 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating whether or not Islam is violent and we are starting right now with AP's opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us AP, the floor is all yours. Thank you so much James for arranging this. Thank you Asar for the debate offer. I want to start immediately with a slide and share my screen here just to make sure it goes perfectly well. Right, I believe you can see it now. Yes, I can see it now. I see it too. So today we want to talk about whether Islam is violent. I want to start with with the Muslim attitudes towards non-Muslims towards disbelievers. So here is a study conducted by the ADL called ADL Global 100. This gives a very simple picture, a very simple overview of how people in different countries view different religious groups. You can see here on the left side you have Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Qatar and below that all the other countries. In these Muslim countries you can see that Jews are vastly viewed unfavorably. Christians are viewed favorably and unfavorably in different regions whereas in these other countries which happen to be non-Muslim countries people don't generally have terrible views about others except that in Germany I guess something slipped here, I don't know. But you would be surprised that Muslim countries seem to be kind of unique in the way that they don't really have a very good attitude and very good view of other religious groups specifically Jews. This is not due to historical or political or current events and influences. These attitudes come directly from Islamic scripture and Islamic beliefs. And I want to start to give an example with this hadith here. Hadiths are traditions, reports which according to Islamic tradition and belief according to Islamic studies were delivered by Muslim followers and spoken by Muhammad. So somebody witnessed what Muhammad said then transmitted it to others who then later wrote it down. According to those traditions Muhammad said in one very infamous hadith which almost every Muslim in the world knows and I've heard this a lot when I grew up as a Muslim. I heard that we are supposed to fight and kill the Jews in the future. This hadith says here Muhammad says the last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say Muslim or servant of Allah. There is a Jew behind me come and kill him but the tree gargant would not say for it is the tree of the Jews. This is talking about a mythical weird magical tree and a future which Muslims are promised where stones and trees tell the Muslims to come and kill the Jews in order to finally get rid of them. And this is very well known around the Muslim world. I learned as a child when I was in first grade that this is the future, that this will come in an unforeseeable future, that this could come in our time. And I learned that this will definitely happen, that the Muslims will definitely fight and kill those Jews before the end. And that was just a brief introduction. I want to get to some more sources when it comes to the Quran and the hadith. When we talk about Islam, we have topics ranging from violence, war, jihad, civil war, hate, intolerance, human rights, women's rights, terrorism, virgins in heaven, child marriage and things like that. It is interesting that when we talk about Islam, we tend to talk about some very problematic things and Islam is very unique in the way that we always have to talk about some very disturbing moral issues and violence and hate. I'm an ex-Muslim. I love Islam. Most of my activism is motivated by that because as an ex-Muslim, we are shunned, rejected, driven out. We are threatened constantly. We are killed, persecuted and leaving Islam is basically social suicide because Islam is supposed to be a unity which you are not meant to leave. And if you leave it, then you are considered a traitor. That's how it was in Islamic history and that's how it still is today. This again comes from the scriptures of Islam itself. The Qur'an says, the Qur'an initially approaches the disbelievers in a rather peaceful way and tells them, for example, in Qur'an chapter 60 verse 8, that a lot does not forbid you from being just and righteous toward those who do not fight you, which means this is often presented by Muslims as if it was a very peaceful verse, a verse which commands peace. But it's not really a verse that commands peace. It's just a verse which says that you don't have to fight those disbelievers who don't fight you. But the attitude changes throughout the Qur'an toward disbelievers. When we talk about the Qur'an, it has to be remembered that the Qur'an is considered the perfect word of Allah, word for word verbatim in Islam. So in the Islamic belief, Allah reveals the Qur'an which is permanent and which precedes humanity. He reveals that through an angel to Muhammad who then recites the Qur'an to the people around him who then write it down or memorize it. So every single word in the book is considered the word of Allah and it is supposed to be directly the law. Nothing in the Qur'an can be questioned. And when it comes to the Qur'an in this book, the Almighty God Allah who is in charge of everything tells you that those who disbelieve for them is a great punishment. They deceive Allah. They are deaf, dumb and blind and their heart is diseased. Most of the Qur'an deals with disbelievers, hypocrites, punishment, hell and war instead of dealing with guiding humanity and giving us a very useful and peaceful and productive message. The Qur'an says further in chapter 8 verse 55 that the worst of living creatures in the sight of Allah are those who have disbelieved. Yes, this is an actual Qur'an verse. It says in 98 verse 6 that those who disbelieved among the people of the scripture, meaning Jews and Christians because they believed and they have books and the polytheists, those are the worst of creatures. So basically all those who do not accept Islam are in the sight of Allah the worst of creatures. They are less than dogs, less than cattle, less than anything that exists out there. It even further says in 7 verse 179 that they are like cattle, rather they are more astray. When it comes to Muhammad again and the things that Muhammad said and commanded, here we have a report, Sahih Bukhari, where Muhammad explicitly says that whoever changes his religion should be killed and based on these words and based on this tradition, Islamic scholars throughout history have ruled that whoever leaves Islam should be executed and then they have differed on how exactly it should be done, whether the person who leaves should be given a chance to repent and whether repentance can be accepted or not, depending on what the person has done, whether it's a woman or a man and so on. But the general ruling is kill them and then of course the methods and what to do exactly can be discussed. The Qur'an's impact on how Muslims feel about others are seen everywhere. In Qur'an chapter 5 verse 51 it says, O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and Christians as friends, they are friends of one another, whoever befriends them is one of them. It has this constant attitude of hostility and here is just an image from Turkey where I lived for over a decade where you can see at a bus stop at a bus station a religious message which cites this very Qur'an verse in order to caution Turkish Muslims and to say do not befriend the Western people, do not befriend the Christians and the Jews because Allah tells us that we are not supposed to befriend them, Allah tells us that they are your enemies. The Qur'an specifies further in chapter 9 verse 30 that it first says that you say Ezra is the son of Allah which may be very confusing to a lot of people who understand Judaism because no Jew actually says such a thing. This seems to be ignorance on the Qur'an's behalf and it first says and the Christians say the Messiah is the son of Allah which could be acceptable. It says may Allah destroy them, how deluded are they. And further in Qur'an chapter 9 verse 29 which comes actually right before this verse, it says fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the last day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His messenger have made unlawful until they give the jizya which is protection money willingly while they are humbled and in accordance with these verses Muslims are supposed to establish a system where Muslims rule and the disbelievers are second-class citizens who have to pay protection money and be protected by the Muslims. If they fail to pay this then they are fair game. This was recently installed by ISIS once again since the caliphate has been abolished in the early 20th century. They came and started implementing this practice once again but they didn't really gain much acceptance around the world so 30 seconds left. I want to quickly cite one more thing here which is Ibn Khaldun who is one of the first historians in Muslim history. He says in his book Muqaddama in the Muslim community the holy war is a religious duty because of the universalism of the mission to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. Therefore caliphate and royal authority are united so that the person in charge can devote the available strength to both of them religion and politics at the same time. The other religions groups did not have a universal mission and the holy war was not a religious duty to them and this is one of the most respected people in Islamic history when it comes to history. And time. Thank you. Thank you very much for that opening. We are going to kick it over to Aisa for his opening as well. I want to say folks if it's your first time here at Modern Day Debate don't forget to hit that subscribe button. We have many more debates coming up. You don't want to miss them. So hit subscribe right now so you don't. With that, thanks Aisa for being with us the four. It's all yours. Salamu alaykum. Shalom alaykum. Paks namaste. Peace and blessings to everybody who's in the audience today. So we are having a deep conversation about is Islam violent? I'm taking the position that Islam is not violent. So we're going to begin with the first topic. So what is Islam and what is the Muslim? Pardon my interruption. I'll give you the time back. I just didn't notice this when we did the sound test earlier. If your mic is scraping against your hoodie or anything like a beard or anything like that. I just want to check in just because there's a little bit of feedback audio wise. Oh, I don't care about the time. I'm good because it's not going to be that long. I think it's a good now. I heard it a little bit there as you were speaking, but I think it's gotten better. Is that good? Yes. Okay. Go ahead. So what is Islam and what is a Muslim? This is the first thing we kind of need to define terms. What are what is going on here? What is this? It's such a large group of people. It's the second biggest religion in the world. So we got to think about what this means. So Islam means complete submission to Allah. This might sound a little negative, but we have to think about that. What does submission mean? It could be submission through peace. It could be submission through love. People who are devout in their spiritualities are submitted to that. So also Islam does mean peace. It means both submission and it means peace. So we have to understand that. If Islam is truly a violent and terrifying religion, why come from the root word sadaama, peace? Why have this? This is something to consider and to think about. So let's look at the Quran. It's actually interesting to think about this. In general, there are going to be violent verses that we have to engage. However, if the Quran and Islam was absolutely violent and absolutely negative, why would there be anything peaceful? Shouldn't it just be extremely violent? Shouldn't it be extremely tumultuous? Shouldn't it be extremely a space filled with anger and rage? Why have any of these verses that even suggest peace? If the Islam and the Quran were violent, there shouldn't be anything like this here. So I think this is an important thing to consider. So we can see that several of these verses say and they can be engaged in different ways. But we can see that these are spaces where we can see peace. And talking about feeding the orphan, feeding the people who are disenfranchised. This is an important thing to consider when we're looking at Islam. If Islam is terrible, if it's awful, these things wouldn't be there. And talking about kind of self-defense as well. So this is an important question to ask. In this debate, we're talking about violence. What even is violence? So taking a Miriam Webster definition, violence is marked by the use of a usually harmful or destructive physical force. So if Islam was like this, why wouldn't Islam just destroy everyone? Why even taking the most uncharitable position of saying, you know, of subjugation? That's not how Muslims would take this position. But with the Dimi status, why even have a Dimi? Why not just obliterate or force convert everyone? I think this is something to consider. So this is important. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is an old saying. You don't want to just say, hey, well, there's negative things here. So everything is bad. There is, of course, we have to grant that there's negativity in all different kinds of religions and spiritualities. This is an important thing to consider that doesn't make the community violent. It doesn't make the teaching in itself violent. So these are things that we need to consider when looking at this. This is another important thing. The No True Scotsman fallacy. This is something that we do all the time when we think about stuff. We generalize and say, well, look at all these negative things. There's 72 versions. There's all of this horrible stuff. Look at all the modern day violence. It's really, really terrible. However, we're not looking at all the variables that might be going on in these countries and the disenfranchisement, colonization, all of these things engage within these spaces. So can we say that Islam is solely to be engaged with violence or within certain elements of that maybe hostile? I think it's an important thing to do. So we don't want to throw everything out. We don't want to generalize and we don't want to just say, hey, this is what it is. And it's important that we have to understand that Islam is not monolithic. There's not just one understanding of Islam. I think this is the biggest difficulty we have with this topic of Islam as violent. We consider that we're like, well, Islam is a bunch of Arab people who look like this and they go around and they take swords and cut people's heads off. This is the thing that we see on TV shows like 24 and other kinds of programs that promote this kind of narrative. Is this the case or is there many different kinds of perspectives within Islam? I think that's an important thing that we have to consider if we're going to say Islam is violent. We would have to say all of Islam is violent. All these people are violent. We would have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I don't think that that's fair. Okay, so if Islam is just this terrible, violent, horrible religion, how could there be any progress? Why would there be any scientific advancements? Yes, you might see in the Muslim community that they'll say, we've created everything that may not really be true. It's more like there was a just like how all cultures, you know, collaborate through globalization. You know, Muslims had things to offer. Christians had things to offer. Jews had things to offer. Everybody, you know, non-theists, Buddhists, everybody had something to offer in space. So did Muslims? We could see al-Kurismi developed algebra. We could see things like domestic steel, surgical tools. We could see preservation of Greek manuscripts and, you know, even advancements in medical care. This is important to consider and to think about. If Islam is just this barbaric, evil religion that just wants to destroy everyone and everything, these things wouldn't occur. Why would Muslims even care about Greek philosophy? Why would they even consider? These Greeks weren't Muslim. They weren't Jewish. They weren't Israelites. And they weren't al-Nusra. They weren't the helpers. And, you know, some translate that as Christians as well. Okay. So this is another kind of fun thing to consider when we're thinking about Islam. If Islam was just bereft of anything, it's just this violent, terrible thing. Why would, you know, non-Muslim writers even incorporate their ideas? We can look at the Arabian Nights. We see it all over the 1001 Arabian Nights. Yes, there's a lot of problematic elements of that story in this day and age. Even the beginning of Wichita-Harrison. It's a very complex narrative. But this pop culture, this narrative is so important within our culture. It's so important within our understanding of humanity. So it's like, and it's not just like barbaric, violent stories. There is some violence in them. Like, you know, Hans Christian Anderson, we'll definitely see that too. But that's important to think about. We also have Dune, which is a series science fiction. A lot of science fiction has Islamic fusion. Usually Islam fused with Buddhism. Tassaw of Sufism fused with Buddhism. You see it with Dune. You have the Zen Sunnis, the Zen Shias. They're not, they're considered very sophisticated noble beings, you know, within the world of Dune. So a lot of these figures don't see Islam as this terrible, terrifying thing. And we can look at Star Wars. Look at the Jedi's. They're wearing North African robes. They are using the philosophy that George Lucas, Mr. Lucas is implementing within it, is coming out of Sufism and fused with Buddhism. So this is an important thing to acknowledge as well. And this is the final topic. It's interesting thinking about Dimmies. Like, I'm going to take, I want to take the things that may not be charitable to my position. Things like Dimmies. This is a very complex thing. Why would you have this kind of system? However, it's important to consider if, you know, this, if Muslims were just these violent barbarians, there wouldn't be Dimmies. There wouldn't be a Dimmie at all. There wouldn't be a situation where this situation happened, where non-Muslims would have a place. They did pay taxes and they, I don't, their lives were not, they weren't perfect, but they weren't the worst thing ever. And that's something that we have to consider. If Islam is violent, this system would be in place. The Maled system was used by the Ottoman Empire and it's actually used by Israel now too. So it's an important thing to consider. The Maled system is the system where each spiritual ethnic group would go to their kind of space. So like, Jews would go to Jewish school, Muslims go to, you know, Muslim school, Christians go to Christian school. There wouldn't be any justice system. There wouldn't be thick, there wouldn't be Jewish spirits. Why have any of that stuff? If Islam is just this terribly violent barbarian religion, there wouldn't be even any spaces of coexistence. And there are Muslims who do coexist with non-Muslims in many different spaces. So South Asia is a perfect example of that. There wouldn't be Ijma that's like a consensus and there wouldn't be Ijtihad. It would just be a monolithic fascist dictatorship that we would see in 1984. If Islam is this terrible thing and it's really violent and it wants to destroy everything, I think that these are the things that we would see. I'm going to definitely grant that where there's definitely difficult things that we're going to see within Islam. There's no doubt about it. And I think what I would like to encourage the audience to consider is let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Thank you. Thank you very much for that opening. I want to let you know, folks, here at Modern Databate, we are both a YouTube channel and a podcast. If you have not already, find Modern Databate at your favorite podcast app, such as Spotify, Apple Podcast. You name it, find Modern Databate right now so you can listen to debates on the go. And as a quick side note, because sometimes people get a little confused about this, on the bottom right of the screen, you can see a thumbnail that says, this is already and exclusively on our podcast. Sometimes we will put up an event and it'll say in the title that this debate has already happened and it's already on the podcast and only on the podcast. And some people still get confused because even though it's in the title, some people just see the, wow, it's set for 12 months out. Why are you putting this on your channel when it's 12 months away? This is way too early. And so even though it says on the title and the thumbnail that the debate is already and only on the podcast, some people still get really confused by that. So I just want to let folks know we're not trying to fool anybody. Frankly, it's just our way of trying to let people know that there is a podcast, which by the way is 100% ad free. So check it out. Download those debates. You can listen to them when you don't have service, whatever else. But with that, thank you very much gentlemen. The floor is all yours for open dialogue. So I want to quickly address some of the things that you said. I feel like everything you said just requires very, very short responses. One of the main points that you brought up throughout the discussion was if Islam is a violent religion, then why is there so much peace in it? Or why is there peace in it at all? Why is it not entirely destructive? I find that a very strange thing to say in defense of Islam, because if you read Mein Kampf by Hitler, you will notice that it has a lot of elements of peace in it and a lot of elements of unity and of establishing a successful peaceful society and this and that, which however does not get rid of the fact that it also has some really, really messed up stuff in it. The Nazis said a lot of peaceful things and wanted to make a lot of, similarly communist regimes had a lot of promises of equality and tranquility and peace and all of that while brutally violating and subjugating populations. So that doesn't really make sense. I mean, of course, Islam, if it is adopted by people, it has to create a community and has to provide for that community even though it is intolerant towards the others. Totally, I totally hear that and I understand that. I think that the issue is, this is kind of a human condition type of situation. People can be tribalistic, people can be violent, people can implement these kind of spaces of toxicity and you're correct. In places like extreme fascism, like Nazi Germany, as well as the so-called socialist kind of revolution, these kind of these spaces where we see Stalinism. I think that that's totally fair and I think this is a human problem where humans want to be better than other humans. I don't think this is specifically an Islam problem. Do I think Muslims do it? Of course. And I want to say one thing to you. I totally think this issue with like ex-Muslims more taught, I think it's extremely problematic to say, we're going to go and execute people. I think this is insanity personally. And I think, and I understand that there can be a textual space that you can find that, but there are a lot of Muslims who don't believe in that either. And I think it just depends on how you read the text and how you view it. So I think that's an important thing to think about. But the issue is you are right. It is a human condition and you are right. Humans try to strive for community for something better and they end up doing some terrible things. We even have the whole phenomenon of something that is very well known in history that whenever populations create a huge movement and overthrow an oppressive regime, very frequently they quickly begin oppressing the very people that they overthrew and also oppressing their own population. This happened a lot throughout history, even through the French Revolution, which is a revolution that is greatly admired. Throughout history, this happened all the time. I agree with that, but that's the problem. Islam is, if you let go of the idea that it is a true belief which comes from the Almighty Creator, from the Almighty God. It is merely an idea that was presented by people in the 7th century who did not know better, who had mostly their self-interest as a group in mind and who, if they sensed threats or rejection from others, were hostile toward them. Like, why don't we talk about why these things emerge and why these things found their place in the Quran, like texts, which say that you are supposed to fight the disbelievers until they are humiliated and they pay protection money or, I don't know, that the polytheists are filthy and should not approach the Kaaba and things like that. Yeah, I definitely think it's problematic and I think we definitely have to take historical context. This is important. These people lived in historical contexts. We're definitely, when we read the Quran, you're definitely going to see that imagery. Like, that's just the way it is. And I think it is a difficult space when people are like, well, it's timeless. You can take a spiritual narrative and make it timeless, but if you're taking it just literally, it's definitely contextual to the time and it has to be read that way if we're going to read it literally. So you don't believe that the Quran is exactly and everything that it says timelessly commanding people to do precisely what it tells you to do when you read it? I think it really can only work within like a spiritual experience. I don't, like, if you're a spiritual observant and you're saying this is some kind of cosmos within, yes. But if you're trying to put it on a literal, literalist, it's impossible. You, I could never argue that, no. Then you don't really share the beliefs of most Muslims around the world because most Muslims would say that that the Quran is authoritative for all times. It is timeless. Everything it says applies at all times. The Sunnah must be followed, which is why we have people in our time who still say that the time will eventually come when the Caliphate will be once again established and people will be commanded to join Islam and those who leave will be executed and things like that. So you don't really agree with the mainstream or with the traditional Islamic stances, I guess. I think we have to understand how the mainstream Islamic movement is now. It's not necessarily equivalent to the traditional Islamic movement. A lot of ancient scholars would say Allah, and that means God knows. Now a lot of days people are Google scholars. They think that they know everything and they say, well, I'm going to read this book and I'm going to know everything. A lot of people actually had spiritual guides that helped them through this space. And if you look at a lot of traditional Islamic societies, you know, including Turkey, I don't know how it is exactly now, but Turkey before had this and South Asia, a lot of people had spiritual guides that would help them understand this. It was not just, I'm reading the book and now I can be the expert. So I think that- Sure. But a good example, Turkey. I mean, Turkey had the Ottoman Empire, which was overthrown violently. And forcibly by the secularists who got rid of Islamic law and who abolished the Caliphate and installed secularism. But prior to that, the Ottoman Empire had a very clearly stated goal of conquering the world and becoming the ruler of the worlds. It is even referred to. The Ottomans referred to their empire as the world empire or the ruler of the world or something translating to something along those lines. So they had this stated mission to conquer the world and to spread the banner of Islam to put it everywhere and to basically make Islam make the Prophet proud. And that doesn't just come out of thin air. That is something that has been in Islamic history throughout Islamic history. That's the Abbasid Caliphate, the Umayyad Caliphate, the first Caliphs. The Muhammad himself, if we look at the sources, he himself said, if we are to trust the most authentic sources, he himself said that he has been commanded to fight the disbelievers until or to fight the people until they say, none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger. I definitely, I'm not going to deny that. I definitely think there is an element of that that exists within the Muslim world. I wouldn't say it's completely that way. I would say Islam spread not only through the sword. There were aspects of that but there were also like mystics like South Asia. That's how Islam spread through South Asia. Like that's just a fact. They were mystics that came but now people had, there was a kind of, there was a reformation with Islam, the Salafi movement, which became very literalistic oriented. I would say ancient Muslims really wouldn't have taken that position if we look at traditional scholars. And I would say that it's important to kind of see that there's nuance and diversity. Yes, there's elements of this. I'm not going to deny that. I mean, when you say that these are, that these are attitudes that are, that recently emerged and that older scholars would not take these positions but I cannot really think of of an example for that because when you look at the early history of Islam, when it comes to jurisprudence or, I mean, I give you an example of Ibn Khaldun who clearly, as if it was a completely normal thing in his time, because it is a normal thing, says that it is the Muslim obligation and mission to fight and to spread Islam by force or by willingly or by force. Then you have the scholars. I have several of their books over here. The scholars of the four schools of theology who vastly still believed in violent rules, violent laws and spreading Islam through war. I mean, these are not isolated cases. The thing that these traditionalists or revivalists, Salafis, did was just to go back to a very literal interpretation of certain scholars like Ibn Taymiyyah and others and to then have an incredibly intolerant fundamentalist, literalist version of what they said. But essentially, they still believe in the very same thing that the Islamic scholars believed since Muhammad that they are supposed to rule by the sword, spread by the sword. If it doesn't work peacefully, that they're supposed to execute those who leave Islam and so on. I agree Islam spread here and there through peace, but that doesn't negate the fact that Islam also probably mostly spread through war. Yeah, I definitely hear. I'm not sure about most, but I would definitely say I have to agree that there was violence. Like the East African slave trade is an extremely problematic element within Islamic history. We can't deny that that's not there and a lot of people don't know about it. But I think this is the thing that I think is important in these conversations. We have to be accountable. There is problems within the Muslim community. I can't say Muslims are just peaceful, wonderful, law-abiding. You wouldn't have jokers, Arnaib. You wouldn't have al-Baghdadi. There is a problematic element and I think this is why we have to have conversations and come together to kind of go towards a peaceful interpretation. I definitely understand that if we take, I don't know if I would say all the scholars were like, yes, let's subjugate. Like as I think of, like let's take Umar ibn al-Qutab who has this problematic elements like particularly with his son and, you know, you giving the hudu basically, you know, his son drank alcohol and he got punished and he died from his all of it, which is deeply problematic. He also, honestly, went into Jerusalem and it was, historians would say, relatively peaceful. He didn't like, slaughtered. He did bring Jews back into Jerusalem. So I mean, I think that this is an important thing to understand. Was there imperialism? Yes. I'm not going to deny that. There was Islamic imperialism and I, it's problematic for me. It's not an easy thing to deal with. I don't, I'm a very anti-imperialist. I don't think imperialism is good at all or manifest destiny. I think these are very problematic spaces and it does happen within the Islamic community. And I would say there are textual sources that would support that as well. But I would also say that Islam is complex and it's nuanced. So I think there are spaces that that doesn't happen. So I think that that, we have to look, I would say we have to look at Islam in a complex way and say there are these negative things and there are also positive things. That's where I come through it. It sounds like you mostly agree with me here. So I don't know why we are debating. I definitely agree on a lot of these things. I think it's super important. The only thing that I just don't think is that I don't think we should just discard Islam completely. I think there is something good there. I think there's value in Islam and I think it's within society. All right. So I have to, I do have to tackle one thing that you said at the very beginning of your opening speech, which is you made the claim that I have to get rid of the friendliness now quickly and attack again. But you said that Islam means peace. That's not true. I have to, I will contest that very quickly. Islam means submission, literally. It comes from the, Islam means submission and submission and peace come from the same root word, which in Arabic works as the three letters SLM. It can develop into peace or into submission. But to say that Islam means peace just because they share the same root word or to say it means peace because why else would it have the same root word? That's like saying dictating and dictator are the same thing because they come from the same root word or combustion and combining are the same thing because they come from the same root word or I don't know, collecting and collision are the same thing because they come from the same root word, right? That's obviously not true. That's not how it works. So, yeah. I totally hear that. That's why I put submission of a lot first. I put peace because that's, I was making sure I was like, you know, navigating to see a lot of people take that as a secondary definition. That's why I didn't put it primarily. I am aware that the primary definition is sufficient to a lot. However, contextually, a lot of folks also give that secondary definition of, so I didn't really hold on to that point because I'm like, I know that that's not a huge ground I could stand on. I think it's an extremely weak ground to stand on because I think there is like virtually no truth to the idea that Islam means peace. You could say, I mean, I understand. Look, if you think about etymology, if you think about how words develop, you could understand that submission and peace have something in common. They come from the same root word and you can see how they relate somehow. You know, you can in peace submit. But again, there is another example which is I think a very, very interesting one. The word hostile and the word hospitality, which are wildly different. You know, one is about, one is about, you know, hosting others in a very nice way. The other is being an enemy, but both of those words come from the root word host, which refers to strangers, but the two words are completely different things. So I think it would be unfair and it wouldn't be accurate and a very good and convincing way to approach the discussion by saying that Islam means peace because of the root word. And I hear that. That's why I didn't hold to that. And I could say it could be submission through peace. And this is the problem with the semantics. Like it really depends on the arbiter. The thing is it's interesting. I don't know if you're familiar with Star Wars, but I think of like the Jedi religion. And in Jedi religion, you have like the positive Jedi's. You have like gray Jedi's and you have the Sith. This is the continuum. And this is kind of how I would see a lot of Muslims in the same space. You could be a good person. And then when you take that force, it could be positive. And if you're a negative person, you're going to make it negative. I think that's usually how it works in general. Yeah. I would disagree with that. And I see your point. Interesting reference. But I would say I would say you could put an effort into really depicting Islam as something that can be taken and turned into a very wonderful and beautiful thing. But compare Islam to Buddhism, for example, or compare Islam to Jainism. I would personally think I personally have my reservations about Jainism because I think it is a very dysfunctional way of living. Although it is incredibly peaceful, probably the most peaceful religious belief out there. Buddhism also is a very peaceful one. And you could take Buddhism and become incredibly peaceful and detach yourself from all kinds of hostilities and all that. With Islam, it is simply not possible to do that. With Islam, even if you personally, if you personally go on a journey and I was there, when I was a Muslim, I was mostly spiritual. I was in Sufism and I focused mostly on my inner spiritual struggle instead of other stuff. But that doesn't change the fact that outside of us who try to just focus on their inner selves, there is a religious community which relies on a religious tradition, which relies on a religious scripture and that scripture is the problem because that scripture gives people the idea that the disbelievers are less than animal and that they are the enemy, that they cannot be trusted, that you are supposed to fight them. So it's a nice effort, but I don't think it is possible to go anywhere with that. Well, I think it's interesting that you bring up that verse, the Hyrule Barrier, the Shadow Barrier, the good creatures and the evil creatures. I think what's interesting about the Quran and I think really just any spiritual text, this is why I would never argue is Islam scientific. I think that that's a lost cause. I would never argue that topic ever because I don't really feel that the Quran functions as a scientific text. Neither do I think the Tanakh or the Evangelion. I don't see these scriptures or Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, all of these texts. I don't really, these scriptures, I don't feel that they do that job. So it's really hard when we read the Quran, it's pretty open to interpretation. That's why a lot of like Ahlu Sunna Wa Jama'a, which where you mentioned the scholars, like the four scholars are primarily Sunni. So they use these interpretations, use the Fasir, they use Hadith, they use all these other corpuses to understand the material because if we read the Quran just as a text of itself, it's pretty vague. It's not really very literal in a sense that we can understand it by itself. I wouldn't say that. I mean, how can you possibly interpret, for example, Chapter 9, verse 29, which is what I like to cite a lot as an example, which is the one that says, fight those who do not believe in Allah over the last day or this and that. Fight until they pay the jizya willingly or by until they pay the jizya willingly. And within context, it then goes on to describe that the Jews and Christians has totally deluded and may a lot destroy them. Then further it says, they take their priests as gods and things like that. So it seems to be a pretty clear command to fight those who don't accept Islam and the Islamic scholars, the earliest to the most recent, have generally understood it as such a command, which is why they fought. Well, this is an interesting question because you had brought up, you had mentioned Ezra as the son of God. So this is an interesting thing. What do Muslims know about Jews? I think this is an interesting question. There's not even a word Christian in the Quran. There's a word called Nasr, helper, basically, it's like a helper of Christ. So it's an interesting thing. What does Islam view a Jew to be or what a Christian is? This, it's a hard thing to say. I don't really know for sure because it's like, maybe it's Arabian Christians and Arabian Jews that fit into that context. It's not, maybe it's not this globalist perspective. And then what these, some folks do, is they do put it on a macro level when it's really at a micro level. I think that's important to consider as well. I think it's pretty clear because the Quran, I mean, it says, even then in that context, in chapter 9 verse 30, it specifically says it's Christians say the Messiah is the Son of Allah or the Son of God. So it refers to the Christians who believe in the divinity of Jesus as the Son of God. It refers to them and those Christians have been the vast majority of Christians throughout history and are still today. So that they were probably like, I don't know, very small minorities of Christians who had different interpretations of those two ideas. But it has been the standard majority Christian belief from the beginning of Christianity to the current. So when the Quran says the Christians say the Messiah is the Son of Allah, then it is very clearly referring to Christians as we know them. We do know that Christians in general, like how they were mentioned in the Quran, well, because it's not really that word Christian again, but it kind of people take it to mean that. But the thing is that what did they say about the Trinity? The Trinity isn't really the traditional Trinity that I would say your standard Christian believes in. You know, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that's not the Trinity that's discussed. So I think that that's an interesting thing to consider. It mentions the Virgin Mary. So it's like, this is something that we go too far. Don't get me wrong. I like giving you guys the flexibility and the freedom to explore at the same time, just to bring us back more centrally to whether Islam is violent. One particular passage, I can't remember if it was explored already, but one that you maybe disagree on, I'm not sure you guys can tell me, but Surah 9, if I understand right, is it fair to say that Surah 9 is kind of like the classic objection to the Qur'an and like you could say maybe like the primary or priority objection that critics of the Qur'an use against the Qur'an? That's what we're talking about here. We're talking about specifically about the ninth chapter of the Qur'an. Okay, sorry about that. Go ahead. We're talking about Christians. Yeah. And it's an interesting thing too, because this is the interesting question. The Qur'an has many different verses. There are difficult verses like this. I am not going to deny that this is not a that this is a difficult verse that a Muslim has to wrestle with. This is not an easy thing. Also, I would say, you know, the Qur'an also says la ikra hafidin. Yes, I know people could say, well, that was before that's after, but if it's in the entire corpus, then I would say if we're taking the Qur'an as a whole, then we have to take both verses on value. You could say, oh, yes, that came later, but I'm like, well, then it shouldn't be recorded at all. We should just put a line through it and say it's not valid anymore. I think that that would be appropriate if the verse is invalid. So, you know. But we are specifically talking about whether the Qur'an is a island or not. And when it says that that the Muslims are to fight those who do not believe, it is first of making a very general and very vague statement about those who do not accept Islam, because it says those who don't believe in Allah or the messenger or the last day, and who do not accept the religion of truth, you know, from among those who believe in the scripture, so Jews and Christians, if they don't accept Islam, they are to be fought. And it then further rationalizes that by saying that Christians believe, Christians say that the Messiah is the Son of Allah. So from there, in the context, the context considered, what it clearly says there, and there has been very little disagreement about this in the history of Islam among the exeges, is that Muslims are to fight those Christians who believe that the Messiah is the Son of God. And those Christians are the majority of Christians. So Christians were the Christians in Islam. Those Christians are everywhere around me. And it doesn't really matter whether they, whether they have a different interpretation or understanding of the Trinity or not. And that's a completely different problem I would say it's an interesting question though, because what do Muslims know about Christians? Do we have any manuscripts that are even from the Christian Jewish populations that were there? We don't really have any data on this. Like I think this is an important thing, like what is being talked about? Like yes, that that you're right, that kind of narrative of Messiah, you could say, okay, that means that, but there are so many different kinds of Christians. Like, I mean, some might argue Arianist Sedotus, Dosis were Christians, but the larger Christian community said they were heretics, but you know, some might argue that those people are Christian too. And some people might argue that in Arabia, that was just a Christian heresy that existed. I don't know. I'm just saying it's hard to say that we, with these scriptures, and going to your point about is this violent, it's hard to, it's hard to understand if this command is a timeless command. Is this contextual in the space? You have to understand what we're looking at here. Like if we were to make Islam a story, we're making it into a narrative, we'd say, well, it's about this kind of rag tag group of people that were in a very oppressive space where their faith believing in the one God, the monotheistic God, you know, the one God was challenging all the other Gods and their whole life was on the line. So maybe they had to take a very strong stance so they could protect and their community could survive. That's just like if we're taking like, you know, a humanistic kind of point of view, that could be a perception on that. I feel like we are kind of walking away from the topic though, because so when we talk about the Christians, again, you say we don't know what the Christians in the time of or in the surrounding of Muhammad believed in. Now, one important thing to remember is that that it is often pointed out in the exegesis, even by Ibn Kathir and by others that that chapter nine, verse 29 and 30 were revealed at the time of a possible confrontation with the Byzantine Romans. So with the Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox Christians who believed that Jesus is the Son of God. And that he is the Messiah. And it does say very specifically, they say the Messiah is the Son of God. And I want to ask you, do Christians today, does the average Christian today that believe that the Messiah or Jesus is the Son of God? Sure. Yeah. I would say most Christians are Trinitarian, of course. Yes. You are Unitarian. Yeah. I agree with that. So therefore, therefore, you can understand that when the Quran says Christians say the Messiah is the Son of Allah, those Christians today that are around us, the majority of Christians, the average Christian, would be included in that description. See, the thing is, it depends on how we look at this verse. Maybe we could take the interpretation of what you said. Maybe this verse is talking about that specific conflict. That is a possibility. And I think a lot of religious scriptures is like, if I take the Bhagavad Gita and I discuss the story of Arjuna and he's having to battle his gurus and he has to have bhakti, he has to have devotion to his Guru Krishna, would I say that all people who practice the Vedas and follow Advaita Vedanta or the Vedic scripture, would that mean that they need to follow this? So I think a lot of things are contextual. So I would take the contextual space. Because I think the difference here is that the Bhagavad Gita clearly tells you a story of how things happened. It is not literally the author revealing something to you and giving you a command. Whereas the Quran has a completely different nature, a different makeup, and different authorship. But the Quran is supposed to be the word of Allah which directly speaks to you to the reader when you open it from the beginning to the end except when it says to Muhammad or Muhammad or whatever. And when you then read the command in the Quran, it is understood to be a command to you. And there is no... When we talk about those specific verses, for example, of fighting the disbelievers, it doesn't say this was commanded to those. It is just a command like any other in the Quran. Well, I think it's interesting when we read the Quran. To me, it's this kind of spiritual continuity. You have these narratives and these stories that are told through it and kind of experiences that are going on throughout the space. And I think it's... I really love that you brought that point up where you're like, this is when the Byzantine situation was occurring. Yeah, so of course, a narrative is going to come. The same thing with Surat al-Ahab, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that one where it says, Parastar the two hands of Abu Lahab. What does that mean? Who's Abu Lahab? We have no idea who this guy is. But the idea until you kind of go back into the story but contextually, it makes sense. Abu Lahab was a very problematic person within the Islamic history. Within the Islamic narrative. So it makes sense that this narrative occurs. So I think there could be different interpretation, different layers of the text. So it's interesting that you mentioned that you were on the Sufi path, right? And I think into Sa'uf, that's a big point that there's multiple layers of spirituality. There isn't just the surface level. This is why the Salafis and Sufis have a lot of conflict. Because the Sufi says, okay, yes, there's the Quran but there's a deeper meaning of the Quran. The Salafi says, what you see is what you get. And that's a huge conflict. You're going to have a big battle with that. Yeah. I mean, that is a difference on the spiritual level. But the issue here is from Ottoman history, we know that every Ottoman ruler was a Sufi in a way. The Ottoman rulers had their own spiritual guides. They were not these hardcore traditionalist, literalist guys. They were actually spiritualist people. And also basically propagated the idea of fathering spiritual guides. But as you can see, they were for many centuries, the leaders of war in order to spread Islam and to spread their empire. So obviously the spiritualism, the focus on spiritualism does not negate or get rid of the aspect of violence and war. So I would ask a question. Would you say they were spreading Islam or were they spreading empire? Because I don't think Muslims ever really spread Islam. Only really mystics did. Because basically they didn't want people to become Muslim because then you wouldn't get all the kind of privileges of being a Muslim. Like I agree that the Dimi thing has problems, but it actually has that too. Is that they didn't just want everyone to become a Muslim, you know, because not everyone gets equal status, right? That's actually a good point to bring up, but I don't think that really helps your point, to be honest. But I have a book here, which is Arabia and the Arabs by Robert Hoyland. He wrote specifically about that. He writes about the early Islamic conquests, how the conquests started, how they continued and all of that. And what he points out is that contrary to popular opinion, the early spread of Islam did not happen in form of the Muslims saying, all right, we have to now go and convert the world to Islam and we will give them these options and we will say come to Islam or not. No, what happened on what happened, what actually happened is that Islam was divided into Arab tribes, which went out there and fought and they didn't care about spreading Islam. They cared about conquering, about pillaging, about this and that, and only later after conquering then introduced Islam to people and he points out that for the first centuries and the first periods, they really didn't put much effort into converting the populations which they conquered to Islam because to them, as you just pointed out accurately, disbelievers were a source of income. Disbelievers were a source of... They fight them, they take their belongings, they use them, they enslave them, they do this and that with them, they turn them into the Dimi people. So it wasn't really in their best interest to just convert everybody to Islam. That idea only became more popular after the centuries where they realized that they are supposed to focus more on the spiritual, the theological aspect of Islam. And so that's the thing, it's like a double-edged sword. So that's the thing, I understand that the problematic element, I'm not saying that there isn't a problematic element of spreading empire. Like I said before, I'm an anti-imperialist. I don't, if most of the people did imperialism, I'm against it. I don't think it was correct. I don't think it's noble. According to my own ethical value system, I don't think it's a noble thing. I don't think anyone should do any imperialism at all. I think it's a very problematic thing. And it did occur within the Islamic system the Islamic tradition. As many spaces have, there are religious movements that have done that, where they are saying, we need to spread and we need to conquer and we need stuff. And this is, I would say is a human problem. Would I say this is just solely in Islam creating this problem? I would say no. And I'm like, I think of manifest destiny into America where Europeans came to America and did manifest destiny. Do I think this came from Christ? I think people may have taken the text and use the text to do stuff. Like, for example, the transatlantic slave trade in America, they used Philemon. They used the Pauline narrative of him not completely saying, let's get rid of slavery, which is another element that we see within Islam there isn't a complete abolition of slavery. But it isn't either in the New Testament, which I think doesn't mean that the New Testament is wrong or the New Testament is invalid or, I mean, the emigrant, the scriptures, the Christian scriptures, as well as the Quran. I think you're going to have problematic elements and that doesn't mean we should throw everything away from that. I think we have to differentiate there because what you are describing is something that happens throughout religions, throughout ideologies. We have Muslims in history who justified all kinds of different things based on their religious beliefs and religious scriptures. They justified peaceful, regressive, progressive, hostile, violent things, all kinds of different things. The Christians, for example, who speak of the transatlantic slave trade, lots of Christians used the Bible in order to argue that slavery is fundamentally wrong because it goes against the whole concept of the equality of man who is created in the image of God. People during the Enlightenment, people in proposition of liberalism argued from Christianity in that it is a Christian value that people should be all united and should be all equal and the same at all of that. Those are entirely different things. The difference here is that in the Quran, with the Quran, we have a book which specifically commands Muslims to do certain things and it is unique in the way that this is a book which is claimed to be the direct word of Allah, giving commands directly to all believers. Muslims, therefore, based on those commands, go out and do certain things. Now, I don't think we can really compare that to people inferring certain things and then coming up with different ideas like slavery is justified or slavery is not justified because the book says this and that. We have clear commands. I want to ask you this question. You said you are against imperialism and you are against expansion and violence and all of that. But I'm pretty sure we can establish and I'm pretty sure you can agree with me there that Muhammad himself was expansionist and imperialist, that Muhammad himself fought and that Muhammad himself advocated for expansion and violence where it was done. We have several examples where he says he's been commanded to fight, where he says kill those who leave and where he says when you encounter the enemy give them several options including convert, die or be enslaved. So are you also against Muhammad's imperialism and expansionism? So I take the position I'm a consistent person. I don't, anyone who does imperialism I'm not for it. But I would say for this, I would say it's important to realize contextualism. So I'm like in this situation that this occurred, there was a certain kind of situation that was going on. And it was a kind, I think this is what a lot of religious communities do. And I do kind of slightly disagree. I think it's interesting to argue that the Quran is like just this divine command theory. I don't think all Muslims take that position. I think what, how Muslims take the Quran in general in my understanding of looking at Muslims. Muslims take the Quran in different ways. A lot of Muslims, they open the Quran to look for wisdom. They're not looking to say, I need to go do this type of thing. I'm going to tell you what I think personally on this. All the really extreme violent people within the Muslim community come from one subset. They're not Sufi people who are going around blowing themselves up. These aren't Sufis who are doing this. These people are from not just Salafi, but the extreme form of Salafism where they're like, you know what, I and a lot of them like take the Zardai brothers. They lived kind of pretty trashy lives. They felt really bad about what they did. So what they did is they said, I need to be good. So I am going to do this thing because that's going to make me good. And the thing is, did they really take a time for a journey? Did they say, I'm going to do self critique of myself? Do like you were talking about in your own Sufi journey, you had to do like your own self purification. That's, that is a position within Islam that there's a lot, instead of just outward violence, there's the energy hot. You can take, for example, Sheikh Ahmed Umba from West Africa, Senegal, what did he do? Did he take a sword and say, I am going to fight these French? No. He did pretty much and a lot of people don't even know who he is. But it, what he did is he rebelled against the French using peace and it's pretty well documented. Senegal is a pretty peaceful country. Does it have its problems? Yeah. There's a lot of economic deprivation. Sure. But you know, West African mysticism, it's pretty, pretty clear. And this is a person who had very, was very religious hafiz al-Quran. He didn't think he needed to kill the French colonizers. So I think it's important that's all very nice. And I really like your, I really like your, your idea of being peaceful and spreading peace and rejecting the violence and imperialism and so on. But I don't think you have, I don't think you have a chance of doing anything there since the dominant attitude in Islam is not the one that you proposed, although I wish it was. But as you have also just acknowledged, and I think the debate is there, kind of over with all due respect, Muhammad himself was the imperialist. Muhammad himself was the expansionist. He himself was the one who began the violence. And I don't think there's any way out of that. Islam starts with the violence. And that is how it is established. That is why it continues this way. That is why your efforts of creating a peaceful Islam will fail. And the violent and hostile, hateful ones will always be around. That's the problem. I would ask a question though. Do you think that I would, I totally acknowledge and I will totally agree that there's violence within Islamic narrative. There is an element of that as there is within you. That's just a human issue. But I would say if we look at the story of Islam, didn't really just start as a violent situation. It was basically you had this kind of spiritual guy who goes to a mountain, has this revelation. Then he comes to this community and he goes in dark and he secretly talks about this one God and ancient prophets and kind of is this sort of guru and Swami and Sheikh that's conveying this narrative. I mean, if I thought, if Islam really did, as you said, start off this violent thing, why wouldn't he just get this sort of God to come, this light sort, like a lightsaber and come and just say, all you indigenous Arabs who believe in all these gods, I'm going to cut you down. I'm going to slice you up. I mean, I would think that why even have a pretense of peace? That's a question I would think we need. I think the answer to that is very simple. It is because there was no actual Allah, no actual connection to God that he was just some guy who was pretending to be or who thought he was a prophet or who thought he was a prophet of God. So how can he get a how can he get the power of something that does not exist? I think he just influenced people in an environment where people were easily influenced by such things. And what's also interesting is he starts his mission and tells people, your gods are fake. My God is real. And they don't kill him. They don't persecute him. They don't they don't lock him up. He lives there for a very long time. A very long time for over a decade, he lives there and they let him live. He eventually, supposedly there is some persecution up until that point. He's the first one who actually says that I can't remember the exact words, but he is the one who actually initiates a phrase where he says that he has brought war or animosity or the spilling of blood or something like that to them to which they don't respond very nicely, of course. And after a long time of living there peacefully, persecution begins. He flees and they leave him alone where he's in Medina, but he comes up with the brilliant idea of creating small groups and harassing caravans. And then in the end, he provokes a war which is called a defensive war, which is actually not a defensive war because he provokes those polytheists who then finally say, okay, enough. We are going and we are destroying Muhammad and his people. And that's how the war began. I think it is just there was no need for the violence. Muhammad himself brought it. Yeah, I definitely that time. Go ahead. I'll give you a chance. I'll give you the last word. In fact, I said, and then it'll be a great opportunity to go into the Q&A. If folks, you have questions, feel free to submit them either by tagging me with that modern day debate in the live chat or if you use the Super Chat, we read through those first. Go ahead, Aysa. I just want to say to Shekora Derham to my colleague here, I think that's important. But that means thank you in Turkish. Yes, that's correct. Thank you for that. And I want to say that I totally, I hear that. I definitely think and it's interesting how stories can be told. I was thinking about this Kursawa movie. I don't know if you've seen Kursawa. It's very, very solid stuff. There's a movie called Rashomon. And we have people who tell different stories from different angles. And that, and there's kind of truth to all these different angles of the story. So I'm like, we could view that. We could view that this was some really terrible situation or you could take the narrative of like Arisala or the message you probably have seen that movie growing up. The movie with the message of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, you know, where they have the actors and you can't see them. And it looks sort of like Ten Commandments. It's that kind of movie. It's like the Islamic Ten Commandments. But like. Just worse. Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. You're killing me, man. But I would say that there are different stories and there are different narratives. And I think we should just be open to different spaces. And I think try to be as inclusive as we can. That's what I... All right. You got it. We'll jump into the Q&A. I want to say thanks so much for your questions, folks. Couple of quick housekeeping type things. In particular, my dear friends, if you enjoy these debates, you probably have a friend who enjoys them. Share this debate with them. That way you can share the joy. Experience it. Express the joy of... Like, oh, that was fun, wasn't it? With that, we're going to jump right into these questions. First one coming in. Mustafa Jaff says, thank you for that. Loki says, this Issa guy has to be trolling. You know, Issa, I think that you take a more moderate approach. A lot of our viewers are used to more... I wouldn't say extreme, but more... What's the word I'm looking for? Between moderate and extreme, whatever that might be. So I think they're just surprised by your approach. Yeah, I think definitely more progressive. You could say moderate, liberal. I would say, definitely I'd taken that position. And that's actually the reason why I came on the show, why I wanted to do this. I'm like, I am tired of this. Like, that's so disrespectful. Like, there's like, it be your foot of... I'm just like, excuse me. This is not a way to talk to someone. You can disagree about points. And they said, when I see you, I'm going to beat you up. I'm like, what the heck is this? This is not even a proper debate. You have to engage with the points. And you have to be accountable. And I'm trying. It's difficult. AP is bringing up hard points. I'm not going to be like, this is easy, you know? Thank you. I really appreciate that. And I want to point out that that's... I'm really relieved. And I genuinely do appreciate it. So thank you. Thank you for that. And I hope you have more, such peaceful and friendly discussions. This one from Stop Scam McMahon says, question to the Muslim gentleman. Aisa says, the caliphate only abolished slavery in its final year when the secularists took all the power and forced it to. In your estimation, when, if ever, should it have? Well, obviously, you're probably going to know what my understanding is. I think it's slavery of human beings is evil and it's an abomination. So that's... I'm going to take that position clearly and easily. And I definitely think textually speaking, these are very difficult things. And it's interesting to talk about the caliphate because there are multiple caliphates. That's actually a funny thing people don't know about. You have the Ottoman caliphate. You also have one in Morocco, too. The guy still says he's the cali. They said there is a caliphate in Morocco. People don't know that, but it's kind of funny to see that. I definitely think it should be easily abolished. And I'm sad that in a lot of these religious spaces, it wasn't. I think there should have been clear injunction. That's just my humble opinion. This one from Lyon Jr. says, for apostate, can he recite the Qur'an from memory? So he said the challenge again. I'm so sick of this, man. This one from... You might have jumped in. I want to... I can do that. I'll just recite the first chapter, which is, Alhamdulillah, Al-Rahman, Al-Raheem. I wanted to add to that point. This is like a weird... It's this gay keeping. It's so bad. I heard that happen with ex-Muslims. And I hate when these like really... I would say like fascistic type people who are saying they're Muslim do. They say, well, do you know how to read Qur'an? And you don't know how to read Qur'an? Oh my God. You are not real Muslim. I'm like, like Muslims in Eastern Europe don't know any Islam at all. Are they not Muslim? It's I hate it. Yes, you were a real Muslim and it was not for you. That's it. And you have every right not to be a Muslim. That's it. Thank you. Thank you. You've got to this one coming in from. Do appreciate it. This one's actually for you again. Apostate probably say, do you think religion is the central cause for violence? No, I don't think so. I don't think religion in general is a central cause for violence. I think I think human nature is a central cause for violence. Human struggle, the human condition, the way humans interact in society. When it comes to Islam, I would say Islam is at the center of the violence within Islam just because Islam happens to be the origin of whatever Islam preaches because that's where the scripture is. But no, not about religion. This one from for Issa says, I think that you're an ex-Muslim and in denial. That's funny. This one from. That's cute. That's cute. Khaled Dawes says, sorry you did this Issa. Wouldn't Islam be closer to the Mandalorian religion than Jedi spirituality? Also, the Knight sisters are clearly Mormons. That is cute. I can see that. I can see that argument about how that could work. I would say that the Jedi religion definitely, it's sort of how it's based. It's like a fusion of Buddhism and Islam. It makes sense because in South Asia, that's kind of like this big melting pot of all the different religions. So if you look at like a guru, like Shirdi Saibaba, a lot of Vedic or Hindu people worship him, but he actually prayed five times a day. So he kind of had a balance of both. So South Asia was very much like that. You got it. Thanks for your membership. Super chat. Ozzy Gold says, who is your daddy and what does he do? Thank you very much for that support. By the way, folks, we always forget to mention this. We have memberships. If you haven't checked out the memberships, you can click join just below this video. If you are like, nah, I'm not really into that because YouTube takes 30%, which they do. Patreon is linked in the description box as well. This one coming in from. Appreciate your question. Friendly ex-Muslim says, Issa, you are lovely. Thank you for sharing your views. Wow. You're friendly ex-Muslim. And I really, and I appreciate you. And I think, you know, wherever your spiritual journey takes you, that's the important thing. Don't let anyone say anything nasty to you and put you down. Shout out to Friendly ex-Muslim. Abdullah Samir is doing a great job as well. You've got it. We've got an unusually diplomatic night tonight. This one coming in from, do appreciate it. DQ says, Apostate Prophet, is there a future for popular Islam in abandoning fundamentalism in favor of a neo-Islam or modern Islamic Sufiism? Difficult question, difficult to foresee. I mean, people always try to predict what will happen in the future. Nobody really has a realistic view because it's very hard to foresee what is actually going to happen. I think Islam is already changing a lot. The way it is practiced today in many Muslim cultures, cultural Muslims are very detached from what Islam actually teaches and what it preaches. Most Muslims have no idea about what Islam actually teaches, which is great, which is fantastic. More of that, please. I think progress will necessarily change Islam and will necessarily turn it from fundamentalism and radicalism toward something that is more in accordance with human desires and the human will to simply live in peace. You've got it. This one coming in from, Omir Dock says, Issa, if you go to Muslim countries and say what you're saying right now, you will have the same penalty as Ridvan. I completely get that. I completely understand. And I would say that I first of all don't even agree that a Muslim country exists. I think there are countries that have Muslim people in it. And there's actually a great writer, his name is Wahil B. Halak. He wrote The Impossible State and he argues that there and he's actually a Palestinian Christian. And he argues that there is no such thing as an Islamic state. These are states that have Muslim people in it. So they are basically doing their own thing. Actually, it's funny. Israel is the only real country that actually has a system that is even similar to the most successful Islamic dynasty, which is the Ottoman Empire. So there you go. Hey, Pete, did I say your name right? I think that's the first time I've ever said your name out loud. Did I say it right or no? I think so. I don't really care. Like most people get it wrong. So I'm sorry. You're an angel. You're an angel. You're a angel. I think it was correct. I think it was correct as far as I remember. Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm not sure. But we have another question coming in from Rusty Kolen. It says, James, thank you for hosting these bates. I want to say, folks, thank the guests. They are the lifeblood of the channel. We're grateful to have them. I've got big news. We are setting up debate con. I've announced earlier. It's November 4th and 5th. Apostate prophet after many years, maybe even decades of me asking him to come has agreed to come to this debate. That's one person. Or I should say to this conference. So keep tuned in for that. But also want to mention, thanks Rusty Kolen for your support, all credit to the guests. Free naturalist says, question for Yusuf. Do you think Islam will bring peace to the world in the future? That's a good question. And it's interesting you mentioned I want to bring up something too. I'm actually going to become a subscriber today too. So just letting you know that. To answer this kind of question, I think like I said in the opening speech, Islam is polylythics, not monolithic. So I hope the peaceful aspects of Islam will do that. There are negative aspects. And I hope that those do not prevail. And that's my position. Nice to see this one coming in from do appreciate it. This is for a passive profit. Can you ask AP about ISIS or etc. Does he think they are a product of war? Or a product of religion? And if religion, what religion teaches what they do? Both. Both. I think they are there. I mean, they are a result of the religion. They follow a very traditionalist and literalist and historical understanding of their religion. And if they were followers of a different religion, they would probably not end up becoming the very groups that they ended up to be. That said, religion is not the only factor, of course. I would say that there is definitely an element of reacting to geopolitical issues, to conflicts around the world, and all of that. Islam, yeah. You've got it. I'm scanning for any last questions. Rusty said I missed his question. So I want to be sure that I got it. In addition, they said, this is another question, cheeky, shellkey. Thanks, by the way, folks, for subscribing. Appreciate that. We know that you're a subscriber since I got the subscribers only chat mode on. So we do appreciate your support. Seriously, the bigger the subscriber's number for this channel, the bigger the guess is we continue to grow and expand as we desire to be YouTube's premier debate channel. Modern day debate is a fully neutral platform for debates on science, religion, and politics. This one coming in from cheeky, shellkey says, so both agree that Islam is violent. But with that, but you would maybe say there's a caveat to that. Issa, am I saying Issa right, by the way? Yeah, do you know what's funny? What my name means? It's actually really funny. Tell me it means Jesus. My name means Jesus in English. So it's and my mom's name is Mary. I'm Jesus, son of Mary. So it's a very funny irony. Wow. But the defending the Muslim position. What was the question again? Sorry. Oh, yeah, no problem. Or do I agree that Islam is violent? So I'm taking the position that Islam is polylythic. So I say there is a poor part of Islamic understanding that's violent. And I would say that there's a part that's not. So I'm basically arguing that Islam as a total is not violent. I cannot say that Islam is just peaceful. I think that's a really big lie. And I saw that that was one of the reasons I'm like, dude, I have to come on the show. Like we need accountability here. This is ridiculous to say, oh, Islam is perfect. And you know, the more time apostates are just having a great time and LGBTQIA Muslims are having a great time. They're not. There's a lot of terrible things that are going on. And I think there should be accountability. And I think this has to be completely, you know, abandoned this terror on other human lives. So especially people who come from the Muslim community, like why would you want to hurt your brothers and sisters who come from your own families? Like it's grotesque and evil. I don't know. That's very nice. Thank you. I appreciate it. You got it. And Ozzy Gold, thanks for gifting those channel memberships. Folks, if you just got one of those gifted memberships from Ozzy Gold, which it'll show in the chat if you did, check out the customized modern day debate, emoticons, where you usually find the normal emoticons like the smileys. You can call your friends in chat. Soyboy and many other names. Thanks very much Ozzy Gold for your support. And this one coming in from Russ. Oh, I missed this one. Stop scamming, man. Thanks for your question. Said question to Issa. Many Muslim polemicists argue that every Muslim on earth is enraged by Koran burnings and Muhammad cartoons. Is this right in your case? Also, do you know other Muslims with your views? Yeah, there's plenty. There's a lot of diverse Muslims. A lot of like LGBTQIA plus Muslims. A lot of Muslims who don't believe in the Koran literate, there's diversity. And I think the problem is, as AP put it, that there is a majority of folks who are deeply problematic. And it's interesting. I was thinking about Christianity too, where people like John Brown, people like Wilbur Force fought against the slave trade. And they use Christianity to fight against these people who claim to be Christian and say it's okay to enslave other people. I think that's the same thing that Muslim people need to do too. AP, now you got it. This one, appreciate it. Rusty Kohlin says, does Issa think that the Hadiths are part of Islam or does he reject their authority? Okay, that's a very interesting question. So the Ahadith, it's a very interesting science. I spent a lot of time actually studying Ahadith. There's like 30,000 Hadith. A lot of people don't know that. And really the only kind of standard of the veracity of Hadith is that the people who narrated them were good people. That's it. We don't know if the information is true or not. And no scholar can say that. They said, well, these are really good people. And I was going to bring up, this is a fun thing. So I like to play some games sometimes. And there's a game that I like called Zelda. And I can memorize most of the maps from this game, right? But there are places where I forget, and I have a pretty good memory. Did people forget information? Did they fill in the blanks? It's possible. We don't know. So do I think the Hadith have a very, there can be very good Hadith, and you can take value in that? I'd say, yeah. The Hadith that say weird things, I'd say, yeah. I think you want to stay away. Like the camel, you're in stuff. You want to stay away from that stuff. I'm sorry, you want to stay away from it. Don't drink camel, you're in people. Got it. This one coming in from, do appreciate it. Moment. It says, Issa, do you think that the Quran is perfect? It's perfect to me. I have no idea. How do we prove perfect? Maybe I'm a perfect in my imperfection. What does that, it's like such a weird thing. It's like, you know, everything is perfect. I'm like, how can you know perfection if you're not perfect? I don't even know what that means. And then people are like, well, the Quran has been perfectly preserved. And I'm like, okay, cool. So yellow pages have been perfectly preserved. What does that have to do with anything? Like this is a silly, it's a silly point. The point is if you get wisdom from the Quran and that helps you in your life, that's the point. So it's funny. I'm actually going to bring up a Protestant point. I think solely fide is the important way to go. If you have faith in it, you have iman, you have imuna. This thing is important for you and it helps you uplift your life. That's what you focus on. Forget the science stuff. Forget if it's purely true. This is ridiculous. This doesn't help you in your faith. And I think people trying to argue that. It doesn't help them. You got it. And ES102 says, James, is that you're reading only super chess? No, actually we do read regular questions, folks. If you tag me with that moderated debate, we've never had a rule that says we only read super chats. It's just that sometimes we get so many super chats that we have to end it before we can get to the standard questions because we got to get the debaters out at some time so we can get to sleep. So, but yeah, we've always had that where we are. We do read that. And they also had a question, which is a standard question, asking if, where did I see this? It was a reference to Star Wars. Whether or not Mohammed is a Sith or Jedi, or, well, we'll give you a chance, Issa. I would hope for Jedi. Let's go for Jedi on that. Juicy. I don't want insane Sith. I don't want insane. I'm going with Jedi, okay? I would go for a Sith. This one from, this is interesting. So, that vibe says, Issa, what are your qualifications? Because you are a heretic. I think they're saying you don't really follow Islam, Issa. That's their claim. And I would say to them, why do they follow Islam? What makes them a Muslim? See, this is the problem. You're trying to be a purist and say, well, what makes you a qualification of what makes a real Muslim and what doesn't? And that's why I brought up the no-trust structure. Everybody's going to say it. Someone is going to tell that person they're not a Muslim. There's something in their life that makes them not a Muslim. So, it's a ridiculous, foolish statement, in my opinion. You got it. This one coming in. I think that might actually, maybe... No, TQ said, Issa, he's clearly a Qui-Gon Jinn, not a Sidious. That's cute. That's an interesting one. Thank you. Anyone familiar with... Qui-Gon Jinn, Qui-Gon, I can tell you who that is. Qui-Gon Jinn is basically one of the protagonists of the Phantom Manus system from the prequels of Star Wars. And he is basically the Jedi Master, Jedi Knight, who like supports Obi-Wan Kenobi. He's the teacher of Obi-Wan Kenobi. And he is kind of a positive Jedi. And then Sidious is basically Emperor Palpatine, if I'm correct. He's the... Right. ...the Lord. Yeah. Very interesting. That's all lost on me. If Muhammad is Qui-Gon, would that mean that AP would be Obi-Wan? He's like his apprentice? Not really. I'm teasing. Okay, this one coming in from Lyon Jr. Lyon Jr. says, Can you ask Apostey his knowledge on the Koran? Like how many... ...Juzz he memorized? Yeah. It's sort of a juice. A juicer, of course. Yeah, these are partitions of the Koran. Why does that matter? I'm sorry. I know, I can answer that question. When I was a Muslim and when I did indeed read to learn to read it, what I did was I only memorized specific chapters. And I was going quite slow. I wanted to pronounce it very well because I live in Turkey. And in Turkey, most people were terrible at reciting and pronouncing the Koran properly. So I wanted to pronounce it in the best way. And then I started learning the chapters. I learned the last 10, which Muslims are supposed to learn for prayers. And then I learned several other chapters among the last, among the 80s and 90s, those chapters. Plus I learned Ayatollah Tursi, which is one big verse, a very important one. And different places. I never memorized one juice, for example. I want to interject with this comment too. It's a very strange thing. It's like they're saying, we need a pedigree to be a Muslim. You need a pedigree to be an ex-Muslim. This is deeply problematic. It's saying, oh, you need to know how to recite Ayatollah Tursi, you know, which is in Sortobakra, by the way, at the end, which is a huge sore with like hundreds of verses. It's one of the largest sores in the Koran. Most Muslims don't memorize a lot of Koran. And it's interesting because like, for example, like in Turkish, they, you know, like they might have a pronunciation of like a, oh, like they say, you know, like a head, you know, like they have that kind of, so it's beautiful. I think it's wonderful. That's your own culture and that's coming through. And I think it's really sad that, you know, people are trying to push me an arrow. It's okay to be whatever ethnicity you are. As a side note, is Robert Spencer a Christian or an atheist? He's a Christian, yeah. Okay. This one coming in from, do appreciate it. Office Depot says, Issa, are you willing to debate a traditional Muslim, such as Daniel, who defends violence and the Koran word for word? Yeah, I know Daniel. I've seen his work. It's, you know, he attacks a lot of other Muslims because he says, oh, these Muslims don't fit his standard of truth of Islam. I'm like, I'm like, you're trying to be the beacon of Islam, but you're ready to attack anyone who doesn't fit your narrative. That's apostate prophets, buddy. You're talking about, be careful. Yeah. This one coming in from, this, let's, this is not coming in from low key. He says, Issa, they said, they say, look, they say, Issa is my new favorite X Muslim. I don't know if there's an interesting, before you respond, if you want to, there's an interesting phenomenon that AP, you've seen it a billion times, I'm sure, in which people like to accuse either they, you know, if they are non-Muslims, they'll say, oh, you're a non-Muslim, and you're like one step away. You're so close. And then there's also sometimes the Muslims will sometimes say, apostate prophet is secretly, what is it? Not, I don't want to, I don't want to say the Muslims, some Muslims. So I want to, I want to be fair, not all Muslims, but some will say AP is secretly, they say that you're, they say you believe in God, or what is it that they usually accuse you of? They often say that I'm a secret Christian, which is a rather recent development. When I first began speaking out, I would frequently be accused of being a Jew, but then later it turned into a secret Christian. So I don't know, there's always a funny thing going on, funny dynamic, I got used to it. Yeah, it always says accusing people, either of being like a closeted position, Christian aid is et cetera, or you're on the verge of leaving your position. Well, I'll give you a chance if you want to respond, Issa, to that. I think that it's such a weird thing to say, it's actually my whole argument. I'm like, I'm against essentialism, where we're like, this thing gets diluted into this essence, like telling a person what it means to be a Christian. I don't want to do that. I'm not going to tell a person, like a person, let's say they do premarital sex or whatever, and you're like, oh, you're not really a Christian because you're having sex before. I'm like, this is insane. If the person sees themselves as a Christian, they're a Christian. You have no right to gay keep and tell them what they are and what they're not. And I think this is an important thing to why people like ex-Muslims get attacked. I want to engage that. And they're like, oh, they're Christians. The Jews, a lot of the ex-Muslims have serious trauma from the Muslim community. Muslims have done really terrible things to ex-Muslims. That's just the fact. And there's a huge tragedy that's going on within the ex-Muslim community. And I'm like, ex-Muslims need to be uplifted and cared for and not be like discarded and said, oh, you were never a real Muslim. How dare you say that to a person who prayed, did all of these things? There was something that did not work in the religion for them. That's it. Leave it alone. Just be a loving, good human being to them. That's it. You've got it. This one coming in from, oh wait, there it is. Thank you Omar. It says there is a period of time where Islam had to expand. Otherwise, it remains confined to a tiny city irrelevant to the world, which rejecters would love to see rather than Rome slash Persia regaining strength. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure what that means. Just a comment, I guess. Okay. This one from, appreciate your question. Commoner Knight says, Issa, if everyone in the world abandoned religion tomorrow, would that reduce violence in Islamic countries in the East or increase it? Why or why not? So what I would say is it really just depends on the Muslim. There are many kinds of Muslims. Like that's my consistent point. I think will people who call themselves Muslim do bad things? Yeah, for sure. They're going to hurt people. They're going to do terrible things to people. I'm not going to say that's not going to happen. Yeah, that will happen. But I think they're going to be Muslim people who are like, look, I want to be peaceful. I just want to pray five times a day. I want to read Quran. I want to fast. I want to go to Hajj. That's their life. They don't want to do any of that other stuff. And I think so many Muslims do have that lifestyle. And the way they view the Quran, it's just like it's a book that helps them. They open it up. They read it. They say, oh, I read Al-Fatiha. How does this help me in my life? They don't see it. It's like this divine command. And there are people who do. And all those people have serious mental illness. So just you need to add that as well. You got it. This one coming in from, do you appreciate it? Yes. 1002 says, oh, by the way, folks, if you're in the live chat, I don't know why I've never. Oh, wait. So if you put in, if you tag me with modern day debate, but it's not exactly as the YouTube has it, if YouTube won't highlight it in orange to me, in other words, you have to be sure that you put the hyphen between modern and day. If you just put like at and then modern day debate, no spaces, no hyphens, it won't show. You two won't highlight it for me. So just if you can't do that, maybe just put like some emojis in there. That'll make it easier for me to see. Because I saw a couple of those. This one from, they say, I assume you think music is halal. Issa, I think this is for you. To me, yeah, that's what sounds like. Depends on the Muslim. I would say that Salafi folks would say it's not. There's a lot of Muslim communities that do like, you know, have, you know, Zikr. I'm sure AP knows about that. That is music. Reciting Quran is music. I don't know. I get where people are like, well, it's singing. It's not instrumental. I'm like, it's music. Sorry, sorry, folks. Islam has music. That's it. You know, the entire Muslim recitation is music. So singing is music. So I'm like, if you don't like drums, you don't want to do a flute or whatever. Okay. You got it. This one coming in from Issa Kabir. Says, how do I get a subscription? Thanks for your super chat. Issa, I think you're the first debater that's ever done a super chat while debating. If you just want to, you mean subscribe or join the channel? No, I want to subscribe. I want to subscribe. So I didn't want to interrupt with that. I'm just trying to try to get my subscription. How do I do that? Oh, you just have to subscribe on the channel, man. Is this your first time? I'm not talking about that paid one, like joining. How do you do your join? Become a member. Oh, yeah, yeah. If you just click, if you click join, it'll be, it should be right below the video. So like around the same space as where it has like the like button or the share button, it should be in that area. And it might even depend on if you're on the phone or not. I'm on the phone. That's why I was, that's why I can do it. I can't do it. Let's try and see what it would look like on the phone. James, I got to go. If we are done with, if you want to be done. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's about it. Folks, we've got to let our guests go. They are busy people. We want to say thank you guys for tuning in. It's been a true pleasure. Thanks for all your questions, folks. Stick around. I'm going to be back in about 22 seconds for the after show to connect with you in the old live chat and say hello, but want to say thank you most of all to Issa and Apostle Private. It's been a true pleasure to have both of you here tonight. Thanks everybody. And thank you, Issa and thanks James. My pleasure. Stick around folks. I'll be back in just a moment. Amazing. My dear friends want to say hello to you and want to say thank you guys for your support. Seriously, it means more than you know. Thank you guys for all of your likes. Seriously, that really does. If you hit like, this channel will rank more highly in the YouTube, like let's say someone searches for Apostate Prophet Debate or Muslim Debate. This debate will pop up higher on the list of the search results if you hit like. So we do appreciate your support that way. And thank you, Issa for becoming a member. Welcome to Extra Juicy. We do appreciate that support, Issa. Thanks so much. Seriously, it means more than you know. And let me just fix the screen here because you can see I'm a little bit all over the place. Let me see here. I need James alone. They're a lot of little, but I do want to say my dear friends, we're excited. We've got all sorts of cool stuff coming up. Stuff that you're kind of like, James, tell me what? Two seconds. Reload this. Such a rookie. This might work. Oh, okay. That's better. So my dear friends, I want to say we've got a lot of cool stuff coming up. In particular, you might be like, well, James, what? This Epic Conference coming up. There we go. It's a little bit better. Coming up. Oh, it's like two seconds. Now we're talking. Want to say this Epic Conference coming up. We have two potential conferences. One is DebateCon, which is, I mean, we're in the process of booking it right now, November 4th through 5th. The card is being, you could say, fleshed out still. So we're kind of like, okay, we're deciding on all of the debates that'll happen. R&Raw and Eric Hernandez is one. We're both of the debaters of Agreed as an example. And now we're just kind of, you could say, negotiating the topic on what they both want to do. So that's going to be a fun one. But in addition, we are working on a very mini conference. So in other words, like two or three debates tops. That would happen in September. So we're only about six weeks away. So like, we've really got to hurry on this because this is, we've got to get the word out. Highly likely to be in Houston. So our first time ever in Houston for, yeah, it's our first time ever for an in-person event. We've done in-person events in Los Angeles. We've done Austin, Texas, Dallas, Texas. Thing, yeah, I mentioned Austin. And so we've only done those three cities actually. I'm pretty sure. Let me just double check. Am I right about that? Los Angeles with Destiny and Vosh. Austin with Matt Dillahunty and Mike Jones. And then Dallas is where we've done pretty much all of our other events, which is, yeah, we've done a number of them in the Dallas area, like Plano, Fort Worth, Dallas, Debellum. But want to say, my dear friends, we're excited. It'll be our first time in Houston that's still being, you could say it's still being confirmed. It's not in stone, but we're so close and we're so excited about it. You guys, you don't want to miss it. But want to say as well, thank you guys. We just during this stream hit 16,000 or 116,000 subscribers. So seriously, we appreciate that more than you know. If you refresh your page, it actually should update. So instead of saying 115,000, it'll show 116,000. So I want to say thank you guys for subscribing, the bigger the subscriber numbers for this channel, the bigger the guests get. So thank you guys for supporting modern day debate through those subscriptions. Actually, I want to say hello to you in the old live chat. If you stuck around this long in the post-credits scene, David Muller, thanks for being with us. Hey, James, how can I get into a debate with people? If you go to the description box, we have a link for how we do the vetting process. It may take a while. I got to warn you right now, I'm doing my dissertation and it has been super busy. So a little bit behind. So I just want to give you a heads up that just be patient because you know, sometimes it's hard for me to get all these debates set up because we're trying to basically, I'm trying to keep modern day debate moving, but I'm also trying to do my dissertation so I can finish my doctorate this fall semester. So we're excited about that. That's going to be a big thing for modern day debate as well. I think I'm excited about that. I think that'll give modern day debate a little bit more credibility and authority is that it'll be modern day debate led by Dr. James Coons. I think that just gives it a little bit more legitimacy. So we're excited about that. Kind of a cool little branding boost. I want to say thank you guys for being with us. Victor Rodriguez, appreciate you being here. TC, the unbeliever, glad that you were here. Millahan, Philosopher's Corner, thanks for your support, brother. I remember you had a super chat that said, members, I think it was said, if I remember right, the super chat said, members, support, thank you so much for being a supporter and thank you for that super chat. That was like one or two, maybe even three debates ago. Sorry, I missed that though. And I did want to say I appreciate your support since I didn't get to read that one. The Hunter, thanks for coming by. I see you there. And Lion Jr., thanks for coming by says, why, how come you guys don't challenge Matt or Aaron on their beliefs? Why let them just sit back and machine gun with questions? That's a great question. So for one thing, Matt doesn't have comparatively, like so, like in reference to others, especially if you consider like each verse of the Bible, I don't know if you could consider each verse of belief, but it technically in a way like each verse almost is a proposition that you'd be defending if you believe in the Inherency of Scripture. So in a way, like Christians are saying like, yep, 31,000 verses, I'm going to defend these. But Matt is, as he himself has said, depending on how you define atheists, like if you go with a classic scholar's definition, he would say like, but he's not an atheist. But if you go with the more contemporary convention I use on the internet, he would say that he is an atheist in the sense that he just lacks belief. And so obviously the person who comes to the debate and they say like, hey, I just, I don't have a lot of beliefs, which Matt generally speaking, you could say compared to theists, I think that that's probably true, at least in the sense of theists have all these supernatural beliefs. And Matt has previously said he doesn't have any beliefs in supernatural stuff. So, if you come into a debate and you say like, I'm not really defending anything, you know, like some people would say like, well, you should. I don't like, I don't say you have to. Modern day debate, we don't, we're just like, we don't, if you just want to debate a single topic like Islam or Christianity per se, that's okay. It doesn't have to be that you, for example, the question of does God exist. It's true that theists in every debate will say, yes, I take the yes position. The atheists may say like, well, I don't actually take the no position. I'm just unsure. I'm just sitting on the fence. And in other words, they arguably be if you use old, like the old scholarly definitions, more agnostic. That's at least what my atheist professors told me when I got my bachelors in philosophy and then a master's philosophy. And that's what my atheist professors taught me, is that atheism is actually the assertion that there is no God. But you know, if you say that a lot of internet, not, I don't want to, I don't want to be paying with broad brush strokes. Some atheists would be like, yeah, that's what scholars say. And then some atheists will be like, no, no, no, that's wrong. That's the wrong definition. I'm like, sorry, I personally, I got to be honest, no offense. But I've got to defer to the atheists with their PhD on the topic over the atheist bloggers. No offense. I'm not trying to put anybody down. But that's the thing too is like usually, you know, like, a lot of times, you know, I'm just saying, like I don't think I'm unreasonable for doing that. Because, but anyway, to answer your question, Lion Jr., sometimes the atheists that come on aren't atheists in the classical definition. And so they don't come in with something that they're wanting to defend or willing to defend. And then in terms of Aaron, I don't know exactly what Aaron is. You'd have to ask him. But I want to say thanks for your support. Let's see. Lion Jr. says, well, at least Aaron Ross should be able to defend Satanism since he preaches it. Yeah. I mean, like he preaches it in the sense, I mean, like he takes the position of like, I think he's described himself as a Satanist before. But I don't think he really believes in the supernatural stuff with it, which no offense to Aaron. But I mean, like it's kind of been like, when I, when I reached out to like Satanists to see if they want to come on the channel, I was expecting somebody to be like, yeah, I believe that there's a personal being called Satan. And I believe in him. That would frankly make for a much more interesting debate. I'm not trying to put anybody down by saying that. But instead, you know, a lot of Satanists, I think Aaron included would say, well, you know, the truth is I'm really an atheist. I just identify with some of the moralistic, moralistic Satanist positions, similar to how some atheists are Buddhists in the sense that they don't believe in a God. And they identify, though, with some of the religious teachings of Buddhism, like the ethical teachings, for example. So I don't know. But yeah, I want to say thanks for being here. And so let's see. Guilty of being right. Thanks for coming by Adam 87. Thanks for dropping in. West Warlock says, thanks, man. Fun stuff. Thanks so much for your support. Umar Frug, thanks for coming by. I don't know what you're talking about. Says, isn't it a joke? We got heavy metal theme tune. We didn't even have music playing tonight, man. Do you like the metal? I can play the metal. Oh, I have to ask Ryan. He's got the music. But let's see. But wet, willy, softy, slow spoken debates. Aw, Umar. Is it Umar or Umar? Sorry, man. Let me know how you pronounce it. But yeah, I want to say thanks for coming by. Alpha Uno, thanks for coming by. Milo B, happy to have you here. Joe Herron, thanks for coming by. Jay, wonderful success. Says, beta! Thanks for coming by. Jim Johnson, happy to have you here. As well as Aka Batusol, thanks for dropping in. As well as Charlie Martel, thanks for coming by. Ozzy Gold, thanks for your support. Uh, let's see. X, Y, Z, thanks for coming by. Let's see. Dave Hill says, a question of burden of proof. The null hypothesis or uncertainty has none. I agree with you, Dave, that a lot of atheists would say that they are uncertain. I don't know if the interesting thing is, generally in my experience, is most atheists, if you ask specifically about a particular religion, not all, not all, not all, not all, because it'll, you know, it'll vary by the atheists that you ask. But most will say that they would take the position that a particular religion is false. But some, it's true. Some atheists would say, yeah, I'm like on the fence when it comes to whether or not there's a god. And then there's some that would say, and I'm also on the fence on whether or not there's a Christian god. So I agree, you know, it just depends on the person you ask. But yeah, thanks for coming by. The great crusade. Happy to have you here. Jay Olympe. Jay, thanks for dropping in. Alpha Uno, glad that you're here. Patchwork, thanks for coming by. Hawaiian CC, thanks for coming by. Says, don't forget to beat the like button gently. Thank you for your kind. But yeah, Jay, wonderful success. Thanks for your kind words. The great crusade says, James try to bring Daniel to debate Christian Prince. Not all, not all, not all, Alpha Uno says thanks for the debate. The quality, let's see. Can I suggest you invite Muhammad a job? Hey, I'd love to have Muhammad a job. It's just that he doesn't, it's kind of hard to get. He's not, he doesn't say yes to everything. I've asked him more than once, so. But yeah, I can, I can see maybe, you know, who's he, you know, who knows? Maybe he will. A boy with no face says, James give my girlfriend faith. A shout out, what's up? Faith, how's it going? Says, you look sharp. There's always best, best wishes to you. Thanks so much, a boy with no face. I appreciate that support. That means a lot. Car fear, good to have you. McCue, McCue Cub. Thanks for dropping in. James discuss the Old Testament in future, please. We are, we do plan on having more. We need more. We need a little bit more variety. That's modern day debates eternal battle, is having enough variety of debates, but not having so much variety too far out there to where it doesn't appeal to our audience and what their usual interests within reason are. You know, you always kind of have to, you want to walk that line of being new and, or I should say, bringing fresh ideas or things, but simultaneously not going so far that it's like, oh, well now you're just outside of your own subscribers' interests. So if we had a debate on what is better, Marvel or DC, I'm sorry, it will flop. I know that a lot of you, like me, enjoy comic book heroes, you, like, we're in the same boat. And I think most of us like those movies, but would we tune in for a debate on that? Like, I can tell you, the numbers would be really low, otherwise I would have done it. It just won't work. Same thing, like Michael Jordan or Kobe. Sorry, it's not going to work. Or, what is it now, Michael Jordan or LeBron? Like, it wouldn't work. I wish it would. But anyway, it's just examples of how you can go too far with a variety. Zen 2011 says word of advice if you're going to bring Christian Prince on. Skip the openings, he doesn't like those. Thanks for your advice on that. I think I reached out, I emailed a guy recently about having Christian Prince on, trying to set it up with Daniel. So, Alpha Lunos says you can ask Muslim metaphysician, he's a Muslim philosopher great against Matt Delanti. We are in the works of hosting and potentially for that September event. So, that could be really cool. Kinky Chef, 69, thanks for coming by. Madden is happy to have you with us. Trump Fan Club, Deutschland. Thanks for dropping in as well as West Warlock. Thanks for coming by. DQ, glad you're here. Frolla King, in the grass. Thanks for dropping in. Thanks for your membership support. Thanks for your support. Joe Herron, appreciate your channel membership. Want to say thank you guys for your love and support. I'm excited about the future. Seriously, we've got big stuff to come. We're excited that modern day debate, just in effect, that's the surprising thing. I'm super grateful. Thank you guys for all of your support. Summer is usually a slow month, but modern day debate in the last month has had one of its biggest months ever with, at one point, I think it was kind of like halfway between June and July, that 30-day range between June 15th and July 15th. We had 5,000 subscribers, the first time in a 30-day stretch that we hit 5,000. So thank you guys for your support, as well as in the last 28 days, 29 days, we've had 2 million views. So I want to say thanks for your support, you guys. It really does mean more than you know. We're excited about the future. There are going to be big things happening. We are constantly trying to improve what we do here. At modern day debate. So Lion Jr., thanks for coming by, says I love you, no homo. Thanks for your support, Lion Jr., appreciate that. Buzz, good to see you there in the old live chat. LJ says, can you host Terry R. Eichert? I don't know who that is, a flat earth. Thanks for letting me know about him. Stark says, anything in the works with guts at Gibbon? I'd have to reach out to Eric, or Erica. If you like seeing Erica on modern day debate, please let Erica know that you enjoy seeing Erica here, because we hope that she feels welcome. We haven't had her on for, I'd say it's a couple of years. I think it was a couple of years ago I reached out, and she's probably super busy, so I have never taken it personally or anything like that. She's probably just got a ton on her plate. I think I reached out a couple of years, maybe a year and a half ago, and I hadn't gotten a response. And so I haven't asked since, my guess is she's just super busy. So I think she's getting her PhD. So good for her, we hope she's doing well. McCaw, poh, thanks for coming by. I said, okay James, can you debate celebrities conversion and towards which religion more than others? Celebrities conversion towards which religion more than others? I'm open to it. I don't know if you mean like have the celebrities on or debate about them. It's obviously easier to debate about them, but I'm not joking. I have considered trying to get a debate in person with Kevin Sorbo from the old Hercules TV show, or the movie God's Not Dead, that was like his more recent thing, against theoretical BS on YouTube. I forgot his name, Scott, Scott Clifton. He made it to, he's an actor on, I think it's Days of Our Lives. If I got the show wrong, I'm sorry. But that's really cool. I mean, the guy chased his dream and he became a TV star. Like a TV show where he's like a main character in it, as far as I understand. I haven't seen the episodes myself, but as I understand, like he's not just like an actor on the background. He's an actual important character in the storyline. So good for Scott. That's really cool. The guy chases his dream down, and so, you know, more power to him. I was thinking about having a debate between Scott Clifton though and Kevin Sorbo, on whether or not Hollywood is like, if they have a leftist bias, or an atheist bias, or something like that. That would be a fun topic, but I don't know. I'm still mulling over whether or not we'll do it, because it's probably going to cost, you know, a good chunk of cash to get these guys. So I don't know. Thanks for your standalone 101. Thanks for your support. Appreciate your kind words, brother. I appreciate that. I'm hoping that if I sleep, I'm trying this thing where I tape my mouth shut. I did it last night. And I sleep with my mouth taped shut. I'm hoping it can restore my jawline. I was looking at pictures of myself when I was like 18, and I was like, whoa, I look way different. My face is thinned out over the years, and I'm like, what is going on? So maybe this tape thing will work, because they say it actually helps. I think I've passed that developmental window though, where it usually makes a difference in terms of keeping your face more square, rather than more narrow. But don't get me wrong. I like my face. I'm not complaining. I'm not insecure about it. Like, I'm happy with my face, but I always want to optimize. Hey, you know, always striving for the best. So if I can have a more beautiful face, if I can get it back to that, where I was looking at myself, and it's like, I used to have a square jaw. Like, and I just don't, I don't think I'd do it anymore. But thank you for your kind words. Anyway, I see the meme disappointed from Jebus and TC the Unbeliever in the old live chat. But yeah, so that would be cool to have those guys. That'd be epic. Who knows if we'll actually get that debate? I don't know. It might be, maybe in the spring. But I want to say thank you guys for your support. I love you. Dave Hill says, have you considered a C-clamp? Ah, that's funny. Is he being like a literal C-clamp as a joke, or is there like some new device out there called a C-clamp? That helps. But anyway, we should start mewing. I don't know what mewing is. But can you host Eric Dubai? He's got over a hundred thousand subs and written like six books. Oh, thanks Hannah says Scott is on The Bold and the Beautiful. So it's not Days of Relief. Sorry about that. But yeah, Bold and the Beautiful, like Scott has chased his dream down. And you know, like that's awesome. He's a TV star. So that's cool. Good for him. And but yeah, guilty of being right. So James is German. It's true. I am German. Oh yeah. And I'm like over 50% German. You can tell by the name. I'm sure. Well, anyway, it's getting late. I got to go. I want to say thanks for your support, guys. Seriously, I love you. Thanks for making this fun. Thanks for hanging out. Good to see you there on the old live chat command cyborg. Hannah, good to see you. My sister's keeper. Glad you made it. Thanks for coming by. Appreciate your love and support. We're excited about the future. We've got big things coming. As we strive to become YouTube's premier debate channel, we believe that YouTube deserves a better class of debate channel. And we're going to give it to them. We believe in providing a neutral platform so that everybody can make their case on a level playing field. Thanks for your support, everybody. We will see you at the next debate.