reward or punishment, then why exactly does this whole thing exist? Why is it important for me to believe in Christianity? If the afterlife, if hell or heaven depends on our belief or disbelief, then why do we have to wait until we live these empty lives in this giant universe and then we die with the belief or disbelief that we were conditioned to and then we are judged by the God who created us as the beings who are weak, who have limited intelligence and who will eventually end up going with whatever their nature gives them. Moreover, the issue is, according to the Christian belief, God wants us to be saved. He wants us to go to heaven. He wants us to experience eternal pleasure. He doesn't want us to suffer. He doesn't want us to burn. He doesn't want us to be punished. He doesn't want these things. But isn't God almighty? Isn't God the all-powerful, all-knowing, good entity? Why didn't he simply create humans in such a way that they would not suffer, that they would not go to hell? Is this one of the conditions of creation? The objection is that he created us with free will and being wrong, making mistakes and eventually being punished is part of our free will. It's part of the deal. But does that mean that God had no other choice? Does that mean that it was out of his power? Does that mean God has to live with the consequences of his creation, which he himself chose? Does that mean God doesn't like suffering? God doesn't like evil? God doesn't like torture and punishment? But it is part of the deal. And since God decided to create, because he found it so beautiful, unfortunately he has to deal with the consequences of also punishing people and also making them suffer. Does that really make sense? It almost looks like there is a logical contradiction here. In fact, let's take an example of me helping my children. If I knew that my children are going to go through something terrible, I would give them the freedom. I would eventually try to, as much as possible, alleviate their suffering. And despite giving them their free choices, eventually help them out and give them eternal happiness, because that's what I want, because I hate seeing my children suffer. I wouldn't think, well, I want them to be free. I want them to live with the consequences of their choices, although I really, really don't want to see them suffer. And I won't just let them suffer. I will save them. If punishment is not there, if you want to go for a Christian explanation, a Christian alternative where there is no eternal punishment, no eternal suffering, if there is no such thing, if there is no eternal torture, then why exactly would I believe in Christianity? What exactly is the purpose? If Christianity is pragmatic, if it's a good system, if it works, if the morals of Christianity are good, if they are cool, then why exactly is that, is that reason enough to believe in Christianity? I could just as well go on with my life as a skeptic atheist, as a free thinker, simply stick with those things that I know for certain are true instead of limiting my worldview to a certain religion which existed from a very distant past and has gone on with the same religious beliefs and the same doctrines that will limit the way I think. Why would I not instead open my mind, free my mind, only believe in that which I can for certain verify and live my life based on rationality, based on the human condition and the human experience. I simply see no reason to believe in Christianity and no convincing evidence which would lead me to the conclusion that Christianity is true and that it is a better alternative to atheism. Thank you. Thank you very much. Apostate, Prophet, and want to let you know folks, if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate, we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion, and politics and we want to let you know no matter what walk of life you are from, whether you be Christian or atheist or one of the many strange creatures in between, we hope you feel welcome here, we're glad you're here, and also Elliot saw your question in the chat. The song that we use at the beginning and end of the streams is World Goes Wild by Above Envy. So with that, we are going to jump into Stuart's opening statement. Stuart, thanks for being here. We're thrilled to have you back and the floor is all yours. James, always an honor. You both, James, especially you and that fly jacket are looking fantastic on a Friday night. And I'm going to start with, I think AP hit some good points. I want to head towards this idea of God. I like that atheism is in play here, so I'm not doing all the heavy lifting this time. Typically, I'm carrying the rager rather large stones like Sisyphus up a mountain ready to just rock me. So I appreciate the boldness, the courage on AP's part. I would start with saying God relates to us, like Shakespeare relates to Hamlet in the sense of he is the author of life. He has a character that came down to this world named Jesus Christ. In so doing, he has revealed himself to us in a way where we could actually know him. Now physically, we don't have that opportunity today, obviously, but by his Holy Spirit, he speaks to our hearts by understanding him in the Gospels, getting to know him because you clearly can get to know him in the Gospels. It's just clear in his personhood. And then growing in trust, if you look in the Webster's dictionary, there's two definitions when it comes to faith. One being basically kind of what AP was alluding to in terms of the no evidence piece, but then the other one being counting up the evidence and putting your trust in an object or a person. And the Christian faith is all about counting up the evidence, putting your trust in an object, but specifically a person, Jesus Christ. So more specifically, I believe Christianity is true and I believe the evidence is there for a few different reasons. And a couple of them tonight will be one, who Jesus is a person. So if we do believe that God literally walked on this earth and interacted with human beings, we have to understand that this has to be a good God, most likely. Our experience, we want goodness. We imagine goodness. So his character, I think his character is unmatched. I think it's exactly what we'd expect if we expected God to come to earth and it is Son Jesus Christ. I mean, he stops the racial riot in Luke 4. The Gentiles are about to just get wiped out and Jesus almost gets stoned to death for stopping this racial riot. You think about the woman at the well in John 4, where he's crossing all different types of boundaries, especially gender boundaries with this prostitute or the prostitute who goes in and she ends up washing his feet. And she's referred to as the woman of the city, which basically means a prostitute. He's dealing with women who are considered total scum. And if they were prostitutes, then they were beyond scum. And yet Jesus is lifting them up in just powerful ways. He, you know, find a time that he spoke out of place. I can't find anywhere in the Gospels where he spoke out of place. He never said or did anything wrong. At least it appears to me. He hung out with the racial, political, moral outsiders, nonstop. He was never hanging out with, you know, he was never doing any set of social climbing. Let's just say that he doesn't scold people for unbelief. There's many different examples, you know, Jairus, for example, says, Jesus, I do believe, but help my unbelief. Jesus doesn't scold him for that. He says, okay, he has doubt. He encourages almost doubt, it seems, and David in the Psalms, doubting the entire way through 150 chapters. It's pretty powerful. And that speaks to me in my life. Because like AP, I've struggled with doubt, whatever the worldview has been. And I've dipped into different worldviews, not just Christianity. So I love that he encourages doubt. And the doubting Thomas is another good example. So how about the lepers? You know, they were permanently socially distanced, we could say. Their entire lives, they weren't touched. Nobody touched them. And Jesus not only spends time with them, but he actually touches them. He obviously, it's good news for the poor. He came to earth for the poor. He has a type of freedom that I don't think, I think it's unmatched. You know, he was never enslaved to who's the in and out party. We think about all of our political divisions today. It's like I get my identity and my self-worth from being in a certain group and by shouting down another group and demonizing them. Jesus never even came close to putting himself in categories or certain type of labels in order to say that group over there is the ones we have to demonize. But he absolutely was harsher on the religious types, the Pharisees, than he was those who were perhaps more broken or looked down upon in society. So he basically scolded those who were religious and was gracious to those who were not religious over and over again. So how about his wisdom? I mean, you and I have temperaments. Some of us are more outspoken. Some of us more introverted. I think these things are habitual. It gets us into trouble. For me, my temperament quick to anger gets me into trouble in a many myriad of different ways. But I think look at Jesus. I mean, again, the character, if this is God, I think the wisdom and character line up. And so, I mean, another example is his healing powers. How about how he calls people out once he heals them? So the woman with the internal bleed, for example, after he heals her, he says, all right, stand up, tell everybody what just happened. Because he thinks that's healthy for her. And sure enough, you see in the story that it is. She experiences incredible joy. But then just a few chapters later, he's talking to a deaf mute and takes them away after the healing. And he heals them in private. So there's their nuanced examples, not just the same, same fabricated thing, perhaps every single time. And then his beauty as well, he combines traits that you never find together in the same person. He has this type of high majesty, where he's Lord of all. And then that's his claim. And that's what people may be able to believe him to be. But then he also has this incredible humility, where he's getting down in the dumps with people. He balances justice and grace, which we need in our culture today. I think you have many examples, I could name many, but I don't want to get political, where it's all about just justice and stay angry at that people group, no matter what, because they did X, Y, and Z to your people group. Or it's cheap grace. It's like, just overlook it. Who cares? Jesus balanced this with justice truth, but then also tremendous grace and forgiveness. It was just, it's unimaginable how he did it. So kind of he also had this transcendent self-sufficiency and yet entire reliance on God the Father, where he was self-sufficient and yet reliant on God. But then he also has, it was tender without weakness. You know, tremendously tender. I can't think of any other character, especially who claimed to be God, or was a gigantic leader who also had this tenderness, but at the same time was not weak. He had endless amounts of power. All right, now Jesus's claims. AP coming from a Muslim background, I'm sure has dealt with Jesus's claims quite a bit. So I think he assumed authority to forgive all sins. It's clear throughout scripture. I think he claimed that he alone could give eternal life. I think he claimed to be the truth, the way the truth in the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. He assumed the authority to judge the world. He said he would, you know, you would primarily be judged in the end based off of your attitude towards him, he said, versus just your good deeds, bad deeds, and then punishment. I claim the right to receive worship. So there's examples where angels were worshiped, and yet they said, no, no, no, we're not to be worshiped. There's examples where the apostle Paul was worshiped. He tears his clothes and says, how dare you do not worship me? Jesus just takes it every single time he is worshiped. So he called himself the Son of God and in John and other places in that Jewish culture, the Son was equal to the Father. So he was the only son we get. And so everything the Father had would come obviously to the Son. So there was that type of understanding of equality. You think of John 518, the Son of God. Again, he's called there than John 8 before Abraham was. I am. So Yahweh, I am that I am. Before Abraham ever existed, I am. And then what happens? Again, people try and stone him. People are always trying to stone Jesus for these claims. So if you had a man who's kind of making up these types of claims, he's either obviously a charlatan or mentally deranged, but then you have to look at his life. He has this incredible character again, there's beauty to his life. So either he is who he said he is, or he's a fool. But again, we see his character is no fool. That's, that's for sure. I think we can all, there's a consensus on that or a charlatan or you explain, again, how do you explain his character or is the great teacher? Well, what about his claims? I mean, he's a schizophrenic. He can't just be a great teacher. I hear so many people say that, but it doesn't make any sense with his claims that is. And so what are you going to do with this Jesus? Either you're going to worship him or you're going to hate him. There's no neutral ground based off of his character and his claims. And that's how people responded to him in those times. Today, you have many respond to him in that way. But the majority of people, I see respond to him in this kind of neutral vanilla type of way where it's like, eh, I don't know, maybe a teacher and I just pretend like he didn't make any claims. So again, it's the whole legend liar, lunatic, lord, and you have to figure that out. And I think part of what we're going to try and do tonight is just figure that out, at least on my end. So they worship Jesus right up the bat. We know early on things did not change a single time in church history. It was very early in the second century that these creeds, the Nicene, Apostles Creed, they were borrowing incredibly from the Pauline creeds. So you think about Philippians chapter two, you think about 1 Corinthians 15, three through eight. So again, it is so hard to unearth these. I find it totally impossible. But Paul's letters even were written before John was claiming deity of Christ. Because a lot of the Muslims I've debated, they said, okay, well, John is John. Yes, there's there's seven I am statements, but it's just in John. Well, then you got to deal with Paul's letters. They were written before John and they're all about the deity of Christ. And then Mark chapter two, your sins are forgiven. He says to the paralytic, boom, another example, just another example of he's forgiving people's sins and everybody in the room that day when they saw that and heard that knew he was claiming to be God. There was no doubt in anybody's mind. And then lastly, the resurrection. I think firstly, eyewitnesses, they weren't hallucinating. Whether it was the 12, whether it was Peter, whether it was the 500, you can't have mass hallucinations. I think even secular scholars within the last 10 years have moved in that direction, where they've said, absolutely, someone like Peter had an experience where he claimed to have seen Christ. And so he had this type of experience and even secular scholars, basically a consensus there as well. And then the world view change overnight. This one is the most important to me. When I'm when I've been over to Rome, for example, it is amazing to go to the Colosseum, for example, and listen about the 600,000 Christians that have been killed in a single Colosseum over a couple hundred years. And to have one Christian leading the tour saying, it all makes perfect sense. The puzzle fits together beautiful. They didn't just die for a hoax. But then you have another woman who's secular. And I turned to her and I'm like, okay, so, so what happened here? How do you have so early, so many Christians being killed for possibly something they just made up or possibly something they were brainwashed for? And she didn't want to get into it. But it's not like she was angry. It was just she was very confused. And she was like, yeah, we don't really, I don't know. And there's this a lot of I don't know. And I couldn't find anybody at least that I was interacting with who said, oh yeah, here's what happened. And so I have the same thing where it's Jews overnight became Christians. So many of these Jews, the secular ones would have said there's no eternity. Many of these Jews, though, would have said yes, there is eternity, but there's going to be a resurrection that is a resurrection for all, not simply for one man. And that was the quagmire that they all of a sudden were in. And so they were going to be the least of all people groups to actually have believed this to have occurred. And so you see this world view change overnight. And then finally, the empty tomb. We know critics who deny the fact that the empty tomb have felt compelled to argue against the historicity of even the burial. And they don't want to do that. So again, we have the early eyewitness accounts, but I think the independent accounts that they have in the Gospels, I mean, historians consider they've had total historical pater when you have two independent accounts, the same event. We have six, maybe even more than six. The simplicity of Mark's account I love. I think that just gives you the nuts and bolts. Nothing like, say, for example, the Apocrypha. Nothing is, has some type of theological commentary. No, it just gives you the history, and that's how history is written. Then the Jewish polemic, the early Jewish polemic presupposes the fact of the empty tomb in Matthew 28, 11 through 15. And postmortem appearances, you have Peter, the disciples, my favorite is James, brother Jesus, pissed in the same toilet as Jesus, all life long, said, yeah, right, you're not the Messiah. But then he encounters Jesus with the empty tomb, face to face, we get from Josephus that he ends up dying for his faith, what happens according to tradition. He's proclaiming after being the head, the head dog of the Sanhedrin, he's proclaiming from the rooftop that, hey, my brother actually is the Messiah. And they go up, grab him, mug him, throw him off the top of the temple. He hits the ground. And then they go down and beat him to death. That type of incredible desire to spread the faith after seeing this historical event was really what began the Christian faith. You got to thank you very much, Stuart, for that opening statement as well. And want to let you know, folks, big one coming up one week from now, in particular next Saturday, as you can see in the bottom right of your screen, these two new fellows who are very big influencers will be debating the controversial topic of human rights versus Sharia law. So it is going to be a juicy one. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on it. This is going to be epic. That's next Saturday. And so with that, thank you both, AP and Stuart. We're going to jump into open conversation. And want to remind you, folks, our guests are linked in the description. If you haven't already, you can check out their links. And that includes if you're listening via podcast as we include our guest links there as well. Thanks so much, gentlemen. The floor is all yours. I highly recommend watching that upcoming debate on human rights and Sharia, by the way, I think people will be exposed to something very shocking that everyone should see for themselves. Yeah, Stuart, thank you so much. I want to ask you a question, if you don't mind. I really want to ask you a very simple question. I'm not asking you for justification of your belief and why you, you know, how you explain the theology of Christianity and all that. I just want to ask you a very simple question, which is, why are you a Christian? What is the simplest explanation as to why you are a Christian? I am a Christian because I've looked into, first of all, the evidence of Christ. So many Christians become Christians through evidence. Others, they're just kind of born into it. Don't think about it. And then after that, I've met Christ. Obviously, I haven't seen him and audibly heard his voice, but I've met him in the sense of who he is in the Gospels and then grown into a trusting relationship with him. So I needed the evidence and then the trusting relationship. So you were not born into a Christian religion or a Christian culture? I was born into a Christian home for sure. And then I was, I had all secular friends. So I went back and forth between being kind of a cultural Christian, if you will, and then kind of a practical atheist at the same time, and then a fervent believer. And so I was influenced by my parents. I was influenced by secular folks. What do you think? If you had been born in some town somewhere in, let's say in Pakistan, where 99% of the population is Muslim, if you had been born there, would you still be a Christian today? In Pakistan, I don't know about Iran, maybe, probably not Pakistan. You would probably not be a Christian. I mean, it is, it is statistically, I mean, you can statistically point at it and say somebody who was born in Pakistan will be, to 99% a Muslim, someone who was born in Afghanistan will be a Muslim, someone who is born in Italy or in Poland or in America will very likely be a Christian or will end up believing in or will end up being an atheist or an agnostic or something like that. So your current religion very much depends on the environment that you are born into. Yeah, I would also say though, easily a child could grow up next door to a Presbyterian fundamentalist church in Pennsylvania and it would push them immediately away from the faith. Sure, but that's just an exception, isn't it? I mean, I was a Muslim throughout my life because I was born into a Muslim family. I am an exception. I ended up disbelieving in Islam because I simply had different interests, a different personality that developed in a strange way maybe, but most people in my situation would still be a Muslim at this point, whereas most people in your situation would end up still being a Christian. You wouldn't, it's very unlikely for you to end up converting to Islam or for somebody in my position to end up converting to Christianity, the numbers, the statistical possibility of that is extremely low. Isn't that true? Absolutely. And that's why you have examples in the Bible of like in Acts chapter eight, you have the Ethiopian eunuch needing Philip to come to him and read him the scriptures. He couldn't even read and he had no exposure to Christ. And so there's many different examples of this, but we also got to think too, AP, about how I think you're getting under the genetic fallacy right now because I don't think just from where you're born determines your faiths. I have many different examples of friends who were born in Christian homes who are atheists. Now, I fully agree though in terms of the numbers taking a certain way, absolutely. But this comes also back to the goodness and character of God. If he's good and just and holy, if he is, then I think everybody's going to get a fair shake. And that's what we get in Romans chapter two, which talks about, according to the knowledge given to you, you'll be judged on that knowledge. And then Hebrews 11, you have those who weren't even exposed to Jesus Christ are going to be in heaven, the patriarchs. But when exactly, just the last thing I want to ask you, because let me just, it's the same question, but let me shift it to your side, because you're a rare case, I think where you stand. I have a friend who has actually a very similar story as you. And I think this is, if you were a white Westerner, I would simply ask the question of even that question that you're asking me is a white Westerner question, like very much so. And then secondly, I guess you could say in terms of being born Catholic, perhaps the majority of people in the US have this religious upbringing and they're more predisposed to that. But no, I think the majority of people, having this type of debate, they're secular and from the West. And so the genetic fallacy there, it holds true. But you were just appealing to an exception, to a minority, which doesn't exactly break the rule. I mean, for example, speaking again of myself, I am somebody who was born into a Muslim culture, left Islam, looking to different religions, pursued as the rest of his life, maybe as a free thinker, whatever it is. I compare that to people who are born here in America, for example, who were born into Christian families, grew up and spent their lives as Christians are, as adults, still devout Christians. And they truly believe that their Christian belief is absolutely true. It's anything else is out of question. It is, of course, true. On the other hand, my parents, for example, grew up on the opposite side in a Muslim household with Muslim traditions. And to them, Islam is, of course, definitely true. There is no other question. So when that is the case, isn't it true that people simply take it as self-explanatory to believe in whatever religion they are born into? And then based on that, they make justifications and explanations such as Jesus was a good guy, or Jesus said great things, or the resurrection is believable, such as, or when Muslims, Muslims make the same thing with talking about the perfect character of Muhammad, or the moon splitting and all that. I mean, of course, there are minorities and exceptions, but isn't that mostly the rule? Yeah, but that's the importance of being a true seeker. I think many who are engaging in this show right now are dogmatic atheists. And so what do you mean by that? At the end of the 19th century, you had this shift all of a sudden through the scientific fields that pointed to atheism. Now in the last 20 years, it's shifting back towards Christianity. And so you have different examples of scientifically, some will say it's been proven that children are born with a God-shaped brain. And what I mean by that is, even if you're born into an atheistic household, I saw this, this was done in the New York Times talked about this. There's an example of this boy driving with his dad to school. And the boy is extremely young. The dad is a hardened atheist. And the boy said he believed in God. And he wasn't even, he wasn't even exposed to God. And he definitely didn't go to church in any event. And so it's fascinating how people are talking scientifically now about a type of brain that is exposed and connected to God. So shifting gears here, unless you want to stay on this one. Well, actually, I want to say something about that issue. There has been some research on whether the belief in God is natural in kids. And there was actually a very recent study that gave us some very nice insights. I failed to remember where exactly it was from. But what the study reveals is that kids who are raised in very religious families are much more likely to believe that a made up story about something supernatural or something absurd is probably true. Whereas children raised in secular families that are not exposed to religious beliefs are much more likely to believe that a certain myth that was just made up, that they are told is most likely false, are much more likely to believe that it is false. So the current research actually very much shows that people are extremely conditioned to think the way their culture conditions them to think and justify things based on that. But sure, we can move on to something else if you want to go ahead. So yeah, just in closing, I would agree with most of what you said. But I would splice that in the sense of, okay, what type of Christian religion you're talking about? There's 3,300 nominations. And I think that study is probably pointing to more of the fundamentalist churches and denominations. And so the young earthers and the strong literalists, I could totally see that. But you could compare that to a study, for example, where studies have been done showing that atheists, compared to many denominations, are more intellectual and have a higher IQ. But if you go to the Anglican denomination, Anglicans actually have a higher IQ than a majority of atheists. I think it's dependent on the people group and even the denomination. But isn't it very much, doesn't it very much depend on your environment? I mean, if we were in China right now, we would be having this discussion in China, in Chinese, in Cantonese, whatever it is. This would be a very absurd stream, don't you think? The stream that we are having right now about Christianity versus atheism would be a very absurd stream. People would be like, why am I supposed to watch this? Nobody's Christian around me anyway. Nobody believes in God. Why are we even talking about this? I mean, there are many things that are much more important than this. It would be a very strange discussion to have in China. This is a discussion that is currently relevant because it is something that concerns our culture and our environment, in which we are conditioned to discuss Christianity and to believe in Christianity or to doubt it. That's an interesting example because Christianity, Christian faith is the biggest right now in Latin America, China and Africa. There's going to be over 100 million Christians in China within the next 20 years. And a lot of that has to do with the underground church and how it's spreading. And the reason why it's spreading so quickly, many sociologists will say actually it's because of persecution, which is very strange. I would say there's a spiritual dynamic there, but there's more than just spiritual. And the more you kill them, the more you kill us, the more we spread. And so I think that actually works against that type of thinking because how vibrant the faith right now is in China. And there's different reasons for it. And the reason why so many Muslims are being converted to Christianity right now as well is something that you would buy into more so globalization is one of them. But then also thousands and thousands and thousands are having dreams of Jesus coming to them. And that can be empirically verified in terms of testimony. And we can't get in these people's heads and say, oh, was it really Jesus coming to them? But that's what they're proclaiming as Muslims. So what would you believe? I gave an example earlier from my father, for example. I can give you two examples from my father who is a Muslim who was very much exposed to Christian culture, who lived within the Christian culture and who is a very firm believer in Islam. I don't want to put you on the spot and act like you know what God thinks and you know what God will decide. But what would you think? Do you think from your Christian perspective, as far as you know, and as far as you understand, would my father be judged as somebody who rejects Christianity or would he more plausibly be judged as somebody who simply does not know enough about Christianity, which is why he will be judged by his actions? Yes. So somebody asked me two nights ago, an atheist asked me, hey, this person who's struggling with this type of sexual sin. I said, okay, so you're getting into unrepentant sins. If you're stuck in an unrepentant sin, then you're going to hell, the Bible says. And so if they're having a sexual encounter together and one of them dies, and the one who dies as an atheist, are they automatically going to hell? And again, this comes back to what you brought up early on. It's the character and goodness of God. If Jesus Christ went to the cross, dying for his enemies and even turned to a thief on the cross on one side of them and said, today you'll be with me in paradise, despite all the things you just did. Your tough question, I don't want to be playing God here, and I definitely don't want to add to the scriptures. So I'm not going to be able to answer that directly. I think any Christian who would try to answer that question directly, I would run from them. I would stop having a conversation with them. What's your most reasonable explanation? What is in your opinion the best answer? What would you consider more plausible to happen as a result to my father, for example, or to me, for example, let's say, as somebody who doesn't believe in Christianity, who rejects Christianity actively? Yeah. So I think again, it would come down to everyone is going to get a fair opportunity. You go even back further, say in Romans chapter one and two as well, even in Romans one, not just two where you have Paul talking about how the natural order our conscience itself, all these things are obvious as evidence for God. And you move into, say, the question of Allah versus the Judeo-Christian understanding of God. And I think again, it will come down to God's character. He will reveal himself in the same kind of way to every single person, different ways at the same time, say environmentally, but everyone's going to get the same type of shake. You see the egalitarianism in the Christian faith. It wouldn't make sense if they didn't. And so I would say to answer your question, though, as specifically as I possibly can, that I think if your father looked at the evidence, read the Gospels, read the Quran, immediately rejected the Gospels, said, I want nothing to do with God, then yes, I think Judgment Day might be a little bit challenging for him. Okay, he didn't really reject God, right? He just doesn't believe that it is true. In my position, for example, as well, I mean, I look at Christianity and I look at the scripture. I look into what the Gospels present me. I read the Gospels myself. I have read quite a bit of the scripture. I listened to Christians and Christianity the entire time, but I genuinely tell you that I do not believe that it is true. I'm not saying, hey, no, that this is true, or this is most likely true, but I just don't want to have anything to do with this. No, what I think is this is not true. I simply cannot believe why I should possibly think of this as true. I am not convinced that it is true. Would I really be considered a disbeliever? And would I be punished for that? Because isn't the Christian belief that God punishes those who reject belief into disbelief? Isn't that what Jesus is supposed to teach and to do? No, that was part of the character piece I was talking about, because the character of Christ, if you notice, he's judging people based off of their attitudes towards him, towards him, not about their wrong and right deeds. So you have in the Quran, for example, are your right deeds, is your heart going to be heavier or lighter than a feather? And that's how you'll be judged. No, it's how are you oriented to him? And do you decide that you are going to de-center yourself, that you are like him, like he did when he was here on earth, that you are going to give up yourself in order to gain your life? And that it's not just about me. So often when I have conversations with agnostic and atheist, they'll say something along the lines of, I want my own identity. I don't want God to give me or Jesus Christ more specifically to give me an identity. And see, that's so much of salvation is pushing back against the ego. Because your question is based off, it's really getting down to salvation. And I'm going to live for myself or not. And ultimately, it's not just the lake of fire in Revelation 21, where we're just going to toss into, because we reject Jesus. No, it's if you're rejecting the Judeo-Christian God, Jesus and God the Father, then ultimately you're rejecting all goodness. I mean, you reject all goodness and holiness, love, unconditional opportunities for even forgiveness. See, the forgiveness piece is huge here. Then you're pushing to darkness and you're pushing to a life that is completely devoid of goodness. So that's going to be the opposite. So that's going to be equal. But you reject it because you don't seem to make sense of it. You reject it because it simply doesn't seem true. It's not something that you know is true, but then reject it because you're just like, I don't want this. I don't want good. I don't want God. You reject it because it doesn't make sense because you are cognitively not there. You have not convinced yourself. You have not been convinced that this is true in my position. And as far as I know, every atheist that I have ever encountered, people don't think, I just don't want anything to do with Christianity. I don't want God to decide over my life. Even when they say something like that, what they mean is that they simply do not believe that this God is true or that Christianity is true, which is why they would not like to devote their own lives and their life choices to something which they are not certain of. So why would people be judged for ignorance? I don't think they will. I think they will be judged. It looks like it doesn't make sense to me. It's not plausible. Then who exactly is going to be judged? The unforgivable sin, for example, is somebody who rejects the Holy Spirit, the evidence for God, and then decides to live a life that is completely tied up in the ego. So a life of pride, resentment, hatred, but that's again, that starts with rejecting the Holy Spirit. And so I would say to you, in your case, the kind of people that you're talking about are way closer to the gyruses when he's saying, Jesus, I want to believe but help my unbelief. And so it's that type of heart that he's looking for. Because again, it's the orientation of the heart towards the goodness of God that he's looking at. And so if you're coming to him saying, hey, I want to believe, that is belief. Didn't you say earlier that if my father knows about the beef and knows about the scripture and the Christian doctrine and tradition, but if he still ends up rejecting it, then he will have a hard time on the, what did you say, the judgment? Is that what he said? No, I said he rejected it. He saw the love of Christ, but then he totally said, I want nothing to do with you. And I'm going to live this type of life. Okay, but he doesn't very different. He doesn't believe that. I mean, he doesn't believe in the, in the Holy Spirit. He doesn't believe in, in this manifestation of God, what he thinks. I don't think that is true. I think my religion, Islam is true. That is, that is stupid. That's what he thinks. Let's say this is, this is what he actually thinks. He thinks that is stupid. That's obviously dumb. Why would I believe in that? My religion is obviously true. But you and that is disbelief. I mean, by the traditional understanding, as far as I understand it, as far as I see it, he would be considered a disbeliever who has rejected Christianity and who would be judged for this disbelief and would be punished for that. That is what I see here. And that is simply ignorance. That is the inability to grasp that a certain thing is wrong. You may call it ego. You may call it rejection. You may call it conduct or arrogance or whatever it is. But in the end, this is simply something that happens out of your inability to believe that that certain thing is true. It is ignorance in the end. Yeah. And I think ignorance will definitely be judged differently than somebody who says, I will reject this no matter what. I'm going to live for myself. It's radically different because it leads the very, the very position of, because, because a lot of Christians will go to say, unless you bend the knee, unless you confess Jesus is Lord, then you're not going to be saved. But that, that does not jive with me. I think that goes against the grain of so many other passages in scripture. All right. I'm looking at the time here because we could stay on this one the whole night. Are you, what kind of atheist are you? What do you mean? What kind of atheist? Are you like into scientism? Are you a hedonist? Are you like an atheist that's perhaps part of the Buddhist sex? Are you more of the politically driven, say social Darwinists? Or are you just one of the atheist's absence of God? I consider myself a free thinker. I don't, I don't really use the atheist label. I just use it for the sake of the debate, generally, because that's technically what I am. If I don't have the belief in the one God, but I don't really consider myself that I usually say I'm a post-theist, I think the whole atheism, theism divide is something unnecessary. God is something that is part of human development, is a part of human history, belongs to the past. It's time to move on and to look at things that we know for certain are true. That's my stance, where it is. Know for certain are true. What kind of things do you know for certain are true? I know that grass is green, because I know that green is what we call that specific color, which we see, which has these specific qualifications, specific specifications that we have. I know that eating food ends my hunger and gives me energy and life, and so on. These are things that are true. So do you think, so then you're in the scientific framework of we need to gain more knowledge and eschew any type of faith? What I would think is there are a lot of theories about the origin of life, about what is outside of the observable universe. There are a lot of theories about how this universe was kicked off and all that. We have evidence for much of the things that we know today. For example, let's go with the Big Bang. When it comes to the Big Bang, the Big Bang is a theory that we have about how the universe that we are currently in began to expand. We have certain pieces of evidence about this Big Bang, which lead us to the final inference that the Big Bang is possibly the best explanation. What I see here is, okay, I see the evidence that the universe is expanding. I acknowledge that and I believe in that. I see that there are temperature changes over time between objects in space. I see that, I acknowledge and believe in that. When it comes to the Big Bang, however, the initial beginning of everything, that is a final inference, a leap of faith that we are taking, which I think, okay, it is a reasonable explanation, the most possible explanation at this time. Nevertheless, it is still an inference. You could naturally see that when it comes to the question of God, which in my opinion requires a much larger leap of faith and a series of huge inferences, I would not consider it possible to accept that as true. Hmm. Okay, so you kind of believe in the virgin birth of the universe in the sense of nothing ultimately kicked it off inside of time? I'm not sure. I mean, what we have is there could be, there are certain theories, some of them may be true, others may not be true. We don't exactly know if the universe for certain has a beginning. We know that it began to expand from a certain place. That's all I know. I don't want to make assertions and say, I don't want to make truth claims. I am okay with accepting ignorance and simply looking for the best explanations and the evidence that emerges. I mean, I simply have a problem with truth claims and religion is all about that. So since you keep going to that evidence, you know, it's interesting how this debate is Christianity versus atheism, but you're kind of this post theist. And so I can't decide if that's a position or not. I feel like it's slight agnosticism, but then it's like agnosticism with a little edge to it, which I like. But I feel, I think too, I noticed, so typically when I'm debating on not just James's channel, but different channels, I'll always hear atheists now use extraordinary claims, need extraordinary evidence. And they don't even know where that came from. It came from Carl Sagan. He didn't even mean what they mean. And you can't even define everyone disagrees on the definition of what extraordinary even is. And then people move the goalposts and say, oh, no, okay, no, I need a little bit more evidence. I know some are claiming that's evidence, but that's not enough evidence because that's not even really evidence. And then the goalposts just shift. So when you say evidence, what kind of evidence do you need? Well, you could appeal to different forms of reasoning, but evidence can be something that is not necessarily concrete, something that we arrive at by pure logical reasoning. But evidence in terms of observable evidence, for example, when I gave an example of the Big Bang, I said we can observe clearly and prove that the objects in our universe are drifting further away from each other, which means they are expanding or the space that we are in is expanding. We can clearly observe that and document that. And I therefore accept that as true because there is no reason why I can possibly object to that. But then you could argue that the evidence points at the Big Bang, and you could then accept the Big Bang as 100% true. I would not. I would say that's the best possible explanation, but that's all it is. And I would have the same position on God as well. And unfortunately, in terms of God, I simply do not see any piece of evidence which would point us at the direction of a creator because we don't have a creator that we can compare the creator to. We cannot describe what creating actually is. We don't know what God actually is. It is simply a term that was introduced to us by certain religions, and we have no reason to accept those religions. I have no reason to accept Christianity as true. For example, I haven't seen one today. I would like to see one. Godless mysticism is a type of atheism. And so I would agree with you in terms of the Godlessness mysticism. It steals from Christian traditions when it comes to mysticism. And at the same time, there's no definition of God. We don't know what God is. Let's get rid of this idea of God. So what we're debating tonight is Jesus Christ. Was he truly a person one? What was his character like two? What were his claims three? And what happened to that corpse four? Did he actually rise from the dead, or did he not? And see, I think that is so far, because I would agree with you, without Jesus Christ, it's what is God? It's come, some type of ethereal mist. It doesn't make any sense. I fully agree. And that's why I like what we're talking about right now. But again, I think it's fascinating how you keep going back to the Big Bang and drawing these conclusions and saying it's not God, because Albert Einstein, as you might know, would strongly disagree with you on this. Because Albert Einstein in bringing in ushering is his fudge factor, as you probably know, he said that, no, the university eternal, I'm going to cheat here on my numbers, but all of a sudden his colleagues start to catch him. And he says, shoot, okay, fine, there was a Big Bang. That means there was a beginning to the universe. That means I have to talk about something now and actually philosophize in a very pragmatic way about how there is some being outside of space and time that started this place, that being God, that's why he became begrudgingly a theist. Okay, but that is simply, again, a series of inferences. I mean, you could also appeal to Spinoza, for example, and talk about Spinoza's God. What he eventually did was to present a certain idea of a perception of God that is not very much in agreement with the Christian understanding of God, just as much as Albert Einstein's imagination of a certain creator or an initial mover is not entirely in agreement with the Christian idea of God. This this this idea of God could be anything in Eastern, in the Far East, in East Asia, people explain this by appealing to a term called the Dow, which is the eternal balance that cannot be described, cannot be explained, contrary to Western philosophy and religion, which you simply rely on and whose balance you seek in the world. Why not trust that? Why go with the Christian explanation? I can say, hey, look, it makes sense. We are in a world in a universe. I am not sure how far back I can go with creation before creation before creation. There must be something at the very beginning. There must be something that is greater than all of this. There must be something all powerful. This could be something that I could that I could come to. But again, I would just be making assumptions moving on from that to come to the the idea of the one God. I would then again make a lot of different assumptions unless I trust one certain religious belief and its doctrines, in this case, Christianity. And there I would then again have to trust vague scriptures and have inferences there as well and think, well, people can't have made this up. There must be some truth to it. It is probably true. That's what we have in Christianity. There is no proper evidence that we have for the claims of Christianity to be true. So what I'm saying is there simply is no reason for somebody who wants to only accept verifiable truth to accept Christianity as true unless we want to make certain leaps of faith. And why would I make them? Okay, so atheists make all kinds of leaps of faith. It's a philosophical question whether God exists to begin with and how this universe began. Anything appealing to metaphysics obviously involves faith. And we know even evolution talks about process, not origin. Origin is all about faith and beliefs and garnering evidence. I think most recently I've really worked through the type of faith that atheists have when it comes to something like human rights, when it comes to something like universal benevolence, when it comes to something like why sacrifice for somebody on the other side of the world? What is the ultimate reason for an atheist? What is the motive to do so? Secondly, I think of this whole scientific piece that we've been talking about. I don't think it's just we're garnering knowledge. I hear so many atheists say, oh, it's all about science. We're just garnering knowledge. No, you're not. No, you are not. You have beliefs underneath. You have theories underneath this quote, quote, knowledge. And all of the hypotheses as well are connected in many ways to the evidentiary type of faith and beliefs. I mean, then you have other... I hear people all the time or atheists kind of talk about how this idea of sin, a doctrine of sin, is despicable. Well, okay. So morally speaking, you think humanity has gotten better? I mean, we've gotten better when it comes to world hunger, but you honestly think the human heart has gotten better? That is a scary claim. There's no way the human heart has gotten better. And so what is going to be the answer from an atheistic perspective? Because I hear so many atheists say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, humanity, utopia. Things are all good. Humanity is getting much better. So there are so many things that I think atheists overreach on that they have no idea they're doing so. Sure. I completely agree. I mean, I agree that atheists make a lot of assumptions and a lot of inferences rely on certain things. I entirely agree with that. I would say that the whole morality aspect is a complete discussion that we can have. I don't... I think that morality is a human construct that is built entirely on necessities and on very simple functions, which is why humans came up with very similar morals around the world. That's fine. And that is okay. But what we are doing in this case is we are saying, well, okay, believing in Christianity is a leap of faith, but other things are also a leap of faith. Sure, yeah, I agree. I agree completely. But why exactly would I take that leap of faith and believe in Christianity? Why would I have the need to believe in Christianity? If I will not be judged for being ignorant, for disbelieving, why would I feel the need? Why would you feel the need to convince me to become a Christian? Why should I become a Christian if I do not think that it is true, if I don't have any evidence? When I could go for so many different worldviews in the world that are just as functional or even more functional, maybe? Why Christianity? And so one of the questions you asked in there was, why would I want you to become a Christian? And I think that has to be done. I mean, if I truly love you, it's the whole idea of the atheist convention that met at Dartmouth University saying, you Christians, if you're not sharing your faith and wanting people to become Christians, morally you're despicable. Or the atheist who said, if I was a Christian, I'd crawl across, cut glass in order to bring people to know Christ out of love. So that's the answer to that one. But I love that you keep going back to, is this thing true or not? Because there's all the evidence in the world that going to church, so a recent meta-analysis study came out on, what was the title? It was church attendance and despair. And how emotionally, relationally, if you go to church, also on a weekly basis, you are so much your life expectancy, your emotional health, mental health, skyrockets. But I like that you keep coming back to, no, we want to know if this is true and you get those benefits oddly enough, if you believe it's true, not just going to church being like, oh, wow, I'm not going to be depressed this week. No, it's if you believe based off of evidence that this is true. And I think one of the pieces you asked, you talked about in your opening was the reliability of the Gospels. And I think two of the reasons that the Gospels are reliable is one, they were written too early. And the manuscript evidence, it's too close to the actual dating of Jesus' death and resurrection. And then the amount of manuscripts we have, almost 6,000 now, I think that early attestation is huge. And then also, another one is they're not written as fiction. Clearly, there's footnotes throughout the Gospels. There's things like in Acts, for example, where you have, I think it's 54 different forms of, here's exactly what happened. And so it's a type of, you know, Warren, what is it, John 21 talks about how there's 53 fish exactly on the beach that Jesus was eating. And so that's not written as fiction. And I think I would push back too. I think it's, yes, I think it's hard to know exactly whether we have the right authors. But historians say that the dating is much harder to get than the authorship. Typically with an ancient document, if the author's name is on there, typically you take that as that, that's the author. But what we're doing in the end is, again, we're just going for a scripture that, evidently, if we look at the world, if we look at discussions regarding Christianity, if we even look at scholarly work surrounding Christianity and these debates that we are having, it is obviously a problem that the scripture is not subjectively reliable to everybody. And there are many problems with it. There are, as far as anthropology is concerned, there are certain standards based on which we cannot consider the resurrection of Jesus Christ or his life events to be certain historical facts. We treat them as stories that may or may not be true. So this is what we are confronted with. We have a certain collection of beliefs and collection of writings and sayings that we may or may not believe because we don't for sure know if they are true or not. If you are born into the religion or if something moves you toward the religion, you will most likely somehow find a way to believe that it is true. In most cases, you will not find a reason to believe that it is true. But in the end, we are simply left with that. And I would again ask the question, why exactly would I become a Christian? Is it pragmatic? Well, if that's what it is, why do I exactly need Christianity? There are ways outside of Christianity that could make me just as happy, that could put my life just as much in order. Why exactly Christianity? If it comes to the morals and the exemplary character of Jesus, as we have given examples in your opening statement, there are people in the world in human history that we can take examples from such as Confucius or the Buddha, for example, who are extraordinarily exemplary people who have been influential for a very long time. And if you follow the teachings of the Buddha, you will not concern yourself with discussions on how everything came to existence and what you should do so you can be saved. You would rather focus on having peace, which I think could be more functional. So why, if it's well-being, if it's pragmatism, then I don't need Christianity. I'm just as good without Christianity. If it's happiness, I'm just as good without Christianity. If it's the evidence, where is the evidence? Yeah, so Confucius' grave is full, Muhammad's grave is full, Buddha's grave is full, Jesus Christ, his grave is empty, and he claimed to be God. And so yes, these were all great dudes, but he claimed to be God. And is the historical evidence there or not that he actually rose from the dead is the question. And so no, it's not a matter of pragmatics. When I talked about the meta-analysis when it comes to church attendance and despair, I'm saying that's one of the benefits of. I think you can get back to evidence versus experiential. I think we're talking about the evidence, but the evidence also has to, once you get to a worldview, you also have to experience it that it actually works. See, I don't think atheism actually aligns with reality. I don't think you can truly live out atheism. I think the meaninglessness, the despair, the nihilism, the moral relativism, I mean, I could go on and on, and that's why you have this incredible, again, the overreach of atheists is insane, especially in the Department of Humanism, because you have so many atheists are smuggling in a type of meaning when ultimately life is meaningless. Ultimately, you can gain meaning here, but ultimately life is meaningless if you're an atheist. Ultimately, you don't have any type of long-lasting hope. You can have a level of optimism here, but there's so many things we long for that the Christian faith answers and it fits, but you keep saying that there's no evidence. So that's what I was starting into though, because you just, so I was the reliability of the Gospels, evidence as well as the resurrection. And I talked to you about right out of the gate. I mean, written too early, but not written as fiction. There's embarrassing details. The footnotes I talked about, like Simon of Cyrene carrying Jesus's cross, father of Alexander and Rufus, who probably weren't even born yet, but they would have been known in the community. And so it's, go check with these guys, see if the eyewitness testimony is correct, and then believe or don't believe, based off of the evidence of the eyewitness testimony. And so it's not written as, again, fiction whatsoever. You have to deal with the incredibly embarrassing details. I mean, Peter, the head of the entire church is considered the rock now, who had this amazing identity shift after encountering Jesus Christ, just like James did. He denied Jesus to a little eight-year-old schoolgirl. That's totally embarrassing. Why would you have the head of your entire church power moving forward? Had this embarrassing moment. Why wouldn't you cover that up? And so there's so many different parts to the Gospels when it comes to reliability, when it comes to written as history, not fiction, when it comes to, like I said, the footnotes, the embarrassing, there's so much evidence to the reliability of it. And we haven't even touched yet when it comes to judging other ancient documents. I don't really see this as evidence. I mean, saying about an ancient text that it contains certain things that may be regarded embarrassing, and if people wanted to make up certain information, they would have removed those embarrassing information. It is not evidence of the fact that the religion which is being conveyed in those texts is necessarily true. I mean, it may very well be. You said these texts were written very early and are thought to be relying on eyewitnesses, but it may very well be. We didn't have the standards back then in the time to actually verify everything by modern standards, which is why we don't have the evidence that these documents have been verified. It may very well be that all these sayings and all these traditions that are the gospel came from a small single source that simply continued as an oral tradition throughout regions, which then turned into different books that, by the way, have great contradictions within each other internally. We have four gospels when it comes to the gospels only. The gospels have a certain account of a person named Jesus. They have a lot of contradictory information. If it were entirely reliable and valid eyewitness account, it is strange to consider the vastness of contradiction and the absence of information in certain gospels, which you can find in others. It is very reasonable to assume that there is a long line of oral traditions there and of oral sayings and transmissions that took place. It's not a modern time like today. We're talking about times where people transmitted all kinds of absurd beliefs to each other. In Europe, people still believed that you shouldn't go out in the forests at night because there are witches in the forests and big monsters in the clouds that might get you or dwarfs and whatever it is. People believed in very crazy things because people were not very much informed and didn't have the advanced technology at the means that we have today. Simply relying on people delivering certain information and including details that proud people wouldn't have included. These to me are not pieces of evidence. These are simply reasons why you may justify your belief. I might simply not accept that in order to justify believing in that certain religion because I rejected on many different grounds as established. Well, okay, so you started right out of the gate with something I never claimed. You said not that the religion is true. That's kind of the evidence I'm giving you. I'm talking about historical reliability when it comes to the Gospels. I'm not arguing for the defense of the Bible. I'm not arguing for is the religion true because of this. Oral tradition I would disagree on. I think, yes, oral tradition we have today. Certainly, I agree. It's on more shaky ground. But if you look at control versus uncontrolled, when it came to how serious you're going to take somebody's word and pass it along, Jesus was considered the rabbi. So it was a controlled setting when it came to eyewitness testimony. And so people would have died for keeping their rabbis word truthful. And so that's why I believe it can absolutely be considered verifiable in many types of ways. But again, I see what you're doing. And again, I agree with the instruments that we have for testing the credibility of history today is way better. Do I wish we had those back then? Absolutely. But okay, but then what's the cutoff? Can we believe, for example, that D-Day happened? What about the Holocaust? They didn't have the kind of instruments that we did. I mean, could they test history or not? At what point are we going to cut off and say, no, we can't trust that because those instruments just weren't as good as ours? And then I think you bring up contradictions. But many would say that the contradictions in Scripture are not downright contradictions, but whether it be scribes messing up on minor details, or whether it be looking at it and saying, no, it's different perspectives from different gospel writers, different sources claiming that this actually happened, instead of agreeing to with each other to an infinitesimal degree, then all of a sudden you say collusion, obviously. And so again, I see you wrestling with the oral tradition, but the oral tradition leads beautifully right into, when Paul is talking in 1 Corinthians 15, 3-8, he's clearly saying some have fallen asleep, but the 500, many of whom are alive. So what he means by that is go check with them. Go check with the eyewitness testimony, these sources to see if the resurrection actually occurred. Many were eyewitnesses and then many were close to the eyewitnesses. And so once that happened, then you had many of these eyewitnesses dying. And so what do they have to do? They had to write down what occurred because the eyewitnesses were dying. And so it wasn't this long, long oral tradition, but you know, just as well as I do AP, oral tradition actually was pretty impressive, especially back then, in terms of memory, in terms of why Jesus spoke in parables. I mean, kids could memorize the entire Torah and speak it. So the oral tradition was incredible when it came to memory. So I believe no, there's a lot of evidence that it truly was, is credible today. Do you believe that the moon was split in two in Muhammad's time? No, I don't. I think in all honesty, when I look at the Christian tradition and the reliability of the of the Christian scripture, I think that the traditions of Muhammad asking for the moon to be split in two and the moon being split in two in Muhammad's time is equally reliable, maybe even more reliable, because we have actual people that we can trace a line of people that we can trace who have witnessed the happening of that and brought it to us. I think it is incredibly absurd. I think it's dumb to be very honest, but it is just as reliable. I mean, the Christian account of the sayings and the life and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are almost very much equally reliable, somewhat somewhere there. And again, even if the scripture was entirely authentic, even if they were written by the people who we think wrote those books, I still don't see how and why we would eventually believe in the claims that these people have made about the origin and life and afterlife and the divinity of Jesus. If it's the character, we have a lot of great people who have who had great character. If it's his status as God and as a forgiving person, I don't think he's very forgiving. If he creates people with evil and then judges them for evil, which he himself created and could have simply gotten rid of. I don't really see where any of these foundations for belief in Christianity really hold up. Yeah, and I would say you've got to take seriously eyewitnesses. How many were there? Do you believe in them? If so, why? If not, why not? And then you still haven't talked about the world you change that happened overnight, that really just completely swept the entire Roman Empire up and then encountering the empty tomb. Whether that occurred and no people aren't going to die for what they know to be a lie. No, no one's going to do that. And so the details, the manuscript evidence, you know Nabil Kureshi probably better than I do. This is exactly what he did right here. He looked at your example of the splitting of the moon. He looked at Muhammad when Muhammad talked about making a bird out of clay. He looked at Jesus when Jesus talked about making a bird out of clay, except it was in the Apocrypha, so none of the early church took it seriously. He looked at these things. He looked at the details and he said, is this written as history or not? And the fact of the matter is these people did exist. Jesus Christ did exist as a historical figure. He had this type of character which we would expect out of a good God, the only God. He made these claims which is clear as day and then it was all backed up by his resurrection and all the evidence we have from enemy attestation as well as those who knew him. And then it changed the world and it has only grown and grown and grown and now it's the biggest religion in the entire world. So I would say to you, you've got to come up with what's your alternative substitute to especially many of these things, but say the world view change that happened overnight. I mean the world view change is not necessarily a reason to believe that the certain message that was delivered is true. It simply means that it was that as a result of a series of events, it resulted in changing the world and becoming dominant in the world just as Islam did in different ways. It might not be very pleasant to speak of, but that happened as well. You know what I'm talking about? I mean it's not people believing in something and people believing in something in masses is not necessarily a proof for that certain belief to be true. I understand why Christianity turned out to be functional, why it worked, and obviously there is the big contribution of the Roman Empire converting to Christianity and then imposing Christianity on its population while persecuting and attacking the former temples, which they, by their own standards, deemed dangerous and detrimental to the glory of their newfound faith. That led to the success of Christianity. I would definitely argue that Christianity worked for a society because it granted people a certain sense of peace within the society, but so did many other systems in the world. As mentioned, Confucianism revolutionized and changed China so much, which is why it is regarded as, which is why it spread through such a massive population in a very quick time. So the fact that something works or the fact that people believe in something or that the fact that something becomes successful to me is alone not proof that it is true, especially if there is so much to the contrary such as the whole idea, which doesn't make sense to me still, that God sets this life up for us and then rewards and punishes us. It's absurd to me and I don't think it's something that we can actually get out of. I think those terrorists who did the 9-11 attacks and those who were doing the suicide bombings, I think their belief is radically different from the belief that upended the Roman Empire so quickly. I agree. Rainwashing takes a long time. Even rainwashing little kids, we know this psychologically, it takes a little while. Again, this happened overnight. Hundreds and then thousands and thousands were coming to the faith. I don't know if you're saying this, but it sounds like you're saying this. It sounds like you're comparing the two and saying that they're the same, but no, this is a belief that they have in a law or some type of word that they got from a law or the Quran. This is very radically different from the eyewitness testimony of those who were willing to die for what they knew to be alive that didn't happen. Nobody dies for that. Many people will die for crazy beliefs. You think of Jim Jones, you think of the Brace Davidians? Absolutely they will die for that, but they're not going to look and say, hey, he did not rise from the dead, but you know what? I'm going to go ahead and die and say that he did. No, you have to be a maniac. I mean, maniacs will do that, sure, but no one in their right mind is actually going to do that, especially not hundreds and thousands of people. I would like to clarify something. I would never say that Christianity is like Islam. I would never say they are the same thing. People who know me know that I would never say that. I just want to clarify that before that gets out wrong. But I completely agree that Christianity is spread quite differently from how Islam spread. Islam spread from the beginning to the end by the sword. Christianity started with missionary activities spreading among the common people and then it became a force later on and then spread through violence for a long time, which still I don't think is comparable. But the point is, we don't actually have evidence that so many people had eyewitness reports of the resurrection and an empty tomb. We don't actually have any evidence of the life and death of Jesus and how he lived, what he said, whether he was actually buried there or not. We don't have any of these things. So we mostly rely again on certain accounts for the sake of simply relying on them because they happen to be part of this religious belief that seems kind of plausible to us or that is part of our culture. We are born into it, which is why we should find ways to explain it. But I don't think that the evidence is there. What I would accept as acceptable evidence is if we had, I mean, for example, why isn't God communicating with us today? Why is it up to us relying on some ancient scripture? Why the hiddenness? I mean, we have the internet. It is the easiest thing nowadays to deliver information from one place to the other. If something happens in the sky in China, people in America will know it within seconds. If today a great miracle happened, if today something huge happened which showed to us that Christianity is indeed true, that God does indeed exist, something that is undeniable, something that cannot be compared to anything else, the information would rapidly go all around the world and we would all see it. I have given the example before of the miracle of a descending leg, as I want to call it, which is that we see somebody live on TV who is missing a leg. People are praying for him to God and suddenly we see from the sky a leg is coming down and attaching itself to that man's leg, something very extraordinary, right? But why can't miracles be extraordinary for all of us to look and see? Why does it have to be vague, buried somewhere in ancient documents that we have to fight in order to verify? I can't accept that. First of all, it's a great question. But first of all, the Bible, think about the amount of years it spans and then think about how many years this world has been around. Okay, so the Bible clearly is a matter of, it's only 42 authors, for example, as well, only a couple thousand years. It's going to be the highlights, the highlights, the top 10 nominees, sports center's top 10 nominees. When it comes to the miracles, when it comes to all many great events, you're going to see in them. So it's hard to take that and say, okay, I should be seeing these same kind of miracles every single day. Well, not if you look scriptural, it makes sense if you look at the Bible and it's literally the highlights in many ways. Secondly, I have not seen a leg grow back. I have had many friends say that they have. Whenever I get invited to one of these tent healings, I don't go. I don't know why. Maybe I should go one of these days. I just get a little spooked. But so many of them have told me that they've seen things grow back that I don't know what's going on. Either they are hallucinating or they're seeing something. But my personal experience in Haiti, they're absolutely with some kind of spiritual craziness going on that does not happen here. And whether that's because of our materialism or whatever the issue might be, it could be different. But near-death experiences alone, 30 million in Asia claimed to have had just NDE's. So that's a specific type of miraculous occur to them. And so there's tons and tons of testimony. You and I would sit here and say, we don't have personal testimony. But I mean, there's so many people who have. So it's kind of hard to say that why doesn't anybody get miracles. I think God would reveal himself personally instead of universally. What's that? It's weird that God would reveal himself personally to specific people instead of revealing himself universally. I mean, it could be so easy. And that's where we would disagree. I mean, agreed again to some extent. Do I want God to be here in actually a personal form? Absolutely. Do I think God has shown himself through nature, evidence through nature, through things like consciousness, through things like how many, the cosmological, we can go over so many different arguments. It's scary. But I think based off of nature, based off of conscience, right and wrong, based off of just an innate knowledge that there is something out there and that I have to push back against that. I mean, many people would say, no, I'm born with, absolutely, there's nothing out there. I was born with a test tube. And so my whole piece on this is, again, we can't play games with God. If I said, okay, peace, prove to me you're my friend, show up in my house right now. I don't know where you live, but show up right now or we'll make it a little more mundane. Just give me five bucks every day. Come on, that type of revelation and be my friend. Obviously, that's a type of friendship that is absolutely not done out of free will and not done out of love for the other person. No, it's playing serious manipulative games. And so God's not going to do that with us. And I have typically my Jewish friends will say, I'll believe if he shows up every single day, just once he shows up every day, and I get a little lightning in the sky. Are you going to come to a trusting relationship with him and understand what real belief is in that sense, it's a trusting relationship? Or do you just want some type of incredibly powerful, amazing vision or him just popping up and all of a sudden, I believe in you because I saw you so I'm going to heaven, right? When that couldn't be more, just alternate to what the Christian faith is talking about in a relationship with Jesus Christ, trusting relationship versus that type of just bald belief. I mean, it's not like God is getting tired from or God is losing something from us asking him, right? I mean, briefly, I want to address the whole near death experience issue. Near death experiences have are very much scientifically explained, although there is still there is still some effort to understand how exactly and why exactly it happens, how exactly it works. It is very much within reason and within the findings of neuroscience to explain that a person who is assumed to be dead or who is dying would have certain hallucinations and a sense of mixing reality with dreams with a dream state with a consciousness that is awake while the body cannot be awake, while the body cannot move. So near death experiences to me wouldn't be evidence. If I myself had one, I would think it would be a very poor reason to believe in God with everything that I know right now about neuroscience. But when it comes to God, it's not like we are asking God to give up something or we are asking God to, it's not like it's a nuisance to God or an annoyance to God or God loses something or God thinks again, you're asking me to come there again to show up. No, it's God. I mean, we are, we are taught that God wants us to believe in him. We are taught that God wants to save us. He wants us to go to the good place. I feel like if that is really the belief that it shouldn't be too much to ask God to try and to show to me that he is indeed the one that people tell me he is. Otherwise, I simply don't see why I should believe in that God, especially if I have too much seeming evidence reasoning to the contrary that he is not even real, let alone being that God that others tell me about. If he really wants it, if he does exist, which I deem very unlikely, then hey, why would it be hard for him to simply come and do what he, the Almighty God, wants to do, which is to save me? Okay, but don't forget, even in Matthew 28, when Jesus is going to ascend and he sends out his apostles, disciples to go evangelize and outreach, it says many doubted, many walked away from the faith, or in John 6, when he's giving out the bread, he's talking about my body's the bread, you got to drink my blood, people misunderstood it, but they were also like, we know the claims he's making, pretty exclusive, and he's calling us to a type of connection with him that we don't want. I still want to live my own life and he takes off. So my question for you then, AP, is could you honestly say right now, if God came down here and showed you himself, and you supposedly, okay, I believe now, because I think my five senses are not lying to me, okay, but it's not that. It's the next step, which is, because even the demons believe, right, and they shudder, that's just not it. Jesus says, over and over, that type of belief is just not it. It's the second step of trusting, are you willing to give up your life to save your life? Are you willing to deny yourself completely and walk in a way where you're willing to give up literally everything, resources, even your very life, for Jesus Christ, and to enter into a type of loving relationship, where it ultimately is all about him and not about us? Are you willing to do that? I mean, it depends if that is what God really wants me to do. If he does exist, and I know for sure that he is real and that's what he wants me to do, I'm not sure it would depend. I would probably do what God wants me to do, because he knows better and I'm after the truth. But the issue here again is, that is not something that we, that actually happens. It's not something that happened to me. It's not something that happened to anyone that I know. It's not something that we can verify ever happened. And I would still ask, why in the world are you judging all those people who don't want to do that because of the way you created them? I mean, even if it comes down to simply disbelieving in God, rejecting God, rejecting what he wants from you, isn't God in the end punishing people for the very nature that he himself created? I say, I would probably believe and follow, but someone else might not want to, because they may have their own reasons, which they are naturally conditioned to, which God has caused, because he's the Creator. Why would he then come and judge the human for that? It seems a bit absurd and a bit cruel to me, honestly. What I want to do is give each of you about two minutes to draw together some of the threads from tonight's debate. And so with that, we'll go into the Q&A immediately afterwards, but Stuart, we'll start with your two minute closing statement. So I talked about the character. This is what you'd expect. If God walked on this earth, character of, he fought racism, he fought political barriers, fought moral, you know, moral outsiders he always welcomed in. His claims, undeniable. Jesus assumed authority to forgive sins. He claims that he alone could give eternal life. He claimed to be the truth, and then the reliability of the Gospels. I think, again, written too early based off of this oral tradition that was taken to the bank at that time. They were not written as fiction based off of the embarrassing details. There were tons of footnotes. It would have been written way ahead of its time, like as in like a 19th century type of fiction, if it was fiction. That's not how fiction was written back then. And then finally the resurrection. Again, it gets back to their independent accounts, the simplicity of Mark's account showing that this is just history. The Jewish polemic saying, hey, enemy attestation here, we're saying that this happened and this is what we did with the body, or this is what they did rather with the body. And then the appearances. Peter, the disciples, the 500, we have this very, very early on. Just after anywhere from a couple years to 15 years after the event itself, we have this claim of who saw and people backed it up. And then finally, we talked about how there was this tremendous world view change and an incredible way to finish. For me is I hear atheists say all the time that you're right, we do need to account for this world view change if we're saying it didn't happen because of the resurrection. You got it. Thank you very much, Stuart. And then AP, if you'd like two minutes as well before we go into the Q&A, we can do that. Sure, yes. So I really appreciate this conversation tonight. I think it was quite interesting. So what I want to say is I came here as said earlier, not with the aim to not with the aim of disproving Christianity, but rather finding out why one should believe that Christianity is true. I don't think that Christianity needs to be disproven. I simply don't think that there is proof for Christianity, which is why you don't need to necessarily disprove something for which there is no solid proof to me, in my opinion, with all due respect. Is it necessary to believe in Christianity? Is it pragmatic to believe in Christianity? It might be for some people, which is why I find it understandable that some people believe in Christianity, that some people believe in religions. I have nothing against religious beliefs. I myself think I am much better off sticking to things that I know and not trying to desperately tell myself that there is some ulterior, some ultimate meaning to life, some inherent meaning to life that I must find. I think I would be lying to myself if I did that and if I based that on religious beliefs, especially since there's so much evidence to the contrary that Christianity is, in my opinion, not true. Jesus may have been a great character, especially for his time and environment, and I partially agree with that. But then again, so what? He was simply a revolutionary guy. On the other hand, if we did want to accept that Jesus is also God and that Jesus also speaks in the name of God, then I would say that he has some qualities that I simply don't understand how they are logical or good, such as creating humans flawed, creating a dirty evil world, and then simply letting this existence continue with this evil way and judging the world for being evil when he himself could have simply made everything beautiful. So this is logically bad to me, and yeah, sure. Thank you. Sorry, I didn't give you a great and earlier warning, but we want to say, folks, our guests are linked in the description. That includes here on YouTube, and it also includes in the podcast. So if you want to hear more from AP as well as from Stuart, hey, on the podcast, you can find their links as well as here on YouTube. And so we're going to jump into these questions, but I do want to say just a couple of other things in particular regarding housekeeping type stuff. One is that, as I had mentioned, my dear friends, we are excited and thanks AP for kind of giving a kind of the nod for giving the thumbs up to this upcoming debate next weekend on human rights versus Sharia law. It's going to be controversial, folks. It for sure will be, but we definitely think it's worth it. And so we hope that you make it for that debate. And don't forget to subscribe for a reminder for when that debate happens. First question coming in from C's the day studio says, Hi Stuart, you said previously you were questioning your faith and then decided to follow God. Is that because your dad may have influenced you to do so? So is the question more so he was influencing me to chase after and check out other truth pass or is it more so he was brainwashing me so much that I was like, okay, I'm out of here. I didn't use this exact words, but I think they were saying I interpreted it as like, did your dad help you to like kind of return to Christianity after you were questioning it? I asked him for resources for sure. I wouldn't got my own resources. And then I remember actually being at my desk, my sophomore year of college calling him saying, Hey, I need some substantial resources right now. If I'm going to be a Christian, you got it. And thanks very much for this question. Amazing. Robert Summers says, leading with calling sex workers quote unquote, beyond scum, why do you choose to call them that? I didn't do that at all. I said they're in the Roman Empire. That's what they were considered, just like many people groups. You got it. I misunderstood, but it's good that you clarified that. Made by Jim Bob says AP, you go with Christianity because it's the most coherent account for the unity between material mind and metaphysics. I think they're saying like you should go with Christianity for that reason. I don't understand why. I mean, I really don't understand why I disagree with that. I think there are better explanations elsewhere. And actually studying psychology and studying neuroscience, which I have very much done to a certain extent over the last two years. I feel like we have much better explanations outside of Christianity when it comes to this reality. You got it. And Chloe McLean, amazing says Stuart, can you differentiate a feeling of the spirit and the normal human experience of peace slash love or wholeness or completeness? Or is it that only God can give you that? No. I mean, yes, in one sense, people experience the Holy Spirit differently. Some it's more of a feeling than others. They would claim that also gets into denominational differences. Many of my charismatic friends would say when they get their hands high in the air, they feel a type of warmth in their palms. I do not get that. So it's different for people. And I wouldn't want to measure it scientifically. I think we've run into all different sorts of problems that we did. You got it. And thank you very much for this question from Joel Nelson says Stuart, how do you deal with Matt saying Jesus was born during Herod's rule? But Luke says it was when Judea became part of Syria. Those events are 10 years apart. I don't know. Good question. Matt has not asked me that. And this one coming in from Chloe McLean says, James say, amazing, please. Amazing. Thanks to your super sticker doubting Thomas as well. And Contrarian 420 says Stuart, how do you square up the infallibility of the Bible with all the fallen hands that have altered and edited it through history? Well, so this is a better one for AP probably than me. Because if you look at the Quran, you're getting word for word from Allah versus the Bible, which I believe in infallibility. And I don't believe in inerrancy. And I think it is through human hands. It's exactly right. Where you do have like Bart Ehrman talks about 400,000 variations. Fortunately, those variations do not in any way take away from the main thrust of different verses or even chapters of Scripture. And then I think if you look at the scribes, especially the monastic scribes, how they transmitted classical Greek and Roman works, they were the only ones relied upon. So not just the Holy Scriptures, but also any work from that period. And so we are fully trusting the monastic Christian monks to do this for us. And so, yes, do I think there's screw-ups? Absolutely. But do I think overall it's transmitted in a way that makes sense and is the integrity of it is still there? Yes. I don't know why you would ask me about the Quran. I think the Quran is a bunch of garbage. But next up, thanks for your question, Chloe. Now we know where you stand. And Nefla Vries says, thanks for what you do, James. Thank you, Nefla, for your support, as well as Mike Q922. Appreciate your support, as well as Spider of the Ateo. Thanks for your super sticker too. And Chloe McClain says, Stuart, do you think that people of other faiths don't have personal relationships with their deity or that their deities aren't as quote unquote good, good being subjective? Yeah, we would have to compare deities to themselves. I wouldn't want to make a general sweeping statement. I would say two. No, I think, I mean, look, when I studied Buddhism, even though the oneness, the getting over ego, there's so many similarities of Buddhism and Christianity. I think you can have a type of experience with the mother tree or coming into this all soul in a way I personally have where I found this piece that AP was talking about. So no, I think you can have a personal relationship in a way where the feelings perhaps are just as peaceful at times than who I believe to be the true God, Jesus Christ. You got it, Anne. Thank you very much for this question. Coming in from Robert Summer says, does God know the exact way that he could reveal himself to me in a way that I would believe I am honestly open and willing? That's the first part of that again. He said, does God know the exact way that he could reveal himself to me in such a way that I would therefore believe I am honestly open and willing? Yes, God knows everything. You got it. And Chloe McClain thinks your question for AP says, do you believe in spirituality? Why or why not? I personally don't simply because I don't have any reason to believe in spirituality. I mean, I believe in I don't believe that a spirit or the soul is really a thing. I think it's a remnant of old myths. I simply don't have any reason to believe in it because there is no evidence to it and nothing to base that belief on. You got it. And this one coming in from Neverland Breeze says, nobody is an atheist because of facts. They are an atheist because they do not want God to exist. AP, do you agree? I completely disagree. I think I've always tried my best to find the truth throughout my life. And if I did ever believe that Islam was most definitely true, I would again go back to believing in Islam despite the fact that I have very strong feelings about it and have said a lot of things about it. And the same goes for Christianity and for God in general. I don't believe that it is plausible to believe in it. I don't think it makes sense. I'm not convinced. And that to me is what belief is. You got it. And thank you very much for this question. And Robert Summer says, why does the Christian God allow for so many different sex or denominations aren't all the wrong ones, quote unquote, leading people to hell, Stuart? No, to the end there. One would be when his disciples go out from him at one point, Jesus, that is, and they see somebody who is doing miracles in Jesus' name. And they're all elitists about it coming back to Jesus and exclusives saying, hey, it's just not right. And he says, no, he's doing it in my name too. And I think that's an example of denominational differences where it's like they wanted their subgroup and they were egotistical about it. But no, Jesus says, here's another example, allow that person in a different way to do miracles in my name. And I think the second answer though is there's beauties in it. I'm a big fan of the Black Church, for example, for a number of different reasons. So there's incredible beauties that connect culturally to how one expresses their faith. But ultimately, no, it's man's fault and woman's fault. We are totally broken people. And we gnaw at each other and hate each other at times and think we are right about what exactly is in a holy book or what exactly is in any type of book. And so denominations have been built off of pride and disagreement. You got it, and thank you very much for this question coming in from Robert Summers has, have you ever actually met an atheist who was an open social Darwinist, Stuart? Let's remember the ninth commandment here. There are not many of the, that's good, it's rich. There are not many of those who exist today, but not too long ago, there were plenty. Conservative non-believer says question for Stuart, once saved, always saved, or continually born again to be saved. What's the prize for salvation? Does it simply mean you don't get tortured forever? Yeah, John 10, Jesus clearly says, no one can pry them from my hand, those who are his own. And so in one sense, once saved, always saved, but then the question becomes, was that person genuine in their decision to take the step of faith? And so I believe that's ultimately what it comes down to. What was the end question or was that the whole thing? They had said, what's the prize for salvation? Does it simply mean you avoid being tortured forever? No, the price of salvation is the trinity, which I'm glad AP didn't grill me on since he has Muslim roots. He probably could have, if he wasn't as gracious. The trinity shows, based on Father, Son, Holy Spirit, from the beginning of time, there's loving relationships. We were made for community. From the atheistic worldview, we were just somehow accidents, and we're just made for ultimately death and demise. But I think we have such a strong connection to love, and it is something that I think that is beyond just materialism, that it makes sense that we're going to have those types of physical relationships in heaven. We're not going to be disembodied spirits playing harps on clouds. In all honesty, I think I'm so sick of hearing people making big assertions because of the trinity. I think if you want to believe in the supernatural, the trinity should be the least of your concerns. You got it. And this one coming in from Pedro H.M. says, if God is beyond comprehension because he is infinite, won't we all be judged on a basis of ignorance? Again, that's why I went to Jesus Christ. Because I think if you rule out Jesus Christ, then whoever's asking that question is exactly right. But I don't think we're going to be judged based off of ignorance. And yet, the original issue that me and AP were talking about is, yes, some are exposed in a more type of obvious way to the gospel than others are. And yet I also do. So that's special revelation. But I also believe in general revelation, which is there's so many pieces of evidence in my mind for a God. And Paul talks about clearly nature as well as our inner conscience of right and wrong. Those are two of them. And so no, I don't think it's out of ignorance. And then I brought up Acts chapter eight, the Ethiopian eunuch. There's many who were in cultures who were not at all connected to the Christian faith, at least as we knew it at that time. They eventually had exposure to it. We should debate that sometime, that the natural, you know, the signs, the natural evidence to believe in God or that God is true. We should debate that totally. That'd be awesome. Love it. Juicy and Nephilim Faree strikes again, says Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that he could not account for morality without a God. And that this fact troubled him very deeply. AP, what are your thoughts? I think it's a little bit of an often of a misrepresentational misunderstanding of what Nietzsche actually meant, which I cannot blame anyone for because Nietzsche wrote in very, in a very strange artistic language that is often hard to understand. But his point is, even with the whole famous phrase God is dead, his point is that humans have lived by a certain morality, by moral standards that were established based on the notion that there is a God who demands good and evil from us. And now we are moving on from that and we have killed God, God is dead. What he means by that is we have killed this necessity and this social standard, this morality. But what he also says about that is that there is no such inherent morality, no good and evil. This was an intention. It is now up to the humans, to the free spirits to move on from that and to build a new world with their own morality based on human strength and all that. But that's a very complicated topic. You got it. And thank you very much for this question. Endo XD says, what about the fourth L? Namely, what if Jesus was a legend? The amount of literary techniques, stolen aspects from mystery cults, Zoroastrianism, etc. Is Jesus just another dying and rising person or savior God? Well, so that gets into would be messiahs. Within, oh gosh, 150 years, I want to say before Jesus' death and resurrection, there were tons of would be messiahs. And all of them were put down by Roman soldiers ultimately. And they didn't want them getting any type of power. And so they, I would say they disappeared pretty quickly off the screen, you know, off the scene. And then Jesus had this explosive movement. So no, when it comes to legend, though, I think again, you have to accept Jesus Christ as a historical figure first and foremost, because there's 16 extraneous sources, whether it be the Talmud, Josephus, Tacitus, you name it, talking about him as a historical figure. And then you have the Gospels as well, which are also sources. And so historical figure. And then on top of that, you have this accounts of all these would be messiahs were put down. And then all of a sudden Jesus very practical, realistic that he did these things and things jumped off the page. But then you got the eyewitness testimony, the oral tradition, and then later on, the Gospels that were written. And so they're too close to the life of Jesus to form to be legend. Again, if Dan Brown was right, and it was 150 to 500 years after that the manuscript evidence that we have that that kind of the length between the actual death resurrection and those written, then that would be legend, but they're too close. You got it. And thanks very much, Robert Summers says, what is your metric that you were using to measure if the human heart is getting better or not? My bet is you say, quote, unquote, look around. Well, so yeah, the secular people say reason will be good enough. We can just reason our ways to getting along together and to doing great things for this world. And I don't think that's true. I think if you put anybody in a prisoner of war camp or anybody in a tense situation, even in their own home life, reason is not going to get you through difficult relationships, even divorce or anything like this. No, it's about the human heart. The human heart going to change or not. And no type of educational system, no type of government has been able to change the human heart. There's no way we can obviously weigh the metric of it. It's ultimately God who knows our hearts. And that's why I think the Christian faith makes the most sense in terms of turning over self, Holy Spirit, having impact, and then living out Jesus' ethics, that works on the human heart unlike anything else. You got it. This one coming in from headless chicken says just dropping you some change because I appreciate what you're doing. Thanks so much. And says keep up the good work. Appreciate your support. And want to say all credit to the speakers who are linked in the description. And that includes in the podcast, folks. If you want to hear more from AP and Stuart, you better click on those links. And what are you waiting for? This one coming in from Surinim says quote unquote agreed, atheist make a lot of assumptions unquote. According, they say they're quoting the atheist. I'm confused. Either of you understand that. I think that's a little bit of a jab at me because Stuart earlier said that when I brought up the fact that or when I assert that religion requires a big leap of faith, Stuart said that atheists also make big leaps of faith. And I said, I agree, atheists do make a lot of leaps of faith. They also make a lot of inferences. And I think that's what this person is referring to. Gotcha. All right. And then thank you very much for this question coming in from Robert Somerset. Stuart, do you know for a fact who wrote the Gospels? Nobody knows for a fact. I think he should read Peter S. Williams. I think he's the best on it. His most recent book is Are the Gospels Reliable? And I think digging into whether they were historical figures. I mean, why would Luke, for example, fabricate if he didn't have a close relationship? He wasn't one of the disciples fabricate what he was writing. He was a doctor. He's an outstanding man. He's brilliant. And so why would they use Luke? Why wouldn't they get somebody else who was really known, who was really close to Christ as just one example? And there's many of those. So that's why I think we can take them as who they are. There's no ulterior motive for Luke and Mark especially to all of a sudden just have these names who people wouldn't have known. Why wouldn't you have had Peter as a gospel writer instead? You got it, Anne. This one coming in from Robert Somerset. Stuart, do you know? Oh, we got that. Conservative nonbeliever says, can you prove Christianity is true without using the Bible as a reference? It seems if you take the Bible away, nobody would believe it. Thoughts? Church Fathers. Second century. They had over a million quotations down. Rip away the Bible, you still have the Christian faith. Next up, Contrary in 420 says, Why dost thou prayt about God? Whatever thou sayest of him is untrue, unquote. Meister Eckhart. Any thoughts? What? Either of you? Can we have that again? Contemporary language? I think they're saying, I'm telling them to pray. It can AP answer this one. I'll be, I gotta give me one second. You bet. So they say, why do you talk foolishly about God? Whatever you say of him is untrue. Okay. It could be for either one. It could be applicable to either one, honestly. I mean, yeah, even that's actually something that I say to ironically, to people who advocate for God or who are apologists of God, who make a lot of their personal explanations about how God judges and who God is and what he will forgive and all that. I mean, who are you to actually talk in his name and make assessments of his character and of his judgments? To me, there is no, there is no God that we can define it, that we can believe. So I don't know what to do with that. You got it. And thank you very much for this question. Or thanks for your super sticker from Woody. And then the super destroyer will get your thoughts on this as well. They say 9-11 was an alleged inside job. Was that a super chat? It was a statement as a super chat. Correct. Oh, okay. Yeah. Thoughts? We're supposed to have thoughts on that. You won't have to. It's okay. All right. What do you say? I mean, I think it's obviously, I think it's very absurd. I think the evidence points to the contrary. I think it would be extremely absurd to believe that it was indeed an inside job. But I mean, you got it. Yeah. Don't worry. We're back to it. Rudy questing says, in regards to Christianity spreading quickly, a lot of that has to do with the adoptions of other religions and beliefs and practices. Christianity is an amalgamation of other religions. Stuart. Way off Rudy, although I like your name a lot. I think it's it's read Larry Hurtado. Hurtado is the best on this church historian. He died from over a marquette. He talks about how Christians were the only faith that would that would lose everything going to other homes of people of different faiths because they were the only faith that couldn't worship other deities. And it was socially very polite to walk into a home and say, this is my deity, I'm going to worship it in your home. And I'm also going to worship your deity. You're just supposed to do that. So the amalgamation, I don't see any evidence for that. And I think just based on the discussion tonight, I think clearly there was exclusivity from the very beginning. Can I add something to that? If I may, I think there is, I think there's reasonable evidence to believe that Christianity has had a lot of influence or that pre-Christian Jewish tradition has had a lot of influence from regional beliefs, including from dualistic, Gnostic beliefs from Zoroastrianism and others, especially in terms of the dualism between God and Satan, which I think may have come from the dualism in Zoroastrianism and in related beliefs. And I think that Christianity did indeed take a lot from certain beliefs that it had access to, just as Judaism before it. You got it, Anne. Thank you very much for this question. Coming in from Roger Schrum, says, does Stuart believe that God stopped the sun for Joshua to finish his fight? Yes. You got it, Anne. But I'm not going to be blown out of the water if that didn't happen. Because, again, the Gospels are written as history, and it's by far the closest documents to our time today, as opposed to going Old Testament, which has way less evidence and credence behind it. You believe that God stopped the sun for that to happen? Again, I don't want to pussyfoot around a little bit, if I may, because I could be a liberal Christian here and just easily kind of do a little bit of dancing. But no, I think most likely the story of Jonah being inside the belly of a fish for a little while, I think those stories were accurate. I'm open to there not being just one Adam and one Eve. I think there could be groups of people initially. So, yeah, if I don't have any presuppositional bias of just materialism and physicalism, then I don't see a big deal with potentially the sun having stopped. Technically, I think that I could be wrong about this. Let me know if it was something that you were thinking of, AP, and maybe other people were thinking in the chat, because I guess two ways you could take it is that the question is getting at the issue of whether or not God froze the day, so to speak, more broadly speaking, or in terms of stopping the sun in the sense that the sun is... If you stop the sun implying that it's moving, why does the Bible state it such that God would stop the sun rather than he stopped the earth such that the day stood still in terms of the lighting, for example? Yeah, I didn't want to be too meticulous about that perspective. Obviously, stopping the sun wouldn't do anything to the day. I didn't want to be too particular about that, but that was indeed part of the question, a little bit of a funny part of the question. But I was also genuinely curious as to whether you believe that that literally happened, that the day literally stopped for a certain event to go on until it ends. Well, and that's the challenge. Obviously, Copernicus and Galileo, you're going to have a lot who wrestled with that, and how literal to take the Old Testament in scenarios like that. And I think whenever science is connected with the Old Testament in certain ways, you're going to, I absolutely at times take science and say, no, that's probably written as figurative without purposely cherry picking. And so, there are many examples of... There's song, so for example, Ezra, or for example, Miriam in different areas of the Old Testament where the splitting of the Red Sea will happen as a historical event, and then there'll be a song about it, and you'll say, wow, this song is ridiculous. It's clearly metaphorical. And some will be like, that is ridiculous. And you're saying that's history. But no, that was a song after the historical conversation of what happened. But here, it's not that. And so, it's harder to wrestle with one like this. But oftentimes it is. James, before getting... Without getting too much off track, may I just ask a short question to Stuart just to have some knowledge of it? In Ecclesiastes, for example, the author says, talks about how at the very beginning, how every day the sun runs through the sky and goes down, and then it comes back again the next day, and this happens over and over again. The meaning being like nothing changes, everything is just futile. But the author describes the sun traveling through the sky every day. Now, when I read this, I think, yeah, obviously, it was written by an author back then who didn't have a proper understanding of how the universe works. Do you have that same understanding? Do you find it acceptable to believe that the author of Ecclesiastes may have been ignorant about the scientific aspect of this? Or do you think that is not possible? He was simply being metaphorical about that, or simply using his perspective? I think the Joshua example is not metaphorical. I think that one is metaphorical. I think Ecclesiastes is all about how to deal with the ultimate existential angst and despair of life when there is no eternity out there, when everything's just under the sun. And I would push Ecclesiastes up to the very first book of the Bible, because it's asking those types of hard questions. We are tonight in terms of worldview kind of questions. And the author is being, you know, Cohellit is being very honest about them. And I love that you have him as a character saying, look, this is me for a long, long time. And then all of a sudden I started to realize, wow, if I shift my worldview here, it changes a little bit. Like Leo Tolstoy, when he went into an emotional breakdown, when he started to realize, things were breaking in on him in terms of, wow, my life's not going to last forever. My books are not going to last forever. They're just going to burn. So what's it all worth? And so I think that's what he's doing there, too, in terms of the sun. But that was a very long-winded answer to your good short question. I love Ecclesiastes. I just, I find it very pleasant to read. But then at the end, the conclusion, I'm like, what? You got it. And this one coming in from Jareed Desain says, has AP thought of starting an AP news service? Yes, I have under very under different names. I have thought about that. Would probably be very chaotic. But yeah, I have thought about that, but I don't think it will ever happen to be very honest. Do you see? And Rodgers, Rodgers Rum says, for the most part, most religions are fed from the fear of hell. They put that in all caps. Stuart, what are your thoughts? I don't know about most, but I would agree with some for sure. Yeah, I disagree with most as well. Many religions don't have a concept of hell or of a certain afterlife where you are punished. Some religions advocate for annihilation forever. That's the ultimate goal. So, yeah, not most, but definitely, fear of hell plays a role in Abrahamic religion. And so the weird thing about that too, though, is so in my neck of the woods, George Whitfield and all these huge revivals started on the East Coast, and they were doing the Fire and Brimstone. They were doing, you know, Turner Burn. And then you even had Martin Luther, who a lot of people said he was writing all of his works basically just out of a fear of hell and death. And so the question becomes there. It could be another debate topic, which is God in judgment and the fear of hell leading you to belief in God is that legitimate, because obviously we don't have too many of those. When I walk into a college campus, there's always one person who's doing that without a single soul around him. It's always a man who's on the edge of campus telling everybody they're going to hell if they don't come to Christ. It's a very interesting approach. Anyway, I won't go into it. We should debate then. Jared DeSane says Stuart's quote unquote human heart worse unquote equals quote unquote G A Y S question mark. They said sad if so. I think they're asking like do you think that I think they're saying like when you say human heart worse, that's all they put is just those three words and quotes. Are you referring to people who prefer the company of the same sex? My communication was off tonight because I'm loving these questions and I'm getting in terms of what I said. No, my point of the human heart was there's a lot of people who have not been Christians. So one example is the head of the welfare state over in England who thought that they could fix problems with just more education and then upon retirement they'll say things like wow education didn't do it, science didn't do it, technology didn't do it. What is going to fix humanity? Like how do we change humanity from the broken state that we're in? And so that's what I'm talking about the human heart and a lot of those types of folks will get down to talking about something like the human heart. So that's probably what I meant by that. You got it. And thank you very much for this question coming in from Contrarian 420 says Stuart. Have you examined other religions to the depth, to their depth before deciding on Christianity since everyone always says they have, which Hindu books have you read specifically cover to cover? If I had to be honest right now I would say no. I have not looked at Islam or Buddhism as deeply. I've read my Joseph Campbell inside and out in terms of here with the thousand faces and all those good works when it comes to religions and how we're all just picking and choosing and we're all, you know, it's different roads on their way up to the mountaintop. And so in that sense, yes. But in terms of many textbooks, I've definitely read textbooks on Buddhism. I absolutely cannot tell you the authors right now. But so no, it's one that plagues me in some ways. I don't know why, but it plagues me in some ways in the sense of I really dove in probably deeper. And part of the reason why the AP was talking, I was born into the Christian faith. But I think at the same time I gave different world views of fair shake. One, not necessarily religion, but hedonism. I mean, what does Dave Matthews Bansang live up today for tomorrow we die or life is short but sweet for certain epicureanism. I think all of that makes a lot of sense. And so I don't really need a God. I think hedonism from a worldview is pretty tintillating. And so that was the one I was kind of into. Solid, yeah. You got it. Last one, Joel Nelson thinks your question says, if you accept the gospel as history, how come you can't answer my question about the contradiction in Matthew and Luke that I asked about? Whoa. Confrontation. You see, indeed, James, can we go next? My gosh. So your contradiction was about an extraneous author and a gospel writer, right? Was it was that the Matt DeLahonte question? Well, I can go back to it. I remember that it talked about in Judea at the time of, so they said, how do you deal with Matt saying Jesus was born during Herod's rule, Herod's rule, but Luke says it was when Judea became part of Syria, which are events that were 10 years apart. Yeah, look at Josephus. Josephus talks about this. I think we definitely got the timeline wrong. And, you know, Herod and Jesus were probably just one year in terms of, yeah. I think the 4BC and the 3BC is what you need to look at. And I'm not going to go much deeper than that right now, but I can tell you, too, I think for a lot of these contradictions, in 2,000 years Christianity has not been upended even close by one single contradiction. And there's an answer for all of them. And I think you also always have to keep into really consideration how monks did get a good amount of stuff right, but also a good amount of stuff wrong, but not the essentials. There's one thing that I have to point out. I don't want to say this, but it caught my attention when you said that there was no contradiction in 2,000 years. You are aware that Muslims are saying the same thing, right? It's a good point. And they are literally saying the same thing all the time. And I have to deal with that. There's no single contradiction in the Quran. Nobody has ever proven it wrong. There is an explanation to every single thing. Juicy. And we do hope to have you back, AP. I know that you are looking for debates with Muslim speakers or debaters. And so I am looking, believe me, I even maybe have a lead, a potential lead, but more about that later. I don't have much hope, to be honest. It is. It's not easy. You know, I did a poll during the debate in the live chat. I put, and I kind of guessed for some reason, I thought maybe some of your haters would be here, AP. I thought maybe there'd be some Muslims who don't like AP who are here. So I put as an option, I put Christian, atheist, Muslim, and then I lumped all the Eastern ones in together. Sorry, guys. But long story short, it was 57% atheist. Is that about 35% or so Christian? And then very, very small for both, actually very small for Eastern religions in zero for Muslims. There are no Muslims in the audience. I'm like, I'm juicing. I didn't expect that at all, to be honest. I, like I said, I thought at least we'd have some of your haters that follow, you know, they'd follow you here, AP, to give you trouble. But no, I don't. But anyway, we want to say our guests are linked to the description. So you can follow them. If you've been listening tonight, you're like, I want to hear more from this person. You can follow them to their links, which are in the description box. And that includes at the podcast. So I want to encourage you folks to check out these guys. We really do appreciate them and get to know them, become friends with them. We really enjoyed them. They're awesome guys. So I want to say thank you AP and Stuart. It's been a true pleasure having you on tonight. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It was a very nice conversation. It was a great pleasure to me. And I would love to come back for more debates with Stuart as well. Absolutely. Thank you, James. Your on point, as usual, and AP stretched my mind for sure. Juicy. I'm glad.