Why Muslims Are Leaving Islam for Christianity (David Wood) | Ep. 550

Summary

Pints With Aquinas – Episode 550

Why Muslims Are Leaving Islam for Christianity (with David Wood)

Released: November 12, 2025
Host: Matt Fradd
Guest: David Wood

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between Matt Fradd and Christian apologist David Wood, widely known for his work critiquing Islam and engaging with Muslim audiences. The discussion covers why many Muslims are leaving Islam for Christianity, the psychological, theological, and social barriers to conversion, the so-called “Islamic Dilemma” argument, and David’s personal journey from atheism and prison to Christian belief. Wood and Fradd dissect apologetics tactics, cultural mindsets in Muslim-Christian dialogue, and the deep costs of conversion, providing a comprehensive, often intense, and sometimes deeply personal examination of one of the most significant religious conversations of our time.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins: David Wood’s Journey into Islam Apologetics

• While incarcerated in the 1990s, David encountered many different faiths and began critically studying them, including Islam.
• Friendship with former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi deeply informed his early engagement:

  “...I really started after in 2001, because I became best friends with Nabeel Qureshi...he became a Christian about four years later. And I actually thought, cool, I'm done with Islam. That was the only reason I was studying Islam.” (03:32)

• The hostility and social fallout experienced by Muslim converts like Nabeel underscored the seriousness and cost of conversion:

  “...if you say Jesus is Lord...that is the worst possible sin...very, very, very high probability that they're going to lose their families...” (05:44)

2. The Psychological Cost & Courage of Conversion

• Fradd and Wood stress the immense emotional/social pressure applied to Muslims contemplating leaving Islam, including estrangement, ostracization, and threats.
• Memorable quote:

  “They also understand that if they convert, very, very, very high probability that they’re going to lose their families...And Nabeel's family was like that. His dad took him around the world...to try and convince him to come back.” (04:51)

• Converts are often forced to defend their new beliefs under scrutiny from their old communities.

3. Testimony: Nabeel Qureshi’s Path to Christianity

• Wood tells the detailed story of Nabeel’s intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journey—battling doubts, seemingly unanswerable questions, dreams, and visions:

  “...He prayed...‘God, I know I'm biased here. I see good reasons to believe in Christianity, but Islam still makes sense to me. I don’t know what to do here, so you’re going to have to tell me. Can you give me a vision?’ And whatever vision…all I saw were crosses…” (15:08)

• Nabeel’s conversion occasioned family heartbreak, debate, and even threats. His eventual profession of faith was understated but momentous:

  “Nabil goes, lord, bless this food...And I pray this in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And I just thought, wow...everyone at the table got it instantly.” (22:06)

4. Barriers to Leaving Islam

• The greatest sin in Islam, shirk (associating others with Allah), is precisely Christianity’s central claim regarding Jesus—creating a huge psychological and doctrinal impediment.
• The penalty for apostasy, according to Islamic tradition, is death—a fact psychologically present even in the West:

  “The penalty for leaving Islam, according to Muhammad, is death...when we’re preaching the Gospel...what a Muslim is hearing is, oh, you want me to believe this thing, which will force me to give up my family...and maybe get my head chopped off and then definitely get me sent to hell.” (24:06)

5. David Wood’s Style and Experiences of Dialogue

• Wood’s direct, sometimes abrasive style intentionally contrasts with what he sees as wishful thinking or excessively gentle Christian apologetics of prior years.
• Early in his career, he faced social pushback even from Christians, who believed criticizing Muhammad would “drive Muslims away.”
• Over time, Wood’s evidence-based, source-citing approach has yielded numerous real-world testimonies, despite opposition and repeated death threats:

  “For about a month and a half...I was able...to post between one and three of those [conversion stories] every single day.” (44:04)

6. The Islamic Dilemma Argument

Definition: If the Quran affirms the inspiration, preservation, and authority of the Torah and Gospel, but these contradict the Quran on key doctrines, Islam “self-destructs”—either the Quran is wrong, or the Bible is true and Islam is false.

• Wood’s concise summary:

  “If we have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, Islam is false. If we don’t have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, Islam is false. Either way, Islam is false. Therefore Islam is false.” (93:00)

• The Quran repeatedly tells Christians and Jews to “judge by” their own scriptures and affirms the incapacity for the words of Allah to be altered (Surah 6:114-115, 18:27, 5:47, etc.).
• Historically, the claim that the Bible was corrupted comes later—contrary to Quranic teaching.
• The “Islamic dilemma” is presented as an apologetic tool that is both powerful and accessible to lay Christians.

Memorable moment:

“It’s something anyone can be comfortable with...If you can show anything from the Bible that contradicts the Quran, they have to say your book’s been corrupted. So it’s always going to come up. It’s going to lead right into the Islamic dilemma.” (97:00)

7. Muslim and Christian Apologetics Tactics

• Wood notes that Muslims tend to take an aggressive, attack-oriented stance in apologetics, whereas Christians are trained to “give a defense.”
• Cultural factors: In Muslim-majority cultures, confrontation and passion in debate often signal strength and conviction—calm is often interpreted as lack of belief.
• Illustrative story:

  “We finished the debate, and I go, I would have scored it 95 to 5...I turned to Nabeel...and he goes, Badawi clearly won...[because] he has a righteous anger at the blasphemy...” (49:04)

8. Responses to the Islamic Dilemma by Muslim Apologists

• Three major responses:
  1. Claim the Quran affirms only the “original” inspiration, not preservation, of Jewish and Christian scriptures—Wood refutes with Quranic passages.
  2. Say the “true Torah/Gospel” is lost—Wood calls this “phantom texts,” unsupported by manuscript evidence.
  3. Acknowledge Torah/Gospel are preserved, but reinterpret Quranic verses or propose Allah deliberately revealed contradictory laws to keep groups separate—a position Wood acknowledges as the “best of the bad” but deeply problematic.
• Despite attempts, Wood reports that no satisfactory scholarly or analytic rebuttal has emerged; responses only strengthen the argument’s perceived force.

9. Muslim Conversions and Trends

• Apostasy rates among young Muslims in the West have jumped dramatically (from near zero to ~26%).
• Most Western Muslim converts to Islam, per Wood, leave within several years upon encountering challenging information and critical scholarship.
• The combination of internet access, open critique, and apologetic resources has created a “new era”:

  “For 14 centuries, Muslim leaders have been able to keep their people insulated...now we have access to people in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia...through the Internet.” (31:13)

10. David Wood’s Personal Story: Atheism, Sociopathy, and Prison Conversion

• Wood narrates his diagnosis with antisocial personality disorder, lack of empathy, attempts at “moral purification,” and ultimately, his decision as a teenager to nearly kill his father in pursuit of freedom from social and moral constraints.
• In prison, a friendship with a Christian (Randy) led to months of debate, culminating in existential crisis, self-examination, and a radical conversion to Christianity after an intense period of fasting:

  “When you ask yourself...who had the ability to take screwed up, messed up people and do something with them, you get a list of one...Jesus, that’s it.” (187:45)

• After conversion, Wood gradually transformed, reconciled with his father, and eventually dedicated his life to Christian apologetics.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the cost of conversion:
  “When a Muslim has wrestled with these issues...they’re going to have to give up their entire family...they understand that, but still want to know Jesus anyway. That’s someone who will lay down his life for Jesus.” (25:53, David Wood)

• On apologetics style:
  “They have more respect for an aggressive, in-your-face, yelling approach...I just got ticked off and I went and spit it...They walked out, ‘He’s destroying our religion.’” (51:38, David Wood)

• Summarizing the Islamic Dilemma:
  “If we have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, Islam is false. If we don’t have it, then Islam is false...Either way, Islam is false.” (93:00, David Wood)

• On internet access breaking down barriers:
  “For 14 centuries...they’ve been able to keep their people insulated from hearing criticisms...we have just reached a new era in history.” (31:16, David Wood)

• On personal change:
  “I went from thinking I’m the best person in the world to thinking I’m the most pathetic person in the world...it was either: this is what I am, or there’s someone out there who can help with this sort of thing...You basically get a list of one. It ain’t Muhammad. It’s Jesus.” (184:34, David Wood)

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Key Timestamps

• [03:32] – How Nabeel Qureshi’s story started, and the stakes of Muslim-to-Christian conversion.
• [13:10] – The role of dreams and visions in conversion stories.
• [24:00] – Explaining why conversion for a Muslim is costly and psychologically daunting.
• [29:15] – Early days of YouTube apologetics and the global impact of viral videos.
• [37:17] – “Leaving Islam” statistics and trends in Muslim converts.
• [44:04] – Daily conversion testimonies and their implications.
• [62:58] – The Islamic Dilemma argument and its Quranic basis.
• [93:00–98:00] – Detailed layout and defense of the Islamic Dilemma.
• [128:53] – Applying C.S. Lewis’s “trilemma” to Muhammad: prophet, liar, lunatic, or something else?
• [147:45–189:56] – David Wood’s personal journey: antisocial personality disorder, near-parricide, prison, and eventual conversion to Christ.

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Flow & Tone

Matt Fradd maintains a searching, sometimes playful but always respectful tone, often giving room for Wood to narrate at length, reminisce, or joke. Wood’s style is intellectually confrontational, rigorous with sources, and often unsparing in critique both of Islam and his own younger self. The conversation ranges from high-level apologetics to deeply personal biography, dense with references to scripture, Islamic sources, and the lived experience of religious change.

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Further Exploration

For more on these topics:

• David Wood’s current work: Search “Apologetics Roadshow” on YouTube.
• For the full Muslim conversion testimony: Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus by Nabeel Qureshi.
• For apologetics resources on Islam, see debates featuring “David Wood Islamic Dilemma.”

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Recommended Debate:
“If you only watch one, just type in David Wood, Islamic Dilemma, and watch one of those debates...the most relevant right now as far as what’s going on.” (192:56)

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Takeaway

This episode offers a rare look at the intersection of Muslim-Christian dialogue, the high cost and complexity of religious conversion, and the power of persistent, thoughtful, and sometimes incendiary apologetics in the digital age. The personal is deeply entwined with the theological—underscoring how ultimate questions, for many, are a matter of real flesh-and-blood consequences.

Transcript

[David Wood]

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[Matt Fradd]

Pints with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the Catholic faith. Start your 7 day free trial today when you download Truthly on the App Store.

[David Wood]

Uthman, the third of the rightly guided caliphs burned all the Qurans. So by the time you get to the third of the rightly guided caliph, so you have Muhammad, then you have Abu Bakr, then you have Umar, then you have Uthman.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay?

[David Wood]

By the time you're at Uthman, there are so many differences in the Quran that he has to order the entire Muslim community to hand over their Qurans and he burns them all and issues a standardized Quran.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I often think that we don't give people enough credit when we are expecting them to change deep seated beliefs. You know, we say just convert. Just convert to my brand of Christianity or convert to this religion.

[David Wood]

Islam is the religion of submission to Allah. But the only way you can submit to Allah is by submitting to everything Muhammad says. So I mean just imagine that. Hey guys, you want to submit to God? Yeah, we want to submit to God. Okay, then you have to submit to everything I say and you can't question anything I say ever.

[Matt Fradd]

If I started a religion, I would definitely do that. Hey everybody, before we get into today's interview, I want to tell you about my brand new book. It's called Jesus Our Refuge. If you, like many people and like all of us to one degree or another, have been seeking refuge in things other than Jesus Christ and have just found yourself increasingly weary, then this book is for you. This book is about taking Jesus seriously when he says, come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. It's getting great reviews and I know it will be a healing balm to your soul. Check it out. Jesus Our Refuge. You can get it right now on Amazon. Thanks. David Wood what would you rather someone be? A Muslim or an atheist?

[David Wood]

And why an atheist at this point, because it's very common to say, okay, it's great. Muslims believe in God, they believe in Jesus to an extent. They believe in miracles and all this. So we'd have a bunch of common ground. But for purposes of Islam taking over the world and shaking that up a bit, I think it's, I think it's good if people convert to anything else until some of that power structure is broken.

[Matt Fradd]

How long have you been involved in apologetics against Muhammadism, which is what I like to call it, Mohammedism, a little.

[David Wood]

Bit way when I was locked up. So this was in the 1990s. But Muslims weren't the main alternative back then. The alternative was a cult called the Five Percenters. They were a more radical offshoot of the Nation of Islam. And so, but they were the biggest, like, non Christian group and so had more interactions with them. But, but I did know Muslims hung out with Muslims. That's why I started studying a little bit, just to basically whatever they told me, I would go and I would go and look it up.

[Matt Fradd]

So in prison you were encountering Muslims and this is why you got into apologetics?

[David Wood]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would, I would react to whatever anyone was saying. So any cult or anything, they started talking to me. I was like, oh, well, give me, give me your sources and stuff like that. And I would go start looking it up. But I really started after in 2001, because I became best friends with Nabil Qureshi. And at that point I was just studying Islam just because my best friend was a Muslim. If he'd been a Mormon or something, I would have been studying Mormonism, but he was a Muslim. And then eventually he became a Christian about four years later. And I actually thought, cool, I'm done with Islam. That was the only reason I was studying Islam. And it was kind of watching the stand that he took for Jesus that I realized, huh, maybe I need to keep on, maybe I need to keep up with this. And even before that it was, everyone started attacking him. Like he got his first death threat attached to his car. And it was about a month he hadn't even been announcing it, so very few people knew. And he got his first death threat attached to his car. And then I was just thinking, I can't leave him by himself to face people who are going to be hostile towards him. And so it was, you're going to have to, you're going to have to talk to both of us. But yeah, over, over time I realized, wow, these guys make really cool Christians. And there's by the way, there's a reason for that, really important reason itself. You take a Muslim, they're basically raised from the time they're born to believe that the worst possible sin you can commit is shirk. It's the worst sin. Which is what? Shirk. That's associating a partner with Allah. So if it's not just Allah alone, if it's anything else, Trinity Jesus is the Son of God. That's all shirk. It's the unforgivable sin. Doesn't mean you can't be forgiven of it. It means that's the only one Allah won't forgive if it hasn't been repented of, meaning you could be a murderer and he might just forgive you and you don't know shirk. He guarantees he's not going to forgive you of that. And so Muslims are raised all their life basically to understand if you say Jesus is Lord or Jesus is the Son of God, that is the worst possible sin. Well, guess what? That's what we're preaching. They also understand that if they convert, very, very, very high probability that they're going to lose their families. And you basically get two versions of this. You basically get what you just converted. Get out of here. We don't ever want to talk to you again unless you come back as a Muslim. And then you'll have the others who spend a year or two trying to convert the person back. So they'll take you around to Muslim scholars and so on to try and convert you back to Islam after you've left Islam. And Nabil's family was like that. His dad took him around the world to Europe and to Canada to talk to various Muslim scholars to try and convince him to come back to Islam.

[Matt Fradd]

But could you also, in this story, tell people who Nabil was, for those who aren't familiar?

[David Wood]

Oh, yeah. Nabil was. He was just another student. I got out of prison and had took a communications class and I gave a speech, and the professor ran the speech and debate team, and she said, you should come check out the speech and debate team. I think you'd fit in well. That's where I met Nabil. Nabil joined the speech and debate team as well. That's where we met. And then you go to competitions at other schools. And so we went on a school trip. We ended up in a hotel room together. And at that point, all I knew was his name was Nabil Qureshi. So he's some sort of Muslim. But that doesn't tell you if he's liberal or devout or what? And so I had no idea. But we get in the hotel room, I, I, I go on my bed and I, I'm reading the Bible in a year. And I'm, I'm in Isaiah at that point. And so I'm reading Isaiah and see this guy out of the corner of my eye unpacking. And then I see him pull out his prayer rug. And I was like, okay, he's at least devout enough to bring a prayer rug on a couple days school trip. So doesn't seem like, doesn't seem terribly liberal here. But then I start praying, this is right after 9 11. And I start praying and I say, okay, God, if you want me to talk to this guy, can you have him start the discussion? Because I don't want everyone saying I'm attacking the Muslim because of 911 or something like that. And right after I said that, all of a sudden he goes, so are you a hardcore Christian?

[Matt Fradd]

Did he say it like that?

[David Wood]

Yeah, exactly like that. Like that weird tone and stuff. Are you a hardcore Christian? And I said, yes, I am. And that started our discussions that weekend. And we just ended up becoming best friends really quickly because other people on the team, they would like, after the competitions, they would go out to clubs and stuff like this. We weren't interested. So every trip like that, we always ended up hanging out in the room together and we would inevitably start talking about Christianity and Islam. And we both loved it. We both loved arguing about the stuff. So we got along really well. And yeah, we just became, we just became best friends really quick. So, and it was about four years later he became a Christian after we spent probably the first two to two and a half years focusing almost exclusively on Christian topics. So we were talking about, did Jesus die by crucifixion? Did he rise from the dead? What did he claim about himself? Is the New Testament reliable? We were talking about those over and over again. And eventually, eventually we, we started talking about what about Muhammad and the Quran here? What about these claims about Muhammad and the Quran? So we started looking into that.

[Matt Fradd]

So up until this point, it was more you on the defensive with him than the questions.

[David Wood]

Yeah, and that's pretty much, that's pretty. Keep in mind, I'm learning as I go, I'm learning how to interact with Muslims as we go. And historically that's pretty standard. And you can see why the emphasis in Christianity is always be prepared to give a defense for the hope that you have. Right. That's what we're commanded to do. We're commanded to. To give a defense for what we believe. In Islam, it's just attack, attack the Jewish positions, attack Christian positions. It's all attacking. And so you get into a discussion, it's normally, hey, the Trinity doesn't make sense. Hey, how can you believe that Jesus is God? Where did he say, I am God, worship me. Your Bible's been corrupted. All these things, all these attacks, and then Christians trying to defend it. Well, that's just the pattern we kind of fell into. But after a while, I was. It just hit me, like, why aren't we talking about whether your guy's a prophet and. And why aren't we talking about whether your book is the word of God? Why don't we apply the standards we're applying to my beliefs? To your beliefs.

[Matt Fradd]

And at that point, did you have the sort of friendship where he wasn't fully defensive?

[David Wood]

Yeah. And that's really, really good. That, as far as I can tell, is like, the best scenario, having two friends discussing these issues. Because we agreed early on, like, probably in the first. It might have been that first series of discussions we had, like, that weekend. If not, it was very soon after that where we basically laid some groundwork and. And concluded. There are three possibilities here. Either you're right and I'm wrong, or I'm right and you're wrong, or we're both wrong. We agree that we're not both right because we're saying completely contradictory stuff. So it's possible that something else is true and that we're both wrong, but we don't believe that. That there's. That we're both wrong. We believe that one of us is right on this. Because you believe one thing I believe. So we're agreeing on the fact that one of us is right in this. And if one of us is right, we have to take it seriously that God put us together in that room to have these discussions so that whoever's right can convince whoever's wrong. And therefore we need to take this seriously. It's not a joke. We're taking it as, like a task from God that we have to get to the bottom of this and that if we ever abandon that, that it's like we're abandoning a, you know, a mission from God.

[Matt Fradd]

So at that point, were you genuinely open to the truth of Islam?

[David Wood]

No, no, no. And he wasn't genuinely open to the truth of Christianity. Like, I believed. I'm here from God to talk to this dude. He believed he's there from God to. To get things across to me. So, yeah, so we ended up having these discussions for a long time. It was about four years long later that he became a Christian. Even before that, his, his confidence, his confidence in Islam was, was dropping, but he was compensating by acting more devout. Like he started signing his emails, humble servant of the truth, blah, blah, blah. You don't talk like that. What are you doing? But there's this, there's this tendency to compensate when you're starting to have doubts. And that's good advice for everyone. If you have a Muslim friend and you're talking to a Muslim friend, because I hear this all the time, like, David, I've been trying to talk to my Muslim friend, but the more, the more, the more reasons I give him, the more bold and Islam he seems like. Yep, that's, that's pretty much every time you warn him. That's pretty much every time. And so, yeah, so he eventually left Islam. It was a big, it was a big issue for his family and parents and everyone. But I saw the stand that he was taking. He did his first debate like a few months later and just crushed, just crushed a guy because he'd already been through it. He'd been wrestling with the deity of Christ so much by the time he stepped there, up there and debated it, it was like rapid fire, rapid fire taken through the entire New Testament. And so anyway, at some point along those lines, I was like, maybe, maybe I need to stick with Islam because all those negative things that keep a Muslim in Islam because of all the psychological pressure. So again, it's. They're told all their lives is the worst possible sin. And apart from that, they understand that they're going to have to give up their families. Their families may stick with them for a while to try and convert them back, but eventually, if it doesn't work, it's, we don't want you because they don't want you around your cousins. They don't want you. They don't want you influencing other people. So stay away from here. And they're very serious about that. Now, fortunately for Nabil, his parents did continue a relationship with him, so that was way better situation than the vast majority of what I've seen.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Well, I just want to ask real quick, tell me about Nabil converting, like, what was the final straw? I know he's got a book before he passed, I forget the name of.

[David Wood]

It, but Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus.

[Matt Fradd]

That's right.

[David Wood]

Yeah. Well, we've kind of gone through all the arguments and reasons and so on.

[Matt Fradd]

Yep.

[David Wood]

And I tend to ask people like, why do you believe that this is true? What are your reasons? Because that tells me what I need to study to see if those are good reasons or not. And at that first weekend when we're having these discussions, oh, it's because Islam is proven by history and by mathematics and by prophecy and by this and reason and logic and everything. Everything supported Islam according to him. And so we eventually start going through that stuff and this was probably a year before he converted when we had started talking about Islamic topics and he found out there's all this stuff that he'd never heard about before in his sources. Because I'm going through his sources and I'm going, hey, you told me to read this source because this is going to show this. Well, look what I actually found. And I asked him again about a year because I noticed he'd changed and he wasn't, oh, you know, the scientific miracles. He wasn't saying all this stuff anymore. And so I asked him about a year before he converted and I go, hey, so why do you believe that Islam is true? Why are you still a Muslim? And he said, two reasons. He said, 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 on the one hand that's interesting because it went from all these, all this proof that Islam is true to that to something else. But that was actually terrifying. If anything can be like, oh, no, what do I do here? Because if you say science proves that Islam is true, that's something we can open the books. You can show me what you're quoting that you think is some sort of miraculous scientific knowledge in the Quran or the Hadith, and we can investigate that. And we're. We. I was a biology and philosophy major, he was communications major and pre med and stuff like that. Smart guy was. He knew his stuff. We could actually look through stuff seriously and know what we're talking about. So everything he said when we first met, that was all, all stuff we could investigate. If you say Islam makes sense to me and I feel the presence of God on my grandparents, you can't argue with that. What am I going to say? No, you don't. No, you don't feel the presence of God on your grandma. Like, how do you argue with that?

[Matt Fradd]

I've met her, she's awful. I don't know what you'd say.

[David Wood]

Yeah, it's like. But it went from the realm of the falsifiable to the realm of the unfalsifiable. There's no evidence. I. I'm thinking there's no evidence I can give you to convince you that you don't feel the presence of God on your grandma. So, like, what do, what do I even do at this point? And so after that was like, what do I do now? Apologetics or polemics, or what do I do against someone who's become unfalsifiable? But I realized, wait a minute, if you're taking that as evidence, you still might be given stronger evidence that outweighs that evidence. If you're taking this as some kind of evidence, then we can still have evidence that outweighs that makes you think, okay, maybe my feeling about my grandma isn't the deciding fact in all of this. So we kept at it. And after a while, he got to the point where he's just, islam makes sense to me, but these guys have evidence for everything they believe. He didn't tell me this until after he became a Christian, but he said when we would go through the historical reliability of the New Testament or when we would go through why Christians believe Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead, he told me later, he said, every time we got through, we went through this stuff, I would be thinking to myself, wow, I thought these guys had nothing, but they have really good reasons for what they believe. And so that started bothering him. And so he told me again later on after he converted, what would happen in his mind is, well, these guys actually have good reasons for everything they believe. But even if they show me with 99% certainty that all these things are true, I'm still 100% certain that Islam is true. Because of the scientific miracles and because of the perfect preservation of the Quran, because of the amazing character of Muhammad, hence the importance of us going through all those issues eventually. And so then he started saying that he has doubts about all these things. And then he went into this different mode where it was, we're all human beings, we have biases, we're raised to think certain things, and we only know a tiny fraction of what can be known. So I can't tell what's true. I don't think God is going to hold me accountable if I get this wrong. So I'm just going to stay. I'm just going to remain a Muslim. And so that was another, like, oh, no, what do I do here? Fortunately, he continued wanting to pursue, but he prayed to God. One night he was on a trip with his dad. He was in a hotel room and he prayed and he said, God, I know I'm biased here. I see good reasons to believe in Christianity, but Islam still makes sense to me. I don't know what to do here, so you're going to have to tell me. So can you give me a vision to tell me what to do? And whatever vision you give me, I'll. I'll follow it. And he said, the room he was in faded to black, and all I saw were crosses. Oh, my. And then he said he. He prayed. Well, that may be it, but how do I know my mind's just not playing tricks on me. He said, so can you give me a dream? And then he had it. He had this weird dream where he's up on a mountain. And he. He's up on this mountain with everyone. All his. All his family and stuff. They're all in this mountain. All of a sudden, he zooms out to a different view from a different mountain. And he's looking. It's not a mountain. It's on this giant, like, reptilian thing. And he goes, whoa, we're all. We're all in this giant reptilian thing. And this giant reptile turns and he said. This giant boy walks up and says, I know what you are. Talking to the reptile and says, I know what you are. I challenge you to a fight. And he says, the boy smushes the reptile, and then the reptile's enraged, the reptile turns to him, and it goes to attack him. And then he says, but the boy has a cricket with a sword. And the cricket with a sword pops out and chops the reptile's head off. Right? And so he tells me this, and he tells multiple people this, and they're like. So it sounds like the reptile thing is something you are already part of. And then you get. You see it from a different angle, and you realize, bad. And then there's a boy, which he interpreted as me. I challenge you to fight. Yeah. He interprets the boy as me, and he interprets the cricket as Christ with a sword to chop its head off right before it destroys him. And so he. He told us. He told this to everyone, even, like. Even his family. They said, oh, you have to break out our books on dream interpretation. And he looks it up, and it's like the reptilian iguana thing, that's an enemy, and a boy is a friend, and a cricket is a protector and all this stuff. And he's like, whoa, wait a minute. This all fits exactly what I thought. But then he thought to himself, well, that's a lot of. There's a lot of symbolism and so on. I'm not going to base my conversion, my internal, possibly my eternal destiny, on something that I'm interpreting. So he prayed. He said, God, can you give me a dream I don't have to interpret?

[Matt Fradd]

And so after the crosses weren't enough.

[David Wood]

Yeah, so let's keep going. So after that, he had another dream. And he calls me up one day. He calls me up, he said, hey, are there dreams in Christianity? And I go, well, I mean, in the Bible, people. People had dreams telling them what to do and stuff. Yeah. So you got Joseph there and then Joseph in the Old Testament, Joseph in the New Testament. Yeah, you had people getting dreams in the Bible, getting warned by dreams and stuff. And he goes, okay, how do you interpret this? He said, I'm standing outside this narrow doorway, and I look in, and you're inside there, and you're at this big feast. You're all looking, you're waiting for someone to show up to the feast. And I can't get in. The door's just narrow enough for me to get in, but I'm outside. And he says. And I look in and I call out and I say, david, I thought we were supposed to eat together. And he said, you didn't even look over at me. You just go. You never responded. And he goes, so any idea what that could mean? I go, open your Bible to Luke. And he said, this is a Bible I'd given him. It's like a. I don't know, Niv. Study Bible or something like this or some study Bible. But he said, he opened it up to the passage and the heading was the narrow door, right? And he looked, and that's where, you know, you will be outside the feast where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and you'll see the feast of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and stuff. And he. And it was funny because when he asked me about it, when he said, hey, how do you interpret this? He said, the first thing I said was, I don't need to interpret it. It's straight out of the Bible. You just dreamed yourself right into a parable of the Bible. And it was that, I don't need to interpret it. It's like, wait, I prayed for something that I wouldn't need to interpret. And he still didn't become a Christian after that. He said, okay, two dreams is good. Could I have a third one? And his third dream was, he's in a mosque. He's waiting for the leader of his sect to arrive to arrive in the mosque. And he's sitting on, he's sitting on some steps inside the mosque. There's a stairway. He's sitting on the steps. Anyway, the leader of his sect shows up and sits down on the floor in front of him. And you can't be seated higher than the leader. So he said, I tried to get down off the steps, but I was blocked. I can't get off the steps. And so he said, I have to go around. And he said, I turned and looked and the steps were leading up out of the mosque. And so the only way, the only way out of this was to leave the mosque and so on. And even then it was months, it was months after that of discussions and so on. Before, before it was. It's kind of funny the way he told me he became a Christian. We ended up going to a Chinese restaurant. It was me and probably five or six Christian friends and Nabil. And we grab our, we grab our, we get our plates and then we say, all right, who's going to pray? Nabil goes, I'll pray. And everyone's like, oh, boy. Okay, let's see what this is like. He goes, lord, bless this food. And he says a little prayer and he goes, and I pray this in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And I just thought, wow, everyone at the table got it instantly. But I'd been arguing with him for so long, it didn't hit me. I was like, gosh, he's hanging out with us so much now. He even prays like a Christian. He's hanging out with us so long, he even prays like a Christian. When that was him telling us that he had become a Christian.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow.

[David Wood]

Anyway, so, yep, that's when I thought I was done with Islam. Right then I was like, cool, I'm done studying this stuff. I'm not interested.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I want to tell everybody to get. Because I haven't read it, but I would imagine the book is excellent. Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus. And I'm sure the story goes into greater detail in there. Wow, that's beautiful. Yeah. I often think that we don't give people enough credit when we are expecting them to change deep seated beliefs. You know, we say, just convert. Just convert to my brand of Christianity or convert to this religion. And we don't realize what it would take for you or I, let's say, to get rid of our deep seated beliefs. And how I think we, we have to be, I think, gentle with People as we seek to do that, because it's not like we're debating what the capital of Australia is like. If you had that wrong and I corrected you, you would just abandon your false belief.

[David Wood]

Yeah, yeah. And this is. This is what I was kind of leading up to before that. All these negative features of Islam, these psychological barriers. So the worst possible sin is saying Jesus Christ is Lord. It's the worst sin you can commit in Islam. You're going to have to give up your family or have a very strained relationship with your family forever. And beyond that, the penalty for leaving Islam, according to Muhammad, is death. Muhammad said, if anyone leaves his Islamic religion, kill him. And so fortunately, it doesn't get carried out much in the west because lots of Muslims believe you need an Islamic state to be carrying that out and not just like a random person doing it. So that's fortunate. But there's nothing that says, oh, only in an Islamic state. So you always have to wonder, is someone going to carry this penalty out at some point? So anyway, when we're preaching the Gospel, the good news, what a Muslim is hearing is, oh, you want me to believe this thing, which will force me to give up my family, my friends. I don't just mean mom and dad, I mean cousins, aunts, uncles, my entire community have to give all that up and maybe get my head chopped off and then definitely get me sent to hell. Like, you guys are calling that the good. The good. It sounds like the worst news ever. You guys are calling it the good news, but all these things actually become good. Because when a Muslim has wrestled with these issues and eventually gets to the point where he thinks, you know what? I may have to give up my entire family, and this may get my head chopped off. And I've been told all my life, this will get me sent to hell. You know what, I want to know Jesus anyway. That's someone who is already like. Like, that's someone who will lay down his life for Jesus. He's already willing to give up everything to know Jesus. And so it's not this easy. Hey, why don't you. Why don't you pray with me to receive Christ? And it's not costing a person anything. It's already costing him everything.

[Matt Fradd]

I see.

[David Wood]

And so that's someone who will lay down his life for Jesus. And that's why I realized afterwards, oh, these guys make really awesome Christians. That's why I kept up with it afterwards.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow, okay. And so you had your YouTube channel for a while and a couple of years ago, didn't you retire that and start something else? A bit confused.

[David Wood]

I gave away my old channel, okay. And I was just going to delete it and someone said, well, if you're going to just delete it, why don't you give it to someone else? So I gave it to Hatun Tosh, who's an ex Muslim from Turkey in the uk, was going to Speaker's Corner and stuff, and I was like, hey, I have way more subscribers and stuff. I. About 700,000. I was like, hey, if you want that channel, you can have it. I'm going to take down most of my old videos because I had just become like the main attack point for complaints. And so YouTube just got to the point where they're banning. They weren't banning it. Like, everything I would post would get flagged for some reason. It was always bogus. I always followed the rules and I would always win the appeals. But it would. Sometimes it would be quick, it would take a couple hours, but sometimes it would take weeks going back and forth because you can't get them to sit down and watch your entire video. You say there's nothing like you're saying there's. When there's this. We've flagged this video for supporting a terrorist organization. There's nothing in there about any of that. It's me talking. It's me talking about, Jesus, what are you talking about? It can take forever to actually get them to go through and remove the. Remove the strike and so on. But I just realized I've been targeted somehow. I was on a list at YouTube, flag everything this guy puts out and stuff. And I'm just like. And they got worse every. It got worse every year. And so it's the point where I was just fighting not to put out. Not to put out more content, but just to keep my old content up. And I'm just thinking, do I want to spend the next 20 years of my life just fighting just to keep my content up? No, I'd rather just burn it all to the ground and start over.

[Matt Fradd]

So that's what you did.

[David Wood]

Yeah, I did. So I have a YouTube channel now. They don't mess with me at all. Because I know one. Basically, I kind of laid low for a while, let other channels become popular as well. And now there's a bunch of channels that are dealing with Islam. And then I also know, okay, this is what kind of set them off at various times, so dial those things back a little bit. And now YouTube doesn't mess with me at all. I get Just as many views as I used to, but no messing with me. So.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow. All right, so how. So how long would you say since you began that YouTube channel? Retired it started a new one to now. Like, how long have you been doing this work in apologetics?

[David Wood]

Probably. I think we got on YouTube in, like, 2007 or 2008, right after it came out. Whoa. But we didn't realize that we weren't focusing on YouTube back then. Back then, it was mainly we would announce, hey, we're going to be speaking at this church at this place. And people would message us, oh, I can't be there because I live in this country. And they were like, okay, we'll toss that on this new thing, YouTube, and then anyone in the world can watch it. And it was. So that was our only intention for YouTube and so on. Eventually we made a video. We were just goofing off. You may remember this, but there was. This was a long time ago. There was a guy, it was Pastor Terry Jones, and he was gonna have a Burn the Quran day in Florida. I actually debated the guys. Like, seriously, you want to respond with book burnings and stuff? We had a debate about that. But at the same time, when I was debating this guy, I was thinking, Uthman, the third of the rightly guided caliphs, burned all the Qurans. So by the time you get to the third of the rightly guided caliph, so you have Muhammad, then you have Abu Bakr, then you have Umar, then you have Uthman.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay?

[David Wood]

By the time you're at Uthman, there are so many differences in the Quran that he has to order the entire Muslim community to hand over their Qurans, and he burns them all and issues a standardized Quran. And I'm thinking, why are they getting mad at this guy burning a Quran, which isn't affecting the Quran? There's Qurans all over. But they're not getting mad that this guy burned all the Qurans. How are you not mad about that? Right? So we made a video, and it was called the original Burn the Quran Day. And it's just me and Nabeel goofing off where we're reading all these passages.

[Matt Fradd]

I don't know about this at all, by the way, so I'm interested.

[David Wood]

Oh, yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Just in case you assumed I knew all about this and they were truncating.

[David Wood]

Your story, because this is what changed our mind about the significance of YouTube. All right, so we make a video, and I'm sitting there, and it's funny, because we planned this how I was going to be A Quran burner. And Nabil's going to come up and start arguing with me. So I'm there and we realized none of us had a lighter and stuff. So I just took a stick and I start rubbing the stick like I'm starting a fire by rubbing a stick in a pile of Islamic books. And Nabeel walks in and we're like, over the top, ridiculous acting. And he walks in. David, what are you doing? You're not gonna burn these books, are you? And I'm like, well, the thought had crossed my mind. He goes, no, books are filled with valuable knowledge here. I'll open one to a random page. And he opens it up and it's about Uthman burning all the Qurans. And they were shocked, right? Were shocked that they were burning Korans. And they were like, we gotta go through. And we just start. We're pretending to open these things randomly, but it's about all the changes to the Quran verses. Eaten by a sheep, entire chapters being forgotten because people forgot to recite them and so on. And we're just going through this and by the end we're like, hey, it's good that we're not burning these books because they contain all this information about the history of the Quran and so on. So we were just goofing off. We had been doing shows in a studio and we're hanging out with guys afterwards and we make this video. We stick it on YouTube. Just joking.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[David Wood]

And it was, I forget, it was like a week or 10 days later, it had hit 100,000 views.

[Matt Fradd]

Whoa.

[David Wood]

And that's when I clicked on YouTube analytics for the first time. I had no idea what analytics were. Analytics of what? And I clicked on it and it told you where people are watching it. It's like at the top was the United States. Next it would be like UK and then Canada and so on. Got down to like sixth or seventh or eighth place or whatever it was. And it said it was either 3.6 or 3.8% Pakistan. And I just looked at them. I go, 3.6% of 100. That's 3,600 people in Pakistan who just watched all this stuff that's in their sources that you couldn't tell them if you went there, they'd form a mob. As soon as you started talking about the Quran being changed and stuff like that, they'd form a mob and they'd beat you to death. And it just hit me right there. It's wait. For 14 centuries, Muslim leaders have been able to keep their People insulated from hearing any criticisms of anything they're saying and from hearing any alternative position presented to them. Their leaders have been able, especially in places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and so on, they've been able to keep their people insulated from hearing a serious presentation of the Gospel because you have missionaries who go over there, and if you were at all successful and people started converting to Christianity, you're gonna get your head chopped off. And so it just hit me like we have just reached a new era of history where they can no longer keep their people insulated, which means we now have access to people in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and all these places through the Internet. And that was just like, I don't want to go around speaking anymore. I mean, they'll do it if someone asks, but I would rather just sit here and make videos in front of my camera and have people in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and everyone. Everyone around the world watching it. And so that's why I really focused on YouTube after that.

[Matt Fradd]

Do you have that original video? Does it still exist?

[David Wood]

Oh, yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, I can't wait to watch that. I've been talking a lot lately about my friends at the College of St. Joseph the Worker. You know, Jacob Imam, Mike Sullivan, Andrew Jones and company, the guys who started the college that combines the Catholic intellectual tradition with skilled trades training. Well, listen to this. They're growing their program and are looking to connect with experienced Catholic tradesmen to hire as instructors. So if you are an experienced carpenter, plumber, H Vac technician, or electric and want to help mentor and teach future Catholic tradesmen, go right now to collegeofsaintjoseph.comcareers to connect with the college and see how you can become part of something truly special. And if you're watching or listening and know a tradesman who needs to hear this message, please invite them to reach out to the College again. That's collegeofstjoseph.com careers. Collegeofsaintjoseph.com careers. Thanks.

[David Wood]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

All right. So then, did you. Did you come at the topic systematically, or did you just start making videos on whatever you were interested in?

[David Wood]

Basically whatever I was interested in. But I'd learned from Muslims what their main reasons were for believing in Islam. And I've been going through the sources with Nabil and learning responses to those, and it's almost always the case that what they're told is not what their sources say. And so it was just, hey, you've heard this. Let's see what it says. And also Christian apologetics. Hey, you've been told, Christians can't support this and I'll make a video about it. And so it was just like that. It was all based on discussions with him and then just kind of making videos about all the stuff I'd learned over time. And so just kept doing that and found out, well, Muslims around the world had the same sort of objections and issues and so on. So let's just make that common knowledge. That's been kind of the goal. Make the criticisms common knowledge. Make the responses to arguments common knowledge. I see. And then you also could. Because then I found out over time that I'm not just talking to Muslims. It's Christians who are talking to the Muslim friend. And the Muslim friend says, this is a scientific miracle. How could Muhammad have known this? And so they go, look it up and oh, wait, now here's a video waiting for them. Well, look at what this says. Let's look at the commentaries. And so it was all making it there for them.

[Matt Fradd]

What has the response been like from Muslims over the last however many years?

[David Wood]

20 years or so, back then, it was tons and tons and tons of death threats.

[Matt Fradd]

Really? And how did they. I mean, were they comments in YouTube? Was it email? How did you get it? And what do they say?

[David Wood]

All of those and tons of them. I mean, I get 40 or 50 death threats a day and I'm gonna kill you. It's gonna be your wife, it's gonna be kids, all that stuff.

[Matt Fradd]

See, it's funny. Cause sometimes when people say they get death threats, I often wonder if they're kind of blowing it out of proportion. But of course, Nabil gets it on his car. Okay, that's terrifying. They talk about your wife and kids. That's terrifying. So are these emails, direct messages? What are you getting?

[David Wood]

Yeah, emails, comments on Facebook, tweets, mostly YouTube in response to videos and stuff like that. But yeah, emails. And it was way worse back then. Way worse. Because there are only a few people doing it. There are only a few people criticizing Islam publicly. And as long as there's like two, three, four people. And back then there was very few people. There was Samuel Green down in Australia. There was Jay Smith in the uk, There's Tony Costa up in Canada. And there were like a couple of us in America. Now there are other people who are, like, writing articles and stuff like that. But as far as people, like putting their faces out there and talking about this stuff, it was a handful. But that means you know exactly who to target with threats and so on. It's way better now that there's way more people, now you have tons of ex Muslims, because back then you had very few ex Muslims who were known to be ex Muslims. Now there are ex Muslims everywhere, really. I mean, all over the place and.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow. More about that.

[David Wood]

And the YouTube algorithm now has been programmed to detect death threats. So when I get a death threat on YouTube now, it's like worded oddly. If you just say, I'm gonna kill you, that instantly. I'll see it pop up if I'm on there. When it, when you get your update and stuff like that, I'll see it. And then like a second later, it disappears. Or when I refresh the pre. When I refresh the page, it disappears. So now it's. It's. Yeah, they're. They're way less frequent.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow. So you say a lot of Muslims are converting. What evidence do you have to support that? Is that just a story that Christians want to tell themselves so they can feel triumphant, or is it actually happening?

[David Wood]

Oh, it's happening. Happening all the time, in fact. So the, the official statistics. The official statistics are among young Muslims. It was like three or four years ago, this statistic was 24% of young Muslims are leaving Islam. That's up from what was close to zero percent, Just if you go back two decades. So the apostasy rate among young Muslims went from around 0% to 24%. Now the most recent one was 26%. So you've got that. You've got statistics that show that between 60 and 70% of Muslims who convert to Islam leave it within a couple of years. So people who are, hey, I'm converting to Islam, and then they find out, oh, there's all this stuff I wasn't told before as part of the deal. And then they leave Islam. So most people, so. So if anyone's watching, they're going, oh, my cousin converted to Islam. What am I going to do? Probably going to leave Islam within the next couple of years. Because that's just, That's. That's what's been happening. But I only started keeping track because back when I was getting started, it was standard. It was standard in Christianity among Christians, that you don't ever criticize Muhammad or the Quran. You don't do it.

[Matt Fradd]

I was, I remember being told that I wrote an article against Islam back in 2012, and I put an image and it was like a respectful image of Muhammadan. Everyone assured me that I'd be killed. Don't do that. So I was like, oh, I took it down. But then I see the kind of things, the kind of characters of Muhammad you post. I'm like, all right, well, I guess I could have, but maybe I'd be getting death threats.

[David Wood]

Yeah. So back then, and I always tell people, they have no idea how much it sucked back then. When I say there was only a few of us dealing with Islam that were actually, you know, going after Muslim arguments and stuff back then. I'm talking 2008, 2009. If you're going after Islam, you got blasted by everyone. So you're getting death threats heaped on you from Muslims. We're going to kill you, we're going to kill your wife, we're going to kill your family, all this stuff, we're going to do this to your mom, blah, blah, blah. Atheists. This was the height of the new atheism. So the new atheist responses you got there would. There were always. There were always atheists who were like, I hope you're successful. Right? Because there were always atheists who were like, okay, I think all this is nonsense, but I'd rather have Christianity than Islam.

[Matt Fradd]

Same Harris.

[David Wood]

Yeah, you had those guys, but you also had just tons of the new atheists who. Their response was, how dare you criticize another religion when you're a religion too. When you're religious too, and all religions are stupid, you giant hypocrite. So you're getting blasted there. But then even Christians were supposed to be loving and this is hurting their feelings. How are you attacking Muhammad when this is so dear to them? You're just going to drive them away. You're just going to drive them away. And I heard this for years from Christians and I was like, me criticizing Muhammad doesn't drive them. They can't stay away from me. They come right at me. They come right at me and start arguing, where are you saying this is going to drive them away and they're never going to talk to you again? And I actually had to try and figure out where that idea came up among Christians because again, it was standard. There was every Christian you talk to almost was telling you, don't ever criticize Muhammad or the Quran. You're just going to drive them away and you'll never be able to reach them with the gospel. And so I was trying to figure this out. I eventually tracked it down to two sources. Two sources. I found this one. It was Christians who heard from a missionary, right? You'd have missionaries over in Muslim countries and they come back and they give a presentation on reaching Muslims and stuff like that. And they would Say, don't ever criticize Muhammad or the crime. Well, that makes sense if you're a missionary in Pakistan. That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. We're talking about us here, but everyone's hearing, don't ever criticize Muhammad or the Quran. It's just going to enrage them. And I'm thinking, okay, so you guys are taking advice from people where it makes sense and then applying it here where it doesn't make sense. So I'm not taking that seriously. The other source, the other source of this information was from interfaith dialogues where the Muslim speaker would say, isn't it great that we're building bridges and all getting together for these discussions? And we've got a Jew here and the Jews watching and we've got a Christian here and the Christians watching and we all get to speak and get along. Isn't this great? Just so you know, if you want to keep these bridges going, if you want to continue having these discussions, never criticize Muhammad or the Quran because then there won't be any bridges and we won't have any of these discussions. And so Christians will be telling me this. And I heard from this guy, this guy at the interfaith meeting, he said, don't ever criticize Muhammad of the Quran because we want to build bridges. And you're just trying to burn the bridges down. What's wrong with you? And I'm going, wait, let me just, let me repeat to you what you just said. You tell me if you think this makes sense. You're telling me that you believe that this Muslim speaker talking to a bunch of Christians and telling them, if you want to infective, if you want to effectively share the gospel with Muslim, don't do these things. And you think this Muslim speaker is trying to give you valuable insights into reaching Muslims with the gospel. That's what, that's your takeaway there? You think this guy is trying to tell you how to reach Muslims with the gospel. That's what you believe. And kind of just saying it. They kind of. Huh, Fair point. Maybe I should, because I'm like, if, if I'm talking, if I'm hearing from a Muslim speaker who's telling me how to preach the gospel, I'm probably going to think I need to do the exact opposite of what this guy's saying because there's no way he's actually trying to help me reach Muslims with the gospel. And so I realized, though, it was so ingrained that I just kind of had to, to, to show them I was like, okay, I'll keep doing what I'm doing and you guys keep doing what you're doing. We'll see who wins. We'll see. And so eventually I wasn't. I always, like, when you post, hey, this guy, hey, this guy, after watching my videos, says he left Islam and now he's a Christian. Because people would send me those messages and I never wanted to share those because, like, bragging, like, I'm so great or something. Like, look at me, look at me, guys, look. This guy converted after watching some of my stuff. But at the same time, I was constantly receiving the messages. Don't ever do this or it'll just drive Muslims away. I need to respond to that.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[David Wood]

So when that would come up, when people, when someone important would say, david, you're just driving Muslims away, you're doing so much harm, we're never gonna be able to talk to Muslims, I would start posting batches of 10, right? 10 to where? To YouTube. I would say, hey, so and so says, David, you're just driving Muslims away. And now they'll never take the gospel seriously. Well, to respond to that, we have these 10 testimonies that I took screenshots of. David, I used to hate you. I was just watching your videos to expose them. Cause my cousins were watching them. And I realized I had to refute you. And just so you know, I left Islam and now I'm a Christian. It was like that over and over again. And it wasn't. I couldn't, I couldn't keep it up for long because you get tons and tons of comments. You have to actually go through them to find these. But for about a month and a half, when I was trying to respond to these guys who were, who were constantly, this will never work, David. It'll never work. You're doing it all wrong. I would start screenshotting when I saw comments from Muslims saying, hey, thank you for your videos. I just left Islam. And when I was doing that, I was able for a month and a half to post between one and three of those every single day. For a month and a half.

[Matt Fradd]

Whoa.

[David Wood]

Just. Just based on the comments I was getting every day.

[Matt Fradd]

Yep.

[David Wood]

And it was just, hey, you guys, tell me this. Check out, check out these three from, from today. And fortunately, people caught on after a while. It's like, wait a minute, we're saying this never works. And yeah, almost every Muslim we hear from, I mean, every ex Muslim we hear from only converted to Christianity or only left Islam after hearing Muhammad and the Quran blasted and destroying all those reasons. I mean, think about how that ties into Nabeel. We're talking about Christianity for a couple years and Christian topics. He didn't convert. Even after realizing why we have great evidence for what we believe. He didn't convert. Why he still thinks he has 100% certainty. He thinks he has 100% certainty because his mind has been filled with, with all these false claims about scientific miracles, about the miraculous perfect preservation of the Quran, about Muhammad being the greatest man of all time, all these arguments that his head is filled with all these. He thinks it gives him 100% certainty. Nothing can ever compete with that. He's never going to take any alternative seriously. He's never going to take the gospel seriously. It's not until the confidence in those issues is shaken that you're actually able, okay, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I need to take a closer look at this. So I would estimate probably at least 95% of the ex Muslims I've ever heard from only left Islam after having all these arguments and stuff wrecked in front of their faces. Like realize, oh, all this stuff that I've been told all my life, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. That's when they start taking some. That's when they start, oh, I need to investigate this myself. Because how it works, they just have immense confidence in their imams, their parents, their sheikhs and so on that what they're being told is true. And you eventually say, actually that's what you've been told. Here, let me show you. That's wrong. And they're confused. It's huh? But they'll do the same thing. They'll go back to the same sheikh and ho, how do I explain this? And then they'll get the new explanation, then they'll come back and then you'll look at it and go, that's wrong too. I can show you from your sources that's false. And this will happen several times. They'll keep going back to the same shaykh, they'll keep going back to the same imam. But eventually there's like this light switch moment when it's, wait a minute, this guy's told me this stuff all my life. All my confidence in Islam is based on what this guy has been telling me. And this Christian keeps showing me that what this guy's saying is false. And he's using my sources to show me that according to my own sources, what that guy said is false. And eventually as light goes on, it's maybe I can't trust that guy. With my entire salvation and everything else. Maybe I need to look into this for myself. And the moment he says, I need to look into this for myself, I can't just have this confidence in this guy. That's when they're on their way out of Islam. That's when it's starting. They're about to leave Islam because they're looking into all this for themselves and they're going to find out that none of this stuff stands up to scrutiny.

[Matt Fradd]

What do Christian apologists do that you wish they wouldn't when it comes to trying to convert Muslims? Have you thought about that? Or are there annoying things or things that you know aren't effective that Christians try?

[David Wood]

Way more so back in the day. Way more so back in the day, back when it was, here's how you do it and just preach the gospel. And it's weird because like you have. If people say, hey, I just preached the gospel to Muslims, I'm fine. Cool, awesome. Yeah. Because guess what, they're Muslims who've already been wrestling with the issues. They just need someone preaching the gospel. They need a friend who's preaching the gospel to them. So I'm fine with that. I've never been one who's like, this is my way and this is the way. Yeah, no, not everyone needs to be doing things my way. In fact, one of the reasons I was doing things my way was, okay, there's a bunch of people doing it that way. Someone needs to be doing it this way. Someone needs to be blasting away at this stuff.

[Matt Fradd]

Is there something cultural that has these Muslims respecting that kind of confrontational approach that we're unaware of here in the West?

[David Wood]

Oh, yeah. And that's something else that I found out from Nabil. And I thought it was just Nabil and then I found out, no, it's everyone else. It's everyone else too. And I even remember the moment we were watching because we would watch Christian Muslim debates and there weren't a lot back then, but we watched. It was me and Nabeel and we were over at Mike Lacona's house, but Mike was somewhere else. So it's me and Nabeel at Mike Lacona's house. He's a Christian New Testament scholar and he lived in our area. But we are watching a debate between William Lane Craig and Jamal Badawi. And that was one of the most one sided debates I'd ever seen. Craig annihilated everything Badawi said. Bottaway couldn't answer anything Craig was saying. It was completely one Sided. And you have. You always have Christians and Muslims who are just going to side with their guy no matter what. Nabil wasn't like that. If Nabil thought the Muslim lost, he thought he would say the Muslim lost. Like when Mike Lacona, our friend, debated Shabir Ali, Nabil said, yeah, I think. I think Mike won that. I think Mike won that. So he can acknowledge when a Christian wins a debate. We watched that debate. For some reason, by the end, Badawi was, like, flustered, and he started yelling. Starts yelling right now. When you or I see a debater get flustered and frustrated and start yelling.

[Matt Fradd]

Not a great sign.

[David Wood]

He's for us, right? For us. We're sitting there thinking, oh, this guy. You know, you're losing, you're getting desperate. Your emotions are taking over. William Lane Craig, totally calm. Why? He has no reason to get flustered or frustrated. He knows he's winning. And the Muslim guy's yelling because he's so desperate he doesn't know what to do, is getting crushed. That's what you and I were seeing. We finished the debate, and I go, I would have scored it like, 95 to 5. And I think that would be generous. It was a complete massacre. So I turned to Beal, and I go, hey, so what'd you think of that debate? And he goes, ah, Badawi clearly won. What? And I go, I was, like, legitimately confused. If it had been some other random Muslim, I'd say, okay, you're just siding with your guy, Nabil. I knew Nabil's not like that. So what was he just seeing? It took me a while to pry this out of them, but when he sees Muslim debater yelling, Christian, completely calm, it's. He's yelling because he has a righteous anger at the blasphemy being put out by this Christian. And so it is a righteous, godly anger that the Christian is leading people astray. The Christian is calm because deep down he doesn't believe what he's saying. He can't even get excited about it. He can't get excited. He can't get emotional about it, because deep down he knows he's. He's wrong.

[Matt Fradd]

And that's weird from Nabil, who sounded like a very logical guy. Part of the debate team surely knows how debates are won and lost, and yet he still couldn't see through that.

[David Wood]

That's what I mean. It's like, nabil, I understand a guy, you know, from, you know, like, Pakistan, where they form the mobs or something like this, just where emotion is in charge of everything. But Nabil, how is he? So at first I thought it was like, Nabil. And it was like, oh, these guys have a more respect for an aggressive, in your face, yelling approach. Again, I thought that was him. And after he became a Christian, we both started debating. We started debating Muslims. And then I would get up there in these early debates, I would present all the information that I wanted to present. But I would do it as gently as possible. Like, as gently as I could be. Cause, you know, there's nice little old Muslim ladies sitting in the front row. Like, I'm not trying to hurt your feelings. I want you to. I want this information in your head. But I'm not trying to be mean about it or something. But then the response from the Muslims would be, ha, ha. He's so weak. And it's like. And one day I just got ticked off and I just went and spit it. Like, how can you believe this stuff? Oh, my goodness. Do you know your prophet did to that little girl? And they walked out of there and they go, he's destroying our religion. Oh, my goodness. And I'm like, wait, you're just paying attention to how I say it. That's it. You're paying attention to how I'm saying it. You're not actually. It's not the information. It's like my demeanor and my attitude and how confident I am. What's crazy is once you realize that, you can see it all the way through the Muslim sources. There's a story. There's a story in Ibn Asaq where two brothers, Muayeesa and Huayyisa. I forget which one converted. One of the. One of the two brothers converted to Islam. Or this is during the time of Muhammad. One of the two brothers converts to Islam, Muay Isa and Huayyisa. And then Muhammad tells his followers, go kill any Jew who falls into your power. They're mad at Jews at this point. So Muhammad says, go kill any Jew that falls into your power. And the brother who converted goes out and kills a Jew. And his other. His brother is like, that was our family friend, man. That was our family friend.

[Matt Fradd]

That was Darren.

[David Wood]

We have business relations with him. You just ruined our business relations. And his brother says, if Muhammad told me to kill you, I'd kill you too. And his brother says, wow, any religion that brings you to this must be the truth.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh.

[David Wood]

And so that mentality is completely foreign to us. It's, hey, we're sitting around, you know, we're brothers. We're sitting around all Day, we're watching cartoons on Saturday, eating Doritos, and all of a sudden you're ready to go on a killing spree. Something big must have changed. And so for them, it's a sign of the truth that something is making you so aggressive and violent that you're ready to kill over it. You must know what you're talking about. You're not just going to kill over it. So you must know. And so they rest their confidence in what you believe based on how violent it's making you. And you can again, once you spot this, you can see it in the Muslim sources because after Muhammad died, you had a bunch of people left Islam after Muhammad died because they were only in Islam because they were scared of Muhammad. There were people who converted to Islam just because they didn't want to get killed by Muhammad. So Muhammad dies and a bunch of people left Islam. Now they left Islam in various ways. Some just were not Muslims anymore, but others just said, we're still Muslims. We're still going to pray five times a day. We're still going to do all this stuff. But we're not paying our zakat. We're not paying our zakat. That's like their alms. We're not paying it to the government. We'll just. I'll go give alms to someone in private. I don't have to give it to you. Abu Bakr put them in the exact same category, the apostate category, your apostates. If you're not doing what your leader tells you, you're an apostate too, and I'm coming to kill you. And Umar, who became the second of the rightly guided caliphs, but he's there. He starts arguing with Abu Bakr. Wait a minute. Muhammad said, there's only a couple reasons you can kill a Muslim. You kill them for apostasy, you kill them for killing someone else, you kill them for adultery, but you can't kill them for not paying their zakat properly. And Abu Bakr is saying, no, if they're not doing it, then they are in the apostate category. And Umar said something very interesting. He said, I could tell by the heaving of his chest that he was right. Like, he got so enraged when I said, don't kill. Don't kill them as apostates. He got so enraged that I knew he must have been right. Something is enraging you that much? Yeah. Then you must know it. And I don't know, I'm like on the fence kind of. Or I lean in this direction, but you're so confident that you must be right. And so this is all connected to. If you go down to today, someone criticized the Quran in Pakistan, mob forms around them and beats the person to death. That's how you show that you have the truth. You just get violent over it, and that's somehow a sign that you have the truth on your side. Whereas we look at that and go, if you guys can't respond with an argument to show why the person's wrong and you just instantly start killing the person, we think that's a weakness. They think it's a strength.

[Matt Fradd]

Which is weird, Right? Because Islam does have a respectable philosophical tradition, even Sina and Al Ghazali and others. So it's not simply that they're, what, irrational or not interested in logic. Especially when you look at the apologetics that they're engaged in today, they seem intent on showing the position wrong. So I guess. I guess. Why am I saying that? Because I would think that if someone acts like that, it's because they're not interested in the truth, and so they're not interested in following the argument.

[David Wood]

Yeah, philosophy just. It didn't really last.

[Matt Fradd]

No, it didn't.

[David Wood]

So, yeah, you've always had people, and you have people still today trying to defend it philosophically and so on. It's just. It's not mainstream. And wherever it's mainstream, it's mainstream. Like, if it becomes mainstream for Islamic apologetics and like America and so on, it's basically, this is what's appealing to you guys. And so we're going to adapt for you. Yeah, you would have science take off for a little while in Islam. You'd have philosophy take over for a while in Islam. You'd have all the writings, but it gets suffocated. It gets suffocated by what Islam really is. Wow.

[Matt Fradd]

So how many, if you had to guess, people have written to you saying they've left Islam? And then my second question is, are they leaving it for sort of atheistic nihilism or hedonism, or are they, many of them, becoming Christians?

[David Wood]

I don't have any statistics, but, yes, there are plenty of people who, David, thank you for helping me leave Islam and they become an atheist or an agnostic, because. And you can see why, right? Like, if I say, hey, here are all these reasons that what you've been told all your life are complete nonsense, and then you realize, whoa, I can't trust that shaykh in what he told me all my life. Just because you recognize you've Been given terrible arguments all your life doesn't mean you therefore accept the Christian arguments. In fact, it's a fairly common response. I don't trust any of this religious stuff. Because simultaneously you also had the new atheists going along and blasting away saying, ha, you know, all these religions are just based on nonsense. This is the only position that makes sense, and so on. So you did have tons of people like that. Again, I don't have any official numbers, but I can say both. And you can actually see why, because you have people who leave Islam like Nabil, where, okay, these arguments from Muhammad that I've heard all my life, now I've investigated them. There's no good reasons to think these, to think that these arguments actually stand up to scrutiny. But he still believes in God, he still respects Jesus and so on. And so it's very natural for people in that position to say, okay, I still believe in God, I still believe in Jesus. Let me take a look at Christianity. It's like the natural alternative. So those guys tend to become Christians. But you also have the reaction of, I just don't trust religious people. All they do is lie. Right, that makes sense.

[Matt Fradd]

Have you ever had missionaries from Muslim run countries reach out to you and tell you to cool it because you're making things difficult for them over there?

[David Wood]

I've heard lots of people say that I'm going to do that. I haven't heard much from missionaries in Muslim countries say I'm ruining things because my message to all of them has always been throw me under the bus if you need to.

[Matt Fradd]

Right?

[David Wood]

Like if you're talking to someone like, oh, are you like David Wood? David Wood? No, that guy's a jerk, man. Do I act like that? I don't act like that. Yeah, we can't stand that too. Throw me under the bus in a heartbeat and then you'll be their friend.

[Matt Fradd]

What is the Islamic dilemma? I mean, I know that we could pose a couple of dilemmas to our Mohammedan people, but by the way, can I just quickly say why I like Muhammadism better than Islam? I don't like accepting people's terms if it says something false about them. Right. So I prefer to call someone who says they're of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints a Mormon, because I don't actually think they're of a Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. I don't think that. So I'll call them Mormons and not because I'm trying to be disrespectful, because I think words matter. And I think, like, Islam means peace and Muslim. No, it doesn't. What does peace mean?

[David Wood]

What does.

[Matt Fradd]

Sorry, what is like submission for the sake of peace? Isn't this what it means?

[David Wood]

Yeah, they start tossing peace in there because the root is related. But Islam, Islam, it means submission or surrender. That's the actual definition.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Okay, well, that's. So there you go. So if someone says, well, as a Muslim or Islam, this means, like someone who submits to God, I just don't grant that. So I prefer to call them. I prefer Muhammadism and Mormonism because I like to kind of attribute that group to the heretical founder. I would think of Muhammad more as a heretic.

[David Wood]

But let me tell you why. You're right there.

[Matt Fradd]

I love being told why I'm right. So take your time here.

[David Wood]

It's actually a really important point. I'm not telling people what to call them and stuff. But as far as why that's actually significant. Muslims claiming, hey, Islam just means submission, which is. That's what the word means, submission or surrender. And in its religious context, submission or surrender to Allah, they'll use that in dawah. That's like their version of like, evangelism and apologetics and stuff. Dawah, but you'll have Muslim dawagai dais, they're called. They'll use that as their argument. Hey, let me ask you, Matt, do you believe in submitting to God?

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[David Wood]

We've got an entire religion that's submitting to God. Why would you object to Islam when all it is is submission to God? Jews, Christians, you all believe in submitting to God. Here's the religion that's defined in its name by submission to God. So why would you object to a religion that's all about submission to God? That's what it is. Now, why I'm telling you, you're right, is it's Surah 4, verse 65 of the Quran. Surah 4. So everyone can look it up. Surah 465 of the Quran says Allah says to Muhammad, they can have no real faith until they make you Muhammad judge in all disputes between them and have no resistance against anything you've decided and accept all of your decisions with full submission. So Islam is the religion of submission to Allah, but the only way you can submit to Allah is by submitting to everything Muhammad says. So, I mean, just imagine that. Hey, guys, you want to submit to God? Yeah, we want to submit to God. Okay, then you have to submit to everything I say, and you can't question anything I say ever.

[Matt Fradd]

If I started a religion, I would definitely do that.

[David Wood]

That's exactly what, that's exactly what I would do if I were starting a religion. Right. Hey, you believe in submission to God? Yeah. Okay, then you can only submit to God by submitting to me. And that's why the submission is actually to Muhammad and that's why it does make sense to call it Mohammedanism.

[Matt Fradd]

I want to tell you about Hallow, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hallow.com Matt Frad sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time you can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hallow.com Matt Frad I use it. My family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music including my lo fi. Hallow has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily routine and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through it all. Just go check it out. Hallow.com Matt Frad the link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent you could play little Bible stories to them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com Matt Frad okay, so this, what is the Islamic dilemma? What is that? Where did it come from? Because it's everywhere online right now.

[David Wood]

That's something we've been trying to popularize for a long, long time. And you can find it mentioned by Christians going way back. People who not they're not putting it like that. They're usually not. They haven't weaponized it. We, we've weaponized it. We've weaponized it. But you have had Christians all along pointing out, hey, you guys are attacking our Bible and saying that our Bible's been corrupted. Your Quran doesn't say that. Why are you attacking our Bible when your Quran affirms our scriptures, which it does. So just to give the history in a nutshell, not on the Islamic dilemma, but on what the Quran says. The Quran nowhere criticizes our scriptures. There are a couple verses they point to that aren't about our scriptures being corrupted. But you can see how they're interpreting it that way. Like It'll say, and they distort their scriptures and so on. If you actually read what this stuff means, it's we distort our scriptures with our speech. Because back then it was understood, hey, Jews have their book and it's in Hebrew, and Christians have their book, but it's in a couple different languages by the time you get to Islam. So it's in, you know, it's in Greek, it's in Latin and so on. It's in several. It's in Syriac and so on. It's in different languages, but not in Arabic. And so if you wanted to know from a Jew what the Torah says, you had to ask a Jew, how do you know if that Jew is telling you the truth? You don't. You can't verify. You can't verify. You can't read his book. You don't speak Hebrew, you don't speak the language necessary to understand. And so the accusation when they would have a disagreement is these people are misrepresenting their scriptures, they're distorting it. And it became, you just can't trust them. And by the way, according to the Quran, and this is something your average Muslim doesn't even know that it's all over the Quran. I mean, it's all over the Quran. The actual position of the Quran is Allah has sent prophets into all the world. Every nation has had its prophet. Everyone had their revelations in their language. The last people to get their revelation were the Arabs. So it's just like Allah is sending prophets over time to different groups and stuff. And everyone on the planet had their revelation except the Arabs at that time. And that's why Muhammad is the final prophet. He's the seal of the prophets. The Arabs were just the last to get their guy. And now everyone has their guy. Everyone on the planet has their prophet and their revelation. And you even see this. And the point of that specifically was if you don't have something in your language that you can read and understand for yourself, you're taking someone else's word for it. How do you know you're getting someone honest? How do you know you're getting someone who's not twisting and distorting your scriptures? You need it in your own language. And so there are even parts of the Quran. Surah 5, 43. Surah 5, verse 43. Some Jews come to Muhammad to settle a dispute because they didn't want to judge by the Torah because the penalty was stoning. And they try to avoid it. So they come to Muhammad and say, hey, what are we going to do about this? And Allah's Response is Surah 5. 43. He says, why are Jews coming to you when they have the Torah? Now think about that. Why are they coming to you, Muhammad, when they've got the Torah, they've got their book, why would they come to you? You've got the book for the Arabs. And just a few verses later, Christians are told to judge by the gospel. And that's the attitude of the Quran. It's everyone has their revelation in their language. You have to follow what's revealed in your language. Right? That's the actual position of the Quran. But Muslims eventually.

[Matt Fradd]

So the early Muslims, that's making it sound like Muhammad isn't interested in say, conquering the Jews or Christians because they have their prophet.

[David Wood]

He wants to conquer the Jews and Christians.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay, so that's not what he meant then, right? Presumably when Allah, that's not the reason.

[David Wood]

For conquering the Jews and the Christians, right? Okay, so if you want to follow this, everyone has their revelation. The Arabs are the last to get their revelation. Then they get the Quran in Arabic, they've got their prophet in Arabic. And then Jews, you don't need Muhammad, you've got your book. Christians, you don't need Muhammad, you've got your book. But we don't need you guys because we've got our book now. We all have our revelation, right? Muhammad, when he's in Mecca. So you got Saudi Arabia, you got what's now Saudi Arabia. Then it's just the Arabian Peninsula. You got this little tiny town called Mecca. That's where Muhammad's formed. At first he's surrounded by pagans and he's telling the. But pagans knew about Jews and Christians. There were Jews and Christians in the Arabian peninsula. And Muhammad is a caravan trader. He got the caravans and stuff. These guys are familiar with Jews and Christians preaching monotheism. And so Muhammad comes out when he starts preaching in Mecca and he's saying, hey, I'm in the same line of prophets that were sent to everyone else. Allah's been sending prophets all along. And he sent prophets to the Jews, the Christians, they had Jesus. And now I'm here for the Arabs. And when the Christians and Jews see me, because it's all pagans, right? Now when we run into the Jews and Christians, the Jews and Christians are going to affirm me. They're going to say, wow, you're the prophet to the Arabs that we've been waiting for. Because he thinks they're all on the same page. That they all had their prophets and they're just waiting. Oh, we need the Arab prophet. And so he thinks the Jews and Christians are all waiting on him and that they were pro, that he was prophesied in their scriptures. And he's saying, when they see me, they'll recognize me. They'll be like, oh, you're the one that we've been waiting for. So that's what he's telling his people. For over a decade in Mecca, he's propped up the Jews and the Christians as the ones who are going to confirm him when they see him. Well, 622 A.D. the Muslim community moves from Mecca to Medina. They moved to Medina and there were three Jewish tribes. And Muhammad's like, all right guys, I'm here. And they're, who are you? He's, I'm the one from your scriptures. What are you talking about? Yeah, the Arab prophet from your scriptures. What are you talking about? And I mean he, he put the confidence of his people in the Jews and Christians and how they're going to react to him and the Jews and Christians, I mean, the Jews there going, we don't know anything about. You think about this. If Muhammad and his community are completely confident that he is clearly, I mean clearly prophesied in their scriptures and they're all saying, no, we have no idea who you are. What's that mean? It means they're lying. They know he's in their scriptures and they're lying about him because they don't want people following the truth, which means they're actually enemies of God. It's not their scriptures. Their scriptures are talking about Muhammad all over the place, but they know it. And they know these Arabs can't look into it because they can't read it. And they're lying to all these Arabs to keep all these Arabs from following the truth. So these guys aren't on the same side with God. These guys are enemies of God who are trying to lead people astray.

[Matt Fradd]

So the problem isn't the scriptures.

[David Wood]

These individuals and these guys have to be subjugated because they're spreading their evil. And so at that point in the Quran, the message. So if you go to the Meccan passages, here's the vibe you get from the Meccan passages. The way it looks to Muslims, it's going to be Muslims, Christians and Jews all united against all the polytheists, the pagans, everyone else. That's how it's going to be. Then he gets there and he finds out, nope, the Jews are saying, I'm not a Prophet. And I'm just a joke to them. Okay, now, and that's where it changes. It's in the Crown Surah 5. 82. Then it becomes, it's going to be Christians and Muslims united against Jews and polytheists. And then he interacts with more Christians who make fun of him too. And then, okay, it's Muslims against everyone and everyone else has to be. Everyone else has to be subjugated.

[Matt Fradd]

It's that meme. Am I a joke to you?

[David Wood]

Yep.

[Matt Fradd]

So, so, okay. So, okay, so this narrative, I had never heard this before, but that shouldn't surprise anybody because I haven't looked into this a great deal. This idea that he was of the opinion that the Jews and the Christians would what, recognize him as the final prophet. Or was that not part of the narrative in the, the beginning?

[David Wood]

That's exactly what we're supposed to do in the beginning. We're all waiting. Yeah, everyone is waiting. It's just everyone's basically waiting.

[Matt Fradd]

And then they, this new prophet's going.

[David Wood]

To show up and he's going to be the final prophet. And then we've got all our prophet. We've got all the prophets.

[Matt Fradd]

Then they encounter the Jews. They don't see him in the scriptures. They think the Jews are lying. Same thing happens with the Christians. So this whole narrative that you're telling me, is this in the Quran or is this what Muslims.

[David Wood]

Everything I said is in the Quran. Now it's hard to. I mean, sometimes you need to go outside of the Quran to understand the historical background of various situations and stuff like this. But yes, everything I just said is in the Quran about everyone having their revelations, Muhammad being the last to receive his revelation. And at that point it's Jews you judge by your book, Christians you judge by your book. We have our book and now we've all got a book in our own language. And that way no one can deceive us.

[Matt Fradd]

And is the idea that the Jews and Christians. The what? The Torah and is it Jeel?

[David Wood]

Is that what they call Injeel?

[Matt Fradd]

Injil.

[David Wood]

Sorry, little side note, Injil is the Arabic transliteration of Euangelion gospel.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. So is the idea that these books point to the truth of him being the final prophet?

[David Wood]

The books are good as gold. You can't trust the people.

[Matt Fradd]

I see.

[David Wood]

Right. But guess what? Muhammad's followers aren't in a position to read them, to check the books, so they're taking his word for it. So the original position of. The position of the Quran is not that Jews and Christians have corrupt scriptures. The position of the Quran is everyone has reliable scriptures, but these guys lie about it, they misinterpret it, they distort it. And your average person can't read, so they don't know they're being lied to.

[Matt Fradd]

And give us some proof of this. I mean, you've referenced it, but I mean, how certain are you that the Quran is saying that these scriptures haven't been perverted?

[David Wood]

That's all the Quran ever says, and it never says anything else.

[Matt Fradd]

Cool.

[David Wood]

Right? And so, I mean, you have it as clear, the clearest claims in the Quran, because there's lots of the Quran that's confusing. The clearest claims in the Quran are claims about the Jewish and Christian scriptures. So I'll just, I'll give a number of references that people can look up, some of the important ones. So Surah 2:85, this is Muhammad's talking to the Jews of Medina. So this is the first chapter revealed after Muhammad moves to Medina and he's interacting with the Jews. Now, the situation you had with the Jews in Medina is you had three Jewish tribes and two Arab tribes. Two of the Jewish tribes were allies of one Arab tribe and the other Jewish tribe was an ally of the other Arab tribe. Well, those two Arab tribes constantly fought. And so what would happen is you'd have two Arab tribes fighting and then you'd have Jews on each side and they'd end up fighting each other and then they'd be taking captives, ransom, taking captives, ransom, holding captives for ransom and so on. And the Jews, no matter which tribe they were in, they would ransom their fellow Jews if they've been taken captive. And he's like, why are you, why are you fighting them to begin with? You're not supposed to be fighting your fellow Jews and then having to. Having to ransom them and stuff. But Surah 2, verse 85, he starts off in verse 84. He's bringing up, hey, how come you guys are doing stuff that you're not supposed to do according to the Torah? Yeah, you're supposed to ransom your captives, but you shouldn't have been fighting your captives and stuff. And then after criticizing them for being hypocrites, he says, do you then believe in part of your book and not in all of it? He says, if you only believe in parts and not all of it, I'll send you to hell. And it's like, wait a minute, if you had a corrupt book, how would Allah be telling you to believe in all of it and not just parts? Because what every Muslim will tell you is you need to go to the Torah and find all the parts that agree with Islam. Yeah. Today they'll say that, yeah, you need to find all the parts that agree with Islam. Those are the parts you're supposed to believe. And wait a minute, Allah, if I do what you say, modern Muslim, telling Jews and Christians to just believe in the parts of our book that align with Islam, your God says he'll send us to hell for doing that. He says, I will send you to hell if you do not believe in all of it. Right. And you find this throughout that entire chapter. So it's Surah 2, verse. You can read all of 40 to 44 in that section. So I'm talking all about Surah 2, chapter 2, the longest chapter of the Quran, verses 40 to 44, you get to verse 85. That's where he says, if you only believe in parts of your book, if you only believe in parts of your book, I'll send you to hell. You have to believe in all of it. Then it's verse 89, it's verse 91, it's verse 97, it's 101, it's 121. Over and over and over again, he's saying that you have to believe in your book and in these passages. He's also making it the main argument, and this is throughout the Quran, the main argument for why Jews and Christians should believe in Muhammad and the Quran. And there's not even a close second. The main argument that the Quran gives for why Jews and Christians should accept Muhammad as a prophet is that he's affirming our scriptures. It's hey, I'm affirming your scriptures. Why aren't you affirming me? What's wrong with you? Now keep in mind, if Muslims are right and he's just saying, oh, the parts that agree with me, I'm affirming, well, anyone could do that one. It's already a bad argument. It's already a bad argument. If I say, hey, I affirm your scriptures, therefore you should affirm me. Every cult leader ever says that, right? Hey, I affirm your Bible. Now affirm me. Well, no thank you. Because you have all this extra stuff that contradicts our Bible, right? So understand, just me saying, hey, I affirm your book is not a good reason. It's way, way, way, way worse. It's a thousand times worse. If I'm not even affirming your book, I'm saying, hey, you should affirm my revelations because I'm affirming your book. Oh, by the way, I'm not really affirming your book. I'm just affirming the parts that agree with me. That would be the dumbest argument ever. It's the main argument of the Quran. He used this over and over and over again. Believe in Muhammad, believe in the Quran, because he's affirming your scriptures, all of it, right? So you have those kinds of passages. Those are, those are all over the place in the Quran. You have passages where Allah brags about no one being able to change his words. So Surah 6, verses 114 to 115. Surah 18, verse 27 says, Surah 18, verse 27 says,. Recite what has been revealed to you, the book of your Lord. There is none who can change his words. It's very strange if you tell me every revelation he's ever come up with before the Quran has been corrupted. Like what my friend Anthony Rogers said, imagine a heart. Imagine you need heart surgery. So you go to a heart surgeon. You start, you, you, you talk to this heart surgeon. He says, yeah, I'm the greatest heart surgeon of all time. I've never lost a patient. I've never lost a patient. 100% success rate. And then you go and check his record and every patient he's ever had died on the operating room table. It's like, are you going to trust that guy?

[Matt Fradd]

Right?

[David Wood]

It's like, that's what Allah's bragging. No one can change his words. 100% success rate. And then Muslims say, nope, every revelation he ever had before that has been corrupted. It's like, okay, why am I going to trust this one? Especially if this is the one where he's bragging that no one can change his words. So you have all these passages about no one being able to change Allah's words. And then you have where he's specifically interacting with Jews and Christians and what they're supposed to judge by. I already mentioned Surah 5. 43. Jews come to Muhammad to settle a dispute. To judge a dispute. Allah's response is, why are they coming to you when they have the Torah? And he's completely serious about that. The historical background is found in the Hadith. You have the whole story. Jews come to Muhammad, they say, hey, settle this dispute. They don't want to judge by the Torah because the judgment is stoning. Even though by that time Jews stoned, stone, that was all connected to the temple system and everything. They, so they, they're supposed to look for some other, other punishment. They're not. It's like, it's like if I ask Muslims, hey, why aren't you killing apostates in a different country? Well, we don't run that country. It's different. Different rules for if we're not in charge of the state. Right? So, well, guess what? That was true of Jews too. They didn't carry out these, they didn't carry out these punishments. So they come to Muhammad. How should we judge? And Muhammad, they put Muhammad on the judgment cushion. So that's how you signified who's judging a dispute. There's some special judgment cushion. So Muhammad sits on the cushion and they say, hey, how are you going to judge this dispute? Muhammad says, bring me the Torah and the Jews bring out the Torah. Muhammad gets off the judgment cushion, puts the Torah on the judgment cushion. This is Sunan Abu Daoud 4,449 for anyone who wants to look it up. Muhammad gets off the judgment cushion, puts the Torah on the judgment cushion, and says to the Torah, speaking directly to the Torah, I believe in you and in the one who revealed you. It's very strange to say to a corrupt book like I believe that there are true claims in the Quran. I would never say I believe in you and in the one who revealed you. Why? It's filled with a bunch of stuff that I don't believe is from God. So the fact that Muhammad is saying to a copy of the Torah, I believe in you and in the one who revealed you, it's pretty clear what he's saying. And then the Torah is the judge of their dispute.

[Matt Fradd]

And he can't read this Torah. So he doesn't realize the contradictions that exist between the Torah and the.

[David Wood]

He's just confident that this is the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God. No one can change Allah's words. You can misinterpret it, you can lie about it, but you're not changing the book. Allah has guaranteed that he protects his books, so that book has to be as good as gold. Again, it's just a few verses later, Surah 5:47, which says, Let the people of the gospel judge by what Allah hath revealed therein. It says, we're rebels against Allah, Christians are rebels against Allah if we do not judge by the Gospel. That's a very strange thing to say. If we've got a corrupt book. He should be saying, don't judge by your book. You need to judge by the Quran. And the very next verse after that, 5:48, it says that the Quran confirms the previous books and is a guardian over them. You look at context. How does the Quran guard the previous books? When you got Jews and Christians who don't want to follow their books, the Quran said, what are you doing? Get back to your books. Get back to your books. Stop avoiding your books. That's the constant criticism of Jews and Christians throughout the Quran is, we're not following our books. Never one word about. Shame on you for following your corrupt books. Never. Not one word ever.

[Matt Fradd]

Right?

[David Wood]

And so that's 5, 48. You go to later in the same passage, you get to chapter, chapter 5, verse 68. Same chapter, verse 68. In verse 68, Allah says to Muhammad, say, o people of the book, you have no ground to stand upon unless you stand fast by the Torah, the gospel, and all the revelation that has come to you from your Lord. We have no ground to stand upon unless we stand upon our scriptures. That doesn't make sense. If he thought our scriptures had been correct.

[Matt Fradd]

Got you.

[David Wood]

Gotcha. So you have tons of passages like that all over the place. And then you get down to. So the Torah and the gospel are still authoritative for Jews and Christians. We're not supposed to judge by the Quran. The Quran's not for us. The Quran's for Arabs. Right? So it's authoritative for us. Our scriptures are authoritative for us. Interestingly, they're authoritative even for Muhammad because you get to Surah 1094, and Allah says to Muhammad, if you are in doubt as to what we have revealed to you, ask those who read the book before you. The book meaning the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay?

[David Wood]

Because Christians and Jews are called the people of the book.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay?

[David Wood]

We've got a book like what book? What book, Muslims? What book does the Quran keep saying that we have that we're the people of? Right. Bible. So Muhammad is told, if you are in doubt as to what we've revealed to you, ask those who read the book before you. And it's like, wait a minute. So if Muhammad's having doubts, what's he supposed to do with these doubts? He's supposed to go to the people of the book and say, hey, I just received a revelation.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm in doubt. I don't understand it. Help me.

[David Wood]

Yeah, I just received a revelation. I'm in doubt as to whether it's from Allah. Because keep in mind, there are Muslims who say, yeah, but he never doubted. Or something like. I mean, Muhammad's first impression of his revelations was that they were demonic. He had to be talked down to that by his wife and her cousin. Where is that stated, that's in Ibn Asaq. Yeah. So you've got. Yeah. And by the way, that's early on. Muhammad, he's in a cave, he's meditating in a cave and stuff. He starts getting these revelations. He thinks he's demon possessed. He tries to hurl himself off a cliff because he doesn't want his tribe making fun of him for being demon possessed. So he tries to hurl himself off a cliff. Whatever's in the cave stops him from hurling himself off a cliff. And then he thinks a demon's chasing him and he runs home to his wife, which is weird. It's like, if I thought a demon's after me, I'm not going to my wife. I'm going as far away from my wife as possible. He goes right to his wife. Protect me, protect me. Right. So he goes to his wife and she's like, no, you're not possessed, you're a prophet. And he's like, oh, I'm a prophet. Yeah, you're a prophet.

[Matt Fradd]

That's way better.

[David Wood]

So just all Muslims of the world should know that their confidence in Islam doesn't come from Muhammad and what he thought about his revelations. It's what his wife had no idea, had no idea what he encountered in the cave. And she confirmed, nope, you're actually a prophet. You're a prophet. And so anyway, we know Muhammad had doubts along the way. But regardless whether Muhammad actually had doubts or Allah is just speaking hypothetically in case you have doubts at some point, the only way Muhammad could deal with his doubts was to make sure that his revelations line up with the revelations of the Jews and Christians. That makes zero sense if our scriptures have been corrupted, because then why would your revelations line up with corrupt scriptures? The only way your revelations would line up with corrupt scriptures, if your revelations are also corrupt. So the fact that Allah himself is making our scriptures the standard, and this is important, Muslims think the Quran is the standard over everything else. And if everything else doesn't line up with the Quran, so much for all this other stuff. That's not what the Quran says Quran, it's the previous scriptures are the standard, and the Quran is judged by this standard. And if the Quran doesn't line up with the Jewish and Christian scriptures, that so much for the Quran. That's the actual position of the Quran. And so that's what you find when you, when you go to the Muslim sources. And that's the early understanding of the previous scriptures. In fact, there's a hadith, it's jamiattermity 2653 jamiadi 2653 anyone can type that in. Find the Hadith. Muhammad is complaining that his followers are going to forget a lot of the meaning of the verses of the Quran. They're not going to understand them. They're going to be reading them, but they're not going to understand them. And he says, this is the time when knowledge is departing from my community. One of his companions sort of raises his hand saying, hey, what are you talking about? We're all reciting the Quran. How can knowledge depart from us? We've got the most recent, most up to date book, we've got the cutting edge stuff. How is knowledge going to depart from us? Muhammad says, may you be bereaved of your mother. It's like he says, I used to think that you were one of the knowledgeable people of this community. And he goes, the Jews and Christians have the Torah in the Gospel, don't they? Look at them. But I mean think about that. Hey, we have a reliable book from God. How can knowledge depart from our community? Muhammad's response is, look at the Jews and Christians. That response makes no sense. If our scriptures have been corrupted, if our scripture's been corrupted, then the reason knowledge has departed from us is because we, we have corrupted scriptures. But he's trying to explain to his followers how you can have completely reliable scriptures and be wrong and you guys are going to be wrong about the Quran. But we have the Quran. Yet the Jews and Christians have the Torah in the Gospel, don't they? So what is the actual position of Muhammad and the Quran? The actual position of Muhammad and the Quran is we have reliable scriptures from God. We just were misinterpreting them, we're misapplying them, we've forgotten the meaning of them, we ignore parts and so on. Those are the criticisms of our books. According to the Quran we have books that are good as gold and we distort them with our speech. Surah 3:78 gives the actual position, says we twist our scriptures with our tongues, we misrepresent them. So that's the actual position of Muhammad and the Quran. The problem arose because Muslims are expanding the empire in the years after Muhammad and they run in, they keep running into Jews and Christians and then they're reading the other scriptures and you have Jews and Christians who are joining the Muslims and they have their scriptures and so on and so they're going, wait a minute, this doesn't line up with the Quran at all. And then what do you do at that? Point. Muhammad put his stamp of approval on our books. Allah put his stamp of approval on our books. But our books are not what the Quran says. Well, at that time, you can't say Muhammad was just wrong and Allah didn't know what he was talking about. You get your head chopped off. So you just have to change it to, oh, your books have been corrupted, even though it's never what the Quran says. And from that time on, you've always had, Bible's been corrupted, Bible's been corrupted, Bible's been corrupted. And that went on because you very rarely have, up until recently, you very rarely have lots of Christians and so on looking into what the Muslim sources say. And so people just took for granted. Muslims are saying our book's been corrupted and that's what the Quran says. And they say, oh, okay, the Quran says our book's been corrupted. And it's just recently that people start going through it. And here's every single time the Quran mentions our previous scripture. Show us where it says one word about our scripture being corrupted. In fact, this was several years ago. I put out a challenge to Muslims. I said, the Quran mentions the gospel 12 times. Specifically, it talks about like scriptures of Christians like, you know, elsewhere and stuff like mentions gospel 12 times. Show me one verse where the Quran says anything negative about my book that has been corrupted or something like that, I'll bow down and recite the Shahada. Got tons of views. No one's ever been able to show me one single verse. In fact, in a follow up, I said, I'll go through every single verse in the Quran that mentions the Gospel. I went through every single one. Some of them are just, Christians have the gospel. So it's not telling you whether it's reliable or not. But every verse is either positive or neutral. It's either positive saying Allah affirms it and we have to judge by it and so on, and it's still as good as gold, or it's just neutral. It's just saying Christians have a gospel. There's not one word of criticism about the gospel ever. Which if Muslims are right, the Quran's saying that our book's been corrupted. Like, you guys should be able to show me a verse, right?

[Matt Fradd]

Did anyone create that challenge?

[David Wood]

I've done multiple, multiple debates now on the Islamic dilemma. And I have to keep saying, they keep arguing based on like their later commentaries. And well, this later commentator from a thousand years later, he says this and this guy says this and I'm going, I've just, I spent my Entire opening statement quoting nothing but your God and your prophet. And I have to tell the Muslims, Muslims, look at what's going on here. I'm quoting your God and your prophet. He's quoting Bart Ehrman. He's quoting this, he's quoting that, he's quoting this, he's quoting that. This debate should be over in five seconds. All you would have to do is say, chapter, such and such verse, so and so your book has been corrupted. This debate should be over in five seconds. And this guy will talk for 20 minutes. And he's quote, again, he's quoting Bart Ehrman. All these other people, it's like, how are you not getting. Your God and your prophet are on my side of this debate.

[Matt Fradd]

I could see you saying something like, I seem to have more respect for your prophet than you do.

[David Wood]

I say that all the time. My last debate I did on this, I started off and I said, this is not a debate between David Wood. Who was I debating? This is not a debate between David Wood and John Fontaine is gone. This is a debate between Team Allah and Team Dawah. Wow. On Team Allah, we have Allah, Muhammad, the Angel Gabriel, because he says he confirms our scriptures. And even the Jinn. The jinn confirm our scriptures and me. We're Team Allah and you're Team Dawah. So that's where we're at right now.

[Matt Fradd]

That's fascinating. So lay out the dilemma very succinctly for us for those who are trying to keep up.

[David Wood]

Okay. So once you understand and go through all the passages where the Quran affirms our scriptures, what your average Muslim thinks. What your average Muslim thinks is that the Quran affirms the initial inspiration of our scriptures, but not their preservation and authority. They've been corrupted at some point, in.

[Matt Fradd]

Other words, and correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that Christ received this revelation from God, taught it. It was in pristine form. But Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Paul, who are these people? These people have corrupted it. This tends to be the apologetic I hear.

[David Wood]

Yeah, okay. Yeah. Total nonsense. According to. Because here's the thing. According to the Quran, because Allah says we still have the inspired, preserved, authoritative Injeel.

[Matt Fradd]

In the seventh century.

[David Wood]

In the seventh century. And it's all the way down in Arabia.

[Matt Fradd]

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[David Wood]

Once you understand what the Quran really says, that it's affirming our scriptures. Not just the inspiration, the initial inspiration, as Muslims think, but their preservation and their continuing authority. This puts Muslims in a dilemma because we either there are two. There are only two possibilities here. Two. That's why it's a dilemma. Either we have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God or we don't.

[Matt Fradd]

Meaning the Quran, is that what you mean?

[David Wood]

No, I mean the Christian Christians. Yeah. So the Bible basically, at the very least, Torah and Gospel. Right. You could make a very good case that it's talking about the Old Testament in general and the New Testament in general. But just for argument's sake, at the very least, it's the Torah as understood by Jews and the Injeel, the Gospel as understood by Christians. And from the second century onward, if you're talking about a text, you talk about someone preaching the gospel or you talk about Jesus preaching the gospel or something like that. But if you're talking about a book that's being read, from the second century on, the four gospels were treated as a unit called the fourfold Gospel. It was treated as singular and like even Jewish rabbis would refer to the book of the Christians as the Gospel just yet.

[Matt Fradd]

Thanks.

[David Wood]

Yeah, so once you understand that, and by the way, you know, you can respond to objections for Muslims will say, no, what if it's talking about the gospel of Judas or like one of these later heretical gospels, guess what? None of those line up with Islam either. None of them. So if you think, yeah, right.

[Matt Fradd]

If you want to pick some later, worse for you.

[David Wood]

Yeah. And those are typically further away from Islam than the Christian gospels are. Right. But yeah, you will have that. Oh, it says gospel, not gospels and so on. Okay. Yeah, but the Gospels were called that from the second century on. They put them together and fourfold Gospel or just the Gospel. And if you want to say it means something else, pick one. If you want to say it means one of the four gospels, pick one. I'll run the exact same argument. If you want to say it refers to any other book, pick one. I'll run it. Right, but the four gospels are what we have that goes back to the first century. It's the only candidate for what was available in the first century. And we know it was called, it was named the fourfold Gospel or just the Gospel. Right, but any Muslim can pick anything you want. The same argument would work. But if you're just talking to Christian, this is how I talk. This is how I'll explain it to Muslims. I'm like, okay, if I go to you, Muslim, and I say, hey, I affirm the Quran. I affirm the inspiration of the Quran. I affirm the preservation of the Quran. I affirm the authority of the Quran. Judge by the Quran, you have no ground to stand upon unless you stand fast by the Quran. And so if I meant something else, then I'm just a horrible communicator. If I'm saying all that to you and you think I mean the Quran and I mean something else, I'm just a terrible communicator. And that's why normally in debates, I'll start off with a ton of Quran verses where Allah affirms that his commands are perfectly clear. And that way, if you say he means something else, but he's not clear, and that's off limits to you. You're supposed to believe that Allah is clear in his commands. And so if he's telling Jews and Christians to judge by their scriptures, he has to mean it or else he wouldn't be clear. So you could put it in another dilemma. Either Allah is clear or he's not clear. If he's clear, if he's clear, then he's affirming our scriptures. If he's not affirming our scriptures, then he's unclear and the Quran is wrong. So which way do you want the Quran to be wrong? So you can make a ton of different Islamic dilemmas, but the main way we use it is once you understand what the Quran is saying, there are two possibilities. Either Christians, you could say Jews too. Either we have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God or we don't. It's one or the other. If you say no, you've got something that was never the word of God or you've got something that's been corrupted or something like that. Okay then, then the alternative is correct. So we either have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God or we don't. Let's examine those two possibilities. If we have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, Islam is false. Because Islam contradicts what we have, Old Testament or New Testament on basic doctrines. The Quran contradicts what we have on basic doctrines. So if we have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, Islam is false. Other horn of the dilemma, if we don't have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, we've got something corrupt or something like that. If we don't have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, Islam is false. Because Muhammad and the Quran affirm the inspiration, the preservation and the authority of what we have. So if we have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, Islam is false. If we don't have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, Islam is false. Either way, Islam is false, false. Therefore Islam is false. And we love that argument because you know, I'll bring up like, you know, I'll go after Muhammad in terms of his character and having sex with a nine year old girl and taking the wife of his own adopted son and all these things that we can criticize Muhammad for and show that he's not the perfect noble character that Muslims say. But not all Christians are comfortable going after that sort of stuff. They don't want to say to their Muslim friend, hey, your prophet had sex with a nine year old girl. What's up with that? They don't want to. The Islamic dilemma is something anyone can be comfortable with and Christians don't even have to bring it up. If you're in a discussion with a Muslim and you say, hey, I believe in Jesus, I believe he died on the cross and rose from the dead, Muslim says, well, I don't believe that. And you start talking, they eventually have to say, your book's been corrupted. Anything you can show a Muslim from the Bible and say, look here, it says right here, Jesus is the son of God. In Islam, he's not the son of God, he's just a prophet. In fact, the Quran says that if you call someone the son of God, like the universe is ready to break apart. That's how serious it is that you're committing like this horrible blasphemy in this unforgivable sin of shirt. So okay, he's not the son of God over here, he's the son of God in my scripture, where your scripture's been Corrupted. Oh really? It's been corrupted? Well, why does your God say, and you can just take them through the Islamic dilemma? So it's something that will always, always, always come up in discussions between Christians and Muslims. It has to come up. If you can show anything from the Bible that contradicts the Quran, they have to say your book's been corrupted. So it's always going to come up. It's going to lead right into the Islamic dilemma. Hey, I find it interesting you just said my book's been corrupted. I was wondering if my book's been corrupted. Why your God says this here, Surah. Why does he say in Surah 5:47 that I'm supposed to judge by the gospel? Because notice if I'm supposed to judge by the gospel, well, Jesus is the son of God who died on the cross for sins and rose from the dead. But I'm not supposed to believe that. So what am I supposed to do? Oh, you're supposed to throw that out. It's been corrupted. Well, why, why does he tell me to judge by the gospel? Right. If you're telling me to judge by the Quran, the Quran tells me to judge by the Gospel. You're telling me to judge by the Quran. What am I supposed to do here? Am I supposed to listen to Allah or am I supposed to listen to you? Who speaks for Islam here? And that's where you constantly put. Your God and your Prophet are telling me one thing. You're saying the opposite. Who speaks for Islam?

[Matt Fradd]

Whoa.

[David Wood]

You guys are the ones who are making stuff up here. I'm doing what your God says. And so just very, very helpful. You don't have to be worried about hurting the Muslims feelings by attacking Muhammad or something like that. Although I, I obviously believe there's definitely a place for that. As far as regular Christians having discussions with regular Muslims, it's got to come up when you start bringing up what the Quran says about our scriptures, when you start showing them. Earlier when I was talking about this light switch moment, they've never heard this before. Put it this way, if they started hearing about it now, it's because of us, because we're popularizing the Islamic dilemma. So they're starting to find out what the Quran says about the previous scriptures. I was shocked because I was interacting with Nabeel early on. He's very knowledgeable, very good, very good arguments and stuff like that. When I started debating, it would be after debate and I'd be talking to Muslims in the crowd afterwards and they would be coming up and Say, yeah, I believe in Islam because of this. And I go, what? Where are you getting that from? And they have no idea. And I would say, in fact, the Quran says the exact opposite of what you're saying. I show them. They have no clue what I'm talking about. I'd be standing in the middle of 10 Muslims. None of them had any clue what I'm talking about. Right. So they do not know what's in their scriptures. We think they know. We think they're very knowledgeable because, you know, you see them dressing in a certain way and heading to the mosque and taking the pilgrimage. They know their practices well. They do not know the contents of their book. Like, terrible, terrible understanding of their book. And so it's kind of wide open for Christians to learn an argument, learn it well, go through these things. And you're kind of trying to force that light switch moment of, huh? I said, his book's been corrupted. I've heard that my entire life from this guy, my leader. And this Christian is showing me dozens of verses where Allah says the exact opposite of what this guy told me. Why am I listening to this guy? Why am I listening to this guy? When the Quran says something completely different, you're looking for them to go, maybe I need to not trust everything this guy says. Maybe I need to look into this for myself. Because that's when he's on his way. That's when he's on his way out of Islam.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay, then I would think if I was a Muhammadan and I was trying to find an escape hatch to this, I would say, fine, yes, that's true. The gospel was not perverted at the time of Muhammad in the seventh century. But, you know, we. But now it has been in the 8th or the 9th century. The Christians have perverted it. And that's how I get out of it. Because the gospel that Muhammad was pointing to didn't claim that Christ died on the cross. The Torah I'm pointing to perhaps didn't say that Aaron built the Golden Calf, which I think is another contradiction. Correct. In the Torah. Yeah. So why not say that?

[David Wood]

Well, that is an approach some Muslims take. And it's just. It's based on ignorance. Guess what? We have copies of the Torah and the Gospel from before. From before and after the time of Muhammad.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, yeah. What if they tried to say, well, sure, but perhaps there was two types of gospels floating around. One that was corrupt and one that wasn't. And the mainstream one that wasn't corrupt said. Didn't say that Christ died on the cross, but the corrupt one made it through history somehow. Does that make sense?

[David Wood]

Yeah. That was the most recent debate I had on the Islamic dilemma.

[Matt Fradd]

I need to watch it. I apologize, I haven't watched it. I really want to.

[David Wood]

Now the most recent debate I had on the Islamic dilemma, they kind of bit the bullet and they took that approach. Really. And his actual argument was, it's funny.

[Matt Fradd]

That I would come up with it without having thought about it much.

[David Wood]

That is funny. You came up with an argument that a Muslim apologist has spent years working on and went down in flames massively. Because during like the cross examination I kept asking him, because keep in mind he has no record of some Torah and some gospel that agree with Islam. Right. There's no record of that. And you want to argue that the gospel only refers to the gospel of Jesus and that's a book that Jesus had and not something else, not the four gospels or something like that. So I kind of. During the, during the cross examination. So his argument was the Torah was revealed to Moses and then it was lost and it was replaced by the five books of the Pentateuch that Jews have had since then. Right. So the original Torah was lost and the. It was replaced by. Not. These weren't corrupted versions, they were just replacement. It's something else. It's something different. It has, it's not from God at all. The Torah that Jews have. Right. So the real Torah revealed to Moses, that was lost and was replaced by something else. And I was just, I was waiting for him to say that because I was going to say, wait a minute. In, in the Quran it says that Jesus affirmed the Torah between his hands. Said that Jesus affirmed the Torah between his hands, which means he still has it. So I was about to jump on that. And then he says, but the Muslim says, but then it was re revealed to Jesus. The Torah was re revealed to Jesus. The Torah was lost and then it was gone for centuries. But then it was re revealed to Jesus and the Gospel was revealed to Jesus, but then it was lost. Right. Somehow both books were available. Now this is interesting because he acknowledges that the Quran nowhere says one word of criticism about the Torah and the Gospel. He's acknowledging, in other words, he's agreeing with what I just said about the Torah, about what the Quran says about the Torah and the gospel. Yes, it affirms the inspiration, preservation and continuing authority of the Torah and the gospel. He didn't reinterpret those verses the way most Muslims will. And so during the cross acts I sort of got here, here's, here's what you have to say if you want to hold that position. And most people can just hear this and go, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of in my entire life. Right. No offense to you, you just had to come up with it off the top of your head. But he wrote an entire book on this. The Muslim, Muslims debating. John Fontaine. Get the book, everyone. I encourage you to get the book. So here's the position. The Torah was revealed to Moses, it was lost. Then Jews started using this other book that was a replacement, the Pentateuch. You get down to the time of Christ, Allah re. Reveals the Torah to Jesus. So there's a reliable Torah during the time of Jesus and the reliable Injeel during the time of. Of Jesus. I asked, do we have any record of either one of these books? Do we have any manuscript of any of these books? He said, no, there's no manuscript evidence for either the Torah of Moses or the Injeel of Jesus. Not one manuscript of either one of these. Right? But somehow you get down to 7th century Medina, one little place, one tiny little place in the Arabian Peninsula, and he says they still had both. They still had the Torah of Moses and they still had the Injeel of Jesus. Why? Because Muhammad's pointing to the Torah and saying, yeah, I believe in you and the one who revealed you. So you gotta have the. That can't be the. That can't be the Pentateuch, right? That's the authoritative. If Muhammad says he believed in it, then that means they have the reliable, authoritative Torah of Moses, and it can.

[Matt Fradd]

Be Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It also cannot be Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

[David Wood]

As far as the angeal, yeah, it's the angeal of Jesus. So the book of Jesus, a book that was revealed to Jesus, that's the angel. It's not Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. So for some reason, we have no record, not one manuscript of either the Torah or the Gospel for their entire history until Medina, when they both suddenly appear, Muhammad affirms their inspiration, preservation and authority. These books are filled with prophecies about Muhammad and then they disappear without a trace. And we have not. The only evidence they existed is the Muslim sources saying that they existed. Fortunately, most people react like you. Are you crazy? Are you crazy?

[Matt Fradd]

Is this the point he actually tried to make?

[David Wood]

That's his argum. Oh, that's his argument. And so think about. But think about how bad this is, because I pointed this out. So we have no manuscript evidence that these things ever existed. No quotes from them, Nothing ever. They disappear without a trace. Then they amazingly keep in mind it's both of them. It's both these different books. And they both appear in one place in the middle of the Arabian desert, right? They both appear. Muhammad affirms their inspiration, preservation authority. These are the books that can supposedly contain all these prophecies about Muhammad. Then they're lost. So sadly, that's why we can't show the prophecies about Muhammad in the scriptures, because they were lost. And so I had to point out, it's like, do you realize the Quran gives two main arguments for Jews and Christians? I mentioned one, the main argument of the Quran by far, for why Jews and Christians are supposed to believe in Muhammad is that Muhammad and the Quran are affirming our scriptures. Affirming our scriptures. And the other argument that it gives for why Jews and Christians should believe in Muhammad is that our scriptures contain prophecies of him. So notice how this actually works, right? The Quran, Muhammad and the Quran are affirming our scriptures, and our scriptures are affirming him in return with prophecies. But Torah and Gospel, sadly, we have no record of them, which means Jews and Christians, we have no reason to believe in Muhammad, the Quran, this is why you should believe in Muhammad. And now Muslim apologists, oh, no, no, you don't have those books anymore. Okay, so we have no reason to believe in Muhammad. You just took Allah's main arguments. Allah had all eternity to say, how am I going to convince Jews and Christians to believe in Muhammad? Well, Muhammad's going to affirm their scriptures and they're going to be prophecies about Muhammad in their scriptures. And now Muslims, you don't have those scriptures. So Islam, as far as why we should believe in it, we're supposed to. We're supposed to think, oh, during that time, there were scriptures that we can't examine, that we don't have. We have no record of them ever existing. But we're supposed to believe that Allah affirms them, and therefore we're supposed to believe them. We're supposed to believe in Allah and Muhammad, and we're supposed to believe that these books contain all these prophecies about Muhammad. So Islamic apologetics is now the biggest case ever of Trust me, bro. Wow.

[Matt Fradd]

And did you know about this dilemma when you were with your friend Nabeel?

[David Wood]

I wish I had known about it. It would have been like a thousand times easier. Because when Nabil was criticized, I knew a couple passages of the Quran hadn't put it together. You can't underestimate how the power of just being told one thing all your life is. So you gotta be sympathetic to Muslims from hearing this stuff all their lives. But guess what? That even affects Christians if you hear all. If you hear the entire time you're looking into Islam, the Quran says your book's been corrupted, the Quran says your book's been corrupted. Then when you read judged by the Gospel, you're still thinking of that in light of what you've been told. Oh, there must be all these other verses that say the Bible's been corrupted or something like that. The Torah's been corrupted, the Gospel's been corrupted. There must be in there somehow it's telling you, judge by the gospel here, it must mean something else. Must mean something, means something else. And so I wasn't using it then. And so when Nabeel's questioning the reliability of the New Testament, we're just doing, like, textual criticism stuff. It's like, okay, you've heard about all these textual variants and stuff. They don't change the meaning. Examine any manuscript ever. You never get to a Jesus who wasn't the son of God, who didn't die on the cross, who didn't rise from the dead. You get nothing that affirms Islam. You need massive corruption of basic doctrines for Islam to be true. That's what you never have with textual criticism. You get, oh, this one says this word, this one says this word. This is a spelling variant. This is that you never get to anything that corrupts Christian doctrine. But that's what you need. So textual criticism does not help you. It destroys your position. But, I mean, how much easier? Because we're sitting there studying this stuff, how much easier would it have been to, what? You're saying my Bible's been corrupted? You're saying my Bible's been changed? Well, let's see what your God says here, buddy. Think it would have made things a lot easier back then. That's why I'm trying to get everyone else to learn this so they can take the easy road.

[Matt Fradd]

And it seems like you think it's as formidable as it sounds, because sometimes you come up with these cute ways to argue against the Catholic or the Protestant or the atheist, what have you. And then you realize pretty quickly, okay, the reason it's cute and memorable is because it's actually not as formidable as you were hoping that it would be. But in your experience and in the reaction you've been receiving from Muslim apologists, do you still believe it to be as strong as you thought it was when you first heard it, or are there or is the kind of the Muslim community beginning to do a better job at responding to it?

[David Wood]

No. The more they respond, the more confidence they give you that it's a good argument. Because keep in mind, you know, when we're sitting there reading it, we're sitting there reading the Quran. I can't find anything where it says our book's been corrupted at all. All I ever find is a law affirming the inspiration, preservation authority of our books. But until you. For years, Muslims were avoiding it. They only start paying attention when the Muslim, when the, like average Muslims start asking their dawah guys how to respond. Because, hey, these Christians are bringing up this argument. We don't know how to respond. They will ignore something as long as they can.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay?

[David Wood]

Because in their mind, like, take something like, take something more basic like Muhammad and Aisha.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[David Wood]

When we started criticizing Muhammad and Aisha, their tendency was to not respond. Because in their mind, as soon as you respond, now your fans are hearing about it too. Guess what? Your fans may have never heard of that. And so you don't have to. You don't have anything to explain to them. If your fans. Your fans. Yeah, exactly. Your fan. If your fans don't know about it, then they're not going to be confused by it. The moment you acknowledge it in a debate and you try to defend it, which that was my goal back in the day. I was like, I'll bring this up in a debate, Muhammad and Aisha. And I don't care if he, if he, if he defends. I mean, I want him to defend it. Right. But I don't care how good the audience thinks that his response is. I care more that the audience hears that this is an issue because then they're going to start thinking about it. Right? So there are all these issues that they're not aware of. And my goal was early debates was to get them to be aware of these things and their sources so that they start thinking. Because what I've realized is they never heard any of this stuff. They never heard any of this stuff about Muhammad. And it's like that with the Islamic dilemma. For years, they just ignored it. Or they would just say, oh, come on, these dumb Christians, they think this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's how they respond. And so fortunately, we pushed it hard enough to where their fans start going to them. Hey, we don't know how to answer this. What does this verse mean? Why does this verse, say this, and then they start making videos. But still, you know, if this is just going back, not like back to last year when we're challenging them to debates and so on, it's. I don't know what their responses are going to be once they really, really start. Ah, we're going to try and respond to this. And so you always have to wonder, are they going to come up with some great response that I haven't thought of? Maybe it could be something I'm totally missing. And so what do you do? You go in and debate. Well, guess what, I've gone in. The responses are getting dumber and dumber and dumber as we're refuting them. They're trying new things. Nothing's working. Nothing's working. So they're building everyone's confidence in the Islamic dilemma when they're trying to refute it and debate.

[Matt Fradd]

Out of all of the bad responses to the Islamic dilemma, what's the best of the bad ones?

[David Wood]

There are three kind of broad categories of responses. We just got the third one, which is, yes, it is affirming inspiration, preservation and authority of the Torah and the gospel. But it's not the Torah and the gospel you have. Right. That was kind of the third approach that someone could take. It's talking about something else, not what you have. But there are basically three approaches. One is extremely rare, but I have seen it. But I actually think some version of that would be the strongest response. But there have been Muslims who say, yes, the Quran is affirming the inspiration, preservation and authority of your scriptures. And so Muslims should be more respectful of your scriptures. Now, sadly, I've not seen these guys actually go through and try to reconcile them. Because that's what you'd have to do, right? Yeah. If we have the word of God and you have the word of God and then we have all these differences, you have to come up with a way of reconciling.

[Matt Fradd]

There's not a development of doctrine or through prophecy. It's contradiction.

[David Wood]

Yeah, it should match up. It should match up. So we'll come back to that because I think that would be the best response to say again, to say, yes, the Quran is affirming the inspiration, preservation authority of your scriptures, your Jewish and Christian scriptures. Right. The ones that you have. So that's one. I'll come back to that. Because they haven't really gone into detail about reconciling these things. Well, say what I think you would have to do to try and reconcile these things. Then at the other extreme you have, yes, the Quran is affirming the inspiration, preservation authority of the Torah and the gospel, but it's not the Torah and the gospel you have, and you actually have no record of it. It's a miraculously disappearing book. It appears and disappears. Now, the problem. So you've got.

[Matt Fradd]

That's one of the best responses.

[David Wood]

No, no, no. These are the three main responses. I think that's a terrible response because on the one hand, the benefit. They all have a benefit and a problem. The benefit of that is you don't have to reinterpret all these verses of the Quran which affirm our books. You grant all of those. You don't have to twist your scriptures at all. But now you're appealing to sort of ghost texts, phantom texts that appear when necessary and disappear and you have no record of them. You don't have a fragment of a manuscript. You don't have a translation. You have nothing to suggest that these things ever existed. You just need that to. To avoid the Islamic dilemma. Right, so you're saying that all these things exist that we have no evidence of. So again, it's a massive. Trust me, bro, the main position, the main position that Muslims have been using is the Quran isn't affirming the inspiration preservation authority of your scriptures, it's affirming the inspiration. But. And then they have to reinterpret all these verses. But you're talking dozens and dozens of verses that they have to reinterpret. Problem there is again, Allah claims to be clear. So when he says, if you don't believe, if you only believe in parts of your book and not in all of it, he'll send you to hell. Oh, what he's really saying there is if you don't believe in the parts that agree with this. What are you talking about? When he says Jews don't need Muhammad because they have the Torah, what he really means is they'll say, oh, he's just being sarcastic there. What Allah really means when he tells Christians to judge by the gospel is, is go to the Quran, find what the Quran says, then go back to the gospel, take out all the parts that don't agree with the Quran and then judge by what's left. Well, that wouldn't be judging by the gospel. That would be judging by the Quran. That would be judging. I'm not judging by the gospel. That would be judging the gospel by the Quran. Right. So they'll try. They have to reinterpret everything, but they have to reinterpret dozens and dozens of Quran verses. And so that's just what they've been locked into because that's the most consistent with what they've been taught all their lives. So that's what they're stuck to now. And right now, all we do is they say something, we quote the Quran, and then they say what it really means is. And we go, well, why didn't Allah say. Did Allah lack the ability to say it like that? How come Allah, in his perfect speech can say it this way, which sounds like it's agreeing with me, and you, off the top of your head, can say what he really meant? Doesn't that mean you are a clearer communicator than Allah? So are you greater than Allah? Allah says he's the best communicator ever. You're saying you can say what he really means.

[Matt Fradd]

Now, I would imagine at this point, many, many Muslims would say, well, you don't actually speak Arabic. And if you did speak Arabic, there's.

[David Wood]

Plenty of Arabic speakers on our side. In fact, usually when I'm. Usually when I'm talking, not when I'm debating, but usually when we're talking, doing live streams, I got Jai and Doc. They're fluent in Arabic, and I'm sitting right with me.

[Matt Fradd]

Who do you have?

[David Wood]

Jai? Jai, Apologetics and Doc. They're both fluent Arabic speakers and stuff. They're the ones burnt. They're the ones who completely burn them up on this.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I'm just trying to think how they would respond, because I would imagine they do get a lot of people who say that. You don't.

[David Wood]

It doesn't work. You're kind of a joke if you just say, well, you don't know Arabic. And it's like. Because it's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of time before I. Okay, yeah, he says, you don't know Arabic. Break down the Arabic. They get crushed on the Arabic because they'll be the ones lying about the Arabic. Well, in Arabic, it says this. And then, okay, let's pull up all the lexicons and so on and all your commentaries. That's not what it says. You liar. And they get exposed as liars. And so what you really end up with is for people who take that middle position, which is again, the main position. Oh, what Allah really means here is the opposite of what he says. What he really means here is, oh, he's just being sarcastic. He didn't really mean what he says. They're constantly saying, allah doesn't mean what he says. But, oh, in Arabic, it means something different. That's another version of that. And they can catch someone off guard and just make stuff up, but then you expose them and you expose them as misrepresenting the text. What you do at that point is every single thing the Quran actually condemns Jews and Christians for doing. Distorting the scriptures with our speech, twisting the scriptures, misrepresenting the scriptures. That's what you guys are doing right now. And Allah says he'll send us to hell for doing that with our book. So where's that leave you? I start calling him apostates. I said, you guys are apostates according to the Quran because of the way you're treating Allah. So that's kind of where we go. That's where we are now. We're still. It's like people are catching on. But you've got 2 billion Muslims. It takes some time to really for this to filter down to Muslims everywhere. So that's kind of what we're in the. But there's nothing that works. Appealing to the Arabic doesn't work. Just constantly saying Allah means the opposite of what he says doesn't work. So none of this is working. It's just how do we convey it to more and more people?

[Matt Fradd]

So have you been excited then to see more and more Christian apologists using this?

[David Wood]

Oh, yeah. No, it's awesome. Because if you go back like five or six years, there were like three or four of us using this argument and we've been doing it for a while and now it's just catching on to where everyone's using it all over the place.

[Matt Fradd]

What happened? What sparked the kind of revival of this argument? Was it a recent debate you had or somebody else had that brought this into the mainstream? And by the mainstream, I mean the YouTube mainstream.

[David Wood]

It was just the beginning of the year. I just said, hey, this is going to be the year of the Islamic dilemma. We're all going to push the Islamic dilemma. I didn't know if everyone's going to go along with me, but everyone did. It was awesome.

[Matt Fradd]

And when you say we, who do you. Who are you referring to?

[David Wood]

Other Christian apologists. I said, hey. And I contacted some Christian apologists inspiring philosophy and God logic. And all these guys said, hey, let's all push the Islamic dilemma really hard this year. And so we started just doing live streams on it over on God Logic's channel. We just over and over again we did open call in any Muslim who wants to call in and challenge us on the Islamic dilemma. And the same thing would happen over and over again. They just call in, they think they got a response. We go through it, we look at it, we show them. You have no idea. You just brought up this verse because you think it agrees with you. Read what he says right before and read what he says right after it. What's going on here? Are you correct? Is that the correct interpretation? They're just getting crushed. So we've been doing that. We've had multiple debates. Those debates have always gone extremely well in our favor. That's what's been going on all year and that's how it's kind of been becoming more and more popular. And now almost everyone is using it. But just going back to why I said the first response I think is best, namely, yes, the Quran is affirming the inspiration, preservation and authority of the Bible that you have. Again, I haven't seen Muslims flesh that out, but I think that would be the only defensible route it would go something like this. The Quran is affirming these other scriptures. And therefore instead of them, just instead of us attacking those other scriptures, we have to try and harmonize them. We have to try and harmonize them. And some, some issues. That's actually, you can actually do that. Like almost all Muslims believe that the Quran is saying Jesus didn't die by crucifixion. It's one verse. It's one verse, Surah 4, verse 157. That sounds like it's saying Jesus didn't die by crucifixion. In context, it's a criticism of Jews who are bragging that they had exposed Jesus as a false prophet by killing and crucifying him. And Allah's response is they killed him not nor crucified him. They'll say, see, Jesus didn't die by crucifixion. Well, there's always been a minority Muslim position that says that's not the Quran isn't denying Jesus crucifixion. It's not denying that. What it's saying is you didn't get the victory over him by doing that. You didn't expose him, because this was all part of Allah's plan. And you even have other passages of the Quran. Surah 3,55 in the Arabic sounds like it's saying Jesus died. Right? It says Allah took his soul away. If you look at English, most English translations will just say Allah took him to himself and it's actually took his soul away. Which sounds like he died, right? That sounds like he died, yeah. Which is interesting because these passages also Say Allah raised him to himself. So if Allah, if he died, Allah took his soul away, then Allah raised him. It sounds like he sounds like death and resurrection, which would fit very well. Anyway, the point is, you've always had Muslims. You've always had Muslims who understood 4,157 differently. Like, there are Muslims who will say, they'll also quote the Quran where it says, it's talking about a battle. It's talking about the battle of Badr. And it says, and Muslims were saying, and we killed this guy. It's like, no, you didn't kill him. Allah did. Don't say you killed him. So you have passages like that where don't say you did it because it's actually Allah doing it through you. Therefore you don't say you did it. Well, if Jews are saying we killed him and Allah is saying, well, this is no, that was part of my plan, then you can kind of see it. But anyway, so then a lot of.

[Matt Fradd]

Muslims might be in the awkward position of having to adopt something that a minority of Muslims have always held, but that goes against the mainstream.

[David Wood]

Yeah, because if you're saying, hey, there's a minority Muslim position, I'll grant you 4, 157, if you ignore everything else, it does sound like it's saying, Jesus didn't die by crucifixion. That's what it sounds like. There are other things in the Quran, even according to Muslims, which makes you go, well, maybe that's not what it means. Maybe that's not what it means. But if you're saying, hey, the previous scriptures are actually reliable scriptures, then what you would say is, okay, the Gospel is completely 100% clear on Jesus dying by crucifixion. Therefore, we have to interpret that one verse and say, that's not denying. So I think you could do something like that. It gets a little more difficult when you're talking about like Son of God stuff. Right. Because there, the Quran is crystal clear and the Gospel is crystal clear. So how do you reconcile things like that? And the only way I can see around that is I mentioned Surah 5:48 earlier. So again, 5:43 Jews, why are you coming to Muhammad? You've got the Torah, you're supposed to judge by the Torah. 5:47 Christians, you judge by the gospel, 5:48, Allah sent the Quran, confirming the previous scriptures and as a guardian over them. How is it a guardian in context? Well, when Jews and Christians try to avoid their scriptures or distort them, the Quran says, don't do that. Stop doing that. Go with your scriptures, judge by your scriptures. That's how the Quran is guarding them. But in the rest of that verse it says that Allah revealed a law, a different law to different groups in order to keep them separate groups so that they wouldn't be one group. Because Allah wants different groups with different laws to keep them different groups so that different groups will compete with each other in good works. So that we'll be saying, hey, our group is doing better works than you. And you'll say, well, we'll do better too. And we're all competing to see who can do the best works. But there it says Allah revealed different things to different groups specifically to keep them from becoming one big group. And if you take that and combine it with Allah revealed all these scriptures and yes, we have some differences in these scriptures. I think you'd have to get. And again, this is not, I don't think this is a great position. I think it's the best of the alternatives would be, yeah, Allah revealed this to Christians and said that Jesus is the son of God and so on, because he wanted the Christians to be a completely separate group from the Muslims and to never become one group so that you'd all have these separate groups. And so you just have to say, yeah, Allah is revealing different things to different groups specifically to keep them all being different groups so they can compete with each other in good works. I don't think that's a great response.

[Matt Fradd]

Well then the idea.

[David Wood]

I think it's a massively better response than the alternatives.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Well then that would be an argument against the Mohammedans trying to take over Christian nations and Jewish nations with the Jewish nation. Right. Wouldn't it?

[David Wood]

Yeah, if it's supposed to stay separate. Yeah, you'd have some other things because it does say that again. When Muhammad found out that the Jews and Christians weren't confirming his scriptures and so on and were denying him, then it's, oh, they're actually evil. They're actually evil. They know I'm in their books and they're denying it and that's why I have to subjugate them all. And so what you'd have to say is, hey, once Muslims are acknowledging our scriptures and that we have differences, then Christians you can acknowledge, hey, we're fine with your scriptures as long as you're acknowledging our scriptures and then you don't have to subjugate us and we'll all just compete to see who can do the best works or something like that. I don't think this fits together very well because I don't believe in Muhammad and I don't believe this is actually from God. I've said this repeatedly when people are asking me about what I think is the best position. If I say, And I would say something like, okay, if for some reason, God forbid, Muslims were to give me some great argument for why Muhammad is a prophet and the Quran is the word of God, if I somehow became convinced of that and I thought, huh, the Quran is the word of God, Muhammad was a true prophet. I couldn't suddenly ignore what I know the Quran says about the previous scriptures. I couldn't do that. So what would I do? What would I have to do as a Muslim? Well, I'd have to do what I just said. I'm not just going to reinterpret everything Allah says that I don't like. I can't do it. I can't say, well, you've got dozens and dozens of verses affirming the scriptures, but I'm going to say they're all corrupted and Allah means something different. I would have more respect for Allah than that. Right. So I can't do that. And I'm not going to say, well, there's this phantom book that Allah firmed that appeared and disappeared and stuff like that. I can't say that. That's just beyond ridiculous. I mean, I actually had to say it to John Fontaine. So wait a minute, so if the Torah, I mean, if the angel made it to 7th century Arabia, then the angel existed in the 1st century, the 2nd century, the 3rd century, the 4th century, the 5th century, the 6th century, the 7th century, all the way down into some weird little city in Arabia without a single mention of it anywhere. Don't you think a book from Jesus would kind of been important to Christians, that we would have been talking about it and translating it?

[Matt Fradd]

So what did he say?

[David Wood]

No, it's just. He can't acknowledge it doesn't matter. This is, this position. It just. He was fine. He was fine with there being no mention of this anywhere. And then the Torah, of course, the Torah is even worse because now you've got it for like 2000 years and it's appearing and disappearing and being revealed. Whenever his source says that it was existed during this time, okay, it was re revealed during that time, then it was lost again. So it's. It exists then it doesn't exist. And it exists and it doesn't exist. And then in 7th century Medina, it exists again. So anyway, the point is, I can never acknowledge that. And so if for some reason I concluded that the Quran is the word of God, I'd have to say, okay, the Quran is the word of God, but it's also affirming these scriptures as the word of God. And therefore the only thing I can do is harmonize. And when I can't harmonize, I have to say Allah has a reason for making these not harmonize. And it must be the only explanation I can think of is548 for why these wouldn't be able to be harmonized. And so I'd have to believe something along those lines, which, it's hard, but it fits better than everything else, even though it's a problem.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow, that's fascinating. Okay, using going from the dilemma to the trilemma, using Lewis's trilemma. But on Muhammad, I guess we could say that Muhammad was either a prophet, liar or lunatic. Perhaps we could say he was possessed. So that might be a quadrillemma, I don't know. But what would you say he is? Given your research on him.

[David Wood]

I think you could make a case for several of those. Except prophet. Except true Prophet. I think you can make a good case for liar. Not with everything, because I mean, I apply the same standard to everyone. When Muslims say Paul was a liar, it's like Paul was willing to endure torture and eventually death for what he's proclaiming. Same with a bunch of the apostles and so on. So I have to take them seriously that they weren't lying. Liars generally make poor martyrs. So when Muhammad's out, you know, when he's being persecuted or risking death in battle and stuff like that, it's like he seems to believe that he's a prophet and so I can't just say he's lying the entire time. There are certain instances, because you have a bunch of them, where Muhammad receives revelations that seem to have no purpose other than giving him something that he wants. Like, so I mentioned Muhammad and Aisha. So Muhammad married this girl when she's six and is based on a revelation, right? So he said he had a dream about Allah giving this six year old girl to him as a gift. Right? So maybe he did. Right. If I had a dream about a six year old girl, I wanted to go see a psychiatrist. I wouldn't think, oh, I guess she's mine, right? So there's that. So maybe you think, okay, maybe he did have a dream about her and he took it as a revelation when Muhammad took the wife of his own adopted son. So Muhammad originally had an adopted son named Zayed and Zayed married one of the most beautiful women there were, Zaynab. And then Muhammad goes to visit his adopted son one day and sees Zaynab almost naked. She was wearing basically like a nightie. And then he walks away praising Allah because he concluded that since he desired her, Allah was revealing that she's going to be his. So Zayd divorces her so that Muhammad could have her. So Muhammad has an adopted son. Adopted son has a beautiful wife. Muhammad sees her almost naked, gets attracted to her, concludes that she's for him. His adopted son divorces her specifically so that Muhammad could have her. But then Muhammad gives the reason from Allah because everyone starts saying, you can't take the wife of your own adopted son. They regarded that as the same as incest basically back then. So they regard that as like incest. Then Allah has to explain why he told Muhammad to do that. Muhammad, it's not me. Allah ordered me to do that.

[Matt Fradd]

I didn't even want to.

[David Wood]

Yeah, yeah, I had to have her because of Allah. And Allah explains it. Anyone who wants to read it? Surah 33, verse 37 of the Quran. I kid you not. Allah says, the reason I needed you, Muhammad, to marry the wife of your own adopted son is because other people are wondering if they can marry the wives of their adopted sons. And I need them to know it's okay. Ah, okay. Now how many people do you know of ever in history who really struggled? Can I take the wife of my own adopted son or not? I don't know. I need an explanation for God from God. Yeah. So that's just silly for multiple reasons. Now suppose it was Allah was really Allah looks around, says, wow, there's all these guys wondering if they can take the wives of their own adopted sons out there. What am I going to do? I know I'll have Muhammad marry the wife of his own adopted son and then they'll know. Well, couldn't you have just revealed that like in the Quran? Just said, okay, in case anyone's wondering whether you can take the wife of your own adopted son, yes, you can. Why do you need Muhammad to do it? You don't need Muhammad to do. Everything that you're saying is okay. You can just say it in the Quran. So you didn't need that. That's the point. One, it's an absurd. I've never heard of anyone wrestling with that. Two, even if there were, Muhammad wouldn't need to do it. Allah could just reveal it. But three, there's a worse problem also. Also in Surah 33. Since people are accusing Muhammad of incest over this, verses 4 to 5 of Surah 33, Allah abolishes adoption. Oh, so think about this. Adoption is abolished in Islam. You can take care of an orphan in Islam, you cannot adopt an orphan into your family. The orphan does not become part of your family. So wait a minute. He said so think about. He's getting it right.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, it's like time in, I can marry her, time out. We're not doing that anymore.

[David Wood]

Time back again. So that's the point. Allah is saying, muhammad, you have to do this so that everyone understands it's okay. Oh, by the way, it's never a situation that's going to arise again because there's going to be no more adopted sons. It's like, okay, this, this is just completely idiotic at this point. Right? Those are the sorts of things where it looks like Muhammad's just trying to justify every perverted desire that pops into his head. And there's plenty more. Like the Quran says Muslims can marry up to four women. Muhammad had at least nine wives at one time. Why? Allah gave him a special revelation. Surah 33, 50. Okay, you get more. Sounds awfully convenient, right? That the one receiving the revelations is getting all these special privileges. I'll give you another one. Surah 66, 1 2. It just says that Muhammad is allowed. Muhammad is allowed to break his oath. Go ahead and break your oath. The historical background is Muhammad. It was understood that Muhammad can have sex with his slave girls. That was understood. Muhammad's wives didn't want it happening in their beds. Right? You go somewhere else. You go somewhere else and have sex with your slave girl. Anyway, Muhammad's wife, Hafsa goes out to run some errands. He takes his slave girl, Mary the copter, Christian girl. Muhammad takes his slave girl, Mary the Copt, into Hafsa's bed, starts having sex with Mary the Copt in Hafsa's bed. Hafsa comes home early, catches Muhammad in bed with his slave in her bed, in Hafsa's bed with his slave girl. She flips out. What are you doing? Muhammad's just going, don't tell the other wives, don't tell Aisha. They're all going to. They're all going to complain to me. She goes, tells everyone, right? She goes, tells all the wives, all the wives around here. You're doing this in our beds. You're having sex with. I mean, just rolling around with your slave girl, getting your fluids all over her. Fluids, your fluids all over Our beds is disgusting. Right? So Muhammad, in order to calm all his wives down, says, I swear by Allah, I will never have sex with that slave girl again. And that calms his wives down. Okay. He's saying he's never going to do it again. Okay. Then he goes back to having sex with her. It's Allah gave me a revelation saying I could break that oath.

[Matt Fradd]

Where is this found?

[David Wood]

This is Surah 661 and 2. I don't believe that.

[Matt Fradd]

This is in the Quran.

[David Wood]

Yeah. So I can believe it. You don't. You don't understand it. From Surah 66 verses 1 to, it just says, muhammad can break his oath because Allah didn't command him to make that oath. Allah says, I didn't command you to make that oath.

[Matt Fradd]

He put that on me.

[David Wood]

Yeah, I didn't command you to make that oath. You can go to Tafsir Jalalayn and you can go to Sunan An Nasai, which give the historical background.

[Matt Fradd]

Whoa.

[David Wood]

But. So you have. Right there. But think about this. Think about the reasoning, Muhammad, I didn't order you to make that oath so you can go ahead and break it. How many oaths that have ever been taken were actually commanded by God?

[Matt Fradd]

Few.

[David Wood]

So all oaths can be. You can swear by Allah all day and all night. Allah didn't command me to say it, so I can. I can go ahead and break that oath. It's like there are these weird. There's these weird issues. So anyway, that's what I'm talking about when I say some of this sounds way, way, way massively too convenient. Muhammad's getting all these revelations, so you can imagine this guy being a liar, like just making stuff up. I've got a religion now. I can say whatever I want. So that's the point. Some of it sounds like a guy who's just making up revelations to get whatever he wants and to dupe people. But there's other, you know, other indications where he sounds like he really believes that he's a prophet and you have reasons to think that he's really a prophet. So you could interpret that as he really thinks he's a prophet, but he feels comfortable making things up as well because he's so special and therefore he can, you know, he knows he can get away with it or just his desires so massively influenced him that he would think he's receiving revelation saying that he could do these things. Point is, I don't know. So you have some indication. You have a bunch of indications that suggest he really believed He's a prophet. You have all these things where it's like this sounds like an obvious false prophet making things up to just give himself whatever he wants. The demonic stuff like was he just possessed or something? Again, his first impression was that he was demon possessed. He was possessed by something and he became suicidal, tried to hurl himself off a cliff for this. So you could say sometimes your first impression is the correct one. So you could think he's actually demon possessed. And you have some other indications. You have what are called the Satanic Verses. That's when Muhammad, this was early on, but Muhammad was upset that his tribe didn't convert to Islam and he was longing for a revelation that would convince his tribe to convert. Eventually he got the revelation he was looking for. It said that Muslims can pray to three pagan goddesses, Allat, Aluza and Manat. They were the gods of his tribe, goddesses of his tribe. You can pray to Allat, Aluza and Manat. And the idea was they're not the main God, but they were called the exalted cranes. Like in the bird sense, they were the exalted cranes. The idea was they'll carry your prayers up to Allah so you can pray to them as intercessors and they'll carry your prayers up to Allah. So Muhammad receives these revelations, he delivers the revelations to his followers. He bows down in honor of the revelation saying we can all now pray to pagan goddesses. His followers bow down and then his entire tribe bows down too. Wow, he's praised our goddesses. And so you have this. Everyone's good and everyone's on the same page. Except now he's a polytheist, right?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[David Wood]

So Muhammad comes back a little later and says, oh, Gabriel informed me that that revelation come from Allah. That revelation came from Satan. Satan tricked me into receiving that revelation which opens so many different cans of worms. One Wait. Muhammad couldn't tell the difference between a revelation from God and a revelation from Satan. I don't trust anything you say. Now if you can't tell the difference between God and Satan when you're receiving your revelation and Satan can actually deliver revelations to you, you got problems. I'm not trusting anything you said.

[Matt Fradd]

Maybe it was God who did give you the revelation and then Satan appeared and appeared form that you thought was God and told you he tricked you. But yep, crikey.

[David Wood]

And by the way, little side note, I mean this, that leads to all kinds of other problems. Like since the Quran affirms the Torah and their Muslims favorite passage from The Torah is Deuteronomy 18:18, which they view as a prophecy about Muhammad. God says that he's going to send a prophet like Moses. And they say, ah, Muhammad is a prophet like Moses, this must be him. Just two verses after that. Deuteronomy 18:18 20 says that if it gives two criteria for spotting a false prophet. If someone delivers a revelation that doesn't come from God or speaks in the names of other gods, that prophet shall die would have been a death sentence. So if Muhammad had delivered the Satanic verses during the time of Moses, Moses would have had him executed for promoting polytheism and for delivering something that didn't actually come from God. So you have all those kinds of issues. But then Muhammad's response was, oops, the devil made me do it. And then he rejected that. And so, but anyway, that was part of the Quran that was revealed as part of the Quran. Then they had to take that part out because it was, it was from, it was from Satan. So you have that, you have. There was a time for between six months and two years. Muslim sources aren't clear on how long it took, but between six months and two years, Muhammad was having delusional thoughts and false beliefs and was coming back and saying he did stuff. And people were like, no, what are you talking about? You didn't do any of that. And then later on he came back and said that someone had cast a magic spell on him that was giving him these delusional thoughts and false beliefs. And I'm sitting there thinking, you're a prophet and someone can take you out by getting a hair from your hairbrush and casting a spell. It's pretty, pretty wild. And then you just look at how he received his revelation. Let's talk about his face turning red and he would start sweating profusely, even if it was cold and stuff like this. He would fall over on the ground and stuff. It sounds like something out of an exorcist movie. So you've got all sorts of things you can point to as far as demonic influence. You have all sorts of things you can point to as far as him just coming up with stuff out of his own mind. And you've got the idea that he believed he was a prophet. No good evidence for that. But he's just deluded or insane by the way. He's accused of that over and over again. Allah has to repeatedly respond, you're not a madman, you're not a madman, you're not who, what prophet has to be told over and over again you're not crazy. You're not crazy. You're not crazy because everyone around him was saying he's crazy anyway. So as far as the, as far as the quadrilemma, you definitely have a case that Muhammad is just using religion to get what he wants. For some of the stuff you have, Muhammad was just insane. And again, you even have that from the Quran. But people are accusing him. You're just, you're nuts, man. Dude, you are nuts. And then of course that some of this had a demonic origin with, you know, Muhammad thinking that and magic spell and all this stuff. The thing you don't really have is evidence that he's a true prophet. The evidence that he's a true prophet is he's firming our scriptures which contradict his. What's going on there for those in the back?

[Matt Fradd]

Is there, speaking of evidence, is there evidence to think that Muhammad was a pedophile?

[David Wood]

Well, if you consider having sex with a prepubescent 9 year old girl pedophilia, which would be straight out of the, the DSM 5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Problems. Yeah, being sexually attracted to a prepubescent girl would be.

[Matt Fradd]

And then engaging in that.

[David Wood]

Yeah. And so you do have distinctions there. Because I read it, we actually went through it for a discussion. But yes, if you are sexually attracted to a prepubescent girl, girl or boy, they would consider you to have pedophilic disorder. But they have various distinctions because there are qualifiers like is it, are you just attracted to prepubescent girls or boys? And Muhammad wasn't. He would have sex with other women and stuff. So they would call it non exclusive pedophilic disorder. And there are other qualifiers like some people are attracted to just relatives and so there's an incestuous variant of it and stuff like that. But yeah, you would say that Muhammad had a. Muhammad suffered from non exclusive pedophilic disorder according to today's standard standards today.

[Matt Fradd]

And yet it's been surprising to see Muhammadan apologists trying to defend pedophilia.

[David Wood]

Yeah, that's recent too.

[Matt Fradd]

If you go, you can't make this stuff up. I would have thought that was a Christian trying to slander them. But no, they're doing that.

[David Wood]

By the way, that's what I thought. I first heard about it. I was in prison when I first heard about that. And I heard because a Christian had read it in Voice of the Martyrs when it was talking about the problem with abuse of minors and minor marriage in various places. And they Said that the reason they can't get around this in Islam or make a law against it is because Muhammad had sex with a nine year old girl. And I was just thinking, you're crazy, man. There's no way Muhammad had sex with a nine year old girl. I don't believe your magazine anymore. And it wasn't until I was having discussions with Nabil and I started looking this stuff up and it's all over the place. It's all over. There's like over 200 passages in their sources talking about Muhammad having sex with a nine year old girl. And so I only started bringing that up not to be mean, but it was because back then, and people don't even, fortunately people don't even have to. People don't realize what arguments have been so destroyed that they don't even hear them anymore. Back then you're talking 2003, 2004. One of the most common arguments for Islam was Muhammad's character is so perfect in every single way that there's no other explanation other than he was. He's a divine prophet. There's no other explanation. And so you start finding this stuff out and it's like, okay, what about him having sex with a nine year old girl? How's that not a problem? Back then you were just called a liar. Liar. That's not okay. Well, here's the source. Oh yeah, but there are all these other sources. And so it was years of them lying. So first they just said it's not true. Christians are making this up. Then once you actually started showing them sources, then it was okay, yes, there are some sources, but the sources are all over the place. It says other. In other passages it says she was much older. Got to the point where several years ago I was in a debate with a Muslim and he was saying, oh yeah, so David's quoted. And I quoted like two dozen passages in my opening statement about Muhammad having sex with a nine year old girl. This guy was saying, no, it never happened. She was much older. And he was going, yeah, but, yeah, so you have those passages, but you have all these other passages. And I just start going, give me one, give me one passage that says she was older. Give me one passage that says she was 18. 1. And he's going, yeah, but there are so many. Yeah, one. And he's going, oh, look at him saying that. And I start going to the audience, guys, if he's saying there's a different age in the Muslim sources, is it too much for me to ask for one? Is it Too much to ask for one source that says anything he's saying and he can never give one because there isn't one. Wow. So again it's a. When you hear people, when you hear Muslims now defending sex with minors, this is the standard position now defending sex with little girls and saying it's fine. The reason is we force them into not lying. And then once everyone understands Muhammad had sex with a nine year old girl, you can't say, then they double down.

[Matt Fradd]

On it, some of them.

[David Wood]

So you have to defend it.

[Matt Fradd]

It's going to be interesting to see what the Islamic dilemma as you laid it out is going to force Muslims to do over the next 10 years, 20 years.

[David Wood]

Yeah, that's what we want to see. I'm interested myself.

[Matt Fradd]

All right, so the Islamic dilemma may show. Seems to show Islam to be false. Doesn't prove Christianity to be true though, right?

[David Wood]

That's correct. An atheist could run that argument.

[Matt Fradd]

Right?

[David Wood]

An atheist could run that argument from just the Christian scriptures, like I said. In other words, an atheist could say, hey, I don't believe in the Christian scriptures. But your scriptures contradict the Christian scriptures while affirming their inspiration, preservation, authority and therefore your religion self destructs. You can say that without ever believing in the Christian scriptures at all.

[Matt Fradd]

So why are you a Christian?

[David Wood]

Well, not because of the Islamic dilemma. Yeah, no, I mean I grew up as an atheist. I wasn't thinking of that when I was young. It was just, it was never an issue when I grew up. So the only time I ever encountered anything Christian was if I would visit my grandmother or something like that. That would be it. It never came up with my mom, it never came up with my dad until, until I was older and I actually realized I was an atheist. And then we occasionally talk about something. So any. Anyways, it's not an issue for my early life.

[Matt Fradd]

I didn't go to church or anything.

[David Wood]

If I visited my grandmother or my aunts, but not my mom or dad or any. And again never. It was never a topic. And when I visited, if I was like at my aunt's and she took me to church, then I would basically go in there and I would sit beside this little clock and I would stare at the clock the entire time waiting for it over. Cause they would have like donuts and brownies afterwards and that was cool, but nothing I ever took seriously. And I don't remember how old I was. I know I was a complete mocker by the time I was like 14. So it was probably a couple years before that before I realized I was in atheist. And yeah, I became a total mocker. By the time I was like in high school, I was like that as well.

[Matt Fradd]

Had you heard the term atheist at that point or did you just decide you didn't believe in God and then later find out that that's what that meant? Atheist.

[David Wood]

Yeah, at some point. Again, most of my early life was not even thinking about it. I'm guessing I was around 12 or something like that when I was like, I don't believe in any of this stuff. And then 14 by the time I was openly mocking. Openly mocking people and so on. And. Yep, so that was that up until I ended up in, ended up in jail. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Now this might surprise you. I know some of the facts there, but I don't actually. I'd love to hear the story if you're willing to tell it. And so how you got to prison and then when you were in prison, how you came to Christ.

[David Wood]

Yeah. So it was never kind of an issue. I didn't realize it when I was young, but I had, I was eventually, when I was 18, diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. So it's more because when I tell my background story, atheists will go, why are you saying that atheists are like this? I'm not saying atheists are like this. This is how I was. I wasn't just an atheist. I was an atheist with antisocial personality disorder. The bad combination. Bad combination because you're going to end up, you're going to end up hurting a lot of people along the way. But I would love, Can I ask.

[Matt Fradd]

More about that or is that a sensitive topic? So how did you decide or discover that you had this quote unquote, and then when did you realize you were different from other people who didn't have it?

[David Wood]

I, I realized when I was probably five, when I was five and six, like the, the five, the five to seven year range. That's when I was realizing I was different from everyone else. I didn't know what any social personality disorder was. People need to be educated on this because I'll tell you from experience, if you have antisocial personality disorder, which you wouldn't even have been diagnosed with it back then, they won't diagnose you until you're an adult. They'll diagnose you with like conduct disorder or something like that. But they don't like putting a label on young people. But you do have the symptoms when you're young. But I started noticing and the example, because this is the example I give, because this is when it first, like, hit me. It was. I had a dog as long as I can remember. So from. From before I could form memories and stuff, I had this little dog named Goliath. And, you know, I was always hanging out with. Always hanging out with Goliath, running around, doing things with Goliath and so on. And then I was over at a friend's house one day, and my mom gets a phone call to tell me that Goliath had been run over by a bus. And she. She turned to me with tears in her eyes, and she. She said, goliath's been hit by a bus. And, like, the first thought in my head was, so what? It's a dog. But I'm looking at my mom going, why is she crying? She hated my dog. She hated that dog. Like, why is she crying over this? And I thought there was something wrong with my mom. Like, did you think that dog was gonna live forever? Like, what? What's what? And why? Why would you care? Like, what's going on here? So I was, like, confused, and I thought there was something weird with my mom. It wasn't till, like, you know, as time went on, I saw other people reacting this way, and I was like, wait, everyone's, like, upset about, like, animals die. What you guys not know? Do you not know about death? What's, like, what's wrong with you? And I remember I was over. We actually lived here, and we had, like, a. This was like, two years later. And we lived in, like, a community house. There was a bunch of people living there, and we all had our dog. And once the dog got hit by a car and then was in a cast for a while, and then a while later, the dog got killed by a car. But these were all the tough kids. This is, like, a tough kid. These were, like, the tough kids. Everyone in the house had drugs. Everyone. Everyone in the house did drugs and stuff like this. The kids in this house were like a gang. They were super tough. They were older than me, and they're all crying over this. They're crying over this dog, too. And I walked in, and they all got their heads down and their hands and stuff like this. And they told me. And at that point, I was like, okay, now I need to fit in. So. But I was trying to figure out how to fit in. So I was either 6 or 7 at this time. But for some reason, I thought it was, like, the angle of your head that signified. So I copied the angle of their head, and I Sort of leaned forward like this. And I got my head at the same angle, but I'm looking around, making sure I'm doing it right. And all of a sudden, one of them kid named Todd, he goes, dave, don't even care. And he was like, well, yeah, he's right, but it's a stupid dog. Right? But so anyway, I learned it's more than just this head tilt. It's something more than that. So anyway, over time, you, you know, you start just mimicking other people's reactions to things, but you don't know what antisocial personality disorder is. You just notice over time, everyone reacts in a certain way, and I'm the one who doesn't. I don't have. I'm not reacting to any of these things. And is it just sad things or.

[Matt Fradd]

Is it also, you know, empathizing with other people's joy as well? Or is it. Could you not understand why people were getting happy and excited?

[David Wood]

There's nothing that wouldn't. You wouldn't feel bad for anything that happened. Like, your entire family could die in front of you. There's no bad feeling. And, yeah, so there's none of that. You are constantly breaking rules. And the worst thing you could do is punish me for something because things would have some level of deterrent effect on me for a while until you did it to me. And that's all you can do to me. That's all you're going to do. David, you don't want to be suspended from school. No, I don't want to be from school. Suspended from school, and then they suspend. Wait, wait. You're going to make me sit at home and read? I mean, watch cartoons? That's what you're going to do if I get in trouble. So, yeah, it's that there's no. There's no. There's just no feeling bad for people or what's going on. And what about guilt?

[Matt Fradd]

Do you experience guilt for actions in, like, repenting to God of things you've done wrong?

[David Wood]

What's that experience? Like, I've repented. I've never once felt guilt in my entire life. Guilt, remorse. I have. No, to this day, I have no clue. Whatever feeling you guys are talking about, I've never felt it in my life at all. So I can recognize that I'm wrong and say, okay, I'm not gonna do that anymore.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[David Wood]

There's never a bad. There's no feeling. There's never a feeling about it.

[Matt Fradd]

Right. So, like, not to get personal, but, like, say, in your Marriage, you've done something that you realize now that was clearly selfish of me or I see how I've hurt my wife. Say if she brings that up, you can acknowledge the injustice that you've committed, but you don't feel. And if you don't have a feeling that associated with that, that makes you feel depressed or bad about yourself.

[David Wood]

Yeah, it's, it's kind of, it's, it's all, it's, it's duty based. Here's what I'm supposed to do, and here's what I am supposed to do in this situation. And therefore I have to do what I'm supposed to do in this situation. If that's apologizing or whatever, then that's, that's what I have to do. So I do what I'm supposed to do. But no, there's no, there's no feeling associated with. Also, like in over the past couple decades, I've developed sort of what I would call like second order responses that I could call remorse or guilt, but it's not what anyone else would. It's not a feeling. So in other words, with me, it's if something, if I do something bad that I should feel guilt for and I don't feel it, I can sort of focus on the fact that I'm defective and messed up and not responding in a normal way. And that, that's not, that doesn't feel good. Hey, I'm defective. Any normal person would be feeling terrible after doing something. I feel nothing. What sort of pathetic, screwed up, messed up person am I that I do not react normally to these kinds of things. And that's not good. And so I could just call that guilt. It would be the sense that I am massively defective and screwed up for not responding in the normal human way. But when you're young, you don't know that. You don't know any of that. You don't know what antisocial personality disorder is. You don't know you have a problem. And so you think everyone else has a problem.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[David Wood]

And you, over time, you think you're superior because you're learning to mimic other people's reactions. And in the course of mimicking other people's reactions, you learn to kind of play with other people's reactions. And you're constantly feeling like you're superior. You all. I mean, and for everyone who's watching, right, let me tell you an outsider's perspective here. An outsider's perspective. Some horrible tragedy happens in a family and everyone cries. And then suppose someone doesn't cry. They don't have that reaction. And that person looks like he's weird. But from an outsider's perspective, think about how weird it is. Like, something bad happens and, like, salty goop starts leaking out of your eyes. And then someone else who doesn't have salty goop leaking out of their eyes, there's something wrong with that person.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[David Wood]

Well, what do you think? What does salty goop leaking out of your eyes have to do with anything? Right? Like, imagine a foreign. A completely foreign culture. Like, you go to some island somewhere or something like this, and then something happens and a baby's born, and, like, wax starts leaking out of ears, and they look at you. No, he doesn't have wax leaking out of his ears. Oh, what an awful person. Wouldn't you be? Like, what the. What's wrong with you? Like, what's wrong with all you people? What's that got to do with anything? That's kind of what it's like. It's like, you're making no sense here. I don't care if it's all of you. It makes zero sense.

[Matt Fradd]

Have you ever cried?

[David Wood]

When I was young when I was enraged. Like, I could be so enraged. It was usually, like, not getting my way and having no way to get my way, and I would be enraged and cry like that. Eventually. Eventually after I became a Christian started, like, someone would get saved or something like this, and I would, like, tear up. It wasn't until my third son was born, my third son was born, and he had a rare genetic muscle. We had no idea what it was. But he's born with, what, like, floppy. It's called a floppy baby syndrome. He's just basically floppy. He's got a heart rate, nothing else. No movement or anything. And my wife and I were praying, and all of a sudden, while we're praying, I, like, got choked up. It was almost like, what the heck is that? That was like, the first time in my life I got choked up over something that, like, was sad and not me being enraged or not for joy, but it was like. It was almost like, what just happened there? What was that? And, I mean, I can count to you on, like, three or four fingers the time that has happened. One was after, like, Nabil died. When Nabil died, no reaction. No reaction at all. And it wasn't until it was at the funeral, and I was talking to his parents, like, his parents were at the funeral. And I went up to them and I said, I'm sorry for the way I treated you, because they Were upset, understandably. So. Their son left Islam, and I've always been like, well, so what? He's got some common sense. You should leave Islam, too. That was, like, my attitude and not, like, how heartbreaking this was for them. And so I actually apologized to them. They're sobbing, and all of a sudden, like, I got choked up and started kind of crying too, as I'm talking to them and apologizing. Then I took, like four or five steps, and it just. Boom, it was gone. So it was there for a few seconds and then just, like, stopped. So anyway, it's like a couple of times it's happened since I've become a Christian.

[Matt Fradd]

This is interesting, right? Because when I think of empathy, I think this is the way Edith Stein put it. It's this idea of feeling what the other's feeling or experiencing their joy or experiencing their sorrow. And so it sounds like you were experiencing their sorrow just for a fleeting moment. But it's.

[David Wood]

But it.

[Matt Fradd]

But do you experience people's joy then? Do you feel elated at another's elation when they're in front of you?

[David Wood]

I can have. I can have good feelings and laughing and stuff like this. It's.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, it's mainly just the sorrow thing.

[David Wood]

Yeah, it's mainly. Yeah, it's mainly the sad things, the empathy type things, that sort of thing. And then the other thing is, like, dangerous behavior. Like, you're not doing anything unless you're doing something bad. And matter of fact, this is actually weird. My entire life, I had a horribly low heart rate. Like, way back in school, they'd say, okay, let's all test our heart rates and stuff. We all count stuff. And all the kids are counting theirs out, you know, 75, 76 and stuff. And they get to me And I go, 42. And the teacher would go, no, you didn't count, right? I'm like, I know how to count, you idiot. I know how to count my heart, count my heartbeats and stuff. But I would go get in a phys. I would go get a physical and stuff like this, and they would go, are you dizzy right now? And I go, no, I'm fine. They go, your heart rate is dangerously low, and so is your blood pressure and stuff. They're like, we need to figure this out. So they're like, testing my thyroid and stuff, trying to figure out why my heart rate is so low, and they can never figure it out. Anyways, this was just a few years ago, and I was reading it and said people with antisocial personality disorder have abnormally low heart rates. And they conclude that it's like one of the theories of antisocial personality disorder is your entire nervous system is basically wired for extremely low psychological arousal. I mean, it's just. It's bored out of its mind and you have to do dangerous stuff to get to a normal human level. And so you don't feel like a normal human level unless you're doing some stuff where it's putting you in danger. And it's like, I was thinking, oh, my goodness, that makes, that makes sense. I've always had to mess with people. Like, if I walk by a gang of bikers right now, I would have an urge to, like, say something to mess with them. But I mean, I'm just looking at my life. So I end up in prison, all this stuff, and then what do I decide to do? Eventually mess with jihadis on a daily basis. Right. So it's like, oh, okay, this is all, this is all making sense from a. From a psychological perspective. So do you.

[Matt Fradd]

So you're not very emotional.

[David Wood]

No.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[David Wood]

No.

[Matt Fradd]

So then, I mean, I know it's a bad thing, but I presume that there's benefits to it. Like, I would think if someone's going to take charge in a scary, dangerous situation, someone like yourself, who doesn't act out of emotion.

[David Wood]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And who enjoys intense situations.

[David Wood]

Yeah. You can look at. There's the bright side. So, one, you don't want to have it, but if you do, then it can be helpful in certain situations. In fact, when I mentioned one of my sons having a rare disease. So we had five sons. Two of them had that genetic disease, One of them died a couple of years ago. And I was interested in how my oldest two sons were going to react. Like, how are they gonna react? Cause are they gonna react like me or are they gonna react like their mom or what's going on? And one of my sons walked, walked, walked in and we went to the hospital and so on, and he just sat there and cried for like two hours. And I was thinking, good, he's normal. That's gonna help him in marriage, that's gonna help him when he has kids, because he's normal, he reacts normal, and that's good. My other son, my other oldest son, he walked in, totally blank expression, didn't cry at all. But he went and hugged his mom, my wife, for like 10 or 15 minutes, just stood there, Just no expression on his face, Just stood there and hugged. And I was thinking, okay, he's not reacting normally. He's More like me, which I thought, just knowing him, but he still knows what he has to do. He still knows what his duty is. And your duty in that situation is to comfort your mom. And so he understood that. So I'm like, okay, if civilization breaks down or something like this, he'll be okay. He'll be okay. And as long as he knows what he has to do as a man, then I'm fine with that.

[Matt Fradd]

Forgive me if I get too personal. Just tell me to stop being weird and I'll stop. But what was it like for the death of your son? And then if you didn't feel a great sadness over that, did you feel, I don't know, shame, I guess. You don't feel shame, but did you feel lonely in that? Especially as you're looking at your wife and.

[David Wood]

No, it's just.

[Matt Fradd]

So what was it like when your son died? What did you feel?

[David Wood]

I didn't feel anything. Yeah, there's no. Yeah again, there's no. I wish there were. I wish there were, but, yeah, there's no. I don't know if there's.

[Matt Fradd]

Is it just logical, like, yes, I assumed he would die, and, yeah, now we got details to worry with, worry about. Or did you miss him, I presume?

[David Wood]

Yeah, it's just. It's. It's sort of a situation of. Okay, I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm the rock in this situation. And I didn't. I didn't decide that it was like, other people died along the way. And then, like, people would say, oh, it's so comforting to. It's so comforting to see how strong he's being in this situation. I'm thinking, well, okay, you think I'm just the strong one here and not the mental one, then that's good. I'll go with that one. I'll be your rock in these situations.

[Matt Fradd]

So you can keep talking about this if you wish, but I also want you to get, like, how did this and what you did lead you to prison?

[David Wood]

Yeah. So again, when you're growing up and you don't know that this is actual problem because you never heard of this. I'd heard of psychopaths and sociopaths and stuff like that. Those are, like, popular terms for people with any social personality disorder, but you don't know about any of this stuff, and so you just think everyone else is defective. So I actually concluded over time that I had, like, evolved to another level of humanity.

[Matt Fradd]

Raskolnikov.

[David Wood]

Yeah, that was. That was a really bad book for me to read when I was a teenager. Because, Ida, this is not associated with any social personality disorder. It's something else. It's something else. But I had delusional thoughts at various times. Like, the first time, I remember, I was watching a line of ants. I was probably, like, seven or eight or something like that. I was watching a line of ants march along beside a lake. And it became clear to me all of a sudden that ants actually control the world and that they had tricked human beings into thinking we were in charge. And there's no. Like, there's no. Here's the evidence that that's based on. It just, like, suddenly becomes clear to you. It's, like, really weird. So I can kind of understand, like, crazy people with delusional thoughts because I've had them. It's like, do you remember those? They're popular in the 90s. They were like, those. I think they're called autosterograms, but I forget what they're called on the popular level. But they were just pictures with, like, designs on them. If you stare at them long enough and let your eyes go out of focus, like, an image will come up.

[Matt Fradd]

Magic eye.

[David Wood]

They. The magic eye things. It was like that. You're staring at it and I don't see anything. I don't see anything. I don't see anything. And then, whoa, it pops out. It's like that. It's like that over and over again. But, like. So at that point, it was, ants control the world. And then it would go away. It would go away 10 minutes later or something like that. But then eventually it was. I thought cats and dogs controlled the world and that they were actually, like, in our houses to keep an eye on us and stuff like this and maintain their control. And so there were those kinds of things. And then, like, all of 10th grade, I thought I controlled the weather. And, like, it would rain. I'd be like, how did I just make that happen? And I had to. I was trying to figure out how I was. How I was controlling the weather without realizing I was controlling the weather. And then.

[Matt Fradd]

Did you share this with anybody?

[David Wood]

I would run my mouth, but they just thought I was running my mouth. Like, yeah, don't worry about the rain. I'll take care of it, and blah, blah, blah, Right? I just thought I was looking, David. Just running my mouth, right? And then in. I was 18, and I thought that I was part of an experiment. And everyone's, like, conspiring. Everyone in the world is in on the experiment except for me and Those kinds of thoughts. So those kinds of delusional thoughts I had, I had along the way. That's different from any social personality disorder. So had a couple problems along the way, but over time, with the not having the same emotional reactions, I concluded that I'm in a completely different category. I've evolved to a higher stage of humanity. Everyone else is beneath me. And then I read Crime and Punishment, and it was a few times before then that I thought that I would read something or I would hear a song or something and I would think it was speaking directly towards me. It could be a song and I would hear it. That's telling me specifically something. Crime and Punishment was like. It was. All of a sudden, it was big. It was like. And it makes no sense. Keep in mind, I'm a complete atheist, a naturalist. It makes no sense for me to be getting messages from the universe or something like that. But that's just what I. That's what I thought, that it doesn't make sense. I mean, I knew. I mean, looking back, it didn't make any sense, but it makes perfect sense to you while you're there. So reading Crime and Punishment, you got Raskolnikov, and he does all this stuff and he's got his Superman theory, and then he does it, and then he turns out he's a little weakling and he actually can't hack him.

[Matt Fradd]

That was the point you drew from that story.

[David Wood]

Yeah, that's not him. He had the correct theory, but it's not about him. It's about me. And it's from the. Think about this. I'm some dude from a trailer park in West Virginia thinking I'm like the most advanced human being in the world and that the universe is sending me a message telling me I'm beyond everyone else's morality and rules and I don't have to follow any of this stuff. I'd already concluded that it's like confirmation. Like, oh, and the universe is telling me I'm right, which makes no sense given my. Given my worldview. So that just convinced me everything I'm doing, everything I'm doing is right. I'm not bound by anyone's rules. I never felt like it, like I should be bound by anyone else's rules. But now it's like I've got this separate confirmation of everything I've concluded up to before then. And so anyway, got in a lot of trouble along the way, but I eventually attacked my dad with a hammer. I hit him. Him in the head seven or eight times. With a hammer. I thought he was dead. I left him for dead.

[Matt Fradd]

Did you have a reason for doing that?

[David Wood]

Yeah, just like. It was like a final. I felt like.

[Matt Fradd]

Did he. Was he mean to you or.

[David Wood]

He had been mean to. There was for that. There was no reason. It was not, oh, I'm really mad at you or something like that. It was. I mean, I can describe it. It was like every time I was following a rule, even if it was just, like, required, like, if. David, here's what you have to do. I felt like I was somehow polluted. Like something had been added to my pure awesomeness and you had added something to me. And so I had this inclination to just. Whatever you're trying to make me do, like, do the opposite. And I would get this feeling of freedom whenever I would do the opposite. So it's a rule. You can't do this. You can't break into a store. You can't do this. You can't steal that and stuff. And every time I did, it felt good. Like, oh, here's the real me. Here's the real me. I've gotten rid of that pollution that you tried to stick into me with your inferior nature and so on. But you have to keep upping the game, right? And so eventually it's, I'll kill my own dad. And then that's gonna be, like, the real me. Then I'm pure, I'm done with it. What else can I do after that? What else can I do after I've done that? And that's gonna be, like, the real D Wood, completely unpolluted from the world that's constantly trying to pollute my pure awesomeness or whatever you want to call it, just. And so did you plan the attack?

[Matt Fradd]

Was it sort of spontaneous decision?

[David Wood]

I was planning other things, and then that's what I decided would be like. I was thinking, like, I started studying bomb building and things like that. Back then you could just walk into a bookstore and get books on, like, bomb building and stuff like that. Like, you get the Anarchist Cookbook, simple stuff. But then you're like, pyrotechnics and teaching you how to, like, make fireworks. And then, oh, if you modify it this way and stuff. And I was buying books on disguises and stuff, how to disguise yourself to do all this. And. But I was just thinking, like, what am I going to do? Kill a bunch of people? I don't even know any. Anyone could do that. Anyone drops a bomb on a place just does that. So, like, too easy. Yeah. Gotta be Gotta be closer. Right. So I was living with my dad at that point and. Okay, this is, this is the real. This is the real. This is how you really go about it. So planned that and so I attacked him with a hammer, left him for dead.

[Matt Fradd]

Was he asleep? Was he.

[David Wood]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was asleep. He woke up while I was doing it, but. Yeah, so then left there, went to my. It was Thanksgiving morning.

[Matt Fradd]

Did you try to kill him?

[David Wood]

Yeah, I thought he was dead. Yeah. I didn't. I didn't know you would survive.

[Matt Fradd]

No, I would not either.

[David Wood]

I was about 235 pounds. I didn't know you, you would survive a 235 pound dude hitting you seven or eight times in the head with a ball beat hammer. Yeah, I thought you were dead. I thought you'd be dead for like one. From like one hit. Yeah. So seven or eight to seal the deal.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay, so you did that and then.

[David Wood]

Yep. Then went to my. That was in Virginia. So then I. That was probably like three in the morning, Thanksgiving Day, 1994. Drove and I was just gonna go have Thanksgiving dinner with the rest of my family that day.

[Matt Fradd]

Didn't feel anything. Didn't feel any remorse or any.

[David Wood]

No.

[Matt Fradd]

Just excitement maybe?

[David Wood]

No, it was, it was. I mean, I thought there was gonna be some awesome feeling of like the ultimate freedom and stuff like that, but it was just. There was just no feeling. There was no good. There was no good or bad feeling.

[Matt Fradd]

It was just like blood was afraid of being caught.

[David Wood]

I didn't want to get caught. But no, that's the thing. It's like, once you, like, what can you do to me? That's always. That's why I said it was better to never punish me than to punish me. Because once you punish me, always it was like, this is all you can do to me. So by that time it's, you know, I don't want to get caught. But what if you do? I was like repulsed by the idea of doing what everyone else did. And that meant like the whole pattern of life. Okay, so you start off and you got kindergarten, then you go through 12 years of school, and then you decide you go get a job or do you go to college? And then if you go to college and then you have your career and then you work for 30 or 40 years and then you retire and then you're old and you sit around. It's like, why do I want to do any of that? Why? Because you guys do. Because you guys have decided this is the pattern that you, the guys who come up with the rules that I'm supposed to follow. Then you come up with, like, the entire pattern of life that I'm supposed to follow. Why. Why wouldn't I just do whatever I feel like doing? And if you can do something in response, so what? It doesn't really matter. And so, yeah, turns out my dad survived. Turns out my dad survived. And so first they put me in a mental hospital. That's where they concluded that I had no idea what antisocial personality disorder was. When they eventually gave me my diagnosis, I just thought it meant I'm not very social. It's like, yeah, people are disgusting, right? Of course. That's not what they mean. That's not what they mean at all. So, yeah, so I end up in jail because antisocial personality disorder, that's not something you stay in a mental hospital for. That's something they lock you up for if you've done something. But it's not like being schizophrenic or something like that where they keep you in a mental hospital. Lots of tons of people in jail and prison have antisocial personality disorder. So I end up in. In a dorm. And in the dorm, there's a guy named Randy, and he was a Christian that I started talking to. And the first time I talked to him, he was up on his bunk reading his Bible. And I just walk up to him and I go, hey, you know why you're reading the Bible? You're reading the Bible because you're born in the United States. If you've been born anywhere else, you believe in something else. If you've been born in China, you'd be a Buddhist. If you'd been born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be a Muslim. If you'd been born, born in India, you be a Hindu. Because people like you believe whatever you're told to believe. So I was proud of the fact that I didn't go along with what everyone else was, which is weird because if you talked about, like, where the universe came from and where life came from, I believed exactly what, you know, what I'd heard in my science class and stuff like that. So I believed what I was taught, what I was taught to believe. But I thought I was this awesome free thinker. Anyway, then I started talking to Randy. It turns out he was in jail because he'd become a Christian. And he went in and turned himself in from. He'd been a criminal. He went in and turned himself in on 21 felonies and stuff like this. So they Locked him up and stuff. And anyway, then he's in there and he's reading his Bible and I started arguing with him, but it was weird because he started arguing back. I'd argue with Christians and lots of times Christians might argue, might push back slightly, but as soon as they see you're like really aggressive, they go, oh, we don't want to fight about this, we don't want to argue about this and stuff like this. It's not something you argue about. He was quite comfortable just arguing over and over again. And so we just kept arguing for, I guess, months about Christianity. And it was weird because I didn't know that there were people who actually had any reasons for believing anything. He kept winning some of these arguments and it was really weird to me. Keep in mind, I think I'm the smartest, most advanced human being in the world. And not just a Christian, but a Christian dumb enough to turn himself in for a bunch of crimes. Like dumbest of the dumb, he's beating me in arguments. And so all I can think of is he must be winning because he's just talking about stuff that I've never studied, I've never learned. And so all I would have to do is learn some of this stuff, learn some of this stuff, and then I can actually crush this dude. And we eventually got into this fasting battle, which wasn't a battle for him, he's just fasting. He's talking about, hey, you know, I can do long term fasting right now because I'm in jail and so I can do long term fasting and I might not have another opportunity to do long term fasting for the rest of my life. So I'm going to do long term fasting now. So I would fast not for fast, I would just do it to beat him, right? So he fasted for seven days. And I know because he gave me all his trays. He was nice. He gave me all his trays and stuff. And so I said, all right, I'm doing 10, right? So I went 10 days. First time I'd ever fasted in my life. I went 10 days, nothing but water. And then I ate for a weekend and I went another 10 days just to rub it in. It's just pure rage just to beat the Christian because I can't out argue about it. So we keep going back and forth. And he actually noticed over time he goes, hey, how come every time I fast you go like a couple days more? And I go, I don't know, just coincidence, I guess. When it wasn't a coincidence at all. Eventually he went 40 days. He went like 32 days on nothing but water. And then he started drinking Kool Aid to prepare his body for eating again because it actually messes you up. You go a long time and then all of a sudden you eat. You get messed up because your food goes right through your stomach and you're your intestine and stuff. And you were in horrible, horrible, awful pain. So he starts preparing his body for food again and he finishes and he told me, Jesus has gone 40 days. And so I said, all right, I'm going 42, I'm going to beat you and Jesus. So I start. And it was on the 11th day when I like totally passed out in front of a guard and hit my head. And then you had other people like reporting me and they looked at my mental health, right? They thought I was trying to starve myself to death. So I'm trying to beat the Christian, trying to beat the Christian. You guys think I'm trying to starve myself to death. I'm trying to commit suicide really, really slowly here, right? Like the dumbest way imaginable. Anyway, so they stick me in a cell with a camera cell and they think I'm trying to starve myself to death. So they're threatening me. And I started eating after that because I wanted to go back into the dorm. And then they wouldn't let me out of the cell. They kept me in the cell with the camera because I thought they're looking at my mental health record and stuff, saying something's wrong with this guy. And so they wouldn't let me out. So then I stopped eating again and stuff. Anyway, I went from about £235 down to the last time they weighed me. I was 152. I'm 6, 6 foot 3 was 152. And I know several days after that that I wasn't eating and stuff. So I'm guessing I got right around like 149, 150 or something like that, which would be a normal weight for someone. I've always been like the big 230, 235 pound guy. So. But I'm back there and I'm. I'm reading everything I can get my hands on. It's all kinds of stuff. I'm reading philosophy, I was reading dialogues of Plato, I was reading Epictetus, I was reading Marcus Aurelius and so on, and also reading the Bible, but I'm just reading the Bible, so I know what I'm Talking about when I go and argue with this guy and he had pointed out how the disciples died because I was accused. My theory that I gave him was they believed in Jesus. Their guy died. They wanted to keep the movement going, so they made up a story about him rising from the dead. Boom. I have solved the mystery of Christianity. And he was going, that doesn't make sense. These guys went to their bloody deaths being tortured and killed, and he gave me Fox's book of martyrs sitting there reading their deaths. Now, some of that stuff is wrong. It's based on later sources and stuff. But I actually, earlier, I think earlier this year, I did an interview with Sean McDowell. Yeah, earlier this year did an interview with Sean McDowell because some of that stuff is based on late sources and some of it's really solid. So I went through with Sean McDowell and yeah, we concluded some of the stuff in Fox's books, martyrs, is based on late sources you can't really trust, but you have a pretty solid case that a bunch of these guys died for their proclamation that Jesus had died on the cross and risen from the dead and appeared to them and so on. But anyway, I was just thinking about that. Why are these guys. My theory is that these guys made this up and died for it. That doesn't make any sense. Why would I try to think of one other person in history who died for something that he knew he made up? Like, lots of people die for things, but you kind of have to believe in it. You can't just be making it up, right? Like, so jihadis flying planes in the building. Okay, say what you want about the guy. I believe he believes what he's saying. That guy believes in Islam. If he's dying for Islam, he believes it. He's not just saying, oh, yeah, I'll just make up that I'm believing in Islam and then die for it. Doesn't make any sense. So I tried to think of one person in all of history who died for something that he knew he made up. I'm making up something I'm willing to die for. I couldn't think of anything. I couldn't think of anyone. I couldn't think of one person, like every person I could think of who was dying for something he believed in. You kind of have to believe in it. So it doesn't make sense that these guys made it up, that they're all conspiring to make up a story and then they're willing to die for it. So I was just trying to. I was trying to figure it out. Why would these guys die? Why would these guys die? Why would these guys die? Started not making sense. And basically it was like, three things that came together. I came up with a kind of design argument. I thought I was inventing it. I thought I was inventing this design argument. But I was just looking around at the brick. I was just looking at the bricks. I'm sitting on my bunk, and I'm looking at the bricks on the wall. And I just thought, like, if someone told me these bricks went into this order by some natural process, I would think, he's a freaking idiot. I would think, you'd have to be an idiot to say that. You would be the dumbest person in the world. I would smack you in your mouth for saying something stupid like that. But. But I believe life formed on its own. Like, life is way more complicated and sophisticated than the simplest living cell is vastly more sophisticated than some bricks stacked up on a wall. So it wasn't. Oh, no. Therefore, life couldn't have arisen by chance. It was more along the lines of, why did I accept that with no proof? And I just accepted it with what my teacher said. In other words, I was always repulsed by the idea of other inferior beings telling me what to believe. And all of a sudden, it's like, wait, these guys have been getting me all along. Like, they've been telling me what to believe about stuff all along. And I just bought into it because it was a. You know, was a teacher in some position of authority. I thought I was. I thought I was the one who was exempt from that stuff. And I was like, no, they got me on that. They got me on the universe and on life and stuff like that. So it wasn't. I concluded life must have been designed. It was. Now I'm doubting that position because no one ever gave me any evidence that life formed on its own. You just told me that was the case. And scientists agree with this. That's what happened. You never gave me any evidence. And so why did I believe that? And so started thinking about design. And maybe I jumped the gun on concluding that life formed on its own. And then the other one. The other thing that started bothering me was, like, I'd been holding to two beliefs that didn't go together at all for a long time. And one was, everything is completely pointless. It's ultimately, like, meaningless. That's why it doesn't matter what you do to me. Like, who cares? Oh, no, you're gonna go to, so what? It doesn't matter. None of this matters. Your Dog died. Who cares? Think back then, right? Oh, no, your dog died. Guess what? Every dog that was on the planet at that time is dead. So what, right? Everyone who remembered every dog that was alive on that planet a few years from now is gonna be dead. What's the point? It doesn't matter, right? So my view back then, you got this giant universe, you got like our little speck of the galaxy, and there's a little speck of the galaxy, there's like little piece of dust that's our sun. And then there's this little, even smaller pathetic piece of dust going around these little blobs of cells on there, thinking they're so important. How delusional are you? Nothing you do in the grand scheme of things matters even slightly. It doesn't. The universe is not changing at all based on anything you're doing. It's all pointless. So I held that. And yet I'm this sort of super important, greatest human being who's ever lived, and I set the rules the of, like, those don't go together. How am I the most important, most advanced human being in this completely meaningless, pointless world where nothing really matters and those don't go together? It's like, pick one. If it's all just pointless and meaningless, so am I. And I'm not important at all. And I'm not the greatest. What's the standard of me being the greatest? And by what standard? Doesn't make any sense. So, like, I gotta drop one of those. They don't go together. And it finally hit me. And at the same time, I'm reading about Jesus and I'm just thinking, okay, okay. In my worldview, there is no standard. So it makes no sense for me to think that I'm the greatest and the most important. It doesn't make any sense. If, however, that's wrong and there is a greatest and most advanced, like, what are the odds that I'm at if I don't even know what the standard is? How can I say I'm the highest thing on the standard? Like, what am I the standard? Why would I think that I'm the standard? And I just start, okay, if this guy who may have risen from the dead, what's more likely, that he's the standard and I'm the standard, or that he's greater or that I'm greater? And I'm thinking, what am I the greatest? And just thinking about all these things, and it finally hit me, right? It finally hit me like I'm a guy sitting on a bunk. I Can't stop drooling. Like, the not eating somehow just made me like, non stop drool. And it got to a point where I would just have a cup on the floor beside my bunk and I would just drool into it. Like, I got sick of spitting. I would just drool into a cup on side of the bed. I got a rash all over me called shingles. But not eating for a long time, your immune system depletes and it reactivates the chickenpox virus in you. And first it's around your waist, then it's under your arms and stuff. But it feels just like poison ivy. It's all over you and stuff like that. But I'm sitting there scratching myself, drooling into a cup. The doctor was telling me, hey, as soon as your blood reads such and such, we're gonna start tube feeding. We're gonna stick a tube in you, we're gonna make you eat. And my lawyer told me that the psychiatrist wanted to send me to Marion, which would have been my third mental hospital. And I'm sitting there thinking I'm a guy who's in here for trying to murder my dad with a hammer. Cause I think I'm so superior to everything else. I can't stop drooling, I'm scratching myself to death. I can't stand up without falling over and busting my head. I'm about to be sent permanently to a mental hospital where they're gonna be tube feeding me. How exactly am I the best person in the world? Just because I don't cry when something bad happens, right? So in a short period of time, I went from thinking that I'm the best person in the world to thinking I'm the most pathetic person in the world. And once you conclude, like, gosh, like, who's worse than? That's what I was actually thinking, like, who's worse than me in this world? Like, there are people who are starving. There are people who are starving. At least they can think straight. At least they're not drooling. Who's worse than me in the world? So I went to thinking that I'm the worst person in the world. And that put me in a little dilemma. Not the Islamic dilemma, but it put me in a little dilemma. And it was just this. It was either this is what I am, like, this is who I am. All the stuff I've been trying to purify myself, I'm in the pure state now. I've done it, I've done everything to get in this pure state. And this pure state is me on a bed, drooling with a rash all over me, heading to a mental hospital. That's like, what I am. Either that's what I am, because that's what I. Either, like what I am is this thing, this pathetic, disgusting excuse of a human being, or there's someone out there who can help with this sort of thing. Like, this is just the way I am and I need to get. And I'll just get used to it because this is the way I am, or there's someone who can fix this sort of thing. And when you start thinking like that, once you realize this is not me being more advanced than everyone else, I'm actually more screwed up than other people and I'm defective. I don't have some ability that everyone else lacks. I lack things that everyone else has and that makes me screwed up, not greater. Then it becomes, okay, this is either what I am or there's someone out there who can help with this sort of thing. When you start thinking like that, I think you're about that close to becoming a Christian. Because when you ask yourself, okay, who out of anyone else in history who had the ability to take screwed up, messed up people and do something with them, you basically get a list of one. It ain't Mohammed, it ain't Mohammed. You get a list of Jesus, that's it. Jesus is the one who took people like demon possessed, like lunatics and stuff like this. And hey, I can fix things for you. And so I have to say at that point, it was not, oh, man, I'm convinced of Christianity right now. It was, if I pray and nothing happens, so what? Like, if I pray and nothing changes and this is what I am, okay, so what? This is where I am. I'm not getting any worse. There's nothing I can say. There's nothing I can pray right now. And oh man, now I'm really bad off because I prayed and nothing happened. It was okay if I pray and nothing happens and I'm in the same spot, but if I pray and something changes, then okay, let's see what happens. And so I bowed down on my bunk and I prayed and I said, God, I don't know if I'm going to believe in you tomorrow, but I believe in you right now, and if you can do anything with me, you are welcome to it. And so I prayed that. And then I did like the prayer of accepting Jesus that I read in these Bible studies and so on that they sent me. And. And then I sat up and Everything looked different. Like, the world looked like it had all changed colors. And I've heard people saying, one, don't base your beliefs on feelings and stuff like that. I'm just saying this because this is what I felt like. So I'm just telling you my experience, but otherwise, don't base your beliefs and things and decisions on feelings. But I sat up, and I've heard people say they felt like a weight lifted off their backs and so on. I sat up, and the way I felt right when I sat up was I say, try to imagine if you're born and you were, like, tossed into a fighting pit and all you do is fight and you know of no other existence at all in your life except just constant, like, bloodbath fighting and stuff like that. And that's your entire life. That's all you've ever experienced. And then all of a sudden, it just stops.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow.

[David Wood]

That's what it felt like. It just like, boom. It just stopped. And I was like, what? What's going on? And so anyway, that's when I became a Christian. I was still pretty messed up, but, okay, I'm going to be reading my Bible. So I started reading my Bible, and it got to the point where, I mean, keep in mind I was still locked up for malicious wounding on my dad. And so I had years to serve in prison. But it got to the point where just me reading my Bible, hanging out with Christians and stuff, just a couple years later, I'd be talking to someone. I remember this guy, Floyd Walls. I was walking through the dorm, and Floyd, he was sweeping the floor, and he stops me. He goes, hey, Wood. Yeah. I was talking to some of the other guys, and we were trying to figure out how someone like you could ever get locked up. And so we're thinking, maybe you're walking down the street with your girlfriend, and maybe someone said something slick to her and you defended her, beat him up, and then got locked up, maybe hurt him too bad. We're thinking something like that. I'm just like. That's when I was like, you guys think I'm a good guy? Because I thought I was, like, scum of the world. And it didn't occur to me that everyone all of a sudden thought I was, like, the good guy after a couple years. And so, yeah, went from everyone saying, this guy needs to be locked up because this guy's got some serious problems to a couple years later, how could dude David Wood ever get locked up? It must be from. For defending someone. Wow. And so, yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And did did you ever reconcile with your dad?

[David Wood]

Yep. Yeah, I actually, Yeah, I wrote him. Wrote him a nice long letter, basically telling him my entire like mental history and stuff and everything I was thinking along the way and stuff like that. And he came to see. He came to see me right after that and actually paroled to his house.

[Matt Fradd]

Beg your pardon?

[David Wood]

I rolled to his house when I.

[Matt Fradd]

What was that like that? Oh, no, just being reunited with him after.

[David Wood]

Oh, no, I mean, he. It was cool. He didn't. It was okay. You were messed up. You're Christian now. You're better. Wow.

[Matt Fradd]

Is he still alive?

[David Wood]

No, he died. He died of a heart attack about, I don't know, 15 years ago or so.

[Matt Fradd]

David, thank you for all of the work that you've done to help Christians be. Defend the faith against Islam and to help people in Muhammadism, as I awkwardly keep saying. Yeah, abandon it. We really appreciate all the work that you've done. Okay, as we wrap up here, where do people go to learn more about you, to watch your debates, to follow you?

[David Wood]

If you type in David Wood on YouTube, you'll probably find me and some of my critics, and it's always good to hear both. But right now my main channel I've been posting on is called Apologetics Road show. But. Yeah, why'd you call it that? I just thought it was a cool name.

[Matt Fradd]

Cool.

[David Wood]

That's all right.

[Matt Fradd]

What's the one debate you would have people watch of yours if they only wanted to watch one?

[David Wood]

I mean, for purposes right now. I mean, I've had some debates I've loved over the years, but just, just pick one of the debates on the Islamic dilemma. Just type in David Wood, Islamic Dilemma and watch one of those debates is. It's kind of. It's might not be like my favorite as far as like my favorite debate, but I think they're the most relevant right now as far as what's going on.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. All right, God bless. Thanks.

[David Wood]

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