Mark Siljander
speaker
279 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Mark Siljander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Christian, Muslim, Shiite, Sunni. I mean, it was completely absurd.
No institutions, no history of democracy.
No, with nothing.
Yeah.
And this is, to me, the biggest area of deception with a neoconservative ideology. They are just so still believe that democracy is the best for every country. But how many democracies, Jordan, are the same?
Well, they're also a minority of governments. And the idea that democracy... See, the problem, part of the problem with this neoconstance is the notion that democracy is the natural state of governance for human beings, which is, like, it's rare...
there are a multitude of unlikely preconditions, some of which seem to be, well, this is something else that we can talk about, some of which seem to be Judeo-Christian in their essence. It's like 47 of 50 Muslim majority countries are not democracies. And 100% of Catholic and Protestant majority countries outside of Africa are functional democracies.
So this is something we can also delve into when we talk about the commonalities between Christianity, Judaism and Islam, because we also have to account for the radical differences in governance style. Okay, so you weren't a fan of the neocons, even though you'd started out as more of a hawk and more of an evangelical hawk, you had an epiphany.
And the epiphany, I'd like to go into that a little bit more. Some of that was conceptual. Maybe the Muslims, Christians and Jews have more in common than we might think. But some of it was your dawning intuition that there was a conflict between the deep realities of your faith and your political approach and strategy.
So how did that, yeah, how do you make sense of that realization coming to dawn on you?
It was sparked, Jordan, by a friend from India. He said, Mark, you talk negative against Muslims and the Quran, but did you know that Jesus is in the Quran? I jumped out of my chair and said, I don't believe. And this is during the epiphany. I'm still developing. It's like one is an infant.
You're born into a new thinking, but it takes time to mature and hopefully someday become an adult in the context of the epiphany. And I was very angry. I said, I don't believe this. So I bought a Quran in English, of course, and started reading it in English. And it was extraordinary how many times it mentioned Jesus. He's the central figure, strangely enough. It was just a profound discovery.
And my wife, I'd scream back to her, Nancy, do you know what the Quran says about Jesus? Yes. She says, I don't really want to know. Yeah, right. Let me tell you. And then she got quite infatuated with the whole process as well. So after studying it, I called a spiritual friend of mine who is my pastor from Michigan who spoke Aramaic.
And this is the key linchpin now with the epiphany, by the way. He was teaching me Aramaic.
Right, which is Christ's original language.
Yeah, Jesus the Messiah from Nazareth spoke Galilean dialect of Aramaic. And there is a fourth or fifth century copy, I believe of a copy of a copy, of what they call the Peshitta text. It's in the Museum of London, I think, at the moment. And Peshitta means simple and straightforward. And it has the Aramaic language of Jesus. So I began reading that and then reading the Quran.
And while I had many nice things to say, which I love to get into before the interview expires, about Jesus, it also said things, for example, he's not the son of God, he wasn't crucified, negative against the Trinity, things like that. The Christians, including yours truly, felt a little bit... offended by. So there you go. There's some of the problems.
But then the epiphany grew to a second, more minor one. I felt, how does one say this? A very strong notion that is in the words. The words. So I asked my pastor, Aramaic speaker, what is begotten in Aramaic?
and began learning Arabic at some level and comparing the begottenness of Jesus in the Quran and the begottenness of Jesus, say, in Matthew 1, with the long 41 begots, Abraham, begot Isaac, et cetera, and discovered something quite fascinating, that the same word the Quran uses, walid, For Jesus was not wallet or begotten, and this may seem a little technical, but it's very powerful.
It's a male verb action, meaning sexually. Of course, no Christian believes God had sex with Mary, but that's what many Muslims believe, Christians believe, because we say Jesus was begotten the same way as we were begotten. But in the Peshitta text, it uniquely and without any...
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