Many people in the West have a poor understanding of the concept of free speech. Whenever I mute or block someone on social media, a cacophony of fools will accuse me of being a free speech hypocrite for “silencing their voice.” They do not understand that I have the right to walk away from their online taunts, insults, and idiocy. To do so is not “restricting” their speech but expressing my right to avoid listening to them.
Canadian psychologist (b. 1964)
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Eighty-one percent of the terror groups (fifty-five out of sixty-eight) of the current terror groups present on the US Department of State's Foreign Terrorist Organization list. The Canadian government maintains the Public Safety Canada's list of terrorist organizations. It lists fifty-five terror groups, of which forty-four are Islamic (80 percent). These Islamic groups vary along ethnic, racial, linguistic, economic, political, and geographical lines but are united by a common religious ideology. Several databased and websites keep track of documented terror attacks around the world. These include the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database, Wikipedia, and the Religion of Peace website. The latter maintains a running counter of the number of Islamic terror attacks since September 11, 2001. As of July 19, 2019, there have been 35,339 Islamist terror attacks in nearly 70 countries.
"Roughly 25 percent of humanity is Muslim. For every Jew, there are roughly one hundred twenty-five Muslims. Judaism is about 2500 years older than Islam, and yet it has not been able to attract nearly as many followers. If we construe religions as memeplexes (a collection of interconnected memes), to borrow Richard Dawkin's term, the Islamic memeplex has been extraordinarily more successful than its Jewish counterpart (from an epidemiological perspective, that is). Why is that? To answer this important question, we must look at the contents of the two respective memeplexes to examine why one is more "infectious" than the other. Let us explore the rules for converting into the two religions and apostatizing out of them. In Judaism, the religious process for conversion is onerous, requiring several years of commitment and an absence of ulterior motive. (For example, converting to Judaism because you are marrying a Jewish person is considered an ulterior motive). Not surprisingly, given the barriers to entry, relatively few people convert to Judaism. On the other hand, to convert to Islam simply requires that one proclaim openly the sentence, the shahada (the testimony): "There is no true god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." It does not require a sophisticated epidemiological model to predict which memeplex will spread more rapidly. Let us now suppose that one wishes to leave the religion. While the Old Testament does mention the death penalty for apostasy, it has seldom been applied throughout Jewish history, whereas to this day apostasy from Islam does lead to the death penalty in several Islamic countries. But perhaps the most important difference is that Judaism does not promote or encourage proselytizing, whereas it is a central religious obligation in Islam. According to Islam, the world is divided into dar al-hard (the house of war) and dar al-Islam (the house of Islam). Peace will arrive when the entire world is united under the flag of Alla
Trigger warnings are antithetical to a fundamental principle of exposure therapy, a well-researched therapeutic approach for combatting generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, phobias (like arachnophobia), panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Geivett concluded his initial presentation by explaining that we are confronted here with an either-or-choice: Either God exists or He does not; either the universe was created or it was not; either life was designed or it was not; either morality is natural or it is not; either Jesus was resurrected or he was not. I opened up my rebuttal by explaining that there are only two types of theories: Those that divide the world into two types of theories, and those that do not.