One of the Greatest Thinkers of Our Time

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written a piece, "Why I Am Now a Christian." It's ironic because Ayaan Hirsi Ali a few years ago was the guest speaker, really person with whom I had a dialogue at a PragerU gala, and she spoke about being an atheist.

And I said, this is the one arena where you and I differ. We are doomed without Judeo-Christian religions. And sure enough, I mean, I knew I was right. It wasn't the matter of debate, but I so, so understand the Islam that she grew up with, why she would become anti-religious. Iran has probably produced more atheists than Harvard.

Why I Am Now a Christian. Atheism can't equip— can't equip us for civilizational war.

That's right.

In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell titled Why I Am Not a Christian.

That's right.

I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.

That's correct.

So she goes on to say, to understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been.

I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated my community in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985. I don't think I had even understood religious practice before the coming of the Brotherhood. The preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood changed this. They articulated direction, the straight path. I'll read to you more. The evolution of this brilliant, courageous woman to take God and religion and the Bible seriously is a major moment. One of the great thinkers of our time, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has written a piece.

She has gone from atheism to Christianity, and she is telling about her Islamic background in a piece she wrote for unheard.

U-N-H-E-R-D. It's a good play on words.

So she writes about during Islamic study sessions—

she grew up a Muslim in Africa—

we shared with the preacher in charge of the session our worries. For instance, what should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to but who refused to accept our dawah, the invitation to the faith? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet's instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty toward unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them. Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of unbeliever: The Jew. We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust, and anger at the litany of offenses the Jew had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our prophet. He had occupied the holy mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind, and soul. By the way, just the irony here is beyond belief. The only reason Jerusalem is holy to Muslims is because of the Jews. It was holy to Jews, let's see, 6 and— for almost 2,000 years before Muhammad was born, Jerusalem was holy to Jews.

That if it weren't for Jews, there would be no Islam. And Jerusalem would not be holy, and many other things.

But the Jews had the temerity not to convert to Islam. You can see why, to someone who had been through such a religious schooling, atheism seemed so appealing. Bertrand Russell offered a simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people. For him, there was no credible case for the existence of God. Religion, Russell argued, was rooted in fear. Fear is the basis of the whole thing. Fear of the mysterious. Fear of death. Fear of death. Fear of defeat. As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them, people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the more confident I felt I had made the right choice.

For the atheists were clever.

They were also a great deal of fun. So what changed?

Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilization is under threat from three different but related forces. The resurgence of great power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin's Russia, the rise of global Islamism which threatens to mobilize a vast population against the West, and the viral spread of woke ideology which is eating into the moral fiber of the next generation.

Yeah, that's what I told— that's what I said many times. It's a pincer. The West is in between pincers, Islamism and leftism.

They both hate the West.

That's why they hate Israel. Israel—

they say it— Israel is an outpost of the West in the Middle East, like that's a bad thing. I would like outposts of the West all over the world. Because Western civilization has given more people more freedom and more prosperity and more rights and more dignity than any other civilization in history. And since I would like to increase freedom and dignity for human beings, I would like to spread Western civilization. We endeavor to fend off those threats with modern secular tools, military, economic, diplomatic, and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease, or surveil. And yet with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China. But we cannot fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question, what is it that unites us? The response that God is dead seems insufficient. So too does the attempt to find solace in the rules-based liberal international order. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

My life has been devoted to that.

One of the great people of our time, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Left atheism.

And she writes her piece, and it's, it's everything.

Activist atheists believe that with the rejection of God, we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism.

But the God hole, the void left by the retreat of the church, has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma.

The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being in action, mostly by engaging in virtue signaling theater on behalf of a victimized minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing.

They then become capable of believing in anything. Line I have cited hundreds of times.

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilizational. We cannot withstand China, Russia, and Iran if we can't explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can't fight woke ideology if we can't defend the civilization that it is determined to destroy. And we can't counter Islamism with purely secular tools.

That's right. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story. Embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage, and mobilize the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilization will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some New Age concoction of meditation and mindfulness. Christianity has it all. That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist.

That's her new title, Lapsed Atheist.

Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday, but I have recognized in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer. There is a—

by the way, put that up. It's up already at DennisPrager.com.

Red State reports Brooklyn students chant "F the Jews" during anti-Israel school walkout. As if the anti-Israel demonstrations across the country weren't already cringeworthy enough, Now the activists are getting kids even more involved. The New Yorker school district held an anti-Israel student walkout event in which the kids chanted anti-Semitic phrases and called for a ceasefire of Israel's military efforts against Hamas. The development started with a parental advisory board in Brooklyn. A Brooklyn parent advisory board promoted and organized a student walkout for Palestinians, a clear violation of state regulations, critics told The Post. The Community Education Council for District 14, which covers ultra-liberal Williamsburg and Greenpoint, used its platform to encourage the 700-student protest. Involving 100 schools and even shared resources including anti-Semitic signs proclaiming, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Recommended chants included, "Resistance is justified when people are occupied," and "Say it loud and clear, we don't want Zionists here." Say it loud and clear, we don't want Zionists here.

Kids marching in Brooklyn, New York. This didn't happen when America was more Christian.

Jews bought or drank the Kool-Aid, most Jews. Ah, secular America, that'll be better for us Jews. I knew they were fools all of my life.

Didn't— doesn't help though, fools don't know they're fools. The reason Jews have had it so great in America more than any other country is is its Judeo-Christian background.

John Adams, President of the United States, could say, we owe more to the Hebrews for civilization than to any other group.

Not said today. George Washington visited a synagogue. The respect for Jews, Hebrew, the Bible has been deep in American life. Of course, there's always been some antisemitism. Of course. But this was the best country for Jews outside of their own country that they've ever lived in, and it was thanks overwhelmingly to the Christians of this country, not to the secularists of this country. Your local Christian neighbor is better for you, my fellow Jew, than your ACLU neighbor. The influx of vast numbers from Muslim countries may, may spell the end of the West as we know it. And by the way, many of these people would agree with me. That's their dream, the end of the West as we know it. It's what Rashida Tlaib wants. It's what Ilhan Omar wants. It's what the left wants. It's quite a powerful movement, Islamism and leftism.