Brothers and sisters, most of you are probably familiar with the background of

Brother Gary Miller,

but for the benefit of those who are not, I like to tell you that he is a Muslim
and comes from a land far away called Canada.
He was one time an ardent missionary for the Christian Church and strange Louis
Missim,
it was work connected with this activity that living to embrace Islam in 1978.
Being a mathematician amongst other things, he lived a very busy life.
He took a year off from the university where he teaches mathematics to champion the
cause of Islam in many parts of the world.
That year has now stretched into two years, and pretty soon he will be getting back
to the university to teach again.
At the end of Brother Gary Miller's talk, we have a love time for a Christian
announcer session
in order to enable you to clarify any point that you wish to.
For this purpose we have provided a mic and we will be pleased if you will use it.
The question time is open to both Muslims and non-Muslims alike,
and we urge you to take advantage of this opportunity,
and we will be very happy if you are brief and concise in your questions.
I ask that I assure you that Brother Gary Miller will be very comprehensive in his
reply.
I have not gone into Olympic production for two reasons.
One of which is Brother Gary Miller prefers to get down to grass tax as soon as
possible,
and the other is that he doesn't need in one any more since most of you are already
familiar with him.
So I take great pressure in inviting Brother Gary Miller to address you.
Thank you.
It's been a lot of Rahmani Rahim, Salaamu Alaykum, and welcome.
As the other said, maybe some of you have heard something before from me,
maybe here or on a piece of tape.
I have people coming to me sometimes and they say, I heard your cassette.
While there's a misunderstanding about that, I'm not in the cassette business.
I don't make cassettes.
But wherever I go, it seems somebody has always got a tape recorder running or a
video machine or something,
and they pass these things around and so on.
But that's not my business, and I don't know which cassette you might be referring
to or what it was I might have said.
The talks are not some kind of a thing that I memorized a long time ago,
and it all just tumbles out.
I usually write them a few hours before I give them, and they're a piece from here
and there,
and some repetition of what's coming to pass.
So if you've heard some of what I have to say before, excuse me, not everybody has
heard it though,
the topic has been advertised as the history of religion,
and let me clarify that I don't have in mind to recite to you the details of the
history of religion,
to tell you in this year, so and so did this, and then there was so and so, and
that kind of thing.
That's not what I mean by the history of religion.
I'm talking about a view of the history of religion, that we could all gather up
the facts as to the sequence of events,
but what does it mean, and how did it come to happen that way,
and Muslims have a particular view of the history of religion, which I'd like to
talk about,
as well as the view that other people have.
As it happens, the study of mankind, usually called anthropology,
of course has a lot to say about religion, when the anthropologist takes up his
subject,
and part of the investigation of man is man's religions, so anthropology has a lot
to say about religion.
It used to be that all the anthropologists basically would tell you the same thing
if you asked them about religion,
if you asked them where did religion come from, how did it come to be the way it
is,
they all would give you back the same explanation, but in the last 30 or 40 years,
there's been another school of thought developed, which was probably always there,
but it's come to be something that has to be recognized,
that the anthropologists don't all tell the same story anymore.
The oldest school of thought always was to say, well religion came because human
beings have always been afraid of what they didn't know,
and so what they didn't know, they worshipped. If the thunder and lightning scared
them,
then they made thunder and lightning a god, so that it wouldn't hurt them.
If a fire burned them, then they found a god to look after the fire,
and so the more primitive the human being, the more primitive his religion.
That was what people usually said.
Go back far enough and you find people worshiping everything imaginable, and as we
come down through history,
the religion gets more and more sensible and intellectual and so on.
But there have been those who have insisted that that's not what the facts seem to
indicate,
that actually, if you look very carefully at the history of human beings,
it seems that the farther back you go, the more intelligent the religion,
and that as we come down through the ages, the more degenerate the religion gets.
And the people who support that idea will bring all kinds of facts into
consideration.
One of the things that they point out is that when we examine any group of people,
we tend to confuse three different things as all being part of the same thing.
We look at their science and their magic and their religion, and we think it's all
religion.
When those are really three different kinds of things, magic is different from
religion,
because of a very opposite viewpoint.
Magic is when you think that you have some influence over the invisible powers.
Religion works the other way around.
It's supposed to be whatever invisible powers there are, influence you.
And science, of course, is an explanation of the shape of the world.
How does it work?
And as it happens, you may find groups of people who have some very strange ideas
about how the world is made, and so when people look at them, they say,
how primitive, look how primitive their religion is, but that's not their religion.
As an example, I suggest that if you ever get the chance to investigate it,
it's been documented now.
You have a tribe in Papua, the Kapauku, which were only discovered by the outside
world in the 1920s.
Before that time, this tribe was isolated.
They had never met the outside world, and nobody knew of them.
The Kapauku tribe lived in the island, and they thought that was the whole world.
Now if you ask the Kapauku, what's the world made of? How does it work?
He may start off by telling you, well, the sky that you see overhead is a big mole
turned upside down,
and it's got holes in it.
And when the sun goes down, some of the light from the sun shines back through the
holes,
and that's what makes those lights that look like stars.
That sounds very primitive, and so people would be tempted to think, well, the
Kapauku is primitive.
Now maybe his science is primitive, but is his religion a foolish item.
There was a little book written just a few years ago called the Kapauku of Papua,
and it documents in under 100 pages what the Kapauku believe about a lot of things.
And here and there it talks about religion, and in every case it points out
something
possibly surprising to a lot of people.
It mentions that as soon as the Kapauku were discovered, well, the missionaries
came running
to save their souls, of course, and it mentions here and there how the Kapauku used
to argue
with the missionaries and used to embarrass the missionaries.
And there's the story of one man who was old.
He knew he was dying, and he asked his grandsons to help him, one under each arm.
He says, take me down, I want to see the priest before I die, I can't die in peace.
He went down to see the priest, and he asked him, he said, I can't die peacefully
until
I know the answer to one question.
And this bushman, there's a man with a few leaves wrapped around him.
He might think this is a primitive man, he said to the priest, you people have such
an advanced
civilization, why is your religion so primitive?
The bushman asking the priest, why is your religion so primitive?
As far as the bushman was concerned, the missionaries religion was very backward,
very childish, very foolish.
Because of a number of considerations, some of it is reported in that book.
They had arguments that they used to have.
It's reported that one day the missionary was reading to them a passage from the
book of Daniel,
and the tribe started to laugh, and so he said, what's so funny?
And they said, read that again, what did you say God was?
And so he read the passage where it says, God is the ancient of days, and the tribe
laughed.
I thought that was quite a joke.
The priest still didn't see the joke.
It was so funny.
They said, did you say God is old?
Priesthood is very old, and they laughed.
They said, you mean he used to be young?
Is he the so-called primitive man as way ahead of this individual, that young and
old are things
that don't have anything to do with God?
Whatever you mean when you say God, it's not something that grows old, and it was
never young,
and it was not something that was made of.
This kind of thing is in agreement with what the Quran says about the history of
religion.
It tells us that in every nation, every people had a messenger sent to them to tell
them what they needed to know.
Which means that the truth has been spread around to everybody.
It may have got lost, or it may have been corrupted, but it's been given to
everybody.
That's the Muslim viewpoint.
Muslim is also told in the Quran that there are no new ideas in religion.
It is if you meet somebody that belongs to some established religion, if he tells
you something about how his religion works,
well, somebody long before him used to say the same thing.
You'll still find some people who will tell you as they come from the church,
they'll tell you how their whole system is supposed to work.
The Quran mentions that, it says when they say, for example, when they say God has
a son,
they're imitating what people used to say long before them.
They imitate people of old.
See, as an example, if I said to you, maybe it's familiar enough to most of you,
and I'm sure it is to some of you,
if I said to you, what great religious figure was the son of God born in a stable
or cave at the end of December,
who then grew up and he worked miracles, and then he died for the sins of men, but
three days later he was raised up.
Who is that?
Well, as a matter of fact, it could be any of several dozen individuals.
O serus of the Egyptians, Adonis, the Brochus of the Greeks, and Baal with the
Babylonians,
Mithras of the Persians, they all fit that description.
They were all sons of God, worshiped by their devotees, born the last week of
December in a stable or cave,
died for the sins of men, raised up on the third day in the rest of the story.
As a matter of fact, Mithras was worshiped all around the Mediterranean more than
2,000 years ago,
a very popular cult of Mithras, and his official title by the people who worshiped
him was,
he was the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
If that sounds familiar, it's because it says in the Bible that the first time John
the Baptist saw Jesus,
he said, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
So I don't believe John the Baptist ever said that.
People have been saying that long before him about somebody else.
I don't mean to cook in a whole thing, but what I'm getting at is that if somebody
thinks they've got a news story,
it's an old story.
It doesn't mean that it's a false story, it just means it's an old story.
Don't let somebody tell you they've got a news story. It's an old one.
This idea of somebody having to die for your sins is part of a lot of religious
systems,
that somebody will take care of my sin problem for me is part of a lot of religious
systems.
Other systems say no, it's connected with my activities and my decisions and my
belief.
Now as to the history of religion, approximately half of the story, I would
suggest, is outlined in two verses of the Qur'an in the sixth chapter
to get the context of it you have to start about the 111th verse of the sixth
chapter.
These I had to apparently reveal an answer to a question that the Muslims had 14
centuries ago as the Qur'an was being revealed.
The Muslims felt to be a Muslim is to be guided.
The non-Muslims are not guided, but what about the people who say they are Muslims,
but they don't really believe in Islam?
Are they guided or not? They come and go with us and they do all the things we do,
but on the inside they don't really understand or believe this.
Are they guided or not?
These verses continue on to explain how that may well be true that there are among
you people who don't believe, but they do everything you do.
And the way they get misguided like everybody else is this, the I.S.S. for every
prophet we have appointed from among men and jinn devils to come after them,
inventing fancy sayings about them so that those in whose heart there is no belief
in the hereafter will listen to that,
that is to the fancy sayings, and they will finish where they are supposed to
finish.
So the solution to the problem is this, that they have always been messengers and
they delivered some important message,
but some of the people who said they followed them didn't listen to the message.
They listened to what people said about the messengers.
They became fascinated with the one who did the talking, not what they say.
And so they finish up misguided like everybody else.
I stress that that verses for every prophet, this is God's plan, the koolinabi for
every prophet that would include the last prophet.
But there are those who came after him who invented fancy things about him so that
people might listen to the fancy things instead of what did he say,
and finish up misguided.
In this way it's happened in many religious systems that the emphasis switched from
the message to the messengers.
A man comes, he says something, but instead of listening to that people start
talking about who was that man.
Wasn't he something?
And they start falling in love with the man instead of what did he say?
This is so much a problem that it even has a name in the church.
They call it the karigma problem, the Christian church examines this under the
Greek word karigma, which has to do with preaching.
Because the question they ask concerns Jesus, they say, how did it happen that the
one who did the preaching became the one we preach about?
Or as one man has said, Jesus talked about the kingdom of God and everybody who
came after him talked about Jesus.
They're talking about the messengers instead of the message.
As I say, they call it the karigma problem. They want to know how do you pass from
one to the other? How did that come to be?
What often happens, of course, if the emphasis goes from what did he say to who is
he, then in the generations that come after, whichever messenger this is,
biographies, stories about the messenger become very important. And people start to
compete to who can tell the nicest story about somebody who's now gone.
And flattery becomes more and more exaggerated. He might have done a good thing and
it gets blown up into a bigger and bigger thing until it becomes unbelievable.
Compare this to what the Quran warns us about. It's an eye that tells the Muslims,
the reader of the Quran.
God says, we raise up prophets, some of them above the others. So there are degrees
of importance to prophets. This one is more important than that one and so on.
But there's another verse that tells the believer that we are not to make any
distinction among the prophets.
So there may be this prophet that's superior to that prophet, superior to this
prophet and so on. But you, the believer, are supposed to treat them all the same.
That's a command. It's God who makes the distinctions. And you, the believer, have
no business saying, well, this one ranks above that one.
The business of us, he will make it clear to us as it says. So many times that on
many other subjects, the truth of the matter will be made clear to you on the last
day. In the meantime, follow these instructions and you can't go wrong.
What is that the Muslim reminds himself and others that the priority in the Quran
is, as I've said several times in different circumstances, the priority is not to
tell the non-Muslim, you should turn your back on what you have and come with me.
The priority is first to tell the person what you have you should re-examine.
Commit no excesses.
It addresses various groups by names, the Christians and the Jews and the Cipians
and the Medellians and so on and tells them commit no excess in your religion.
It doesn't say leave your religion. That's step two, three or four maybe, but it
starts off by saying commit no excess. Don't say more than you have the right to
say.
So if you tell me as a Christian, for example, points one, two and three, I might
agree with you. When you get to point number four, you may say something for which
there's no proof.
And the Muslim wants to say, if you can't prove that, why don't you just set it
aside? Stick with what you can prove. Because we both believe what you can prove,
we have proof.
Another thing can follow if a nation becomes so interested in the man instead of
what he said.
It's an automatic thing that most often comes. If the emphasis is on the speaker
and not the speech, racial pride and nationalism start to stir up in people.
If the emphasis is on the messenger, so it is that a lot of religions are named
after men. A lot of religions are named after the places where they came from.
This can be trouble. I'm not saying it always is, but it can be trouble because it
means maybe the emphasis is in the wrong place.
You're not talking about the message if you're talking about the place where it
came from. More often than this, maybe what happens is in order to compensate for
maybe lost pride or something.
You may have a group of people who they follow a religion, but the so-called
founder or the messenger came from some other place or some other racial
background.
As they start to develop their picture of who is the messenger, it starts to get
bent into the shape of what they look like or where they come from.
Somebody said only a generation ago, God is an American. Some people will tell you
today he's a Republican. Not only an American, he belongs to this party.
It was that you have a movie which cinema, motion picture that has been around for
some time now, Jesus of Nazareth.
It's interesting that the man who plays Jesus in that movie has blue eyes. It's
extremely unlikely that Jesus had blue eyes, considering who his ancestry was.
The people who appreciate him and the part of the world where they made that movie
can understand him and the blue eyes better than one with black eyes, I guess.
But you see, what causes that kind of shift is that the emphasis is on a man
instead of what did he say.
So you tend to want to make that man a lot like you.
If these verses tell half the story, that is half the story of religion is because
people shifted from the message to the messenger.
The other half of the story would just about be covered by another verse in the
Quran that tells us about the source of a lot of deviation and why are there many
religions.
It's in the third Surah and the sixth ayah, or verse. It tells us in that place
that the Quran has two kinds of verses in it.
The verses are in a muqamat, or muqashabi hat.
And that verse is quoted by Muslims a lot.
Excuse me, they quote half that verse a lot. They don't usually quote the whole
thing.
They quote enough of it to try to tell you that the Quran is a very dangerous thing
to read.
Only a few people can understand it because look, some of the verses are muqashabi
hat, which they tell you means secret.
Only a few people know you have to trust them to tell you.
They keep reading, that's exactly the opposite of what's being discussed.
It tells you that yes, there are two kinds of verses.
But anybody who tells you that they know all about these secret ones, watch out for
them.
That's the man who misleads you.
It's a warning. There's no mystery about the meaning of that ayah.
Muqamat is one kind of a verse. It comes from an Arabic group that means locked or
locked in place.
The root is aqam.
What is locked in place, muqamat would be like an item in a piece of machinery that
is so tightly fixed in the machine that when the machine runs, it doesn't shake.
It's locked in place.
Some of the verses of the Quran are like that. It means you can't take them any
place.
You can't make them mean anything except what they say.
The first verse of that chapter says Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah. There is no
deity but he.
Now people cannot sit around and argue about what do you think that means.
So, now he has one mean.
Muqamat, that's something like, the word, an image might be explicit.
When you go to a shop and the sign is hanging on the door and it says closed, you
don't turn to your friend and say, what do you think this meaning of that?
How do you interpret closed?
It says what it means, there's no discussion, we all know. That's explicit.
And some of the verses of the Quran are said to be muqashabiat, which comes from a
verb in the shabha, that means kupi, muqashabiat.
Sometimes it's translated in English as ambiguous, I don't like that really.
Maybe a better word would be consimilar, it means it has a shared similarity.
Look to sacrifice a kaw and they say, which kaw?
They all look alike, you mean this kaw or maybe that kaw?
And that sentence is built around the same verb shabha.
The Jews were saying, it's not clear which one, it could be this kaw or it could be
that one.
In the same way, some verses of the Quran could mean this or they could mean that.
If, as this verse goes on to say, you take these verses apart from the ones that
are locked in place, then try to give them a meaning and you'll go astray.
It says the muqamat are the basis.
The ones that are locked in place will lead you through the ones that can be
ambiguous, as they could mean this or they could mean that.
But they can't have two meanings if you compare them to the ones that are locked in
place.
What happens to, well, to give an example, there is a man in South American,
Guyana.
He wrote a little book to the Muslims saying that according to the Quran, Jesus is
God and he proves it by quoting about seven different verses from the Quran.
But you see what he did was he tears those verses loose from their context and
quotes them to you.
If you put them back where they came from and compare them to the verses which are
clear, they can't mean what he says they mean.
The same kind of thing has happened then in so many times and places.
When people have been given clear sayings and some sayings that are not quite so
clear,
they leave the clear and they pay attention to those things that can be bent this
way or that way.
Left behind the things that would guide them straight and took the things that they
can shape into whatever they like.
This by the way is not a defect in the Quran.
That ever occurs to somebody to say, well, maybe all of the Quran should have been
muqamat, all locked in place.
The simple reason it can't is because the Quran, unlike most religious scriptures,
talks about the Quran.
It talks about itself.
It mentions Quran by name 70 times and by other names and descriptions many more
times.
So when you have an item which is referring to itself, some verses have to stand on
top of other verses.
If each verse stood all by itself, you don't have a book anymore.
You have 3100 pieces, that's all.
The Quran is a united thing that's woven back upon itself.
That's why some verses have to depend on other verses.
In any case, what I was trying to get at is that you have a situation, for example,
the Quran says,
who pledges loyalty to the messenger, pledges loyalty to Allah.
Now if you took that verse loose from the Quran, you might say, you see this means
Muhammad is God.
You're stuck for Allah.
Because it says, who pledges loyalty to the messenger, pledges loyalty to Allah.
It could thin and shape it however you like.
But put it back where it came from, consider all of the verses that are very clear
on this subject.
You realize whatever it means, it doesn't mean that.
Now compare that to what a person will do if he takes hold of one of the reported
sayings of Jesus,
or he said, who honors me, honors God.
People say, oh you see, he was God.
The boy said, if you honor me, you honor God.
Because I am God, is what they wish he would have said, but he didn't finish that
way.
So it may mean that, but put it back where it came from,
and then compare it to the other things he's reported to have said, and whatever it
means it can't mean that.
It's reported that he said on one occasion, there are things which God knows which
I don't know.
Now whoever says that isn't God.
God knows what I don't know.
So I'm not God.
It seems like the only way you can understand that.
So what happens when you take a verse and you give it a meaning, like who honors
me, honors God means he's God,
and you're confronted with another one which clearly indicates that no, who says
this can't be God.
Well what people do is they give it a label and that makes it go away.
There's a collection of things like that where Jesus says, for example, God is
greater than I am.
God knows what I don't know, and I never said a thing except what God told me to
say, and so on.
So I put that in a collection, it's called the difficult sayings of Jesus.
It's difficult, all right?
It's difficult because it doesn't fit with these other ideas.
But to give it a label doesn't make it go away.
That's something like if you have a problem you can't solve, you work on it for a
long time,
and then decide, oh I know what I do with this, I put it in this box labeled
unsolved problems there.
I take care of that.
This is an unsolved problem.
That doesn't finish the matter.
It seems more likely that the label is ought to be switched if anything,
that the things which people say are clear are actually the ones which should be
causing them some difficulties.
The things which they call difficult are the ones that are clear.
Statements like God knows what I don't know is very clear.
That ought to be labeled clear.
Then the other one doesn't look very difficult at all,
whatever it means you know what it does it be.
From here we could discuss continuing difficulty that comes right down to today.
And whether you're talking about religion or anything else,
one of the leading difficulties in any subject is the problem of communication.
That is the meaning of words causes conflict and confusion.
To give you an example, people today may say Jesus is the Son of God.
Son sounds like an easy word alright and everybody knows what a son is,
but it means a lot more than that to somebody who says Jesus is the Son of God.
There's an interesting document that has come down through the years from about 17,
16 or 17 centuries ago.
It was written by somebody in the Roman Empire who was complaining that people in
his day were arguing about the sonship of God
or the fatherhood of God and this kind of thing because it was such a complex
meaning to the words father and son
that that's all people talked about, he complained.
He said when you go into the market and you buy a loaf of bread,
when the baker hands you your change he says,
is the son co-eternal with the father or consubstantial?
Whatever that means.
Anyone want to give more examples?
He says as you pass in the street you greet somebody good morning and they say,
does the Holy Spirit proceed from the father and the son or does it proceed from
the father alone?
That's all anybody talked about, he was complaining about it, he says,
I can't leave the house and that's all I hear, so I'm saying,
well this is a work like this or does it work like that?
It was such a complex thing that people were struggling over about 16 or 17
centuries ago.
He was fed up.
But the problem comes with what do words mean.
They can cause conflict within groups of people or they can cause confusion,
one group of people tries to talk to another group of people.
Simple words that you hear all the time,
how special meanings to some people.
Not long ago somebody came to me after a talk and he said,
what has God revealed to you?
And I said, well he revealed what he wanted me to know.
He told me his will, what he wants.
He says, yes, yes I know that, but I mean what does he reveal to you?
I'm asking, what do you mean reveal?
He said reveal the first time, what does reveal?
The same word now has to be inflated, you see, and it means a whole lot more,
which in fact he can't even tell me.
What he means when he shakes and quivers and puffs out this gust reveal
is something to do with that.
Didn't it happen to you maybe late one night and God came into your room
and he touched your heart and you shivered and boiled and you rolled on the floor
or whatever it was?
To him that's revelation.
That's more than the dictionary says.
Reveal means you take the veil off, so you've unveiled something from the same
origin of that word.
Something was covered up and now it's revealed, which you didn't use to know now
you know.
But when you say reveal, it's something more than that.
And there's many words like that.
They get inflated to mean more than they must.
And of course that can take people astray because they're carrying around a whole
family of ideas
when they hear a word which aren't really contained in the word.
It's what happens even to, if you're talking to somebody who has no religion,
they puff up the word sometimes.
You can get into quite a discussion with somebody about trying to defend something
and he's talking about an inflated word and you go right on with it.
As fat as he makes the word you make it fatter.
You hear people say God is perfect.
Well look up the word perfect sometimes.
See what it means.
Perfect means pose the job.
It's appropriate.
It's enough. Perfect. No defect.
But people blow up that word and they start making all kinds of difficulties
for the one they're talking about.
Say what if he's perfect, he can do this and he can do that and so on.
That doesn't have anything to do with a meaning of perfect.
I'm not sure what I mean.
If I said to you I have a perfect car, a perfect automobile.
What do I mean by that? Probably.
I mean it starts every time I turn the key and it runs smoothly and it's not
rusting and so on.
But if you start inflating that word perfect, you can start making all kinds of
demands.
If your car is perfect you don't need to drive it.
Drives itself.
As a matter of fact it should go into your grocery shopping for you.
It's perfect doesn't it come in the house and talk to you in bed tonight?
It's perfect. It goes and does your work for you.
Keep rolling up this word perfect.
People do the same thing especially in the atheist tries this trick when he talks
to a religious person.
Because perfect he can do this, he can do that and the other thing.
And those things do everything do with perfect.
God can do anything they say.
That's very silly thing to say.
They see where people get into a problem with words is they confuse difficult with
impossible.
So there's nothing too difficult for God to do.
But some things are impossible because they don't mean anything.
You can say that a man can a man pick up a car?
Is it impossible?
No, it's difficult.
Very difficult.
Difficult because of the limitations that the man has.
It's not entirely out of the question.
A man could pick up a car over by himself.
Now when you're talking about deity, they talk about God, there's nothing too
difficult.
That is something too heavy.
He can't pick it up or whatever.
But some things are impossible because they don't mean anything when you say them.
What does it mean when I say a square circle?
What is a square circle?
Well, there's no such thing and God can't make a circle square.
Because if it's square it has corners and it's not a circle anymore.
If it's a circle it doesn't have corners.
There's just words that you string together.
It's a kind of thing that careful people have been aware of for centuries.
That there's no end to the words that we can string together put one after the
other.
That doesn't mean they make any sense.
Something has to have a meaning before you say is it possible or not.
If you don't understand that, this is where people can lead you anywhere they like.
And I have to wonder what is the Quran for anyway.
The Quran talks about the things that cannot be so.
It tells you why they can't be so.
It gives you arguments to you.
It says when somebody says this you tell him back.
This is the reason that can't be so.
It tells you as an example, as I used the other night,
the suras start soft by telling us as an oath it says by the even and the odd.
It's reminding us that even and odd are different things.
And you'll never find something that's old.
If it's odd that means it isn't even.
That's what odd means.
It means it isn't even.
I'll tell you I have about an odd number.
I mean you can't divide it by two.
Nobody can make it work.
Because of what the words mean.
See when that usually comes back for what people try to use that is,
the Muslim may take all of these wonderful arguments in the Quran.
He may give them to somebody who says for example if God is three.
And he says look it can't be so because of this and this and this.
All chronic arguments.
God cannot be one at the same time.
Three because of these reasons.
And the man says your God is two week.
Why God can do anything.
It can be three if he wants to.
Do you know that kind of argument demolishes itself in this way?
The man says to you God is three.
You ask him why is he three.
I'll tell you that's his nature.
So he is.
Always been three.
That's the way he is.
And when you try to explain well how can something be three and yet one and three
and so on.
Then you say because God can do anything.
Well think about it.
If he can do anything then he didn't have to be three.
He could have been one or five or seven or whatever.
Or he could be eleven tomorrow and twelve and next to him.
Start over again.
Say after that.
If he can do anything.
Which means it isn't his nature.
That's not the way he has to be.
It's the way he decided to be.
Which is different than what he started off telling him.
He started by telling him his nature is three.
He finishes by telling you he decided to be three.
Which is it?
The attitude as I say of confusing what's difficult and what's impossible lets
people get away with anything.
That's what puts a stop any kind of reasonable discussion that you can have.
There are people who will tell you my God that one time was a little boy and went
to school and learned things.
Say if God learned things well no he knew everything.
He's God.
Well then what did he learn?
Well he had to go to the screen learn things.
Round and round they go.
Because of the passage they have in their scriptures that speaks of this one they
say was God.
Because when he was twelve years old he went back to his parents and learned.
He grew in knowledge.
They tell you that's well God did that.
He learned some things.
And when you say but what was it God didn't know that he learned?
Oh nothing he knew everything.
Round and round.
That's why some people wrap up all those ideas and they put it in one phrase.
And because they can string words together it sounds like maybe they solved the
problem.
I tell you all theology is paradox.
Paradox is a thing that seems to contradict itself.
In fact it comes from two words that mean to speak against.
Speak back against.
So they tell you well science works like this.
It makes good sense and so does everything else.
But when we come to the study of God it doesn't make sense.
That's what makes it theology.
See everything else makes sense.
You talk about God no that doesn't make sense.
That's different.
All theology is paradox.
That's one man who's regarded as being very saintly individual.
Well a lot of people he said 17 centuries ago the reason I believe it is because
it's absurd.
Silly.
As it is absurd therefore I believe it.
The problem with that of course is that if what you're supposed to believe is
absurd how do you decide which is the silly thing you're supposed to believe?
See there's a lot of absurd things that contradict each other.
Truth is one kind of a thing.
It's only one version.
There's a lot of things in conflict that are false.
How do you decide which crazy thing is the true one?
If you can't use your mind to decide between true and false.
That's part of the good news of the Quran.
The good news of this message.
It tells mankind trust yourself to know.
In fact it's saying you will recognize truth when your mind is switched on not when
it's switched off.
Something you want to find out what you need to know you'll find it when your mind
is on not off.
Doesn't mean we don't all make mistakes.
But what we do know for sure is we don't find it with the mind switched off.
So by way of maybe some advice I'll try to suggest that that attitude should grow
in a person so that it gains some confidence so that he's not frightened by what
somebody else might say to him.
He doesn't get scared by the big vocabulary somebody has or which school that he
goes to and so on.
So many examples of people who thought they knew something and it was the humblest
sort of a person by his appearance who blew him away.
The mind was telling me how years ago he's from Sudan.
He said there was a man he gathered quite a crowd around him and they were all
silently listening to him talk about the wonderful way that one political system is
supposed to work and they thought he must know what he's talking about.
He's got all these credentials and all these letters after his name.
And the whole point of his speech was to say that in this system everybody has had
exactly the same levels and there are no leaders.
Everybody is exactly the same. That's how it works best.
And while he's telling the crowd this farmer came by pushing this vegetable cart
and he stopped and he listened for a bit.
What's this man saying?
Nobody else has got the nerve to speak and this man put up the time with so little
man looked and said you had a question.
He said I want to ask you have you ever looked at the fingers on your hand?
See how they all have the same length?
See they're all different lengths.
That's why it works better. The fingers are all the same length. It wouldn't work
as well.
And just that quickly he showed the man that maybe you ought to think again about a
political system where there are no generals and no presidents and no leaders or
anything.
Everybody is at the same level.
Will it work? Your hand wouldn't work if your fingers were like that.
If your head is clear it doesn't matter who you're talking to.
You don't lose arguments because of what you don't know.
If your head is clear you can take whatever is told to you and give it back and use
it.
Don't be frightened.
Maybe the challenge is not in talking to people about religion unless you're trying
to defend your own view.
Sometimes people think they've got a lot of very clever things to say and they
haven't thought them through but they hope to frighten you with them.
They give you some examples.
They said the other night I would have the best thing to do when somebody gives you
some thing that sounds very deep is to take it and apply it back to what he just
said.
Apply it to itself.
The other night was there was a philosophy that's why it spread.
A lot of people think they figured it out for themselves for the first time in
history.
They say you can't be certain of anything.
There is no certainty.
When they say that they're imitating a man who lived about 23 centuries ago who was
probably imitating people who lived before him.
His name was Piero, a Greek who said there is no certainty.
You know that might even be true.
But can you be sure?
That's what you want to ask somebody who says that.
He tells you that the reason I don't dabble in religion and that is you can't be
sure of anything.
I've had people tell me that and ask him, are you sure?
I say I'm positive.
Apply it back to itself.
He's so sure that you can't be sure of anything.
There's a lot of dead-ins like that.
People who come to me frequently and say, I don't believe in God.
You can't prove there is a God.
Well as one man had said about 60 years, 70 years ago now, he said people who start
off with that statement have already skipped a question.
They said God, but what do they mean when they say God?
What's God do I have to tell you I believe in?
Well I always tell people when they say I don't believe in God, I usually say which
God don't you believe in?
Tell me about the one you don't believe in.
Probably I don't believe in him either.
After you explain him to me, you mean God that sits on a chair with a long white
beard and rolled up his sleeves one day, six thousand years ago, and made man and
puffed and puffed and had to sit down rest after that.
That's what God do you mean?
I don't believe in that one.
And so on.
So many other ideas that people have.
The key question comes before this, what do you mean?
You said God, you tell me about this God I'm supposed to defend to you.
So it is in fact that if you really do not commit access, you don't say more than
you have authority for saying.
Most of them may find themselves in the position sometimes I have had it happen.
When you explain what it is you believe about God people will say I thought you had
a religion, that's atheism.
There's no God there at all.
That's one of the attributes of Allah.
Allah, Tif.
Has a shade of meaning in Arabic it means a supple.
That's a Tif.
He's so subtle he almost isn't even there because he's so unfamiliar to anything
that you might have in mind.
Whatever you think he is, well you're wrong.
Allah, Tif.
A related word is used in Arabic when they talk about fabric that's a gossamer.
It's fabric but you can read the newspaper through it.
The attributes of Allah, very supple.
So I'm trying to get out of this.
You may often be frightened by people who try to tell you, well religion works like
this and I can figure it out.
And anybody who still has a religion today is pretty primitive.
The anthropologists don't always tell it that way.
The people who study men don't always tell it that way.
I'll tell you in fact that most intelligent men have been the ones that maybe we
used to think were the most primitive.
And the Muslim is in a happy position of not being embarrassed by all that
information.
The more he hears about the history of religion the more the truth comes out.
The more his eman grows because when the facts are discovered they tell him more of
what he knew already.
Tell you one last example of that.
A couple of years ago I finished giving a lecture and the question very came.
Somebody stood up and he's waving a book in a year and he says, you Muslims dare
not let me read this book.
He's trying to challenge his sisters information in this book which your ears
couldn't stand in here.
So the chairman said, well I'll give you two minutes read what you want.
Two minutes.
Oh he is really happy and he started reading as fast as he could.
And what he was reading was the documentation that long before 14 centuries ago the
Arabs used to follow the religion of Abraham, this Ibrahim.
He was filling in all the details.
He said there's proof in this museum and in that ancient inscription and you go to
this place you find this and that and all this.
Saying which professor and which archaeologist found all this information he read
as fast as he could for two minutes finally the chairman said no.
So it's two minutes but he was happy he thought he'd exposed Islam as being some
old thing that was brought back to life 14 centuries ago.
And he sat down and I said, thanks very much.
So that was beautiful.
That makes me happy.
It increases my belief.
And he was really upset about that. He said he wasn't supposed to do that.
He said, why not?
So the Quran tells me that since there have been men there's been Islam and now
you're bringing me proof.
And telling me that Islam isn't 14 centuries old it's much older than that.
It's what I've been trying to tell a lot of people and they tell me no no it
started with a man 14 centuries ago.
Really upset about that.
He said no no no.
It says if a religion is a true religion it would be a new religion.
Who says it is telling people what they didn't know before.
Which is an interesting idea because one only has to remind a person of the methods
used by Jesus.
He didn't tell the Jews anything they hadn't heard before.
He told them about the resurrection of the dead and he rehearsed the stories and he
was always saying it's written in your book such and such and so on so.
By this man's own standards this must have been a fake man.
He was an imposter.
He didn't tell them anything new.
He told them what they heard before.
Try to remind them of it.
Stick a case of it.
As I say, using what you hear if your mind is alert, if it's the truth it works for
you, not for anybody else.
If your head is clear.
So those are some thoughts.
Kill them out. Thank you for your time and attention. The patience may have less
reward our efforts.
Please.
Please take advantage of this opportunity. We will lead it fast by it.
Yes, please.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
It's not worth it.
It might get not on.
Okay.
Okay.
I can carry you anyway.
But thank you.
I should tell you first I have not done this thing.
But sometimes I get that.
Thank you very much.
But still, it's given to me. I should first tell that I have not done this thing.
Sometimes I have become a Muslim, I don't know.
It's Allah.
But I was born in a Buddhist family.
Later I had gone to Italy and I was living in the Roman Catholics.
After that I was living in India, in the Hindus.
And later I read the Holy Quran that was pure freely by a certain age.
And I don't know to which religion I should follow.
Then what did you want me to tell you all?
The thing that I wanted to ask you is about the revelation.
Revelation that you said, revelation, the court is revealed to certain special
persons only.
Why the court is God revealed to us that, or the general people?
Then that is the question that I have in my mind.
Because if the court is revealed, God is revealing himself to some special people
like Robert
Muhammad, Jesus Christ of Moses, or his talk, or some other person like Jesus of
Allah.
Now the other booker, I am asking you to know the reason why the court does not
reveal himself to the simple person like us.
Yes, all right.
Just start with, you said professor, I'm not a professor of anything.
That means I'm working and I'm not working these days.
I'm not attached to some university.
That question shows maybe some, when you think of revelation, you're thinking of
something maybe different than what I'm thinking of when I talk of revelation.
As though revelation was full of secrets.
And to the Muslim it's not.
It's not.