Lisa Fields: Hello. Welcome to the Jew three Project podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Fields. I’m the founder of the Jew three Project. Well, thank you for watching another episode of the G3 Project podcast. As always, I’m your host, Lisa Fields, the founder of the G3 Project. And I’m here with my good friend, Abdul Murray. Welcome.
Abdu Murray: Thanks, Lisa, for having me. It’s always great to talk with you, and I’m excited about this, our time together.
Lisa Fields: So you’ve been on the podcast several times already. Yeah. I’ve known you for I mean, it’s it’s
Abdu Murray: almost a decade now. Yeah. I would say it’s about ten years. That’s absolutely it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Amazing
Lisa Fields: apologist, father, friend. Tell our audience a little bit about, who you are. Sure. Absolutely.
Abdu Murray: Wow. A decade. It’s kinda crazy. So I am Abdul Murray, and, the first thing you’ll notice is the weird first and last name. The first name is a Muslim first name, and the last name is Scottish, but that’s not really my heritage. My my last name is really Mirai. When we came over to The United States, they said, you sound like you’re saying Murray with a Scottish accent. So they changed our last name to Murray for us. So now I’m Lebanese and Scottish. As you know, I’m I’m I’m not Scottish. But, I was raised a Muslim and I was a very proud Muslim until the age of 27 when, I had after a nine year look into the philosophical, theological, historical, scientific underpinnings of various world views. I I realized that the Christian faith answered, all the questions that I needed to have answered for a comprehensive world view to make sense of life, on multiple levels. And so I gave my life to Christ in the year 2000, and I’ve been serving him ever since. I’m an attorney, by training and also, by profession up until, I went to full time ministry. So I’m in full time ministry now, and our ministry is called Embrace the Truth, which, the mission of which seeks to offer the credibility of the gospel to every questioner we encounter. Our our our big push is that we don’t really answer questions. We answer people because questions don’t need answers, but people do and they use their questions to get them. So I I fundamentally believe that if you answer people, you can’t go wrong. But if you answer questions, you might get it wrong. But if you look at people, you’ll be fine. Mhmm.
Lisa Fields: No. I love that. You have a new book coming out Yeah. On AI and and gender.
Abdu Murray: Yeah. Yeah. And people often ask me, like, what what is the deal with those two things? How did you create a nexus between those two things? As I’ve been sort of observing culture ever since a book I wrote in 2016 called, well, actually, it came out in 2018. I wrote it in 2016 called Saving Truth, where I looked at the post truth culture. And we’re not a postmodern culture anymore, I don’t think. We’re we’re a version of it. We’re a post truth culture where we acknowledge that truth exists. We just don’t care if it conflicts with our preferences and our feelings. So, in light of that, we saw a rise in not in the expression of human freedom, but in the free the the expression of human autonomy, which is unlimited, unbounded, even by truth. Truth doesn’t even bound the idea of autonomy because, you know, autonomy comes from two Greek root words. One is autos, which means self, and the second one is nomos, which means law. So when you’re autonomous, you’re a law unto yourself. And when that happens, chaos ensues because anything you want is what should be enforced publicly. And, the the result of that is that there is someone ends up enslaved from that whole thing, publicly speaking and culturally speaking. Because if my preferences and my feelings don’t match the cultural milieu of what is acceptable at that particular moment, then, those who have the loudest voices and the most power at the moment can suppress, those who even if those who have the truth on their side. And that’s a dangerous place to be. Well, as a result of that, we’ve we’ve the post truth culture has is a seaquake culturally that has emanated that has allowed two, what I call cultural tsunamis to flow from it. And the first cultural tsunami is, this gender ideology, which suggests that you which not suggest, it demands that you not believe your own eyes, that we’re going to suppress certain information. And we’re going to, say that people can switch genders as it were, or there’s a spectrum or continuum of gender. And if you don’t believe it, you’re going to be penalized for it. And if you don’t agree with it as well. And that collapses your sense of reality. That collapses your sense of what’s real. But along comes another cultural phenomenon essentially at the same time, which I, in the book, call AI mania. And, so I’m not against AI. I actually like technology. I’m a bit of a technophile. But, I do worry about how human beings use it and what is it how do tools affect how we see the world and ourselves? And so artificial intelligence comes along and with its deep fakes and its abilities to make entire videos and movies almost, that look real but are not, we’re not able to tell what’s real anymore. And then AI also suggests that if we have this intelligence doesn’t mean that you’re human. Because if this thing is intelligent and it’s not human and it’s soulless, what does that say about us? So gender ideology collapses our reality of what it means to be male and female. And AI, AI mania threatens to collapse our understanding of what it means to be human in the first place. And so I thought that these two things needed to be addressed because they’re happening at the same time. And I think we can understand the problem, but also come to a, a solution. Mhmm.
Lisa Fields: I think the interesting thing about AI and, the the the tech bros or this whole culture Yeah. There is, some when we when we think about, like, the Peter Tills of the world, there’s a lot of God language being used, but not a lot of God language being used correctly. Tell us about the Yeah. The tension there around, the tech bros and how they’re using god language, but not using it consistently with scripture?
Abdu Murray: Oh, yeah. There’s there’s, there’s a lot of it. Whether it’s Peter Thiel or even, sort of like the the lead evangelist for transhumanism, which is not the, you know, which is important because transhumanism is essentially the next logical step in the development of AI, where we’re going to merge with, a super intelligent technology. We’re not at the super intelligent technology yet, but we’re gonna merge with it. And so once it becomes human level intelligence, meaning AI, then we will figure out a way because the AI will be smart enough and we can essentially be smart enough to figure out a way to have our consciousnesses downloaded into some kind of or uploaded, I should say, into some kind of storage medium and then not be limited by these bodies. And then there’ll be no more sickness and there’ll be no more death and these kind of things. For a while now, those who are looking at the formation of culture and technology have said, this sounds like eschatological language. This sounds like rapture language. In fact, I think it was Scott Horgan who wrote for Scientific American, who called it the rapture of the nerds. And this idea that we’re going to somehow be elevated to a godlike status, or at the very least have a utopia here on Earth through technology. So, yeah, there’s a bunch of this sort of God talk, throughout this whole thing. Ray Kurzweil is the lead apologist, I would say, or evangelist for, transhumanism. And in a in a movie called The Transcendent Man. And you can also see in his own videos because he has a, he’s the one who’s who wrote The Singularity is Near and then a book called The Singularity is Nearer. And he believes that we’re gonna achieve human like intelligence and machines very, very soon. And he thinks this is gonna be the greatest thing since sliced bread. It will elevate humanity to what’s what’s called a posthuman status. So we’re not transhuman really, we’re posthuman now when when we get to that singularity. And, he he was asked in the transcendent man, He was asked, do you believe in god? Or he said, if you ask me if there are god is there is there a god? I would say, not yet. In other words, we’re working on it, and we’ll become that god once we create this godlike machine. And there are people who are professing Christians who would would adopt some of this language as well. There was a really interesting book called What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly, who was one of the founders, I believe, of Wired magazine. And as a self professing Christian, he talks about the fact that there’s this thing called the Technium. And the Technium is almost this entity. It’s this emerging thing that the more technology human beings create as creatures of god, we extend god’s creation in the universe, by creating technology. But that technology itself is the thing, is an entity, not just tools to be used, but some kind of emergent, like, entity or being as it were, almost godlike. And so a lot of this, rhetoric sounds extremely spiritual, and some of it sounds Christianesque or at least pseudo Christian. And that can be dangerous because we do have people who are rushing headlong into using technology for a spiritual connectedness that is, kind of shocking, actually. So one of the terms, for example, that you asked specific question about terms, Kevin Kelly, says, you know, we’re we we reflect God. And so far, I’m okay with that, in terms of we bear God’s image. But he says that we create like the one like the God who is the initial auto creator. And I think what he’s referring to there is a misnomer because it suggests that, you know, God God eternally exists. He’s a necessary being. He never began to exist. And so everything that does exist comes from him. So he never needs to be explained. He exists in and of himself. Well, I think Kevin Kelly, who is, by the way, a brilliant man, misuses this term because God didn’t create himself. He always existed. He never needed creation. And so we sometimes we play fast and loose, even while intention sometimes, with with God talk and then we hyper technology technologize it and then think it applies to something we’ve made. And that’s a dangerous place to be, especially when we have people who are using LLMs like Chat GPT and Gemini and all these things as prayer partners. And this is a real thing. This is really happening.
Lisa Fields: Yeah. I think one of the things, you know, as you’re talking, it gives me tower of apple feel.
Abdu Murray: Yeah.
Lisa Fields: Yeah. Absolutely. Thou babble or or Lucifer, I could be like God. Mhmm. And it is very, consistent in the ideological framework of human and ideology of wanting to be their the captain of their own ship. We see that throughout all scripture. Oh, yeah. Looking for ways to control one’s life. And I think what one of the appeals of AI, particularly for a lonely generation, is people don’t know how to do community and relationships well. Oh, my. And so the isolation creates the need for technological companions.
Abdu Murray: Oh, that could be more true.
Lisa Fields: So it’s like, I I can’t I I’ve struggled with human connection, but I know I need some kind of connection and community and conversation, so I’ll create technology.
Abdu Murray: Yeah. Yeah. I think that this stems from and you’re hitting on a very important tone that I’m trying to strike in the book. And in the book, you know, the label it’s called fake ID. And it’s the understanding that at some point we actually don’t know what it means to be human because we’ve confused ourselves with a lot of different cultural things, including the embrace of technology and the inability to create community. When you read Jonathan Haidt’s book, for example, The Anxious Generation, and you see the damage that’s been done to, Generation Z and of course, which will perpetuate into Gen Alpha, through social media and the algorithms of technology because the world is at their fingertips. I mean, it’s one thing to have social media on a computer. It’s another thing to have it in your pocket all the time. And then think that by using that, you’re actually creating community and relationship when you’re really creating a simulacrum of that thing. So the whole the whole, sort of, deep fake, as it were, has been going on for quite some time well before, generative images through AI were even available to us at our fingertips. We were doing deep fake relationships for a long time, through social media. And so you couldn’t be more right about that. But one of the threads that I try to weave throughout the book is the fact that, I love the way you begin your comments there because, one of the arguments I make is that an ancient book that accurately describes the human condition with unparalleled, accuracy is unlikely to have a human origin. The Bible is an ancient book that describes the human condition with unparalleled accuracy. Therefore, the Bible is unlikely to be of human origin alone. In other words, the Bible has been saying this stuff that we’re discovering now for thousands of years. And it’s pointed out human nature and that natural desire from Eden to the current digital Eden we’re in, that natural desire to what it be God, not to be with him, that’s our purpose, but to be him. And along comes, you know, these two things, whether it’s gender ideology or especially AI as well, that says, we’ve created this thing. Yes. You are just a machine. You’re just a biochemical machine, but don’t worry. We have this other re where you’re a clever machine. And we can create, as clever machines, a really, really clever machine that appears godlike. It’s omnipotent, it’s omnipresent, it’s omniscient it seems. And one day when it fully achieves its divinity, we’ll merge with it. And we’ll finally beat God at his game because God created us to be with him. And he could not create a God just like him because a God just like him doesn’t need to be created logically speaking. But we just did it. We just created our own God. And this is not a new story. This is this is the very first story in the bible. This is the very first thing. Outside of the creation of the world, the very first story about human beings was their attempt to be God. And this has been going on since human beings running around. So fact that the Bible nails it so accurately for so long and predicts our coming age suggests that maybe this book ought to be listened to. Maybe it’s just not a collection of minor and backward wisdom from some handful a handful of shepherds and fishermen. But maybe it’s actually something really worth believing and really worth studying because it speaks to our current condition. So you you nailed it directly, and even the Tower Of Babel stuff, I talk about that as well, where, human technology is an attempt to become God, will lead to our ruin. And God knows that. And so he confounds the language, not so that, we would be ignorant, but because we were going against his purposes, which was to go out into all the world and be fruitful and multiply. And I know that God wants diversity, and a unity in diversity because though he scatters human beings in Babel because of their use of technology to try to become God, because at Pentecost, people heard the same gospel message in their language. What I love about that story, by the way, this is a totally aside, but love about the Pentecost story is that people didn’t hear Hebrew or Aramaic or what or whatever the disciples were speaking at the at the moment they were speaking it and then suddenly understand that language. That’s not what happened. God had them hear it in their language. So he respected their different ethnicities and their different origins. So God is a God who loves diversity, but he also loves human beings to have unity and unity with him. And Babel was all about rivaling him, which is completely different. And that’s why I think if we apply that to AI, we can see that people are trying very hard through the use of developing technologies to become God. And there’s so many instances about it, that I show in the book.
Lisa Fields: Mhmm. No. I as you’re talking, I’ve started thinking about, you know, the fact that’s as we’re talking about AI and talking about people trying to become God like that, most people don’t understand what who God is and what it means to be God and what it means to be human. Yeah. Our attempts to be God revealed that we don’t really know who God is. Mhmm. And our attempts to, I don’t know, act outside of our humanity Mhmm. Really reveals that we don’t know the value of what it means to be human. Absolutely. I think it’s important for us to define that because the the assumption is most Christians know what it means to be human and know what it means to be God. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Would you mind just defining those for our audience?
Abdu Murray: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you. This is something I I I specifically talk about too, through the book because I’m so glad you asked because we’re at a moment right now, and I don’t care if this is inside the camp of, you know, or inside the the Christian sort of sphere or outside of it. We’re being told two competing things that both can’t be true. The first thing you’re told is that you’re a machine. You’re just a biochemical machine that responds to external stimuli. That’s what it means to be human. You’re just a sophisticated meat computer, more sophisticated than other animals, but still just an animal based on this biochemical sort of machinery. The other claim is that you are the god of your own universe. Well, you can’t be both those things. And so we bounce back between these two things all the time, trying to reconcile the contradiction, what I call cultural schizophrenia. We’re trying to cure the cultural schizophrenia, and the human mind can only deal with contradiction, that it’s been forced to accept as true for so long before an anxiety results. And I think that’s what’s plaguing a lot of our young people who are having a hard time, and this is not just young people, but even older, who are having a hard time forming the community you just talked about because they don’t know what it means to be human. And they think it’s either this this machine and connectedness is what’s important. No. Meaningful connectedness is what’s important. So from a biblical perspective, what it means to be god is so different than what the culture talks about. God is not a being among other beings. God is the source of all being. You know, when you look at some of the classical, definitions of God across monotheisms, but especially as it is in the Christian worldview as elucidated in the Bible. God is not like the gods of the Babylonians or the gods of the, the Hittites or the, the Egyptians or the Greeks, where he emerges from something that already existed. You know, the the the the Titans emerge from the ether and the Titans create the gods of Olympus. Everything is contingent. It depends on something else to exist. Biblically speaking, God is not is not described that way. God is described as the necessary being, the eternal being who always existed, who can’t not exist. So he is the grounding of all being. Everything else that comes into existence is not him, but it depends upon him. And that is what it means to be God in a in a basic sense. So God is ever existent. He never began, and he will never end. His knowledge never ceases, and it has no limit. His power has no limit, and his love has no limit. And, his moral value, moral virtue has no limit. In fact, he is the definer of all those things because if he’s the definer of existence, then everything, including morality, including concepts like logic, find their rooting in him. That is fundamentally distinct from what the culture actually gets us to think about as God. God is being a being among other beings as if, you know, he’s as great of a piece of art as it is. The the the Sistine Chapel depicts God as this gray gray gray bearded man who breathes life or touches, you know, Adam and brings life into Adam’s body as if they’re almost coequal, in the depiction. As brilliant as that that art is, it does not capture what the Bible actually describes as God. You can’t actually depict it in in in in, physical terms, in in in pictorial terms. You just can’t do it. So if he’s unfathomable in one sense, but quite, approachable in another because he does condescend, and he does take on the form of a servant in the person of Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God as the bible describes him. So God is invisible, but he has managed to find a way to make himself known to us, and what it means to be human. And that goes into the next part, what it means to be human is not that you’re a machine nor are you the God of the universe, rather you are created in God’s image. So we bear the markers of what God actually is. We aren’t God and we never will be God, and we are infinitely less than him, but there is there is this imprint upon us. We are made in God’s image. Now this is important. Theologians talk about the difference between between God’s image and being made in God’s image. It’s like a river. You can be in the river, but you’re not the river. So even though we’re made in god’s image, we are not god’s image. Rather, Jesus is god’s image. Jesus is the one who, reflects his splendor and the radiance of his of his likeness. So we are made like that. So we are, you know, as the bible describes, we made a little little lower than the heavenly beings yet crowned with glory and honor. So we’re not the machines that the materialists would say we are, nor are we the gods that sort of the post truth thinking says we are. We are this glorious thing that’s right in the middle, and we reflect something of our creator, but we depend upon him in the first place. And last thing I’ll say about who God actually is. I love the fact that the Bible is so sophisticated in its philosophy. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz has an argument from contingency where he argues that god exists based on the contingency of the universe. So it’s a it’s a quick argument. It well, it’s actually much more complicated than this, but I’m gonna make it simplified. It’s the idea that everything that exists owes its existence to something before it. That’s a contingent being. So everything’s either necessary or contingent. Everything we see in the universe and the universe itself is contingent. It owes its existence to something prior to it. And it isn’t therefore necessary. But you can’t have an infinite chain of causes in the back, like, you know, who created me, my parents, who created them, their parents, who created those people, their parents, and then their parents. You keep going back and back and back. And you go, you know, what created the universe? Well, God. Well, who created God? You don’t have to go there. Because at some point, you have to have a stopping point in the past. Because if you didn’t have a stopping point in the past, you couldn’t get to now. You can never count up to now if there’s an infinite regress of actual events in the past. What that means is there’s a necessary being outside of, the idea of sequential time that creates sequential time, and that being sounds a lot like God. So Leibniz argued that the existence of contingent things and the fact that we exist now suggests that there is an eternity past that is based on a being that doesn’t need to be explained. It explains itself, and that’s God. Sophisticated argument and a powerful one. When Moses approaches the burning bush and asks God, what is your name? The Lord of glory, the Lord of language summarizes Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s argument in his name. I am that I am, not I came this way, and this is my name, and I have this but it it was my my name is I am. I exist. So the bible already speaks about a philosophy it took us centuries to develop, and it said it to Moses from a bush. That’s amazing to me. So what it means to be God is that, and what it means to be human is to be made in God’s image. You aren’t God and you aren’t a machine. You’re this wonderful thing in between. Yeah.
Lisa Fields: And I think that’s important to note in our particular culture, there’s a lot that’s been going on in particularly hip hop culture around, I think it was I think his name is N. L. E. Chopper or NBA Youngboy. So I’ll say both of them just in case when they heard it this. They they know, we might include the clip. But there’s this idea where people can’t understand God and Jesus being the son of God. They they’re like, you know, and this is the age old thing. Like, is he a son?
Abdu Murray: Yeah.
Lisa Fields: Who do I pray to? Why am I praying? Why am I going through, someone when I could just go to God directly? And Yeah. People really struggle with, the trinity, and that’s your sweet spot to to communicate. So I could I mean, we’ve discussed it on the podcast, but because it’s such a reoccurring thing and we’re talking about who God is, I think it’s important to just
Abdu Murray: give you the space to communicate that. Yeah. Absolutely. And thanks for it. And this is something I struggled with. When I was a Muslim, I had those exact same questions. Like, well, how can Jesus be God’s son but also be God? And, you know, who do I pray to? And this trinity thing, what? So I’ve come to to believe that the trinity is the the the understanding of God as a triune being is something that is so beautiful that it permeates and explains so much power very powerfully. So it’s not a problem to be solved. It’s a solution to a lot of problems that we face theologically. So, quickly, as I understand, the Trinity in terms of explaining it, and, it’s important because that actually does factor right into the book, by the way, because this idea of what it means to be made in God’s image is part and parcel of the trinity as well. So the trinity is the idea that there is one God. He is one in his substance, one in his being, one in his nature, yet he exists in three persons. Now when I say person, of course, we think of a separate human being. Like, you’re a person, distinct from me as a person. So while we still are human, we are separate entities and we’re not the same and we never will be the same, even though we share the same moniker of human, in terms of our nature. The trinity uses the word person not in the distinct sense of human being oh, sorry, distinct beings, but rather distinct personages or personalities or centers of consciousness. So God the so the father is a distinct center of consciousness from the son, God the son and God the holy spirit, yet each of them share the same divine nature. So while that’s hard to sort of, understand the comprehensive way because you and I are unipersonal beings, we have one personhood and one nature. We’re human, and I’m the human whose name is Abdu and who goes by Abdu and who understands himself to be Abdu. I have one personhood and one nature. I’m one what and one who. So it’s very hard for me to grasp the idea of what it’s like to be a being who is one what and three who’s at the same time. That doesn’t mean it’s illogical. It just means it’s hard for me to grasp. So how I’ve done it before in the past is that, like, if I were to grab my phone and I were to say, what is this? It’s a phone, it’s a computer, whatever. Its alternate nature is a non living thing. I have a nature as well. I have a what ness, and my what ness is living thing. I’m ultimately basically a living thing. So my nature I have a nature and the phone has a nature. But you can’t say to the phone, who is that? At least we’re not doing that yet. I think we are starting to talk to these things and and humanize things that are really inhuman. But, if you talk to it for too long, you know, a lot all kind of things result in terms of mental health issues. But you can say about me, who is that? So the phone has a nature, but it has no who. It has no personhood. I have a nature and I have personhood, which means my whoness and my what ness are different things. And because that’s the case, it’s not a contradiction to say, God is one what and three who’s. It’s perfectly logical to say that. Is it comprehensible? No. And that shouldn’t bother us because if God was easy to get, and this is why those questions are so important, I’m not familiar with who, the quote, from the hip hop artist, but I think that those questions are attempt to put God into a such a simplistically logical box that we can wrap our our our arms and our minds around him as opposed to saying, look, God is o God is is logical. He’s perfectly logical because he’s the source of logic, but he’s also incomprehensible. So the trinity doesn’t violate logic because god can be one what and three whos, but it does transcend understanding. And that should give you comfort because if you can wrap God in a nice, neat little box, then maybe you made him up as opposed to him being who he actually says he is, which is a triune being. And this actually goes to some something beautiful beyond just that. It goes into the beauty of the fact that God needs nothing to be who he is. If God is love, the bible describes that. And a lot of us wanna believe that God is love, or at least loving. And God is the source of all creation, the source of all being. Then there was a time in which god existed by himself. There was nothing else. But if he’s truly going to be loving, then he has to create something outside of himself to love that thing. But a god who has to do something in order to be who he is, he has to create something outside of himself, therefore, needs something to be who he is. And a god outside of himself, therefore, needs something to be who he is. And a god who needs something can’t possibly be perfect. The trinity solves it because god the father, god the son, and god the holy spirit exist eternally within the godhead, and the father and spirit and and and son love each other eternally and never need anything to exist in order to be relational, in order to be loving. That solves so many problems because without it, then god needs something. And why would you worship a god who needs something as opposed to a god who provides everything that we need? But I think that’s an important distinction. How that factors into our conversation, is that the second person of the trinity, the second consciousness of the trinity incarnates himself in the person of Christ. Incarnation literally meaning enfleshment. He takes on flesh to live among us and dwell among us and be a servant to humanity by giving his life, by dying on a cross to pay a debt that we all owe so that but we can’t afford to pay, without going to hell so that we don’t have to so that we don’t have to pay that debt, and he rises from the dead to prove he was right. So Jesus is God incarnate. He is the second person of the Trinity who is divine, incarnate in the person of Christ. So he has human nature and a divine nature. And again but one personhood. Why that’s important for purposes of the book is that this idea of a trinity revolutionized the idea of equality and human understanding, early on. Whether you have the Trinity, formalized in terms of its its phraseology by the African father, Tertullian, and others as well, or you have, other theologians who understood the Trinity from the biblical record, That word, the two words that we often use to derive the English word person are the Latin word persona and the Greek word prosopon. Both words meant a mask. It meant an artificial thing you put on a human being as an actor in a play. So it wasn’t a definition of what you are. It was actually a fake thing that was put on you because the idea that you were inherently valuable as a person in the ancient Near East simply didn’t exist outside of the bible. You didn’t have value in virtue of your birth. You had to earn value, whether it was by the number of, cattle you owned or the property you had or the military service you had done or the money, whatever it was, you achieved personhood by virtue of status and accomplishment, not by virtue of what you are, in and of yourself. But it was the church who formulated this idea. Well, they they understood the biblical idea, I should say, and then use the words persona to refer to father, son, and spirit. So if God, the infinite value being, the being of infinite value, could have the word persona attached to the father, son, and holy spirit, then you saw a development of an understanding that what it means to be a person is actually inherently valuable because it was linked to the ultimate value being, which is God. So that’s really important for our understanding that, about what it means to be human and to be a person is to be ultimately and infinitely valuable because the ultimately and infinitely valuable God says so about you and me. And we have a lot of Christian development in theology to thank for our understanding of that. Unfortunately, we’ve lost so much of it because we’ve mechanized ourselves. You know, you look at this thing in my hand, we call this a phone for reasons I don’t know because no one ever makes calls on these things anymore. But we do use them for everything else. And we call them names. You know, we call it Siri. We call it Alexa. We you know, you can now give your your your chatbot any name you want. And then what we do with this stuff, we go and we look at pornography, we create AI, chatbots we fall in love with, and always be horribly disappointed when the software gets updated and the and the the carefully curated image of our cyber lever changes on us and we’re depressed now. In other words, we humanize these machines that we use to devalue human beings. And that’s because we don’t have a fundamental understanding of who God is. And if we don’t understand him, then we can never understand what it means to be made in his image. But if we understand the vastness and the beauty of who God is and what God is, then we can begin to understand ourselves and have an anchor in a very, very tough time to understand what it means to be human. Mhmm.
Lisa Fields: No. I love that. That’s that’s, extremely, extremely helpful. Is there anything before we close that you wanna say about the book that we haven’t already discussed?
Abdu Murray: What I would say is this is that while the book actually does diagnose some pretty serious cultural issues when it comes to understanding what it means to be human and that there are two cultural tsunamis that are converging right now to collapse this understanding of reality. You know, what does it mean to be human? Is there a God? Am I just a machine? While the book does a lot of that, it really does offer quite a bit of hope because if we have an anchor, we can write out the cultural tsunamis. We really can. If we have an anchor and what it means to be human based on what god actually is and who god actually is, and we can prove it through the apologetics I give in the book, I think we’ll be in good stead. We can navigate these cultural tsunamis and come off the other end, not seeing reality collapse, but reality fortified. And our perception of it will give us, I think, a great way forward.
Lisa Fields: Well, I think that’s, that’s a, phenomenal, necessary thing that we need, for us today. How can people get the book? When is the book out?
Abdu Murray: So the book comes out 02/03/2026. It’s available for preorder right now. And, by the way, if people do preorder and join the launch team, we’ll, give you free stuff, like a a couple of free chapters. And, we’re we’re providing, reader guides. We’re providing a parent guide, how to navigate a world where reality seems to be collapsing and additional materials as well. But they can they can find it on Amazon, and anywhere, frankly, that, Books for Soul, Barnes and Noble, etcetera. It’ll be in bookstores physically in February 3, and, they can find out more by going to embracethetruth.org as well.
Lisa Fields: Awesome. How can people connect with you on social?
Abdu Murray: So I’m available on all the socials, I believe. Just Abdul Murray, at any one of my socials, except for Instagram. You have to do Abdul Murray one 2. If you don’t do Abdul Murray one 2, you’ll get my cousin. But, but if you do Abdul Murray one two on Instagram, you’ll get me there too. So Abdul Murray at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Lisa Fields: Well, thank you for joining us, Abdul. You this has been, I think, an incredible conversation. I think we covered a lot of ground and I’m excited for people to hear it. Thank you for listening to another episode of the G3 Project podcast. You can catch all our past episodes on our website at g3project.com, wherever you stream your favorite podcast, on our YouTube channel. All the things are available on there. Thank you so much, for supporting Jew three. You made Giving Tuesday our our best Giving Tuesday yet. We were able with the match to raise over $25,000. So thank you, for your generosity. Remember, we wanna end this year strong. We get, the end of the year giving push. And so, you could give at g3project.org, hitting that donate tab. You could give by mail or online. We have merch on our website, all of the things, courses, everything. Remember here, the G3 Project, we’re helping you know what you believe and why you believe it. Until next time, grace and peace and God bless.