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If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of t...more

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Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.

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Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

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I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology—that progress comes through clas...more

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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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We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

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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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The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal sys...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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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