This audio is brought to you by MuslimCentral.com

In the session that I have with you now, I'd like to have a pretty difficult conversation, and I hope that you can keep up with the ideas that I want to share with you.

This is not the kind of speech that I usually give, some of you are familiar with the kind of talks that I give.

So I'm giving you a heads up ahead of time that I would really appreciate if you guys can keep up with the things that I'm saying.

In the course of my talk, I will ask you some rhetorical questions so you can repeat what I said just so I know you're still alive.

Because they make sure that the lighting in here is extremely romantic, so I can't tell what's going on back there.

So the only way I will know that you're still with me is by you repeating yourselves after me, inshaAllah.

So there are three parts of my talk. The first part of my talk is the problem. I like to call it the problem.

Here what I'm going to talk to you about is what I felt growing up as a Muslim towards Islam.

And what I learned from Muslims, from the Mimbar, from the Imam, from the Khatib, from whatever lectures my dad used to watch on VHS tapes, or whatever.

I don't come from a very religious family, I come from a very average family, and the only exposure to Islam I had is much like many of you have had that are similar in age.

But as I grew older and I became a teenager, and then I started going to college, there were basically four attitudes that developed in my mind.

And I've talked about that previously when I came here, but I'm going to go further inshaAllah, but I'll review those four attitudes.

The first of those attitudes is that this religion is extremely, extremely harsh. That it has a lot of punishments.

That this is haram, and that is haram, and if you're in doubt, chances are what you're doing is probably what?

It's probably haram. And you're probably going to get in a lot of trouble for it.

And the punishments are pretty extreme. I mean, cutting the hand or, you know, stoning to death or something.

There's some pretty extreme punishments in this religion. I'm not talking about Christians doing propaganda against Islam, or watching Fox News or whatever.

I had that impression just being a Muslim hearing about Islam from Muslims.

Now, that was my first impression that the religion's pretty harsh.

My second impression was that this religion, it seems like the only time they talk about good times is when they talk about ancient history.

And the only time they're talking about bad times is when they're talking about right now.

...