Welcome to episode 38 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss how to debate Islam with a famous former Muslim, Hatun Tash. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Podcast description:
Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.
Episode 38:
Episode Summary:
Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome our first guest onto the show. Hatun Tash is a former Muslim who was born in Turkey. We discuss the importance of perfect preservation of the Qur’an in Islam, and compare different translations to see if they all agree. We discuss Hatun’s experiences discussing her Christian faith with Muslims in different countries. This is the first episode in a two part series.
Speaker biographies
Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.
Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.
Hatun Tash is is a well-known Christian preacher who regularly debates Islam and the Koran. An ex-Muslim and convert to Christianity, she is director of the ministry Defend Christ Critique Islam. She has faced threats to her life on multiple occasions and was attacked and stabbed on 25 July 2021 while preaching at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. You can find her collection of very popular and entertaining videos on YouTube in the Hatun Tash DCCI Ministries channel.
My concern about federal law enforcement exchanging morality for political expediency is getting worse by the day. I keep finding stories in the news showing that the secular left has no shame at all about using the power of government as a weapon against their enemies in the Republican party. Today, let’s look at a 19-minute video and article from Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire.
First, the video, which is exact same thing as the article below:
And here is the article. It’s behind a paywall, so I only want to quote a little bit.
Here is what happens to Democrat domestic terrorists:
Here’s one example that went totally unreported by the mainstream press. Kevin Benjamin Weier is a California man in his mid-30’s. During the canonization of Saint George Floyd three years ago, Weier took it upon himself to light a federal courthouse in Portland on fire. There’s no dispute about that. Weier pleaded guilty to, “repositioning a piece of lit wood” against the walls of the courthouse.
After Weier pleaded guilty, Joe Biden’s DOJ made a point to issue a press release about the many years in jail that this domestic terrorist was facing. Specifically, the DOJ’s press release stated that Weier’s intentional destruction of federal courthouses was, “punishable by up to 10 years in prison.”
[…]As it happens, Weier ultimately received a sentence that was nowhere near the 10-year term the Biden DOJ suggested he might serve. Instead, on the recommendation of federal prosecutors, Weier received a sentence of two years’ probation. For trying to set fire to a federal courthouse. And indeed, Kevin Weier never served a day in prison. He did have to pay a $200 fine, though. So there’s that.
Two year’s probation, that means no prison time at all. Because he’s a Democrat.
But here’s what happens to Republicans:
If you’re a former GOP congressional candidate by the name of Enrique Tarrio, this is all very confusing.
[…]Enrique Tarrio was just sentenced to 22 years in prison for “orchestrating” a riot that he didn’t even attend. There’s no discussion whatsoever about what Tarrio might have done, or how exactly he facilitated what happened on January 6th. No one cares.
[…]According to the government, Tarrio told his followers… to organize a big crowd in Washington to storm government buildings.
As we know from Tucker Carlson’s video, the most violent thing that happened in the Capitol is that a Capitol Hill policeman murdered an unarmed Republican woman who was trying to push her way through a closed door with her hand. His identity was hidden from the public, and he was later promoted. Promoted.
And another example:
Consider the case of Joseph Biggs, a man with no criminal record whatsoever. Biggs is an Army veteran who didn’t hurt anyone on January 6th. But he did walk around the Capitol building and he did help pull down a fence on the periphery of the building. And for that, judge Tim Kelly — the same judge who sentenced Tarrio — decided that Joseph Biggs needs to spend 17 years in prison.
Matt Walsh did post a video of people “storming government buildings”, though. Except these people were Democrats:
An actual insurrection:
Did they get 22 years in prison? Nope:
And their punishment is — absolutely nothing. They get zip-tied, at most, and let go immediately. Their explicit purpose was to derail a government proceeding. In fact, some of these activists barged into the Senate chambers. None of them suffered any real consequences.
Because they’re Democrats, and the law is ever only applied against Republicans – and Christians. It doesn’t apply to the secular left. This is fine with federal law enforcement and federal judges. They think that they are doing a great job of serving the people who pay their salaries through mandatory taxes. Why think that our secular left law enforcement is capable of anything different to law enforcement under Stalin, Mao and Hitler?
Now we are seeing real violence:
So does the Biden DOJ’s handling of the raid on Craig Robertson a month ago. Robertson was the elderly invalid Trump supporter in Utah who shared threatening memes about Joe Biden on social media for months. Weeks later, instead of picking up Robertson while he was on his motorized scooter at Walgreens, the FBI decided to surprise Robertson with a 6 AM raid at his home.
Robertson was shot and killed by the FBI, and no bodycam video has been released. What happened? We don’t know, and they are refusing to release the video. Just like they are refusing to release the manifesto of the Nashville anti-Christian mass murderer.
Members of Antifa and BLM also get light sentences:
Consider the case of the BLM arsonist back in 2020 who lit a pawn shop on fire, in the name of civil rights. Three days after Saint George Floyd overdosed, Montez T. Lee decided to commit an act of arson that killed Oscar Lee Stewart. Stewart’s body wasn’t found in the rubble for nearly two months. What was Montez Lee’s sentence? He got less than ten years in prison. That’s less than half the sentence that Enrique Tarrio will face, for sending some naughty text messages.
[…]We see relatively light or non-existent sentences like this all the time. A serial child rapist in Ohio just got ten years in prison. A drunk driver in Phoenix — at four times the legal B.A.C. — just got 12 years in prison for driving 135 miles per hour and killing someone. A terrorist train engineer in Los Angeles who tried to run his locomotive into a U.S. Navy hospital ship during COVID received just three years in prison. A man who burned down a Minneapolis police station, live on national television, during the George Floyd riots received just four years in prison. Another man who lit a molotov cocktail and threw it at the police station got just three years in prison.
How can we get federal law enforcement to treat people fairly, regardless of political party and religion? Well, make sure that you vote in the next elections, and make sure you’re telling all your friends and family about stories like this. We have to get 2 Republicans to the polls for every Democrat who votes.
I am always on the lookout for good resources on science and Christianity. And I found some. Well, Uncommon Descent found them, and I read their blog, so I found them too. The first four episodes are out, and the topics are: 1) introducing the Cambrian explosion, 2) pre-Cambrian fossils, 3) punctuated equilibrium, and 4) Darwin’s “tree of life”. Each video is 12-20 minutes long.
So, before we see the videos, I feel I should explain the outline for arguing for a creator / designer of the universe from scratch. There are six main arguments. 1) the origin of the universe from nothing, 2) fine-tuning of the creation event, 3) fine-tuning for habitability in the galaxy, solar system, and planet, 4) the origin of the first living self-replicating organism, 5) irreducible / minimal complexity in molecular machines, 6) the sudden origin of basic body plans in the Cambrian explosion (a geological period a long time ago).
These four videos introduce you to the sixth argument in that list, the Cambrian explosion.
First video: Introducing the Cambrian explosion
Description:
When Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, he was painstakingly aware of the fact that the fossil record diametrically opposed his theory. Ever since Darwin’s time, paleontologists have put their finger on the Cambrian explosion, where most of the major animal phyla appear abruptly in the fossil record suddenly and without any evidence of intermediate forms preceding them in Precambrian strata.
Second video: evaluating precursors to the Cambrian explosion
Description:
Are there transitional forms and Precambrian fossils which reveal the evolution of the diverse animal phyla that appear in the Cambrian explosion? The history of paleontology shows the answer is no! As paleontologists have learned more about the fossil and geological record, the challenge of the Cambrian explosion to Darwinian theory has only increased.
Third video: evaluating punctuated equilibrium
Description:
In the 1970s, paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed a model of evolution called punctuated equilibrium, intended to resolve the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. Can “Punk Eek,” as it’s often called, resolve the abrupt appearance of new animal phyla in the Cambrian explosion? This video explains why the answer is No—among many other problems, Punk Eek requires too much evolutionary change too quickly and lacks a biological mechanism to account for the rapid origin of anatomical novelty we see in the Cambrian period.
Fourth video: evaluating homology and phylogenetics
Description:
As more scientists have realized that the fossil record poses serious challenges to Darwin’s theory of evolution, many have turned to molecular homologies and phylogenetic trees to defend Darwin’s tree of life. But do these approaches really support Darwin’s tree? Nope.
If you like these videos, you can read a much longer, more detailed book about it by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, called “Darwin’s Doubt”. Or, you can do what I’m doing and just read a chapter about it in the new book “The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith“. That book covers all 6 of the arguments I mentioned before. You can see the table of contents on the Discovery Institute web site. The chapter by Dr. Gunter Bechly entitled “Does the Fossil Record Demonstrate Darwinian Evolution?” covers the fossil record, and the Cambrian explosion in particular. I like Gunter a LOT, because he had a recent debate on the Unbelievable show on this topic, and he really cleaned the clock of his opponent, a slippery theistic evolutionist named Joshua Swamidass. It was beautiful. He cut through all the theistic evolution garbage and got straight into the science.
I’m reading the book right now. Or rather, I’m having it read to me, because I got the audio book version. If you remember reading books like “Mere Creation” (1998) and “The Creation Hypothesis” (1994) as a young man like I do, then you will love this book.
I like to know a little about every interesting topic, and then watch lots of university lectures and formal debates about them, so I can debate these topics in the places where I live and work. The new book has a lot of different authors from a lot of different perspectives writing on a lot of different topics. You could find a way to talk about these topics in pretty much any environment.
So far, I like Dr. Fazale Rana’s chapter on Adam and Eve the best, but I’m still in Section I. I’m just starting on Jay Richards chapter next.
