Louder with Crowder - Unholy Alliance? Decoding the Islam-Christian "Friendship" with Jay Dyer
Aired: 2026-05-01
Duration: 01:10:37


=== Stepping Outside Normal Story Lines (05:09) ===

[00:00:58]  for today I love that song.
[00:01:12]  I love that.
[00:01:13]  You know what?
[00:01:13]  And I love you.
[00:01:14]  Thank you for joining us.
[00:01:16]  Not you, but most everybody else in here.
[00:01:20]  I definitely love you.
[00:01:21]  You see this sign right here behind me?
[00:01:23]  It means Stephen's either out or we tied him up somewhere where he can't really interrupt us.
[00:01:27]  And that brings us to Gerald Apologizes Apologetics.
[00:01:34]  Gerald Apologizes Apologetics.
[00:01:37]  It doesn't mean that.
[00:01:39]  It doesn't mean that.
[00:01:41]  You know what?
[00:01:41]  At this point, I guess it doesn't matter.
[00:01:42]  We're all going to have some fun with it anyway.
[00:01:45]  Um, I talk to you guys a lot about topics that touch on apologetics or topics that touch on religion and faith and where it intersects with politics or world events.
[00:01:57]  And I love talking about those things because I think it's a fun conversation.
[00:02:01]  I think you get to dive into subjects that maybe we don't have time to cover on the show as in depth.
[00:02:06]  And it gives us an opportunity to kind of veer outside of the normal lines of stories that we talk about.
[00:02:13]  I think in this case, some of them will match up with things we've mentioned on the show.
[00:02:17]  For example, we're going to be talking about Islam in the West and some.
[00:02:21]  Real push to try to kind of sanitize Islam and make it seem like it is more compatible with Catholicism than it is with the evangelicals in Christianity or even Judaism.
[00:02:32]  This is a post from Sneeko that we'll get to here in just a minute.
[00:02:35]  And why there is this push to try to, I guess, make it seem like Islam is not the threat that it is, we'll leave the judgment up to you.
[00:02:44]  Obviously, you know my opinion on it.
[00:02:46]  Also, the Freemasons, there's been conspiracy theories about these guys for years, but now there's actually a murder trial in France.
[00:02:54]  With Freemasons that went and killed a lot of people.
[00:02:56]  I think there are 20 something people on trial.
[00:02:58]  Maybe the conspiracy theorists had it right, and a couple of other topics that we will love to get a little bit more in depth with.
[00:03:05]  And to do that and more, I bring people to the table who know more about this than I do so that you guys get the very best information.
[00:03:13]  And that is why we have the very wonderfully talented Jay Dyer with us today.
[00:03:23]  All right, Mr. Jay Dyer, welcome.
[00:03:24]  Thank you for joining us.
[00:03:26]  I hear you're on a road trip right now.
[00:03:28]  Yeah, all the podcasts.
[00:03:29]  You are 19 of 19.
[00:03:30]  So we're the very tail end, the dregs of Jay Dyer's brain at the end of how long?
[00:03:36]  Five weeks?
[00:03:37]  Five weeks.
[00:03:38]  That's last week, yes.
[00:03:39]  Well, I feel special because we've saved you, you've saved the best for last in us.
[00:03:43]  And that makes me feel.
[00:03:44]  It's only because of location, not because of quality.
[00:03:46]  Oh, okay.
[00:03:46]  It's not prioritized.
[00:03:47]  No, just location.
[00:03:48]  It's okay if it was.
[00:03:49]  Don't worry.
[00:03:50]  Best places to find you on X, J007 and Jay's analysis.com.
[00:03:56]  Actually, no, now it's, it's, oh, no, sorry.
[00:03:58]  It's Jay Dyer.
[00:03:59]  I bought the handle J Dyer on Twitter.
[00:04:01]  You know, we're a professional show, but sometimes at J Dyer, J A Y D Y E R. Perfect.
[00:04:10]  Okay.
[00:04:11]  We have a few topics to get to that I think our audience will be pretty interested in.
[00:04:16]  One of them is the Freemasons and some really interesting, maybe another conspiracy turns out, maybe not so conspiratorial.
[00:04:24]  And then this real weird push that I've noticed lately over the last several months to sanitize Islam.
[00:04:31]  Right.
[00:04:33]  But this very interesting wedge that they are trying to drive between the kind of Catholic orthodox side of the church and the more Protestant, evangelical side and Judaism, and saying, you don't want to be like them, right?
[00:04:47]  Kind of using the Judaism wedge there.
[00:04:50]  So just wanted to talk about that.
[00:04:51]  And then also Pam Bondi being ousted as the attorney general and what that means for the Epstein files.
[00:04:57]  I know you've commented on that a lot.
[00:04:59]  But before we get to all of those, you sent me a clip.
[00:05:03]  You send me clips every once in a while of different debates.
[00:05:05]  You know, I enjoy those things.
[00:05:07]  So I appreciate that.
[00:05:08]  But this was a conversation that you had.
[00:05:10]  I'm not going to play the clip, but a conversation that Jay had with Tim Poole.
[00:05:15]  And you spent what I don't think was a planned half hour, roughly, kind of going through Tim's worldview.
[00:05:25]  And I don't remember exactly how it came up, other than like a free market system versus like a communist system.
[00:05:31]  Company towns.
[00:05:31]  Company towns.
[00:05:32]  That's right.
[00:05:32]  Yeah.
[00:05:32]  Company towns and blue jeans and selling all the.
[00:05:35]  Okay.
[00:05:35]  That's right.
[00:05:36]  Anyway, go find the clip, guys.
[00:05:38]  We'll try to include a link for it.
[00:05:39]  It's about half an hour.
[00:05:40]  You can find it on Jay's.
[00:05:43]  I think you posted it there.
[00:05:44]  It's everywhere, yeah.
[00:05:45]  Yeah, as well as YouTube.
[00:05:47]  So it's funny because it struck me, and I wanted to get your take on this and really kind of explain what was happening there, at least from your perspective, because that wasn't really something that was supposed to be a 30 minute deep dive.
[00:05:59]  And Tim got very frustrated.
[00:06:01]  I love Tim.
[00:06:01]  I think Tim was wrestling with some ideas in his head, but like what happened there kind of from your perspective?

=== Grounding Beliefs in Christian Ethics (07:58) ===

[00:06:08]  Well, I have done multiple debates there.
[00:06:11]  So I kind of expected there might be a debate.
[00:06:13]  And I talked to Josie ahead of time, and you know, I'd done Tim Gordon twice debating him there, and you've had Tim on, but there was a Protestant in one time that you there was.
[00:06:21]  I think y'all basically both were like, Yeah, you shut up, and we're gonna nicely.
[00:06:26]  Well, so yeah, what happened was just in passing conversation, the subject of company or I brought up company towns in comparison to kind of top down control structures.
[00:06:37]  I don't think there's a huge difference between the way Stalin would have run Russia and the way a company town would have been run, and that really seemed to be an issue of contention.
[00:06:44]  So that led to a lengthy, protracted discussion defending.
[00:06:48]  Whether a company town was really free market.
[00:06:50]  I see it as more of a not Austrian economics principle system, but more of a monopoly capitalist system.
[00:06:56]  And that then led into a debate about the history of communism, the history of capitalism, what classical liberalism is, what laissez faire is, what utilitarianism is.
[00:07:06]  And I don't think Tim was aware that the positions that he was saying were actually utilitarian.
[00:07:11]  Yeah.
[00:07:12]  And that seemed to frustrate him when you pointed out, like, well, that's this kind of position.
[00:07:16]  He's like, no, deal with the argument.
[00:07:17]  You're like, well, I'm dealing with what underpins the argument.
[00:07:20]  Like, I'm going to the foundation of your argument.
[00:07:23]  It's not dealing with kind of these one off issues that may come up from it.
[00:07:28]  And it seemed like, and I was talking to you just before we went live, it seemed like Tim has a worldview that, for the most part, or a large part, I haven't explored all of it.
[00:07:38]  So I can't say I know every detail of what he believes, but it seems like it wants to be grounded in kind of Christian ethics, but he didn't want to say that.
[00:07:51]  Wanted to say, like, this is actually something that we can observe in nature.
[00:07:53]  This works.
[00:07:54]  And you made some arguments there about how that's kind of a problem.
[00:07:59]  It's inconsistent, basically, to say, you know, well, I'm going to pick the elements of this system that I think work, and then I'm going to reject all the metaphysics or the theology behind it because those, you know, they kind of go together.
[00:08:12]  And also, there's not really a basis to know what it means for something necessarily to work, right?
[00:08:17]  And I don't mean to get too philosophical, but in philosophy, just because something works, well, works to do what?
[00:08:23]  Right.
[00:08:23]  I mean, a nuclear bomb could work to destroy all of my enemies, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good thing or it's ethical or whatever.
[00:08:29]  So, just having something work or it kind of begs the question as to what's the purpose and is this working for something good or for something evil?
[00:08:39]  So, when you just sort of have these generic principles that you apply, that you appeal to, if there's not a basis for the principles, then it becomes very arbitrary.
[00:08:48]  And that's kind of what I was trying to highlight.
[00:08:49]  And I think, like you said there, like one of the things that I always do if I'm debating an atheist or somebody like that is.
[00:08:54]  I go to the presuppositions and I critique what's underlying the arguments that they're making.
[00:08:59]  And that usually ends up being a very devastating approach.
[00:09:02]  Yeah.
[00:09:02]  And why?
[00:09:03]  Maybe tell the audience because I love debate.
[00:09:06]  I don't like protracted debates that don't really get anywhere.
[00:09:09]  I like debates that are actually fruitful, substantive.
[00:09:12]  Yeah.
[00:09:13]  And you have a good faith partner on the other side that's willing to take good critique.
[00:09:17]  And I think there's a lot of examples that stretch on for hours and hours where, I mean, I've seen Andrew debate people and try to get them to define a term for an hour.
[00:09:24]  And they refuse to define an obvious term, right?
[00:09:26]  And that it's because they know where that leads.
[00:09:28]  Right.
[00:09:29]  And then it's nowhere good for their argument.
[00:09:31]  And a lot of people online don't really have much of a background in debate.
[00:09:35]  I get it.
[00:09:35]  That's fine.
[00:09:37]  But if you do, you start to see very quickly, like, wait a minute, like these.
[00:09:41]  These arguments that we're having are on all these issues that aren't really the argument that we should be having or the conversation we should be having.
[00:09:46]  It should be like, where are you getting your beliefs from?
[00:09:51]  Like, what is the core of your belief?
[00:09:53]  What are the anchor points, the epistemology, right?
[00:09:57]  Of what are you pulling from to get this belief?
[00:10:00]  And if you don't know that, it can lead you into a lot of different crazy areas.
[00:10:04]  Is that kind of what you find as well?
[00:10:05]  You spend a lot of time trying to define terms and trying to go after kind of the basics of what people actually are pulling from.
[00:10:12]  Yeah, I agree with you.
[00:10:13]  The formal debates tend to be a lot more fruitful because you have a significant amount of time to explain your position.
[00:10:19]  And you also have cross examination with a good moderator.
[00:10:23]  And those are a lot more fruitful than the sort of wilds, all over the place, blood sport type debates.
[00:10:28]  But those can be fun and entertaining.
[00:10:29]  Yeah.
[00:10:30]  But it's a lot more fruitful when you can define the terms.
[00:10:33]  I don't usually have too much of a problem defining terms because I think what happens with Andrew, he's really good at picking the cultural issues to debate.
[00:10:41]  And then a lot of times when you have those cultural issues that you're debating, The opponents are going to be obsessed with or unable to define terms.
[00:10:50]  I remember debating Not So Erudite, and she wanted me to define feminism, define this and that.
[00:10:55]  And I defined it, but it was too specific because it was related to history.
[00:11:00]  She just wanted a dictionary definition.
[00:11:01]  So I think with a lot of the leftists and the sort of cultural people, they think that the meaning of a term or definition is just what you find in the dictionary.
[00:11:09]  Of course, if you're debating movements or if you're debating big scale ideas or something like that, there's a lot more that goes into it.
[00:11:14]  You can't just use a simple, oversimplified definition.
[00:11:17]  I think in Mainline debate that goes on out there, especially culture stuff, it's a different field than if you're trying to debate somebody on something that's very technical.
[00:11:32]  That makes sense.
[00:11:33]  And the Tim Pool debate actually, and Andrew had the same debate, interestingly, with Tim a year before over the notion of rights and justifying the rights and how do we ground them.
[00:11:43]  I didn't know that, again, that that discussion was going to go in that direction, but it ended up going that way because it was just sort of.
[00:11:49]  A lot of appeals to general ideas that didn't have any grounding.
[00:11:52]  And that's when you said epistemology, that's the key thing with what we mean by that typically in debate we need to know not just any old reasons for your belief, but what are the good reasons for the belief, right?
[00:12:06]  Right.
[00:12:06]  You know, if I said, oh, I bought Bitcoin, you know, when it was $10, and you say, oh, did you read a bunch of economics?
[00:12:15]  No, I had a dream and God told me to buy Bitcoin.
[00:12:17]  Well, that's not a good reason to, you know, it might have worked.
[00:12:21]  Yes.
[00:12:21]  But it's not a good reason.
[00:12:22]  You're not going to try to replicate it.
[00:12:23]  You're not going to build a system of beliefs or practices around that.
[00:12:26]  And I, so this, I haven't had any formal training in debate.
[00:12:29]  Andrew's talked to me about debating with him against a couple of people.
[00:12:32]  And I always feel like I'm going to be on the court with like, you know, name your favorite bat, like Michael Jordan.
[00:12:36]  And I'm just kind of like the water boy over here, you know, like very skilled people.
[00:12:40]  And I feel like you're in that category too, where y'all have studied this.
[00:12:44]  You have a good background in philosophy and you understand logic very well.
[00:12:48]  And so many people don't.
[00:12:50]  And I think that leads us to a place where we don't know why we believe what we believe.
[00:12:54]  And I've always, So, I've said that for probably the last 10 years.
[00:12:57]  Know why you believe what you believe.
[00:12:58]  It's incredibly important to know that.
[00:13:00]  And I mostly meant it in the frame of biblical belief.
[00:13:04]  Like, if you believe in God, why?
[00:13:05]  If you don't, why?
[00:13:07]  And most people don't usually answer those questions.
[00:13:09]  They just either do or don't.
[00:13:11]  Right.
[00:13:11]  And I think it's very important today for people to know why they believe what they believe.
[00:13:16]  And when you interact online quite a bit, as I do, you see a lot of people that really have no clue.
[00:13:22]  And it does, you are protected when you have those kind of moorings from buying crazy ideas.
[00:13:29]  Yeah.
[00:13:30]  And you can kind of go back to the roots of your beliefs and go, wait a minute, this is a little off the beam and you can evaluate it.
[00:13:37]  When you don't, you can just kind of float around and believe whatever you want.
[00:13:40]  And you can be swayed by the doctrine of the day, essentially.
[00:13:42]  So that's why I wanted to jump into that because I think it's important to see, like, hey, there's some people that I like, like Tim Poole, who I think probably has, you know, way more in common with what I believe than what I would kind of reject of his beliefs.
[00:13:56]  But it seemed like he really just didn't want to ground it in Christianity.
[00:13:59]  He didn't want to ground it in Christian ethics.
[00:14:01]  And that belief, he wanted to kind of have it be broader, but he couldn't find any place to anchor it.

=== Freemason Lodge Theories and Risks (15:09) ===

[00:14:06]  And I thought that was interesting.
[00:14:07]  So, not a topic necessarily that I wanted to dive too deeply into, but I thought it was interesting.
[00:14:11]  And, I think it's instructive for us to make sure that we know why we believe what we believe.
[00:14:15]  So when we talk about these things, I always know you have a reason for any, even if it's a conspiracy theory, you know, that you think is interesting, right?
[00:14:23]  You know, or want to dive into.
[00:14:25]  But that kind of brings us to our first story.
[00:14:28]  So you sent me this.
[00:14:29]  Now, strangely enough, I'd actually seen this.
[00:14:31]  I don't remember why I had seen this already, but Freemasons.
[00:14:36]  So there are a lot of conspiracy theories out there about Freemasons.
[00:14:39]  And just to clarify, just because I say it's a conspiracy theory, it's not necessarily the derogatory.
[00:14:44]  Approach to it.
[00:14:45]  It's that, you know, you can't really prove it.
[00:14:47]  There's a lot of different theories about it.
[00:14:50]  I don't mean it that way, at least.
[00:14:52]  So defining a term doesn't mean it's a bad thing.
[00:14:54]  But there are a lot of conspiracies out there about the Freemasons and things that happen.
[00:15:00]  Until you read an article about the murders in France, and so we have the overlay here trials underway in France for 22 people who officials allege ordered or carried out crimes for a group of Freemasons living in the suburb of Paris.
[00:15:12]  Multiple people killed in different fields and different industries.
[00:15:19]  What is that?
[00:15:20]  Because this is kind of right up your alley.
[00:15:22]  I think you were at a Freemason point of interest recently.
[00:15:26]  Yes, we were.
[00:15:26]  And they had, what was that?
[00:15:28]  Was that Mecca that they had?
[00:15:29]  Well, they did.
[00:15:30]  So we went to the Washington Monument in Alexandria, not the Washington Monument, the D.C., but in Alexandria, they have a giant sort of temple that you can tour.
[00:15:43]  And my wife had been there.
[00:15:45]  It's a temple to Freemasonry, I think.
[00:15:46]  It is.
[00:15:47]  Right.
[00:15:47]  Okay.
[00:15:47]  Yeah.
[00:15:48]  But it's a.
[00:15:50]  The whole ethos of it is really just sort of honoring George Washington, is the main theme of it.
[00:15:54]  But my wife had been there like 10 years ago, and she was like, Oh, you got to come see this.
[00:15:58]  And I was just kind of like, I'm just, you know, I'm not that interested.
[00:16:01]  But it was actually worth doing because we got a guy who's a historian who's a Freemason, and he kind of gave us the full on, you know, like, here is what we actually believe.
[00:16:11]  And if I was to summarize it just simply, the ethos of it is essentially a kind of a syncretist, ecumenist type of view.
[00:16:20]  So basically, all the religions are really just manifestations of some sort of generic theism.
[00:16:26]  Right.
[00:16:27]  And to be a Freemason does require acknowledging some generic creator.
[00:16:33]  So you can't get into the lodge unless you believe there is a higher power, sort of an AA type of deity.
[00:16:40]  But kind of an unnamed higher power.
[00:16:42]  It's God, but like not maybe a specific person.
[00:16:44]  And they will actually shy away from the specifics.
[00:16:46]  Right.
[00:16:47]  So if you want to believe in Jesus, that's fine, but don't tell the Hindu dude over here who joined the lodge that his deity is wrong.
[00:16:53]  So.
[00:16:54]  And that's kind of what I knew from what I'd read.
[00:16:57]  And I've looked, I always try to go to the sources of things.
[00:17:00]  So if I'm going to talk about David Rockefeller's views, there's a big new Brzezinski's views.
[00:17:04]  I want to talk about what they said in their book, right?
[00:17:06]  So I tend to not like conspiracy theories, even though I would be classed hosting Alex Jones as, you know, in the domain of conspiracy theories.
[00:17:13]  Hey, guys, bring the tinfoil hat out.
[00:17:15]  Thanks.
[00:17:16]  Gay frogs as well.
[00:17:17]  That turned out to be true.
[00:17:18]  Well, I got tired of being called a conspiracy theorist in undergrad and grad school.
[00:17:22]  So I decided, okay, I'll just read the books of these people, and then you can't argue with me that I'm a conspiracy theorist.
[00:17:27]  You must have been fun at parties.
[00:17:30]  I've been asked to leave a few.
[00:17:31]  So, yeah, actually.
[00:17:35]  But back to the Freemasons.
[00:17:36]  So basically, my overall assessment would be I've read Manly P. Hall, I've read Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, so I'm familiar with the overall philosophy of the top Masons.
[00:17:46]  But really, it's just kind of an antithetical idea to what Jesus says in John 14, right?
[00:17:54]  I'm the way, the truth, and the life.
[00:17:55]  No one comes to the Father but through me.
[00:17:57]  So that's the main, I think, point of contention.
[00:17:59]  If you take the New Testament seriously, you'd have to disagree with that element of Freemasonry.
[00:18:06]  But beyond that, I believe also from history, the British Empire, for example, they were very proficient at using the Masonic Lodges as an intelligence network.
[00:18:16]  And that's a good window into perhaps what we see with this news story is that it's just a really good venue, you could say, for organized crime to tap into and to use because of the oaths of secrecy, that kind of stuff.
[00:18:31]  In this very case, for example, there were one or maybe two individuals who were working with French intelligence, right?
[00:18:38]  And so, again, this overlap of secret societies and intelligence agencies, something that I've covered quite a bit over the years in my books and in Hollywood analysis, makes perfect sense to me.
[00:18:49]  So, I'm not really surprised, although I don't think we usually see this level of extremity when it comes to these types of cases.
[00:18:55]  But there is similar stories with Operation Gladio, which was using the Grand Orient P2 Lodge.
[00:19:01]  And they were training people for these types of hits, terror events, assassinations, you name it.
[00:19:08]  And you can go all the way back to in America.
[00:19:10]  There's a case of William Morgan, who was a Freemason, or he was calling attention to the fact that he was murdered by Freemasons.
[00:19:16]  And this led to America's short lived anti Masonic party.
[00:19:20]  There actually used to be a party in America called the Anti Masonic Party due to the William Morgan event because the Masons had murdered a guy.
[00:19:27]  So I don't think this is like super common, but I do think it exists.
[00:19:32]  And the better method of understanding it is there's a historian, her name is Jessica Harlan Jacobs.
[00:19:36]  She wrote a book called Builders of Empire.
[00:19:39]  And she really just points out that the British super state, the empire, used the Masonic networks just as an intelligence apparatus.
[00:19:48]  I think that's a lot of what's going on here, probably in this case as well.
[00:19:52]  I don't think the Masons are as popular as they used to be 100 years ago when you had people like Rudyard Kipling writing books about it.
[00:19:58]  And there's a great movie that I think illustrates this point, too.
[00:20:01]  It's kind of a satire, but it's Kipling's story The Man Who Would Be King.
[00:20:04]  It's got Michael Caine.
[00:20:06]  Do you like Michael Caine?
[00:20:07]  It's got Michael Caine, it's got Sean Connery, and they play Freemasons.
[00:20:10]  And they go and they trick everybody in a village.
[00:20:13]  To believing in Sean Connery as a reincarnated Alexander the Great.
[00:20:20]  So, but what's, yeah, it's kind of a satire.
[00:20:23]  It's an adventure kind of story, but it's Kipling's story kind of trying to tell you what Freemasonry is.
[00:20:30]  And so they kind of see it like, look, all the religions are kind of cons, but you can do a lot with this con, right?
[00:20:38]  So I think Freemasonry is like that.
[00:20:40]  Yeah.
[00:20:40]  So, you know, when I first read this, you know, the first question was like, is this just like an isolated incident or is this like proof of a, A broader conspiracy, but it seems like you're saying it's fertile ground for these types of things to happen because of the secrecy, because of this.
[00:20:57]  You know, we're doing something for a higher purpose.
[00:20:59]  I don't know if that purpose is laid out or this higher good is laid out.
[00:21:02]  Well, in this case, great question.
[00:21:04]  In this case, there's two possibilities because we don't really know exactly what was going on, but it could either be a situation where they actually were working at the behest of the French intelligence establishment and were being tasked with kind of outsourcing black ops and things that maybe the state didn't want.
[00:21:22]  With some distance.
[00:21:23]  Exactly.
[00:21:24]  Plausible deniability.
[00:21:26]  And I interviewed a while back the famous gangster Sammy the Bull.
[00:21:33]  We did several podcasts and he made a great point too.
[00:21:35]  He was like, Look, when I was raised up in the Sicilian Mafia, he's like, We had a very similar structure to Freemasonry with the omerta, which is the oath you take, the blood oath, you have rituals that you go through to sort of join.
[00:21:49]  And, you know, it's taken very seriously.
[00:21:50]  And he's like, You know, I realize that this is very similar to the way that the Masons have historically structured things.
[00:21:57]  And that's partly because the Freemasonic revolutionary France, Garibaldi, he had a very close relationship with the Sicilian Mafia.
[00:22:06]  And so they kind of blended and had a lot of overlap.
[00:22:08]  And if you get into the history of the five families, a great book by Selwyn Robb called The Five Families, first few chapters get into this the history of the mafia.
[00:22:15]  And there was an absolute connection between the Masons and the mafiosi back then.
[00:22:21]  And Sammy the Bull confirmed all that.
[00:22:23]  But long story short, I think that's another window into this how it's similar to organized crime.
[00:22:28]  But the other option, if it's not the state using this as a sort of excuse or proxy, could also be what's called false flag rigor.
[00:22:36]  Recruitment, which is where a person pretends to be somebody, oh, hey, we're the CIA and you need to come work for us, but they're actually Russians or something, right?
[00:22:44]  Pretending to be.
[00:22:45]  So it could be the case that it was just an organized crime outfit.
[00:22:47]  It could be individual people running their own little criminal operation, or it could have been something bigger, something like a, you know, establishment, French establishment hit squad.
[00:22:58]  And those do exist.
[00:22:59]  Like, they are.
[00:23:00]  I don't disagree.
[00:23:01]  Now, I don't know if they're the ones that got Charlie Kirk or not, but I do understand that they're.
[00:23:05]  Well, you know what's so annoying about that was as soon as I saw the story, I'm like, okay, here we go.
[00:23:09]  I know, right?
[00:23:10]  Queen Qandas is going to immediately jump on this and say, I'm saying that cute with a Q, like cute hard, right?
[00:23:17]  Justification, I told you.
[00:23:18]  And it's like, no, that's not.
[00:23:20]  This doesn't say anything about the French Legionnaires.
[00:23:22]  It has nothing to do with you.
[00:23:23]  I know.
[00:23:24]  Yeah.
[00:23:24]  So, and nothing to do with your lawyer's office that was right there.
[00:23:28]  Well, and I think I appreciate you framing it that way because I think people may run to the okay, so the Freemasons are this like organization that has their tentacles and everything, and they're the initiators of these kinds of actions.
[00:23:41]  And really, it looks like these are kind of.
[00:23:44]  One offs where they're used in a large part.
[00:23:47]  And also, even one of the guys in, I think in this article, one of the guys who committed some of the crimes, I don't know if it was the murders or if it was just some of the robberies or other things that they did, said he thought he was working for, I believe he said he thought he was working for the French government.
[00:24:01]  Yeah, which could be a false recruitment.
[00:24:03]  So it fits right with what you were saying.
[00:24:04]  Yeah, that's a possibility too.
[00:24:05]  And also, I want to stress that like this is, so I think European masonry does have a bit of a different flavor to the way Bible Belt, you know, granddaddy at the lodge.
[00:24:15]  My granddad was in the Masonic Lodge.
[00:24:17]  He was a shriner.
[00:24:18]  My best.
[00:24:18]  Friend growing up was a Mason.
[00:24:19]  I have a family member that is, and they don't know any of this stuff.
[00:24:23]  Right.
[00:24:24]  So, but what I think happens is that you get vetted and recruited and invited to higher level stuff.
[00:24:32]  So, it's kind of a vetting process.
[00:24:33]  Right.
[00:24:34]  So, if you're willing to do more intense, extreme things, and I think the way it works in America and the Scottish, right, is like you don't get invited to the DC 33rd degree unless you're very prominent.
[00:24:46]  And that's, I think, where.
[00:24:48]  Things would probably get a little more serious.
[00:24:50]  But the local Blue Lodge, the three degrees, the local Blue Lodge, where everybody's just meeting and, I don't know, eating spaghetti or whatever they do.
[00:24:58]  I don't know.
[00:24:58]  But boomers eating potluck food.
[00:25:02]  Yeah.
[00:25:02]  Is probably not a.
[00:25:04]  Feeling like they're a part of a secret society taking over the world or secretly controlling things.
[00:25:09]  I thought it was the Jews.
[00:25:09]  Turns out it was the Masons.
[00:25:11]  Okay.
[00:25:12]  Well, I want to keep kind of going with that for just one second.
[00:25:15]  Like, are there any other, like, things just to dispel or confirm any other concerns that we should have potentially about Freemasons?
[00:25:22]  Because that's one, right?
[00:25:23]  Like, if they are kind of carrying out these targeted attacks on people that would be against whatever Freemasons are for in that particular area, is there anything else concerning about that?
[00:25:32]  Like, going back to the, you know, The all gods are kind of there.
[00:25:36]  Yeah, I think this the concerning element is even at the Blue Lodge, like the basic idea is still a kind of syncretism or pluralism that just doesn't fit with Christ's teaching.
[00:25:52]  So, as a Christian, it's definitely not an organization that you should be a part of.
[00:25:57]  I don't see how a Christian could be.
[00:25:59]  Yeah.
[00:25:59]  I mean, and of course, Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church in their official teachings say that you can't, it's a violation of canon law.
[00:26:06]  Classic Protestant churches have also said you can't, um, you know, I guess that doesn't apply to Baptist deacons because most Baptist deacons are members of the lodge, but uh, yeah, so they're also drinkers, so oh, yeah, um,
[00:26:21]  but the other thing I would add too is like, and I'm not defending like the Scottish right, I think it's just as bad theologically as the European Grand Orient, but there's a lot more nefarious kind of stuff that tends to happen in like the Grand Orient lodges because they were very famous in the French Revolution for helping to support.
[00:26:39]  The revolutionaries and their committee for public safety, 10, 20,000 people getting their heads chopped off.
[00:26:46]  Oh, wow, yeah.
[00:26:47]  So, and the Masonic elements had a huge role in that, particularly the really radical Jacobins.
[00:26:52]  And they were very closely tied to the lodges of Europe.
[00:26:55]  And that's not from my historian professor in undergrad.
[00:27:02]  He was like a specialist on the French Revolution.
[00:27:04]  He was like, yeah, it was basically a Freemasonic thing.
[00:27:08]  And I think that's a different flavor typically from what you have in other branches, perhaps, of Masonry.
[00:27:13]  But overall, you're right.
[00:27:14]  I think they're still spiritually bad.
[00:27:15]  There's almost like there's a retail version of Masonry that most people are probably involved with that are in Masonry.
[00:27:21]  And then there's some that maybe has a history, like you said, of being much more active and playing a bigger part in the local society.
[00:27:28]  So, okay.
[00:27:29]  Well, very interesting.
[00:27:31]  When I saw this story and I was like, I don't know where we're going to go with this, I don't know if Freemasons really, is this going to end up being another Dan Brown book or something?
[00:27:38]  Like, there's different stories.
[00:27:39]  But one last thing, too, that I think is a good window into this for what I'm talking about with the European element is the propaganda Douay Lodge.
[00:27:47]  And that's Italy's elite Grand Orient Lodge.
[00:27:50]  And that's where Gladio recruited a lot of its hit squads from.
[00:27:54]  So, this is probably Grand Orient Masonry.
[00:27:57]  I don't know which lodge it is, but that would make a lot more sense with the way Gladio was structured, which is the post World War II, Cold War era CIA training of, and Kissinger really ran this whole operation according to multiple sources to stave off a Soviet invasion of Europe.
[00:28:13]  Yeah.
[00:28:14]  And that led to the compromising of the Vatican Bank, et cetera.
[00:28:17]  So, that's what this kind of looks like is that style of thing.
[00:28:20]  That's crazy.
[00:28:21]  I mean, to hear something like that, it feels like something that's 30 or 40 years past its prime.
[00:28:26]  You know, like there was a lot more fervor about this when I was a kid.
[00:28:29]  And talking, you know, you would hear Cold War talk about it.
[00:28:32]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:32]  Around that time period.
[00:28:33]  Okay.
[00:28:33]  Well, that makes sense then.
[00:28:34]  But the Cold War stuff, the timing makes a lot of sense.
[00:28:37]  By the way, I read it's a book on the CIA, Something in Ashes.
[00:28:44]  Legacy of Ashes.
[00:28:44]  Legacy of Ashes.
[00:28:45]  Thank you.
[00:28:46]  It was really good.
[00:28:46]  And it's like, wow, we were just throwing stuff against the wall.
[00:28:49]  We had no idea they're talking about how many people.
[00:28:52]  That the CIA had sent into these countries to gather intel or to try to subvert governments.
[00:28:57]  And they were just mowed down because they already knew we were coming or they had an informant.
[00:29:02]  Like, we were not prepared at all.
[00:29:04]  Well, I just did a crazy interview with John Kiriakou.
[00:29:07]  We did a two hour interview on a lot of this stuff.
[00:29:09]  And he was saying basically a separate interview, but he was saying that he was one of the guys that was tasked with coming up with crazy ideas.

=== Gaza Tragedy and Shifting Alliances (03:24) ===

[00:29:16]  Yeah.
[00:29:16]  So he would say, I would come up with 20 different crazy ideas and we would do two of the 20 crazy ideas.
[00:29:21]  But that's part of the job of an operative to come up with crazy ideas.
[00:29:24]  And yeah, a lot of times people get killed.
[00:29:27]  Lots.
[00:29:28]  The way that the book described it, it was just like sometimes 10, 20, 30 people that were dropped into a country were immediately captured and killed.
[00:29:34]  Yep.
[00:29:34]  I mean, immediately.
[00:29:35]  Like, as they hit the ground, they were met with an entourage of welcome, but not for welcoming purposes.
[00:29:41]  He said the same thing about his operations in Greece.
[00:29:44]  And I didn't realize how vicious the leftists in Greece were in the Cold War.
[00:29:49]  And, well, post Cold War and towards the end of the Cold War.
[00:29:51]  But, I mean, they were like hit squads.
[00:29:54]  It was crazy.
[00:29:55]  Like, you don't think of the left.
[00:29:56]  You know, we think of the left as like the purple haired.
[00:29:58]  Freaks at college, but AOC or something, yeah.
[00:30:01]  But no, these are like serious AOC with like an Uzi in training exactly.
[00:30:04]  Real leftist, yeah.
[00:30:05]  Um, all right, well, let's dive into another topic.
[00:30:08]  This one touches on obviously there's a faith thread through just about everything that we do, but specifically, obviously, in the Masons.
[00:30:16]  So, as Christians, Masonry is not so good.
[00:30:18]  Let me know in the comments what you think.
[00:30:20]  If you disagree, I'll point you to the all gods kind of thing that violates what we talked about.
[00:30:26]  Um, and we're going to dive into Islam and Islam's kind of Relationship to the West.
[00:30:33]  And it's very interesting.
[00:30:34]  I've seen a move here with what happened in Gaza.
[00:30:40]  October 7th happens.
[00:30:43]  Israel, Lovell Merhatem, has been kind of in a decent position with the United States, probably a pretty favorable position with the general population in the United States.
[00:30:53]  That support goes up because it's a tragedy and it's an event that we're like, everybody's shocked by, right?
[00:30:59]  You can get into how it happened, why it happened, all of the stories about that.
[00:31:03]  And then the aftermath is.
[00:31:05]  No matter what you think about Israel, no matter what you think about Gaza and Hamas, it's a tragedy when something like that happens in Gaza.
[00:31:13]  Nobody, I think, on any kind of credible side of this has been denying that it's a tragedy.
[00:31:19]  It's just whether or not that is something that should have happened, shouldn't have happened, should have happened differently.
[00:31:23]  I'm in the camp of they should have taken care of Hamas, but it should have happened much differently.
[00:31:27]  I think he lost a lot of support for a reasonable cause, a debatable cause, right?
[00:31:34]  And Israel's standing.
[00:31:36]  Especially among the younger generation, has just plummeted.
[00:31:40]  Just absolutely plummeted to the point where I see posts that I'm like, listen, I've seen these kinds of things before.
[00:31:46]  And it doesn't normally lead to a very good place.
[00:31:49]  There's a difference between saying, like, I think Netanyahu is probably a war criminal.
[00:31:52]  He probably needs to be tried so they can get to the bottom of it.
[00:31:54]  I think there's plenty of war crimes you can probably look at that happen in Gaza.
[00:31:57]  And we should make sure nothing like that ever happens again.
[00:32:00]  Two, we need to kill all the Jews or we need to get rid of the state of Israel completely and wipe it off the map.
[00:32:07]  Or, you know, from the river to the sea sounds like a great idea now.
[00:32:10]  Talking not just about the river that's close, the river that's far, like there would be no Israel after that.
[00:32:17]  I've seen that kind of stuff.
[00:32:18]  And then I've seen people start to really kind of turn on President Trump in a way that I was very surprised by.
[00:32:26]  And we've been critical where it's necessary because we disagree with some of the things he's done.
[00:32:32]  We disagree with how he's handling some of the optics around big stories.
[00:32:38]  And we'll talk about one of those with the Epstein files.

=== Shia Islam Strategy and Messiah Views (14:54) ===

[00:32:40]  A little bit.
[00:32:41]  I have some substantive disagreements as well, but at the very least, it was horribly messaged.
[00:32:45]  Right.
[00:32:46]  And that's fine to have that kind of a disagreement.
[00:32:48]  But when you start turning on everybody that has a pretty good track record, has been pretty consistent on these issues in the past, and you start kind of aligning yourself with somebody who you would never a few years ago consider a friend or an ally, that's probably a better way to say it because there might be some good people, but you wouldn't align with their views.
[00:33:12]  It gets really dicey.
[00:33:13]  And that doesn't mean like, you know, you may not like President Trump.
[00:33:16]  You may think he's gone completely off the rails and whatever.
[00:33:18]  I'm not saying that.
[00:33:19]  I'm saying like, Going so far as to go, well, if I can't trust this anymore, I'm going to go to Islam and I'm a Christian.
[00:33:27]  That's the kind of world that I'm seeing right now.
[00:33:31]  And I don't know that I really understand completely what's going on, but I see it as kind of this wedge.
[00:33:36]  And so let me just bring up this post by Sneeko that kind of illustrates my point.
[00:33:40]  And I can't remember exactly what day.
[00:33:41]  So if we can bring up Sneeko, he posted this on X. Is there a date down there?
[00:33:47]  It's a little too small for me to see.
[00:33:48]  It's in March.
[00:33:49]  Is it March 5th?
[00:33:50]  6th.
[00:33:50]  Okay.
[00:33:51]  So March 6th, he posted this.
[00:33:53]  Catholic slash Orthodox Christians have more in common with Muslims than they do with the warmongering evangelicals.
[00:34:00]  And listen, he's saying warmongering.
[00:34:01]  He's just saying evangelicals in government and worship Jews.
[00:34:06]  And I'm sorry, in government who worship Jews and want Armageddon.
[00:34:12]  How did that strike you?
[00:34:13]  Because I know you've, I think you've tangled with Sneeko before.
[00:34:15]  Yeah.
[00:34:15]  We actually had a sort of debate.
[00:34:18]  I mean, actually, that was funny because the debate was, was, Andrew versus Sneeko and his buddy apologist.
[00:34:25]  I forget the guy's name.
[00:34:26]  Is this the one where he refused to?
[00:34:27]  Well, they booted Andrew.
[00:34:28]  Yeah.
[00:34:28]  Because Andrew was making some jokes that they didn't like.
[00:34:32]  He started off nice.
[00:34:34]  They didn't like the jokes.
[00:34:36]  And then they said, well, you come debate Trinity instead of that.
[00:34:38]  And so I hopped on and we ended up having it.
[00:34:40]  It was Muslim Lantern.
[00:34:41]  That's the guy.
[00:34:41]  So we had a two hour debate.
[00:34:42]  And it's funny because I can't find that debate other than my clips of it.
[00:34:47]  So I think they were not a huge fan of that debate.
[00:34:50]  I don't think it's on Rumble anymore.
[00:34:51]  It may, maybe I just can't find the title.
[00:34:53]  It's not on YouTube.
[00:34:55]  I know Sneeko got taken out of YouTube, but regardless, so I'm familiar with this line of reasoning.
[00:35:02]  I think it's so low tier, it's so silly that it's surprising that people fall for it.
[00:35:07]  But then again, to answer your question, I think it's dialectics.
[00:35:10]  Humans are very susceptible to two choices.
[00:35:14]  And if you choose this one, then the other one's the bad guy, right?
[00:35:18]  And life is more nuanced than that, right?
[00:35:22]  You can have two organized crime factions fighting each other.
[00:35:25]  That doesn't mean that one of those guys is the good guy, right?
[00:35:27]  Tony Soprano goes to war against the five families in the show, and they're all bad guys, but they have different motivations.
[00:35:33]  So I think in geopolitics, it's pretty similar.
[00:35:36]  This one is a little more hairy, though, because it brings in religion, which makes it more difficult.
[00:35:41]  But people do not understand that Islam is not the friend of Christianity.
[00:35:47]  They think that that whole, you know, we're closer on the same page because Muslims say Jesus is a prophet.
[00:35:55]  Yeah, but John says in 1 John 2, if you don't believe in the Son as the Son of God coming to the flesh, you're Antichrist.
[00:36:02]  And Muslims also have the teaching in the Quran, which I didn't believe this back before I had studied Islam.
[00:36:06]  I thought, oh, they're just saying that about Muslims.
[00:36:08]  It's not true.
[00:36:09]  But no, they actually have the teaching that you smile with your face, but you oppose them in your heart.
[00:36:14]  And that's what they do until they have the upper hand.
[00:36:17]  That's actually a deception, essentially.
[00:36:19]  They can do that, yes.
[00:36:20]  And by the way, Allah in the Quran is the greatest of deceivers.
[00:36:24]  So why would you not be able to be a deceiver if Allah is the greatest of deceivers?
[00:36:27]  It kind of falls apart really quickly.
[00:36:28]  Yeah.
[00:36:30]  And so, although the Sunnis will say, oh, technically we can't do takiyya, they still can and they still will, even though the Shias believe that they specifically can do deception.
[00:36:39]  So, they do it until they have the upper hand.
[00:36:42]  I think everybody's probably seen in the UK how different it is.
[00:36:47]  I went to the UK in 2018 or 19 to speak at a conference, and it was just, it's like Londonistan.
[00:36:54]  It's Islam.
[00:36:55]  Okay.
[00:36:56]  That's by design.
[00:36:57]  It's not accidental.
[00:36:58]  And the evil socialist leadership, the Fabian Socialists, Kier Starmer is a Fabian Socialist, and the people before him that ran the country all the way back to Blair, right?
[00:37:06]  They believe that no, Islam is the great ally.
[00:37:08]  It's the great friend.
[00:37:10]  And they intentionally opened it up to change.
[00:37:14]  The demographics and the country by design.
[00:37:16]  And they had said, by the way, 100 years earlier that the elites of the UK would do that.
[00:37:20]  They said they would do that.
[00:37:21]  Bertrand Russell was saying, we'll change Europe and the UK with Islam 100 years before people were doing it today.
[00:37:27]  So this is not a new thing.
[00:37:29]  And if you think about it, well, demographic warfare is not new, it's ancient, right?
[00:37:35]  And that's kind of what this is.
[00:37:37]  But to get back to Islam and Sneeko, so yeah, I think that people are being, because people in America don't know the history and the religion.
[00:37:47]  Of Islam, they think that because there's these statements that Jesus is a prophet or Mary's a virgin, that's much closer to what, you know, Judaism or something says.
[00:37:58]  But again, it's not.
[00:38:01]  It's completely opposite of what Jesus says.
[00:38:03]  They have, well, they believe that if you believe in the Trinity, you're an idolater.
[00:38:11]  And eventually they do have the right to kill you if it's the type of Islamic regime that's like a Sunni.
[00:38:20]  Now, I'm not pro Shia or anything like that, but historically, Shias have had a tendency to be a little more amenable to Christians because this gets really hairy.
[00:38:30]  But Shia Islam is Neoplatonism.
[00:38:33]  Define kind of the fields for us of who we're talking about.
[00:38:35]  What nations typically would you think of as being dominant?
[00:38:38]  Iran is Shia, and that's the branch of Islam that is ruled by mullahs and they believe in a kind of a lineal descent that has to be from Muhammad, from the different.
[00:38:50]  That's really the divide is tracking the descendants.
[00:38:54]  And who really had the real faith and passed it on.
[00:38:58]  And they link it definitely to that.
[00:39:00]  But what's interesting about Shia Islam is that it's very influenced by Sufism and Neoplatonism.
[00:39:06]  We had a talk with one of the top Shia guys.
[00:39:09]  He's a teacher at Harvard.
[00:39:10]  His name is Dr. Khalil Andani.
[00:39:12]  And he debates the Sunnis all the time.
[00:39:15]  And one of his main arguments is that Sunni Islam is just sort of crazy because the Quran, in his view and in their view, is just another form of Neoplatonism.
[00:39:26]  So, they will be at great lengths to try to.
[00:39:30]  In other words, they're a little more.
[00:39:31]  Do you know what perennialism is?
[00:39:35]  Are you familiar with that idea?
[00:39:37]  For the audience, I think I understand it, but it's one of those terms where I'm like, I could be off.
[00:39:40]  I could think it means pizza and it doesn't.
[00:39:43]  So let's make sure.
[00:39:44]  Perennialism.
[00:39:45]  Pepperoni perennialism.
[00:39:45]  Yeah.
[00:39:47]  So basically, it's the idea that it's not exactly like what Masons would say, but it's the idea that there is a skeletal structure of all the world religions that's something akin to neoplatonism.
[00:39:59]  Platonism, like that's a superstructure.
[00:40:01]  And then the world religions are kind of like skeletal, like outfits that the superstructure masks itself under, if that makes sense.
[00:40:10]  And so the Shia Islam has that type of a view.
[00:40:13]  Now, it's an insane eschatological cult.
[00:40:16]  Yes.
[00:40:17]  So I'm not defending it.
[00:40:18]  I'm saying that there are situations.
[00:40:20]  That's the 12th Imam stuff you get told about.
[00:40:22]  The hidden Imam.
[00:40:22]  It's like some mystical hidden dude.
[00:40:24]  The apocalyptic kind of component through their eschatology is like that's one thing that they don't, that they're not lying about when they tell you that on Fox News.
[00:40:31]  That is true.
[00:40:32]  That's true.
[00:40:32]  Now, how it kind of Plays out and manifests, it's different.
[00:40:35]  Maybe they overplay that hand a little bit.
[00:40:37]  But there is that kernel of truth there.
[00:40:39]  Right.
[00:40:39]  And for example, in Syria, Assad was an Alawite, which is a sect that is very similar to what we're talking about with Shia.
[00:40:47]  They have a more of a Sufi type, tolerance type of view.
[00:40:52]  And so, ironically, under Assad, Christianity fared a lot better in Syria than when they brought Jalani in, who was the hardcore Sunni.
[00:40:59]  So that's Shia Islam.
[00:41:03]  But Sunni Islam, and it has a lot of different flavors and sects, is not based on some sort of descent from.
[00:41:11]  Islam.
[00:41:11]  Anyone can potentially become an imam.
[00:41:13]  And if you watch the debates that I do, most of the debates, almost all debates actually, have been with the Sunni sort of radical types like Jake, the Muslim metaphysician, Daniel Hakikachu, Muslim Lantern.
[00:41:28]  They're all sort of the Saudi Arabian style, sort of Sunni.
[00:41:32]  They're called Salafi, which means the original righteous of the first couple generations of Islam.
[00:41:36]  And they take it very seriously in that literal, we're not figurative with the Quran like the Shia are.
[00:41:42]  Like everything is like a literal sort of Jihad type of thing, yeah.
[00:41:46]  Well, and when I said like the lineage, it was like who had the truth, right?
[00:41:49]  Because there was debate over like how many there were like 20 something versions, I believe, of the Quran.
[00:41:54]  And Uthman had them burned, right?
[00:41:55]  Exactly, they all had all of them burned, and it's like this one.
[00:41:57]  And so the debate is, okay, well, what is the true Islam?
[00:42:00]  And that's where you get the different sects, and even within some, like you said, Sunni, there's different flavors of it because you have different kind of tradition.
[00:42:07]  So, the so your question, like where does Christianity fare better, uh, it kind of just depends on the flavor of Islam, for example, you have Ottoman.
[00:42:16]  Turks and sultans who probably didn't even believe the religion, but it was a very useful tool for the Ottoman Empire.
[00:42:23]  And they would absolutely persecute Christianity.
[00:42:25]  They would take the girls into slavery.
[00:42:27]  Christian ladies would be brought into sex trafficking.
[00:42:31]  Sultans would even have a harem of boys.
[00:42:33]  I mean, just terrible stuff, which isn't actually what even the Quran teaches, right?
[00:42:38]  You're not supposed to be gay.
[00:42:41]  I thought they threw them off buildings last I checked.
[00:42:43]  No?
[00:42:44]  Well, no, I'm saying the sultans would do what they wanted.
[00:42:47]  No, no, no.
[00:42:47]  But they had a religion for the people, right?
[00:42:51]  Sunni Islam.
[00:42:52]  But anyway, so, for example, the British Empire, they made an alliance with a lot of Sunnis and what are called Wahhabi eventually against the Ottomans.
[00:43:08]  And they wanted to sort of pit them off against each other.
[00:43:12]  That's why you have Saudi Arabia and all these countries in the Middle East after the Sykes Pico agreement and all that.
[00:43:17]  The British Empire sort of divided up the Middle East.
[00:43:19]  Yeah.
[00:43:19]  And we get blamed for it all the time.
[00:43:21]  The Brits are the ones that frickin' started it.
[00:43:22]  They did start it.
[00:43:23]  We had a role, don't get me wrong.
[00:43:24]  I'm just saying.
[00:43:25]  They don't really get fragged with a lot of this, and we do.
[00:43:27]  And I'm sorry, I don't mean to go off crazy stuff.
[00:43:30]  No, you're fine.
[00:43:31]  To go back to the question, so everybody's presented with this sort of false choice of, like, well, you know, if Trump's making a mistake, if the evangelicals are wrong, oh, then the Muslims must be good.
[00:43:45]  Well, yeah, it's just Orange Man bad.
[00:43:48]  So therefore, whatever opposes Orange Man must be good.
[00:43:51]  That's the false dilemma.
[00:43:52]  Right now, as I read the room, it's Israel bad.
[00:43:55]  Israel controls the United States.
[00:43:57]  So therefore, we're tied into it bad.
[00:43:59]  And we're going against the Muslims, so Muslims are good.
[00:44:03]  And people are buying this.
[00:44:04]  And it's not just like the sneako types that are saying this.
[00:44:07]  He's saying this for a reason right now.
[00:44:09]  It's part of a strategy to kind of split off Catholic and Orthodox from evangelicals, really read that as Protestants at large.
[00:44:19]  And like we needed one more reason to have a split to some degree.
[00:44:23]  I mean, it's like, come on, that's a fissure.
[00:44:24]  Just let us heal a little bit, all right?
[00:44:26]  We're working on it.
[00:44:27]  But I'm a little struck by it because.
[00:44:30]  It doesn't like on it on the surface as somebody who, and I don't have the in depth understanding that I think you and many others have on this, but I did teach a class called A Christian's Response to Islam.
[00:44:40]  I have been to Indonesia and I have preached the name of Jesus Christ in the largest Islamic country in the world, not in the cities, but in Aceh, kind of in the northern part of the island there.
[00:44:52]  So I understand what it's like to be in these places, and I've done outreach to Muslims before, and I felt that kind of really dark presence of being in a demonic.
[00:45:03]  Of culture and go, like, how can you ever think that there's an alliance that would super like evangelicals still believe way, way, way more like the fundamental things, like Jesus Christ being the Messiah?
[00:45:15]  There is no option for him not to be.
[00:45:17]  And Islam doesn't give him anything other than, well, actually, he lied to you, he's not the Messiah, he's just the prophet, right?
[00:45:25]  And he's gonna step aside one day.
[00:45:27]  And in their eschatology, it's kind of the exact opposite of Christian eschatology, depending on what flavor you subscribe to.
[00:45:33]  And then for Judaism, it's like, Jesus wasn't even afforded that.
[00:45:37]  He was actually a false Messiah.
[00:45:39]  And I understand the remarks about him being in the Talmud burning in feces.
[00:45:43]  So, how do you think these things are compatible if you just use that one example of, okay, well, how do they treat Jesus?
[00:45:49]  That's all you have to go to.
[00:45:50]  And it's like, well, how are these things compatible?
[00:45:52]  Well, what's the best explanation for Islam when you really want to know what it really is?
[00:45:58]  It's a copy and paste.
[00:45:59]  And it's a copy and paste, not just of elements of Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrian.
[00:46:05]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:46:06]  Pagan elements, Gnostic elements.
[00:46:07]  Teaching is there.
[00:46:08]  There's a great book by a guy named Gabriel Saeed Reynolds, and he's a scholar on the history of Islam and its texts.
[00:46:16]  And I forget the name of the book, but I had to use it for one of my, I read the whole thing for one of my Islamic, I think the Daniel Hikikichu debate that I did.
[00:46:23]  And basically, what he does is he takes 10 examples from the Quran about where it's just lifted from the Bible and from pseudepigrapha and from Gnostic texts, and they actually just mix up the stories.
[00:46:35]  And so it's not even consistent with the original narrative, and probably that has to do with.
[00:46:39]  Muhammad being illiterate, right?
[00:46:41]  So he was hearing things and he would just sort of create the religion or him and his buddies or whatever warlord buddies.
[00:46:47]  And so it was, there was not really a concern with consistency.
[00:46:50]  So the stories get all mixed up.
[00:46:52]  For example, you have Jesus being the Messiah.
[00:46:59]  That's a specific Hebrew term for the anointed one, right?
[00:47:03]  In Islam, they don't know what this, there's no significance for this term because he's not the fulfillment of the Jewish prophecies to be the world's Messiah.
[00:47:13]  He's just called Messiah, and there's no theological significance to it, right?
[00:47:17]  Very similar with the dietary laws or the Levitical washings.
[00:47:22]  In Christian theology, we would say, well, those are types of baptism or spiritual realities and so forth.
[00:47:28]  Paul in the New Testament says, for example, that the unclean animals and the clean animals are like pedagogical teaching advice about morals, right?

=== Hadiths, Pigs, and Flying Ark Myths (02:03) ===

[00:47:35]  In Islam, it's just Allah just says, do that.
[00:47:39]  There's literally no significance or purpose for these things.
[00:47:41]  So you can tell, well, so this is just like a dude who's illiterate hearing stories.
[00:47:47]  Crafting a religion, and he doesn't even know the context.
[00:47:50]  And there's so many examples of this, it gets crazy.
[00:47:51]  Like, they think that the Ark of the Covenant was a box that would fly.
[00:47:59]  Really?
[00:48:00]  Yeah.
[00:48:00]  And that it had moons.
[00:48:01]  I knew the stone that ascended, and basically the prophet said, No, stay here.
[00:48:05]  Well, it's like you could tell.
[00:48:09]  I didn't know there was a box that flew.
[00:48:10]  No, so the Ark of the Covenant has wings because of the seraphim.
[00:48:13]  And so Muhammad thought it was a flying box because of the wings.
[00:48:18]  Maybe he saw into the future and it's really a drone.
[00:48:20]  I don't know.
[00:48:22]  The drone of the covenant.
[00:48:23]  Well, here's the thing.
[00:48:24]  Also, when Jesus comes back, he destroys all pigs.
[00:48:27]  Well, but pigs are amazing.
[00:48:29]  They turn garbage into bacon.
[00:48:31]  Exactly.
[00:48:32]  I mean, why would we do that?
[00:48:34]  Yeah.
[00:48:34]  I know that Jews don't like pigs either because of the dietary laws and everything else like that.
[00:48:38]  But I know that we believe that those were kind of taken care of.
[00:48:41]  So I was on with a guy who does a lot of.
[00:48:42]  You're really missing out, Jews.
[00:48:43]  Like, you need to read the New Testament.
[00:48:45]  Life gets tastier.
[00:48:48]  I was on with a guy who does a lot of Muslim expose type stuff.
[00:48:53]  And he was pointing out that I think this is in the hadiths that when.
[00:48:57]  It's a strong hadith, meaning that Sunnis have to accept it.
[00:49:00]  That when Muhammad comes back, Jesus will come back and destroy all the pigs.
[00:49:04]  And my thought when I first heard this, I was like, well, surely that means something spiritual, right?
[00:49:09]  Like he's going to spiritually kill the goats, right?
[00:49:12]  The people to his left hand, the pigs.
[00:49:13]  Right, right, right.
[00:49:14]  And it's like, no, it's the pigs.
[00:49:16]  Like literally the pigs.
[00:49:17]  Like literally.
[00:49:18]  Job number one kill all the pigs.
[00:49:20]  Kill all pigs, right?
[00:49:21]  Job number two, we'll figure that out when we get there, but let's just get past the pigs first, okay?
[00:49:26]  Also, by the way.
[00:49:27]  Not for like a barbecue purpose either, but like just to get rid of them.
[00:49:29]  They're just bad, right?
[00:49:31]  And also, Satan can apparently fart.
[00:49:35]  In the hadiths.
[00:49:36]  That's true.
[00:49:37]  Really?
[00:49:37]  Yes.

=== Vatican II Documents and Political Positions (15:28) ===

[00:49:39]  And so this is.
[00:49:39]  Wait, wait.
[00:49:41]  Yes.
[00:49:42]  I'm thinking, okay, he's a spiritual being.
[00:49:43]  He doesn't have a body.
[00:49:46]  Yeah, a body.
[00:49:47]  But no, you could still rip one, apparently.
[00:49:49]  And if he does, that will distract you from the call to prayer.
[00:49:53]  So.
[00:49:54]  What?
[00:49:55]  Yes.
[00:49:56]  Hold on.
[00:49:57]  I don't know, Jay.
[00:49:58]  So I do need this.
[00:49:59]  I'm being serious.
[00:50:00]  This is in the hadiths.
[00:50:01]  So this is a strong hadith or the other one?
[00:50:04]  If I recall, it's a strong one, yeah.
[00:50:05]  Okay.
[00:50:06]  Satan can break wind and distract you from prayer.
[00:50:09]  To distract you from prayer.
[00:50:11]  Is it because you'll look around and go, who farted?
[00:50:13]  Probably.
[00:50:15]  Come on, guys.
[00:50:15]  I know we're all bowing down and everybody's in a really tough to hold it in position, but.
[00:50:20]  And think about it.
[00:50:21]  So, like, Muhammad's sitting around with the warlords.
[00:50:23]  He's sitting around with the warlords.
[00:50:25]  Somebody rips one.
[00:50:26]  That must be Satan.
[00:50:27]  That's a hadith right there.
[00:50:28]  Yeah.
[00:50:29]  That's a crucial hadith right there.
[00:50:30]  You know what it was?
[00:50:31]  It was the guy that did it not taking responsibility.
[00:50:34]  He was a.
[00:50:35]  Because it really reeked and it really screwed up the prayer meeting.
[00:50:38]  And he's like, it wasn't me, Carl.
[00:50:40]  Okay.
[00:50:40]  This is Satan.
[00:50:41]  Yeah.
[00:50:42]  This is Arabic SBD.
[00:50:44]  Oh, my gosh.
[00:50:45]  Oh, my gosh.
[00:50:46]  Okay.
[00:50:47]  I'm not joking.
[00:50:48]  This is true.
[00:50:49]  And this shows you how silly this is.
[00:50:50]  This is real.
[00:50:51]  And so, you know, that's the thing about this because Islam, and, you know, people obviously walk on eggshells when you're talking about it, but I think it's fair to be critical where it's necessary.
[00:51:03]  Like I said, I'm critical of President Trump when he does things that I think are bad for the country, bad for the world in general, like in our place in it.
[00:51:12]  It doesn't mean, you know, doing what Europe wants us to do.
[00:51:15]  Don't get me wrong.
[00:51:15]  Yeah.
[00:51:16]  I love when he pisses off Europe.
[00:51:18]  I'm like, good, those pricks need to be put back in their place.
[00:51:20]  But I do think you need to be able to describe what actually is Islam, what actually is Catholicism.
[00:51:26]  You've had your issues with the Pope.
[00:51:28]  We talked about that.
[00:51:29]  You've had your issues with the structure of Catholicism.
[00:51:33]  I think you've debated Trent Horne or you've talked to him.
[00:51:35]  We did the debate, yes.
[00:51:36]  Six years ago.
[00:51:37]  Okay.
[00:51:37]  Yeah.
[00:51:37]  It's been a little while.
[00:51:39]  And it's totally fine to be critical.
[00:51:41]  You've been critical of other Orthodox brothers if you have a disagreement.
[00:51:44]  Like, it's fine to have these things.
[00:51:45]  But for some reason, you can't talk about the realities of Islam as a Christian or anybody else.
[00:51:50]  It's one of those protections.
[00:51:52]  And I don't think that's, I think it's very bad for us.
[00:51:56]  And I think it's very bad, and I'll tie this together.
[00:51:59]  I think it's very bad to say it's a psyop because they don't want you to look at how bad the Jews are.
[00:52:04]  Because there's a lot of people out there saying, okay, they're going back to their Islam trope because they want to distract you.
[00:52:10]  Maybe somebody's doing that fine.
[00:52:12]  Like there's a 5%, but this has been a problem for a very long time.
[00:52:15]  These worldviews are not compatible.
[00:52:17]  These cultures really are not compatible.
[00:52:20]  Like, we're very, very different.
[00:52:21]  And for you to start to think that you have more in common with Islam than you do with Protestants as a Catholic or an Orthodox is a huge problem for us because that will divide us in ways that they absolutely want.
[00:52:35]  Like, this is part of their strategy.
[00:52:36]  You talked about it 100 years prior on kind of the using, you know, it's funny.
[00:52:41]  I think back to Braveheart, you know, if we can't get them out, we'll breed them out, the proctor.
[00:52:46]  No, that's right.
[00:52:47]  Right.
[00:52:47]  It's that same kind of mentality.
[00:52:49]  And I remember watching, I think it was called, it's either called Epicenter or something similar to that.
[00:52:54]  I think Joel C. Rosenberg did it.
[00:52:55]  I think this was him.
[00:52:56]  I watched a number of videos at the time back in like 2007, 2008.
[00:53:00]  And he did a video about the population and needing the replacement population level of being 2.1 or 2.2, whatever it was, and saying how Germany at this rate would be a predominantly Muslim country by 2050.
[00:53:14]  And this was back in 2007 or 8 that I was watching this stuff and seeing like, oh my gosh, like this is a real, real problem.
[00:53:19]  But I think people right now would say Jews are bad, therefore don't believe them that this is a problem.
[00:53:27]  And we're really kind of, I mean, I want your opinion on this.
[00:53:29]  I really feel like we're sleepwalking into a really massive issue with Islam like the UK is facing.
[00:53:35]  And it's all because, well, Jews must be bad.
[00:53:37]  So therefore, maybe these guys really aren't that bad.
[00:53:41]  Well, one of the things I took issue with was some of the commentators that you had on the screen there, like Sneeko and others, was over this issue of who was actually the largest supporter of illegal immigration in the last several years.
[00:53:56]  And a lot of people pointed to the Jewish organization Hi Us, but they were like minimal, they were like 5%.
[00:54:02]  The biggest was Catholic charities by like massive percentage, like 80% massive.
[00:54:08]  How did they support Catholic charities?
[00:54:11]  Everything from money to sanctuary cities to human trafficking.
[00:54:15]  All of that is involved in the way that the Roman Catholic Church in America has facilitated it.
[00:54:20]  And by the way, the papacy and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops openly say, open your borders.
[00:54:26]  I mean, all the way back to Francis, they've been saying, we should open our borders.
[00:54:32]  France should not have borders.
[00:54:35]  UK, all of Europe should not have borders.
[00:54:37]  I mean, they openly say this consistently.
[00:54:40]  And then the Roman Catholics on Twitter and everything will be like, oh, yeah, how dare you go against the Pope?
[00:54:45]  I'm like, dude, the Pope is destroying Europe.
[00:54:46]  What are you talking about?
[00:54:47]  What is their argument?
[00:54:48]  Like, steal me in their position, the people that would defend the Pope's or defend the Pope's.
[00:54:52]  They would either say that it's a political position, so it's not theologically binding, something like that.
[00:54:58]  I hear that so often.
[00:55:00]  I'm like, okay, well, then what is.
[00:55:02]  That's the point.
[00:55:03]  Like, if you're having a Pope and he can just say some stupid stuff, Well, it's not ex cathedra or what.
[00:55:08]  Okay, fine.
[00:55:09]  So it's not, I guess, binding.
[00:55:12]  So what is the real?
[00:55:13]  Like, do you think the average parishioner knows that or believes that?
[00:55:17]  It's like whatever he says as the vicar of Christ, that's the word of God.
[00:55:21]  So therefore, I have to believe and follow that.
[00:55:23]  I know there's people in Catholicism that fight over different issues.
[00:55:26]  There's different kind of flavors there too.
[00:55:27]  But it just seems like a coward's way out of defending the argument.
[00:55:32]  Yeah.
[00:55:33]  And also, you'll never get a consistent principle as to when it is and isn't binding.
[00:55:38]  Yeah.
[00:55:38]  This was the last sort of.
[00:55:40]  I'm anti Catholic.
[00:55:41]  By the way, like there's a lot of good people there.
[00:55:43]  I just don't like it when you run from what is obviously true.
[00:55:47]  That was the really frustrating part.
[00:55:48]  I had meetings with Catholics or specific Catholics.
[00:55:52]  We'd talk theology.
[00:55:53]  He was a part of our Bible study.
[00:55:54]  He was a great guy, loved him.
[00:55:55]  And he would raise questions and we would constantly talk through stuff.
[00:55:59]  But it almost always came back to, well, that wasn't like an official teaching of the church.
[00:56:04]  Yeah, whenever it doesn't work is when it's not official.
[00:56:06]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:56:08]  And I know because I used to be in that world.
[00:56:09]  I used to try to make it work.
[00:56:11]  Well, you were Catholic too, right?
[00:56:12]  I was.
[00:56:12]  You were a part of the church.
[00:56:13]  I tried to make it work, right.
[00:56:14]  And then became Orthodox.
[00:56:15]  When did you become Orthodox?
[00:56:17]  2016, 17.
[00:56:18]  Okay, somewhere now.
[00:56:19]  Yeah.
[00:56:20]  And, uh, yeah, because I remember trying to make that work and what forced the square peg into the round hole, right?
[00:56:26]  So, um, the issue though with the geopolitical side of it is that, you know, the papacy, especially since Vatican, post Vatican II, has pretty much been on board with all the globalization agendas.
[00:56:39]  Yeah.
[00:56:39]  And this is a thing that nobody ever talks about, which I've been highlighting.
[00:56:42]  There's a document in Vatican II, which all of Vatican II is binding.
[00:56:46]  Even if, by the way, something's not ex cathedra, you still have to follow, according to Roman Catholic canon law, the, Ordinary teaching, as it's called, of the papacy, even if you disagree and you think that it's not infallible, you still have to submit with docility in your conscience.
[00:57:02]  That's Calvin Canon Law teaching.
[00:57:05]  So they could disagree, but they're not supposed to publicly oppose the papacy in their system.
[00:57:09]  It's kind of like the NFL, you can't speak about the refs kind of thing.
[00:57:13]  You can be pissed off.
[00:57:13]  Is that how it is?
[00:57:14]  You can't find if you say it.
[00:57:17]  But there's a document called Gaudium et Spez, which was Vatican II's social and political statement.
[00:57:24]  Everybody focuses on the documents related to ecumenism and how Muslims and Christians and Jews worship the same God, which is all problematic.
[00:57:31]  That's no certate.
[00:57:32]  There's Lumen Gentium 16.
[00:57:34]  But there's another important document that's overlooked called Gaudium et Spez, and this has to do with the Vatican's political statement.
[00:57:40]  And it openly says we're for chain migration, open borders.
[00:57:45]  We want to get rid of self defense amongst nations.
[00:57:50]  Really?
[00:57:50]  Yes.
[00:57:50]  It's very.
[00:57:51]  Like at the nation level?
[00:57:52]  Yeah.
[00:57:53]  Really?
[00:57:53]  Yeah.
[00:57:54]  So armies are bad.
[00:57:55]  Yes.
[00:57:56]  Borders are bad.
[00:57:57]  Because this, so in other words, it's like a socialist document.
[00:58:01]  It's worse.
[00:58:01]  Like, you, I mean, at least most socialist countries actually had some borders to it.
[00:58:06]  Well, they were great at checkpoints, Jay.
[00:58:08]  I don't know if you've seen this document actually says we want to support UNESCO and United Nations.
[00:58:13]  So it's basically a United Nations style document.
[00:58:15]  Yeah.
[00:58:17]  And that, I think, is another key window into pinpointing okay, maybe prior to Vatican II, Pius XII still upheld some traditional values, but post Vatican II, they've become explicitly a sort of voice of a United Nations style view of nation states.
[00:58:32]  And that's never changed.
[00:58:34]  And in fact, each successive pope, even if we wanted to argue that, I think John Paul had a lot of problems, but a lot of times Catholics say, oh, well, he helped in the Cold War.
[00:58:42]  Okay, well, let's grant that.
[00:58:44]  Francis and Leo have gone even further with you need to open your borders up.
[00:58:52]  You can't have the death penalty.
[00:58:54]  The death penalty is anti pro life.
[00:58:56]  That's 100% contrary to all the traditional Catholic teaching about the death penalty.
[00:59:00]  So they've consistently, absolutely contradicted.
[00:59:03]  And like you said, Even if we were to grant that it's not ex cathedral, which by the way, Vatican II is ordinary universal teaching, you can't reject Vatican II.
[00:59:13]  But even if we did grant that these were all political, personal opinions, you are still supposed to follow the papal ethical teaching, even if you disagree, and that's in their canon law.
[00:59:23]  So you have to submit with docility, is the terminology.
[00:59:27]  So it makes no sense to say, and again, this is the same papacy that says we worship the same God as the Muslims, right?
[00:59:36]  So, are they finding, I mean, steal me in the argument too for me from, and I say that because I want to know the actual argument.
[00:59:43]  Like, I don't want to like straw man it from my perspective.
[00:59:45]  Like, I really want to understand, like, how are they covering this?
[00:59:49]  Is this just like, you know, Christ wouldn't have borders, wouldn't believe in borders, wouldn't like we're all God's children?
[00:59:55]  Like, a lot of the low tier argumentation is that.
[00:59:59]  I mean, if you get into like the Vatican II documents or the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which is the successor of the Holy Office, if you get into those documents, I mean, they'll have a little more sophisticated.
[01:00:08]  Style of argumentation, but I think they'll just say something like, well, we all worship the God of Abraham, right?
[01:00:14]  Vatican II says this in Nostra Tate III and Lumen Gentium 16.
[01:00:18]  Oh, well, it's all the God of Abraham has the same lineage as Jews, Muslims, and Christians, therefore, generic theism.
[01:00:29]  But that's such a giant leap.
[01:00:31]  The New Testament is very explicit that if you don't have the Son, you don't have the Father.
[01:00:37]  And here's another mistake that I noticed having all these debates with the Catholics on this topic, not just Tim Gordon, but others in the last two years.
[01:00:44]  They're also making a leap from worship.
[01:00:48]  To mental recognition.
[01:00:50]  So, in other words, a Muslim might think I am intending to refer to the God of Abraham mentally.
[01:00:57]  But the problem is that Vatican II says they worship the same God as us in the Christian church.
[01:01:02]  Now, for us as Orthodox, we can't really divorce worship from what we do on Sundays in the liturgy, right?
[01:01:09]  That's worship.
[01:01:11]  It's not just mental recognition of a thing that I'm linguistically referring to.
[01:01:16]  And if Vatican II had said, Muslims intend to refer to the God of Abraham.
[01:01:21]  Maybe they could get away with it, but that's not what they say.
[01:01:23]  They say they love and worship the God of Abraham just like we do.
[01:01:28]  So there's an equivalence language there.
[01:01:30]  And that's what I kept hammering home to Tim Gordon on the Tim Pool debate it's an equivalence language.
[01:01:34]  It's capital G God.
[01:01:36]  It's not a lower G God.
[01:01:37]  It's intending to say that we worship the same God and it's worship.
[01:01:41]  That's not the same thing as notional mental recognition.
[01:01:45]  That's, I think, a kill shot because they don't worship God.
[01:01:48]  No, and it.
[01:01:49]  The gods that are described, I mean, obviously, the Christian God, Yahweh, like, the attributes are the same, right?
[01:01:59]  To a degree, right?
[01:02:01]  Minus Jesus, minus the triune.
[01:02:02]  Well, that's a problem.
[01:02:03]  But that's a big problem.
[01:02:04]  I mean, if you're just looking at the attributes of God, if you want to say, like, let's just focus on God and not worry about the Trinitarian aspect of it, you can't do that for Christians, I understand.
[01:02:13]  But the attributes of Allah are not the same.
[01:02:16]  They're not.
[01:02:16]  Even at a fundamental level, they wouldn't even line up, and you would at least just be left with the Christian God and the Jewish God to kind of contend with.
[01:02:24]  For example, Allah is not in time and space.
[01:02:30]  No, and he's also very capricious.
[01:02:32]  And he lies.
[01:02:33]  On the whims of the day, if you happen to.
[01:02:35]  That's why jihad is such a popular way to go because it's the only guarantee of actual making it into paradise.
[01:02:40]  I think it's called paradise.
[01:02:41]  I can't remember if it's heaven or paradise.
[01:02:42]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:02:43]  And that makes it much more clear for people.
[01:02:46]  Christians have a very hard time understanding why somebody would die in battle for God like that by blowing themselves up in a terrorist attack.
[01:02:55]  And it's like, well, if you understand their theology, it makes it much clearer.
[01:02:58]  Like, if that was, like, as Christians, if we believe the only way to, like, fully, like, if we fully believed in God and heaven and hell and, like, woo, hell, real bad, not like bad, like, but, like, you do everything that you can to avoid hell.
[01:03:10]  Everything.
[01:03:11]  Like, and you give everything that you have, every ounce of energy.
[01:03:13]  And if it could take, like, chopping off your own arm, you'd do it, right?
[01:03:17]  If we believed in it like that, then the only obvious answer would be to die in jihad because that's a guarantee.
[01:03:22]  Otherwise, it's like, well, I hope that I kept the pillars of Islam and I did all the things I'm Supposed to do, and also that God is in a good mood that day.
[01:03:29]  Yeah, right.
[01:03:30]  You know, like that.
[01:03:31]  No, this is a great point.
[01:03:32]  Actually, I forgot about this point too.
[01:03:33]  That's this in Western theology, they call this theological voluntarism, which is that God's actions are not really dictated by his nature, his actions are arbitrarily willed.
[01:03:44]  So, God, for example, there was a debate in the Middle Ages could God take the Virgin Mary out of heaven and damn her if he willed to?
[01:03:51]  And the reason they had this debate was whether God's actions are dictated by his nature.
[01:03:56]  And so, for example, if his nature is holy and good, well, he can't lie and go against.
[01:04:00]  His word, right?
[01:04:01]  So the answer would be no.
[01:04:02]  But because Islam is very similar to, say, a very strict Calvinist type of perspective, they would actually identify the divine nature and the divine will so God could will to be other.
[01:04:14]  If He will, if He wants.
[01:04:15]  To just damn all the saints the next day, he could.
[01:04:17]  That's voluntarism, and that is Islam.
[01:04:19]  Islam is absolutely 100%.
[01:04:22]  I mean, they're even what's called occasionalists.
[01:04:24]  They think that at every second, Sunni Islam, at every second, Allah is destroying and recreating the world.
[01:04:32]  And that's because they don't believe in secondary causes.
[01:04:34]  So you're not actually a being that's willing to do this or that.
[01:04:38]  If you were to allow secondary causes, the Muslims argued, this would detract from Allah's sovereignty.
[01:04:43]  How could there be a created cause?
[01:04:45]  Thus, Allah is the direct cause of every single event at every second.
[01:04:50]  Uh, everything so good and evil, and even towards the end of the Quran, there's an actual surah which says God is directly wills good and evil, and they don't just mean providence, they mean directly causing evil.
[01:05:03]  That's why He is also the greatest of deceivers.

=== Allah's Attributes and Eschatology Debates (03:52) ===

[01:05:07]  Geez, I guess you get to play both sides there.
[01:05:09]  That seems like a very good strategy for Satan to employ, exactly.
[01:05:16]  Well, isn't it interesting that if all is the greatest of deceivers, it seems like maybe the God of Islam is something Jesus talked about, right?
[01:05:21]  Like He said, I mean, maybe.
[01:05:23]  The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy.
[01:05:24]  He was a liar from the beginning.
[01:05:25]  A little bit.
[01:05:27]  So, have you, I'm assuming that you've studied eschatology from all three areas.
[01:05:33]  To a degree.
[01:05:33]  Yeah.
[01:05:35]  So, I came up with a Protestant, premillennial ish kind of, and I hold it very loosely because I also believe that there's a lot of room for debate, a lot of room for error.
[01:05:46]  And ultimately, it does not affect, I don't think, like how I am to live my life.
[01:05:51]  I think there's, you know, what Christ is commanding me to do in my life, that's what really dictates.
[01:05:56]  How I'm supposed to live my life.
[01:05:57]  You know, we don't spend a lot of time going because the world is going to end, therefore, you must.
[01:06:01]  It's because Christ said to do this.
[01:06:03]  Here's how he modeled it.
[01:06:04]  Here's what we're supposed to do.
[01:06:06]  But it's interesting.
[01:06:07]  And a lot of people get into the weeds of eschatology.
[01:06:10]  Eschatology is a study of the end times or talking about the end times, kind of wrapping up all of history.
[01:06:15]  And so, premillennial means like I believe that we are prior to a literal thousand year millennial kingdom.
[01:06:21]  However, you want to debate how that happens, when that happens, just know that that's roughly where I come from, but I could be swayed.
[01:06:29]  I compared it to Islam and Islamic eschatology.
[01:06:34]  And it's been a while.
[01:06:34]  I'd have to brush this off, but I think back in like 2009, I taught a specific class on this.
[01:06:41]  And it's been so long that I don't want to mess it up.
[01:06:44]  But what I saw was the exact inverse.
[01:06:47]  Yeah.
[01:06:47]  So if you laid out the characters in Christian eschatology, they would be like represented in Islamic eschatology.
[01:06:57]  But in Christian eschatology, they're described and given like, you know, either, either.
[01:07:01]  Power or descriptors that kind of tell you who they are, what they do, how they act.
[01:07:06]  And when you looked at Islam, it was the exact opposite.
[01:07:10]  What was described as good here was actually described as bad here.
[01:07:15]  Like it completely inverted the good and evil portion of it.
[01:07:18]  So going back to your point, like their Allah has a lot of the attributes of Satan.
[01:07:23]  Exactly.
[01:07:24]  Right.
[01:07:25]  It's like that's scary.
[01:07:26]  And this is, I think the false prophet in Christianity, when it talks about the false prophet, had a lot of overlap with their prophet.
[01:07:34]  Right with Muhammad.
[01:07:35]  And so it's like these descriptors, it was very eye opening for me.
[01:07:38]  I'll have to brush that off and see.
[01:07:39]  I don't know how deep I got into that, but man, it's really interesting because I'm baffled by this, but I also see that Islam has been trying to subvert, conquer, whatever you want to call it, the West for a very long time.
[01:07:53]  They've been doing it through birth rates in different places, they've been doing it through migration and other places, and then getting going.
[01:07:58]  And in this case, it seems like they're infiltrating.
[01:08:02]  I don't even think it's like infiltration of the Vatican, but it's like the Vatican seems to be playing right along with it.
[01:08:08]  In a lot of ways, based on what you've just talked about and what we're seeing.
[01:08:11]  But then trying to pit Americans who are Christians against Israel so much so that they side with Islam is just the creepiest, weirdest thing that I've seen lately.
[01:08:27]  And it all does come down to me that Jews are bad, so therefore Islam might be good.
[01:08:33]  How do we defend against that?
[01:08:36]  How do we help people get past the Jews bad part.
[01:08:39]  I mean, because you can have that conversation, and I think there's a lot of conversation to have there, like on how to deal with what we're seeing Israel do and influence in politics in the United States.
[01:08:48]  And you can have all those arguments, but how do you get past that and go, hey guys, like Islam really does want this?
[01:08:55]  They want you focused on Jews bad so that you think they're good because their goals haven't changed.

=== Overcoming Lies About Islamic Goals (01:37) ===

[01:08:59]  One thing that happens, and I think you alluded to this earlier, is that people that are, say, 40, 45 and under, they think, well, if Boomer news is saying something, it's not true.
[01:09:14]  Right.
[01:09:14]  And I remember.
[01:09:15]  And I understand why.
[01:09:16]  Yeah.
[01:09:16]  I get it.
[01:09:16]  Because there's a lot of lies.
[01:09:17]  A lot of lies.
[01:09:18]  And COVID really popped the lid off of all that for people that even if at that point you weren't like, oh, they're lying to me, COVID came around and you're like, maybe they were the whole time.
[01:09:26]  Exactly.
[01:09:27]  Maybe it's true.
[01:09:27]  Maybe Alex Jones is freaking right, dead coming.
[01:09:29]  Well, in the 2000s, I remember like, I came to be convinced that I didn't agree with the sort of normie, you know, Fox News style of stuff.
[01:09:38]  I mean, I was never liberal, but I was just.
[01:09:40]  Didn't believe what the Obama years did for me because there were so many lies told about Obama, and I was like, he's bad enough without having to lie about XYZ.
[01:09:47]  What do we do?
[01:09:47]  Yeah.
[01:09:48]  So I think that the natural result would then be to say, well, then maybe what they're saying about all these groups is just not true.
[01:09:57]  And I don't know if I believe that, but because Americans are not typically well educated, they're not taught this kind of stuff.
[01:10:03]  I had to go to like several years into college before I had a history of Islam class.
[01:10:10]  I never had anything about it.
[01:10:12]  I was never, you know, to Notre Dame.
[01:10:13]  Like, I mean, you think the world religions class is probably something that you'll take, and Catholicism sitting right there at the top.
[01:10:20]  There you go.
[01:10:21]  Yeah.
[01:10:21]  Nothing.
[01:10:22]  Yeah.
[01:10:23]  So I didn't know anything about it.
[01:10:24]  I did.
[01:10:24]  And in fact, I didn't know anything about the real meat and history of Islam and the Quran until starting to debate Muslims in 2017.
[01:10:33]  So that actually got me looking into it.
[01:10:36]  And I was, again, like,