 Save 10% with my coat, Bobby Tan. Just kidding guys, today's offer is much greater than a saving of 10%. I teamed up with my Muslim brothers and we created pure passage. Imaging sending the reward of Umrah, this Ramadan, to someone you really loved but had already departed from this dunya. For they're really sick and they cannot perform Umrah at all. Imaging the feeling of honoring his or her memory and expressing your love and devotion while still ensuring that they receive this gift, the reward of performing Umrah. As a new revert I just learned about this but you know better than me that performing Umrah is a profound spiritual journey that most Muslims aspire to undertake and you understand the rewards of it. However, for some this journey can be challenging especially when their loved ones are sick or have already passed away. At pure passage we understand how important it is to fulfill this obligation for your loved ones. That's why we offer our professional and reliable service to perform Umrah on behalf of your sick or deceased parents, spouse or any other relatives. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to fulfill this sacred act even if they are unable to do so themselves. And equally understand that the physical and financial challenges of performing Umrah yourself on behalf of your loved ones can be overwhelming. That's where pure passage comes in. We take care of everything and make sure that your loved ones Umrah is performed with the utmost care and attention to detail. So let us help you earn this immense reward for your loved ones by performing Umrah on their behalf. Contact us today and let's make it happen. Mi idhmi la. Alright guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new, my name is Bobby. Guys, I do remember back in the day when I used to watch David Wood and he was telling us about an avalanche of apostasy. Muslims are dropping out of Islam, he said. But this was nothing than a little echo chamber, a little bubble of Islamophobia because we see the exact opposite. Islam is growing every single day and will soon reach over 2 billion people. Therefore, it is not surprising at all that we're going to react today to why I left the Catholic Church and embraced Islam by Davut Reed. As you can see in the background, Davut Reed is an older gentleman and to me, this is absolutely fascinating how people go throughout their life sticking to their religion and then reverting to Islam in the later stages of their life. Guys, I'm super excited for today's video. With no further ado, let's have a look. G'day. G'day, mate. Ozzy. I've decided to start this YouTube channel. I've called it under my new name, Davut Reed. My Christian name was David. And Davut is just the Arabic version of the name David. The... That's easy. My first video on this channel was just of my Shahada. That was my reversion to Islam. I say reversion because they say that everybody's born a Muslim. And we're just brought up by the religion of our parents as I was. I was born into the Catholic faith. I was educated by Catholic brothers, Maris brothers. And was married in the Catholic Church. To be honest, I drifted away from the Catholic Church in my early 20s. And I turned 60 this year. But I still always identified as a Catholic. This is a very interesting point because what I observed in the Balkans, where my parents are from, is that most people fell away from their Orthodox Christian faith. However, they are all strongly identified with Orthodox Christianity. If you ask them about the tenets of the faith, the creeds, they cannot tell you anything. Most of them have no idea about the Trinity or any particular saint whatsoever. However, they are absolutely firm in their conviction that they are Christians and that the bad guys are Muslim. It is so fascinating to see that the mind grabs onto a concept and cannot let go of it, even though it doesn't even believe in it. I talked to atheists on the Balkan. They told me that there is no God. They told me that they do not believe in any type of creator. However, in the same breath they told me that they are of course not Muslims, but Christians. Go, Fager. What you're born with. So when I tick the box, it was always as a Catholic. Exactly right. I struggled with the concept of the Trinity. That's the beginning. At first, I struggled also with idolatry. I started reading the Bible and as far as I could see, a distaste was left in my mouth over the idolatry of the Catholic Church and worshipping, or not worshipping, but praying to saints. It's not worship, it's veneration, don't you know? Yes, there is a huge difference between veneration and worship and just because you think it's worship, okay, it's not worship, it's veneration. This is what the institutional Christian religion claims, of course, that they are venerating icons, that they are not worshipping them. Worship is to God alone, but who is God? God is not only God, God is Jesus as well and God is the Holy Spirit too. So therefore, let's worship Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Father and God and everybody else and let's not worship the icons, but let's venerate them. It's a mess. And he's absolutely correct. When you're reading the Bible, you can clearly see that the Bible speaks loudly against idolatry and by that standard alone, you simply know that this church that we see nowadays, be it the Orthodox Church or be it the Catholic Church, has not been created by Jesus Christ himself. Even though this is the traditionalist claim, they will tell you that Jesus Christ established the first church. But think about this logically. Do you really believe that Jesus Christ created a church before he got crucified according to Christians with crosses in the church where he is crucified? Moreover, did he really create a church where everybody sings in Greek or in Roman and has depictions of his mother everywhere? Does this make any sense to you? Praying to Mary and praying to Jesus and praying to God. And that seemed to be a lot of different people. I was praying to people. I went on a bit of a journey. In my 40s I had a go at Protestantism but never actually joined any faith. I went to a couple of evangelical churches for a little while and that didn't sit well with me at all as well. And that is the struggle within the Christian faith. You basically have two ways. Either you go the Orthodox path or the Catholic path. They're fairly similar. You go the traditionalist path or you go the Protestant path. Alright, if you go the Protestant path, now you are living by Sola Scriptura, which means you go only by the Bible. However, if you're anti-Protestant church, you will see the exact opposite yet again. Fine, they don't have idolatry. Congratulations, that is amazing. However, they sing and dance and chant all in the name of Jesus. And of course they're not living by Sola Scriptura. If you open up the Bible and you check out Leviticus, you will see if you see a man laying with another male, as he layeth with a woman, you should surely put them to death. So this is within the Bible and if you live only by the Bible with no further interpretation of church fathers or popes, then you should surely put them to death. But do you? Of course not. And there is the hypocrisy again. No matter how you try to fix this system, the system is already rigged. Recently, my wife of 30 years was diagnosed with a terminal illness that required a transplant to save her life, which we didn't think she was going to get. And in November of last year, the opportunity for the transplant came up and we travelled four hours to Sydney, the hospital where it was going to be performed. And the day of her operation, I decided that I was going to go to a church. And as it happened, I ended up passing by a mosque. And I went into the mosque. And yeah, I gained some sort of connection there. It all sort of fell into place over one God. It became very evident to me there was one God. There was no intermediaries to this one God. There were no saints in the middle. There were no praying to Mary in the middle and there was no praying to Jesus in the middle. It dawned on me that Jesus, when he was in the garden, was praying to God. He wasn't praying to himself. There was no three in one. There was only God. There was only the singular one God. And it just dawned on me. It was so beautiful to hear. But I have to interrupt real quick here and say that it's so fascinating that when we face hardship, we all return to God. When I talked to Sheikh Uthman Ibn Farooq, he told me as well, there are no atheists when the turbulence hits on the airplane. And this is absolutely accurate because as you can see, he was facing hardship with his wife and he wanted, he needed to reconnect to God. And on his journey towards the church, this mosque appeared. He went one step closer to God and God came thousand steps closer to him. Then I realized that I decided that I wasn't going to rush into this. So I made some inquiries and I ended up doing, meeting a nice Muslim man who said he'd lead me through a course called Understanding Islam. And I saw him for several weeks, three, four times a week. And he led me through the process. And he said he didn't want to rush it. He jumped right in. Eventually it all made perfect sense to me. Absolutely made perfect sense to me. And I took my Shahada. And that video was on this channel. It's the first video I put up. And since that time, I've been attending the mosque when I get the chance to. I've come back to Canberra. I live in Canberra and I've yet to make contact with the local mosque here. It is Ramadan at the moment. It's my first Ramadan and I'm fasting at the moment. I left the Catholic Church. If you're watching, just go to the mosque, brother. You don't need to be formal about this. Just go in. Broken away from a system of religion that had never sat well with me. Never sat well with me. I could never make up my mind whether I was praying to Jesus or praying to God or praying to Mary. So confusing. Who? Who? The Father, Son, the Holy Spirit. All of them. You know, three is one. One plus one plus one is three. No. One plus one plus one is not one. One times one. Times one. Did you get it? I'm very pleased to have broken away. I feel connected now to the one true God, that my creator, the creator of everything. Alhamdulillah. And it's now a matter of doing what he wants. And I found that through the Qur'an. I read the Qur'an. I read it with an open mind. And it all fell into place. That is so amazing, man. Because when I look back, I read the Qur'an with a totally closed mind. I hated Islam and I read the Qur'an to debunk Islam. That was the sole purpose of my inquiry into Islam. May God forgive me. I was an Orthodox Christian. However, I didn't believe in the Trinity. I couldn't accept that concept. I thought to myself, man, I'm going to read the enemy's book and I'm going to debunk it. Once I debunked this book, I'm going to return to my faith and be even a firma conviction. A super Christian, so to speak. But now we are here. That didn't work out. So, you know, it's probably, I think it's for everybody. I think that the morals and the guidelines of Islam could cure a lot of the world's ills. And it certainly has in my life. God answered me. The transplant of my wife was successful. I've now gotten her and I'm very thankful to God for that. You're sure? Yeah. I'm so pleased to have broken away from Catholicism. The Catholic faith, to me, stunted me throughout my life. It left me with guilt, an enormous amount of guilt. The concept of original sin. The, yeah, the Apostles Creed. How many times did I pronounce the Apostles Creed in mass? And did I believe in it? I'm not even so sure I ever believed in it. But by rote memorization and, yeah, very pleased to have broken away from the Catholic Church. Very pleased to have embraced it. It is very important what he said right there. The guilt that you feel and what I witnessed throughout my life is even with people when they want you to feel guilty, this is never genuine. This comes from insecurity, from fear, and they want to invoke the same emotions within you to control you. God doesn't need you to feel guilty, to feel dirty all the time. Oh, I'm a poor sinner. I hate myself. Absolutely not. Allah is the most gracious, the most merciful. Islam. It's a journey. I'm only learning. Sure. You know, there's a lot of, a lot of education to be had. And I am really looking forward to progressing on in my life and having a deeper connection with the creator of everything. The creator of the world, the creator of me, and to develop some sort of gratitude after 60 years of disconnection. But this is the first video on this channel. I want to be able to express my thoughts and my feelings and my faith. And this channel will be an avenue to do that. They said jump in. You know, nobody's going to be perfect at producing videos to begin with. But anyway, I've held my nose and jumped. So thank you very much. And Assalamu Alaikum. Alaikum Salam brother. All right, this is it for today's beautiful video in the end. He said he just jumped in and recorded a video. He didn't know how to do that previously because he's not a YouTuber, obviously. However, that being said, I believe he did a fantastic job. His story was captivating. And moreover, he didn't use one jump cut. He doesn't need an editor whatsoever to make his story entertaining. I personally find it very comforting listening to the older generation and seeing them realize the truth as well. You could clearly see in his story and hear in his voice how he was struggling, what kind of burden the Catholic Church was on him, the ideology of the original sin, the ideology of the Trinity, such an unnatural concept. And he was in constant conflict with himself due to this theology. But that being said, when he faced hardship with his wife, he had to return to God. And this is when he had the epiphany that there is nothing else but one God. Of course, why would you need an intermediary? Think about this rationally and logically for once. Please, if there is one God, he is all powerful. He created everything. Why would you need a created intermediary? Mother Mary surely is created by God. Would anybody disagree with the statement, Christians? Of course not. Mother Mary has been created by God. So now, why would God need me to pray to one of his creations in order to reach him? What is this? This reminds me of the good old days when we had a 56k modem for our internet and we had to bypass the telephone line in order to receive an internet connection. Is this really how limited God is for you in your minds? Surely not. If God wants to establish a connection with you, how else than by you praying to him? If you want to reach out to me, a mere mortal here, you would have to talk to me. Do you need an intermediary? And then we're gonna play the telephone game? Maybe this message will reach me? That doesn't make any sense. And it led to so much confusion with this man. 60 years he was suffering from this. And for me it was similar, but thank God it happened earlier. I strayed away from the Orthodox path in my 20s as well. Even though prior to that I was never truly practicing. However, then in my 30s I became extremely zealous, extremely pious. And I wanted to understand my faith. I went to Mount Athos, this autonomous island in Greece, very similar to the Vatican. And you have only monks and priests and bishops living over there, worshipping 24 hours a day. I talked to them. I wanted to understand my own faith. But nobody could give me a satisfactory answer. Nobody could explain to me why it would be right to pray to Jesus or pray to Mother Mary. How does this add up to anybody? I am truly wondering. Anyways, that being said, I'm truly happy for our brother Dawood here. I'm gonna link his channel in the description box guys. Go over there, show him some love. Let's end this video with the Quran Allah guides who he wills. Alright guys, but this is it for today's video. If you liked it, leave it a thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed already, guys, please do so. And if you want to support this channel by Patreon, all the links are in the description box below. Thank you so much for your ongoing support guys. And as always, may God bless you all. Much love and peace.