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Greetings friends, family, strangers, and enemies alike,
My name is John D. Ferrer, and I’m a graduate of Southern Evangelical Seminary (MDiv – Apologetics), and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (ThM and PhD – Phil. of Relig.). I will be speaking at the National Apologetics Conference in Charlotte, NC on Oct. 13-15, 2016. My topic is “How Holocausts Happen.”
Have you ever found yourself thinking, “How could people have ever resorted to slavery, genocide, and holocaust? Surely we’re more enlightened now. We know better. We wouldn’t let that happen in our town.”
But DO we know better now? In this talk, we will find the answer to that question. When we scour our historical basement to see what we’ve learned from past barbarities, we find that it’s not very pretty. In the first chapter of this talk, we will seek to understand the depth and breadth of the problem of human violence throughout history. In the second chapter, we will study 10 different socio-cultural patterns that tie these atrocities together, identifying their collective power to transform ordinary people into compliant mobs.
Third, I will respond to the claims of Steven Pinker, who argues that violence is declining. In some ways his theory is well argued, but it suffers from grave mistakes that leave his theory ultimately indefensible.
In the fourth and final chapter of this presentation, I discuss how we are prone to forget the lessons of the past, but we readily excuse even deadlier things operating institutionally today. Indeed, the deadliest crime against humanity is still happening right under our noses, a holocaust almost 10 times deadlier than the Nazi holocaust of World War II.
Photo Credit: Jewish man’s beard being cut-off by Nazi’s
To read more about the work of John Ferrer, visit his website — Intelligent Christian Faith
