Reza Aslan: evaluation

Transcript context

…The distance appeals to you. The distance appeals to me. I’m getting a little bit personal here, but when I was in high school, I became an evangelical Christian for a brief while, and it was a very real and emotionally resonant conversion for me. I heard the gospel story, and I thought it was great, and I believed it. But I will say that when I look back on that time, the one thing that I always had a hard time with was this idea that Jesus was my best friend, that God is my buddy. It’s a joke that my friends and I do all the time, but they gave us this little card with Jesus’s picture on it, and it said, “Jesus in my pocket,” and you were supposed to keep it in your pocket all the time. I remember thinking to myself, “Do I want Jesus in my pocket? There’s something that doesn’t feel right about that.” When I went to college, I happened to go to a Catholic university, and I thought, “Oh, I don’t know anything about Catholicism. I’ll go and check out this mass.” There, Jesus wasn’t in your pocket. Jesus was way up there on the cross, and you went to him with fear and trembling and distance. I’ve got to say I liked it. It appealed to me. Maybe it’s because of the fact that I was raised Muslim, even though at the time, I wouldn’t have really understood what that meant. But there’s something about that notion of the distance between man and God that I like. I want to approach God with that level of reverence, that makes God other, in a sense. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s just my personal opinion on it. If I look at the historical data, what seems to me to be the regularities is that Islam can be quite good for commerce and being a merchant, but not nearly so good for having a stable democracy. Is that a view you would try to talk me out of?…

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