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Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

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As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was p...more

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The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. ...more

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The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and ...more

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Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history o...more

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When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

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I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.

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Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? You suffer f...more

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So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

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In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could thin...more

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One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, th...more

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In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander th...more

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The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used ...more

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The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doub...more

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Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power ...more