Dismantling Islam With David Wood | A Bee Interview
Head of Acts 17 Apologetics and sociopath David Wood discusses Islam, imprisonment, and personality disorders with The Babylon Bee. An important episode for anyone interested in talking to muslims about the gospel message.
Hello everyone, welcome to the Babylon B interview show.
Today we are talking to David Wood, the head of the Act 17 Apologetics Ministry.
I have the documentation that says antisocial personality disorder on it.
Can we see?
And turns out it's actually really bad.
Do you remember, and I always think of this whenever I get a worship leader magazine in the mail?
Wait, hang on.
Let's pause right there.
So you get worship leader magazines.
What are you more than one?
The penalty for leaving Islam is death.
Muhammad said, if anyone leaves his Islamic religion, kill him.
Did you ever learn to feel remorse, by the way?
I don't think we can.
but we're here with beatboxer and uh international comedy superstar david wood who does uh comedy videos and raps on christian podcast yeah Yep.
My quest to become the ultimate human beatboxing machine began when I was just a boy.
I came from a poor trailer park and my family couldn't afford to send me to beatboxing school.
So I had to learn the streets of West Virginia.
Yeah.
Did you have any influences like Carmen or DC Talk?
Yeah.
Anybody like that?
No, this is back in the day.
How old are you?
How old are you?
I'm 35.
Okay, so this is before your time.
Back then, it had just started to become mainstream with like Run DMC and the fat boys and then the Beastie Boys.
I like the Beastie Boys.
I liked two of their songs.
Yeah.
Well, they only had a couple songs.
Like Sabotage.
Girls was always good.
No, that was on the album that got popular way back in the day.
It was sort of how I understood what girls were.
You got to show my first girl.
What are these girls?
girls this guy's singing about to do the laundry To clean the bathroom.
These girls sound awesome.
They do the laundry.
I was like in the bathroom.
Oh, that's what girls are.
Yeah.
Oh, weird.
That's not a good first introduction to the female members of our species.
No.
That actually got worse because they had on that album, they also had Rhyming and Stealing, which is them about being rapping pirates.
And one of the lines was about going around plundering and raping.
So it's like...
Yeah, it was a different time.
Yeah.
It was a different time.
They're going to be in trouble right now.
Yeah, for sure.
How they're in trouble just for not saying it back then because there's no time limit on, you know, now the cancel culture.
We'll follow you.
The one I do remember, and I always think of this whenever I get a worship leader magazine in the mail.
Wait, hang on.
Let's pause right there.
So you get worship leader magazines.
What are the challenges?
Well, they come.
Like more than one.
What are these magazines?
They come to the church, worship leader mag.
Is it everything that I'm picturing in my head right now?
Yes, it's like a picture of Chris Tomlin with an acoustic guitar that Taylor made for him.
Seven styles.
You have to try.
Seven Luke's you need to slay this Sunday.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
No, for sure.
It's like how to be a more sexy worship pastor.
Can you please bring some in?
Yeah, I'll bring one in.
Please.
No, they're amazing.
No, but I always think of the Beastie Boy song whenever I get one.
It's like, your mom threw away your best worship leader mag.
Dan to dandy.
You could make a parody of that about someone throwing away your best worship leader mag.
I feel like there's about three people in the world who would get that.
That dude did it with Baby Got Back and he made Baby Got Book.
I liked that.
Oh, I remember that one.
That actually was good.
Makes me so how late.
So I wasn't allowed to listen to this kind of music, so that's my introduction to that song was the parody.
I think that's still the only version I've ever heard.
I just like that David compared run DMC to Carmen.
He's like, no, no, it's more like the Run DMC days.
They're like, no, no, Carmen.
Yeah.
It's like, it's not even the same.
Do you know who Carmen is?
Yeah, I remember one, it was.
We need a righteous invasion.
Okay, so you do know that.
We want a riot.
Yeah.
Damn, riot.
That one started off.
He goes, it sounded like an old white guy trying to rap.
He goes, it starts off.
He goes, Webster's dictionary say a riot.
It's like an unrestrained uproar in a public place.
Turbulence right in your face.
That was straight gangster.
Dude, gangster.
I feel like every Carmen song was like a white guy trying to rap.
Well, it sucks because the instrumental that led up to it was awesome.
And I was like, oh man, I'm about to hear some hot fire here.
And then Webster's dictionary say.
Well, we'll talk about Carmen a little later.
In the meantime, so you had a pretty boring testimony from what I understand.
Yeah.
One of those that people just kind of gloss over on during testimony time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pretty much.
Yeah.
Atheist.
Criminal.
Shed any light on that for us.
Well, I mean, how long do you want to spend on that?
Well, we got about 40 minutes to fill.
So I mean, I could fill 40 minutes with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, just take a break then.
You go and keep going.
Well, you have 60 seconds.
No, basically, grew up with, let's say, some psychological problems.
Had delusional thoughts along the way about creatures controlling the world or people conspiring against me and so on.
But that's not actually what led to the problems.
And I think this actually relates to things like, you know, the school killings and stuff like that.
Because matter of fact, I should probably make a video on this.
When you have messed up thoughts, people are not explaining to you like what you have that is causing these things.
Right.
So when I was growing up, I noticed very soon that I did not have the same emotional reactions that other people had when something would happen.
So animals would die, people would die, people would get sad about that.
It never made sense to me at all why anyone would get sad over something dying.
So over time, you have to sort of figure out on your own, why do I not react the same way that other people react?
Because they don't tell you.
People don't tell you.
And so the conclusion I draw was that I had just evolved to a higher level of humanity where I no longer have those irrelevant emotions that the rest of you all had.
They may have played some sort of role at some point, but now we're getting past that.
And so that's the conclusion I draw, but that left me with, great, well, I'm the new stage of humanity here.
And eventually went to a mental hospital and they said, no, you actually have something called antisocial personality disorder.
So that's what sociopaths and psychopaths have.
So we were joking about that beforehand, but that's actually something that you've been diagnosed with.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I have the documentation that says antisocial personality disorder on it.
Can we see it?
Which is funny.
Notice, even then, even then, they give you that.
They don't explain what it is.
There were some things on there in the report that said David is incapable of remorse.
And I was like, what?
How do you know what I'm incapable of?
Because I don't like being told what I could do either.
But then I was like, gosh, have I ever felt bad over anything?
And I couldn't think of anything I'd ever felt bad over.
But I saw antisocial personality disorder on my paperwork, and I just thought it meant like I'm not very sociable or something like that.
That's what I don't like.
And turns out it's actually really bad.
Those are the guys who are.
Those are the guys who become serial killers.
So for years, I've got this paper telling me I have antisocial personality disorder, but I think it's like this innocuous.
I'm bad at small talk.
Yeah, I'd rather be reading in my room than talking to you or something like that.
And then it wasn't until college that I was taking a psychology course and stuff.
And I read and I was like, whoa, wait, that's what I have.
This stuff that they're saying is so bad and is going to make people serial killers.
Wait a minute.
Now it makes sense.
Now it's like all of a sudden your life makes sense, right?
Like, oh, I'm reading, I'm reading the symptoms of this.
And oh, that's why I'm like that.
Oh, that's why I'm like that.
Oh, that's why.
And, you know, it crossed my mind.
Hey, if you were to catch people when they're young and then say, hey, what you are experiencing right now is what a small percentage of the population of the world experiences because it's a disorder.
We know what it is.
And if you don't do anything about it, it's going to lead to some very bad things.
Very bad stuff.
And so don't conclude that you're the new stage of humanity or something like that because that's going to get.
Doesn't it often kind of, it goes there, though, too?
It becomes delusions of grandeur and that kind of stuff.
It can.
There's a lot of overlap with narcissistic narcissism and narcissistic personality.
In fact, that's one of the problems with the personality disorders.
Most people who have one have at least one more.
And there are people who have like all 10 of the personality disorders.
But there's a lot of issues about how you categorize them because there's so many overlapping symptoms.
And so that was, so you were that way.
And then it became you got into some bad stuff early on too, right?
And ended up in the clink.
Yep.
At some point.
It's a slammer.
How did that go down?
The clink.
The big house.
The big house.
Well, it's, so you guys are, I was East Coast, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Like, we're on the West site.
Yeah, West Coast prisons are worse because it's like race and gang oriented and stuff.
And you have to go, you have to go like join a gang and this and that.
We've transcended those issues in California.
Yeah, you'd have to like go to, you know, join the Aryan Brotherhood or something like that.
No, that's just the university.
You have to do that at university.
Yeah.
But fortunately, East Coast isn't like that.
People might click up by, you know, if they know each other or neighborhood or something like that.
It's more affinity-based.
Like if you like to cycle, you know, you can join one group.
It's like small groups at a church.
In class.
If you enjoy reading.
If you get worship leader magazines, that's a whole click.
Yeah.
So I'm into paintball.
Ended up with a 10-year prison sentence.
Little bit of time in psychiatric hospital and mainly prison.
That was under the old law, though.
Under the old law, if you served a 10-year sentence, it meant five years.
It didn't mean you were actually doing 10 years.
You had what's called 30 for 30 for every 30 days that you don't get in trouble.
Then they take an extra 30 days off your sentence and they call that good time.
They could take that away anytime if you get in trouble.
But it keeps building up so that by the time I was leaving, I had five years of good time.
If I had gotten into a fight or something like that, they would just take that and say, hey, now you're serving five more years.
But so anyway, it meant that I served a little over five years and that counted as a 10-year sentence back then.
Wow.
And you met somebody in prison that led you to Christ.
Yeah, a guy named Randy.
This was in jail.
So this is before prison.
Jail's where you go like temporarily.
And then prison's where they send you longer term.
But yeah, he was a Christian who turned himself in for 21 felonies.
So he'd just grown up committing crimes and then became a Christian, joined the Navy and went back and confessed to everything he'd ever did.
And they said, okay, well, that's 21 felonies.
And so they locked him up.
And then this guy's in the dorm and he's sitting there reading the Bible all day.
And he's like fasting.
And first conversation, I walked up to him.
I said, hey, you know why you're reading the Bible?
You're reading the Bible because you're born in the United States.
If you'd been born anywhere else, you believe in something else.
If you've been born in China, you'd be a Buddhist.
If you've been born in India, you'd be a Hindu.
If you've been born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be a Muslim.
Because people like you believe whatever you're taught to believe.
Did you tip your fedora?
No, but it turns out this guy knew a little apologetics and stuff like that because he'd become a Christian like that.
And so he was able to actually put up a fight and he ended up spinning it on me and pointing out that a lot of the stuff I believed about the universe and life and everything else is just stuff that I heard in a class or something.
And I believed everything my teacher was saying.
So it's not, hey, I'm the free thinker here and you just believe what you're told to believe.
I believed everything I was told.
Now, I had some weird beliefs that other people didn't have.
But as far as what I believed about, you know, how we got here and what we are and so on, that is, it was stuff I'd heard.
So you converted to Christ, got released out of the pokey.
The pokey.
I looked up a, I googled some of the stuff.
You were like, you did some.
You went to study at Old Dominion University, and you bet Nabil Qureshi.
And he started challenging about Islam.
We both joined the speech and debate team, and we went on a trip because you compete against other schools.
And there were four guys on the team.
And one of the guys on the team, we were all friends, but sharing a hotel room is different when we're going on a trip.
And one of the guys was flaming homosexual, right?
He called himself Madonna with a RuPaul twist, right?
And so we're thinking, okay, the guys have two- I'm trying not to picture what that is.
I know.
I know that guy, actually.
We're walking and there are two hotel rooms and stuff.
And there are four of us guys.
And Nabil and I didn't know each other.
This is our first trip and stuff.
We step off the bus and Nabil goes, want a room together?
And I go, yep.
So we.
It's like the meme like Muslim, Christian.
Yeah.
That's right.
But so, yeah, so Nabil and I shared a room.
And then, yeah, I knew his name's Nabil Qureshi, but I don't know whether he's liberal, Muslim, or devout.
Branched of Indians.
Had no idea what he's going to do.
Quresh.
He.
Yeah.
Kind of.
And, well, as a Muslim name, it means from the Quraysh, from the Quraysh tribe, which was Muhammad's tribe.
That was the Quraysh in Mecca.
I used to tease him saying, you know, anyone can make up that name at some point in their family's history, right?
Just to say that they're from the same tribe.
Because, I mean, he looks Pakistani, not Arab.
So come on, dude.
You weren't there, right?
And so we end up in this hotel room and I see him.
I'm doing my Bible in a year reading.
I'm in Isaiah at that point.
And so I'm over there reading Isaiah.
But I can see him pulling out his prayer rug and stuff like that, putting away his prayer rug.
And I was like, okay, he's devout enough to be bringing a prayer rug on a school trip.
So, and then I'm sitting there reading and I'm like, all right, Lord, if I start talking to this guy, everyone's going to start calling me a Muslim hater and stuff.
So if you want me to talk to him, just let him start it.
And it was right after that.
He goes, so are you a hardcore Christian?
I said, yes, I am.
And it was cool.
We stayed up all night that weekend.
That's when I start making excuses and I ask God, like, can you give me another sign?
Like, that's something else.
Well, that's what he ended up doing because after a few years of arguing about Christianity and Islam, he concluded that Christians have a good case for believing in Christianity.
But he concluded that he also has good reasons to believe in Islam.
And I watched him change over time because when we first met, it was Islam is proven true by logic and history and mathematics and science.
But we eventually went through all those issues.
And he had to find out along the way that the evidence didn't bear that out.
And so I asked him again a few years later, I asked him the exact same question because I wanted to see if he was going to say the same things.
I said, so why do you believe in Islam?
And he said, well, two reasons.
One, it makes sense to me.
And two, the people I feel the presence of God on most strongly are my grandparents and they're Muslims.
And that is a terrifying shift right there, right?
Because if you're saying it's proven by science, that's something we can investigate.
I can't investigate or prove you wrong that you feel something about your grandma, right?
There's no way for, there's no way I can't falsify that.
So it's like he went from the realm of the falsifiable to the non-falsifiable based on feelings as his ground for believing in Islam.
So we still kept at it, though.
And he eventually got to the point where he just said, okay, God, I see why Christians believe this and they have good reasons, but I still think I have reasons for Islam.
So I don't know what to do.
Could you give me a sign?
Could you give me a dream?
And so he had a dream, which was all symbolic.
It was all like creatures and stuff.
But according to, he went to his manual, like they have like a dream manual of what different things.
The code break.
Yeah, like this thing represents a friend.
This represents.
And according to what it meant, according to his manual thing, Islam was attacking him and about to kill him.
And then I showed up and squished it.
And then when it turned to attack me, Jesus came and chopped its head off.
But it was so symbolic.
So he's more specific.
Yeah, he'd asked for a dream.
It got more specific.
So he had asked for a dream and then he got that one instantly.
But then he prayed.
He said, okay, I'm not going to base my eternal choices about eternity on a weird dream that I have to interpret.
Could you give me something that I don't have to interpret?
And so he has a dream where he's standing outside a doorway of a feast and there's a feast in there and he sees me at the feast and he says, David, I thought we were going to eat together.
And I say, you never responded.
And so he calls me up and he's like, hey, David, there's this, I'm outside this narrow door.
I cracked up laughing.
I'm outside this narrow door and I'm looking inside.
And there's, you guys are at the feast.
And I asked you about the feast and blah, And he goes, how would you interpret that?
And I go, I don't need to interpret it.
It's straight out of the Bible.
It's straight out of the Bible.
It's right.
And that's amazing.
So he went to the passage in Luke where you're going to be outside the narrow door and you're going to, you know, there's the feast on the inside, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and so on.
And David.
And he said, but it was funny because I said, I don't have to interpret it.
And he had asked, God, can you give me a dream I don't have to interpret?
That's fascinating.
And so then he said, you know, Jesus didn't chop anyone's head off during that particular dream.
Yeah.
Sad.
And so then he had then he had another one and then he and then he asked for a vision.
And when he asked for a vision, he said the room went to black and all he saw was crosses everywhere and so on.
And it was still months.
It was still months before he converted.
He was a stubborn fellow.
Well, it's rough.
And this is something for Christians to keep in mind.
There's a negative side and a positive side to it.
The negative side and what makes it so difficult to reach Muslims with the gospel is they have some serious barriers in front of them in that they are taught from the time they're born that the worst possible sin you could commit is the sin of shirk.
That's associating a partner with Allah.
So saying Jesus is Lord is associating a partner with Allah.
So something that is fundamental to Christianity is the unforgivable sin in Islam.
So there's that.
Then it's just built into their understanding that if they are to convert, they're going to have to give up their family because their family is either going to kill them or is going to shun them, more likely shun them if it's in the West.
And so they're going to have to give up their family.
And then if anyone, if they ever get into a position where they have the authority to carry out punishments, or if you just get some guy who just wants to carry it out, the penalty for leaving Islam is death.
Muhammad said, if anyone leaves his Islamic religion, kill him.
And so, you know, Christians, we preach the good news.
So mostly peaceful killing, though, is my understanding.
Yeah.
It's beheading.
So we preach the good news.
And so Jesus died for your sins.
Jesus is Lord.
And, you know, God gave you the righteousness of Christ so that you can be righteous before him.
And we preach that as good news.
When a Muslim hears that, he's hearing, okay, so you want me to believe this thing, which is going to have to cause me to have to give up my entire social framework, maybe get my head chopped off, and then get me eternity in hell.
You guys are calling that good news because it sounds like the worst news ever.
But the cool part is, when a Muslim eventually gets to the point where he says, you know what?
I've been told all my life that this will get me sent to hell and I'm going to have to give up my family and this may get my head chopped off.
But I want to know Jesus anyway.
That's probably going to be a pretty cool, cool Christian.
It's going to be a very, very committed Christian.
This whole account.
They're not going to be the kind of Christian who gets worship leader magazine, probably.
No.
They don't care about that stuff.
They're also not going to be a progressive Christian, which means not Christian.
So anyways, they'll be the ones who throw away your best words.
That's right.
My progressive Christian threw away.
I'm sorry, we're going to go back.
But this whole account is written about in Nabeel's book, the first book that he wrote called Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus.
If you guys haven't read that book, you should read that book.
It's a fascinating book.
He also wrote another one called No God But One.
That was amazing, too.
So also great, great content for people that are interested in engaging in engaging with Muslims.
So that's awesome.
We were doing some street witnessing in Orange County and we came across some Muslims and they needed to ride home because the bus hadn't come yet.
So we said, sure, jump in our van.
And they get in and they're like, one of them is studying nuclear engineering, one of them studying electrical engineering, one of them studying rocket science.
Nice.
And we're like, hmm, that's an interesting combination.
But anyway, we said, oh, we're Christians.
And they said, oh, so you believe in three gods.
That was the instant first objection.
Is that common?
Is that like the main?
It's actually, it's actually built into the Quran, right?
So the Quran says to reject the Trinity.
It'll say, don't say three and things like that.
The closest it ever gets to defining what the Trinity is is Surah 5, 116, where Allah is asking Jesus about all the confusion over him on the judgment day.
Allah says, did I tell you to take you and your mother as gods in addition to me?
And so this is in a chapter where you're told to reject the Trinity.
And then you get to what the Trinity is, and it's God, Jesus, and Mary.
And they're three separate deities who just work together closely.
And so, you know, what's interesting is I understand a, you know, seventh century Arabian caravan robber misunderstanding who's even in the Trinity, right?
I understand that.
Wait, I'm hearing you guys talking about the Trinity.
I'm hearing you talking about Jesus, and I'm hearing you talking about Mary, the mother, and I'm hearing you talk about the father.
So that's what the Trinity is, right?
I understand Muhammad missing that and not understanding that.
It's very weird that God in his word misunderstood that, right?
It would be weird if the Quran is supposedly the word of Allah.
I expect Allah to actually know what the doctrine of the Trinity is.
You would think so.
And he would state it accurately and then refute it because since he completely misrepresents it to the point where to this day, Muslims think that that's what the Trinity is made up of.
Isn't that true, though, with like most of the apologetic arguments coming from Islam are from these imams that are still kind of like touting a lot of the same arguments that they've been touting forever.
Things like the Injil, the New Testament, you know, being corrupted in the year 300 by the Apostle Paul.
Like that's still something that people say, right?
Yeah, insane stuff like that.
Yeah, I play a clip.
I played a clip by Sheikh Yusuf Estes, one of the most popular Muslim speakers in the world.
I played it for Bart Ehrman during an interview.
Ehrman almost died laughing at it.
But this guy's popular.
What he was arguing was the Roman Catholic Church was founded three centuries before Christ by Alexander the Great in Rome to be the cult of the Roman Empire.
And so it was just interesting that it was Alexander the Great starting the Catholic Church in Rome.
In Rome.
But it's interesting.
Can you get us a fact check on that, Dan?
Would you mind Googling that right now?
And also Bart Ehrman.
Yeah.
That's cool.
It's just interesting that it's you can, this stuff thrives in an atmosphere of ignorance, right?
I call it Islam's 99-1 rule, right?
These guys know that when they're talking to an audience, at least 99% are not going to question anything their guy's saying.
They're trained not to.
Maybe one at most might go look into this and say, this is just ridiculous.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
And we, how do we make sure that she's not committing adultery with the dude while I'm gone?
And so we need the wisdom of Allah for this.
That's when Allah revealed in the Quran that if you have to be out of town, your wife has to be around a dude.
You want to make sure you can trust him.
Have her breastfeed him 10 times.
And after 10 breastfeedings, he'll be like a son to her.
This has been another edition of the Be Weekly from the dedicated team of certified fake news journalists you can trust here at the Babylon B. Reminding you that someone out there knows something about Carmen.