(Part 3) Reddit mentions: The best world history books

My assertions are axiomatic, and quite obviously so, at that. This is not a wise battle for you to pursue, unless you wish to descend into colonial European notions of manifest destiny and the white man's burden.

>>Those people are just as advanced as any other
>
>No, they're not.

Tell me, then: in a contest of using indigenous medicinal plants, who would prove "more advanced" - you, or these tribespeople? In determining who has superior herding techniques, which party would be the victor? In a comparison of familial kinship and relations? Spearcraft? Long-distance hiking? Animal husbandry?

There simply does not exist any way to declare any of these criteria "unimportant" without making a subjective assertion of your own personal values. And the people we're talking about would most certainly have a different class of values about those things. Why would your values be "more objective" than theirs - or anyone's? The answer is that they cannot be. It is your own opinion, and with any degree of humility, all genuinely reasonable people recoginze that, as I hope that you will, too.

>>Civilization and technology are specific types of advancements, but they are not objectively superior to any others
>
>Yes, they are.

Funny - there sure seem to be a great many very well-reasoned arguments against civilization and technology, even from those who have experienced the very height of their "advancement".

I certainly see no evidence for an objective declaration, even just by examing the meta-issue of the debate itself, which is undeniably still open.

>>to add "culture" in there is frankly just plain racist.
>
>No, it isn't.

Yes, it is. You have virtualy no notions of these people's culture. The very definition of "culture" practically prohibits the very idea of it being declared "advanced" or otherwise. It is simply the collection of common and traditional practices of a given group. I would even go so far as to say that if one were to make judgments of "advancement," surely a culture that has been largely uninterrupted and un-usurped for a period of thousands of years has matured and "advanced" far more than a culture which is ever-shifting and highly dependent on technological advances that didn't even exist a generation prior. But even to make an assertion such as that is meaningless, because the criterion "advancement" simply does not make sense when applied to culture - any culture. The only role that such a declaration can fulfill is to demean and devalue another group of people completely arbitrarily, as to support a racist or otherwise xenophobic worldview.

>By what standard are modern Western civilization, technology, and culture objectively superior to barefoot African tribesmen? By the only objective standard of value: their success at meeting the requirements of human life.

And just what are those "requirements of human life?" These tribespeople might tell you some very different things than what you would tell them. Would either of you be "right?" Absolutely not.

As for the rest of your points, they are all similarly obvious - and highly subjective, though largely incontroversial in our demographic - subjective and personal value judgments. Adding the word "objectively" to your statements does not make it so. Even such criteria as you have mentioned - lifespan, "individualism," property rights (lol), etc., are not objectively "advanced." After all, what are the "objective" benefits of a long lifespan if it is filled with ennui, alienation and oppression? What is the value of "individualism" to a person who cherishes deep bonds and shared struggle with others? How can one declare "property rights" to be an objective good when the very concept of such has only existed for a few hundred years, and has arguably led to the greatest ongoing extinction of species in millions of years?

You see? Value judgments, all of it. And for someone who might call themself a "libertarian," you certainly seem not to understand the true spirit of the credo, "live and let live."

I like how you completely ignored my comment about how the medical communities "treatment plan" for people who were gay... You know, to cure them of their "sickness" or "desease". Yes, it's not about vaccination, but it highlights the fact that "your gods" are nothing more than men and women like the rest of us. As such, even the almighty medical professionals have been known to make mistakes -- shocking, I know!

Vaccines are not drugs by the way. They are blue prints for viruses to teach your immune system how to recognize them. Giving a 10 week old a polio shot doesn't protect them from getting polio the next week. You need to have a fully developed immune system in order for the viruses to be recorded to begin with. I take it you don't have children, so you might not know that the vaccination schedule runs for many years with the same vaccines delivered over and over. Vaccines are not free either... Even if you don't pay for it, someone does (for example I am in Canada and we have "free" healthcare.. the government pays for every visit someone makes to the doctor). So, if you think that the cycle is limited to just public health alone, then I'm sorry but it's you that has your head in the sand. There are several industries and hundreds of millions of dollars in the wheel of this machine.

Your dismissal of naturopathy is a little disconcerting as well. Many medical professionals, you know, the ones that did biology and chemistry in school? Beyond the basic level? Even many of them are aware of the importance of things like probiotics and raw foods etc. Naturopathy is not about rubbing plants all over your body, it's about understanding the chemistry .. the NATURAL Chemistry of your body. How can you so quickly dismiss thousands of years of healing? Modern medicine has made some astonishing discoveries and advancements, but it is still in its infancy compared to traditional medicines ... Would you call Traditional Chinese medicine bullsbhit? My son recently had an ear infection and the doctor asked me to wait almost three weeks before prescribing an anti biotic because the antibiotic is known to completely erase your immune system and it can take up to two years to recover it. His suggstion was to keep the ear dry, and eat pile of probiotics to boost his immune system through a healthy gut, and give it some time. We followed his advice and in the end, yes it took a little longer, but my son's ear infection cleared and he didn't have to take any drugs. My point is, you don't always need Chemistry to solve the problem. Sometimes time and the right balance of diet is all you need.

All bashing aside here, one of the last books I read before making my choice was this one:
https://www.amazon.ca/Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines-Forgotten/dp/1480216895

I had read dozens of items on both sides of the argument before getting to this one. Before starting this book, I was still in favour of vaccinating my children. This book changed my perspective. Some might find it a little dull in parts because it can be really numbers heavy, but if you like math you might enjoy it. The book, I thought, was very well written and covers the topic from the inception of vaccines though to modern day using published facts to support their arguments. For me, even if I don't agree with someone's point of view, I like to atleast make the effort to understand their perspective and their position. If you are the same then you might enjoy this book.

For the record, humor is not lost on me. You're the funniest person I've ever met! Or at least .. you seem to think you are. Couldn't end the topic on a serious note! ;).. bro.

First off, I think a person can develop/maintain a robust spiritual outlook on life, even while being skeptical of unsubstantiated supernatural claims. On the more extreme side (for a secular person), is the author of Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, who claims to meditate for 2 hours every day, and goes on a meditation retreat for a month or more, which he claims has helped him to achieve the kind of focus he needed to write his ambitious books. On the less extreme side, you have people like Noah Rasheta who tends to spend maybe 5-15 minutes in set-aside meditation a day (from what I can gather) and often practices mindfulness as part of his day-to-day activities.

---

What I do now (not as systematically as before, but when I feel like it) to cultivate useful spirituality in myself (mostly for how it can serve me and others, but to a lesser extent for its own sake):

1. Exercise regularly. Running, particularly at low speeds [so maybe we'd call that "jogging"], can be highly meditative.
   
2. At least one time per week I go on long walks with my wife (3-7 miles) where we talk and enjoy the neighborhoods or nature together.
   
3. Read and reflect on ancient or modern "wisdom" literature: meditations of Marcus Aurelius, aesop's fables, the triple path, the tao te ching, brene brown, sam harris, ted talks, etc, etc., etc. I also listen to lots of podcasts on topics of interest.
   
4. Spend time engaging with my children and/or wife. Try to listen to them and see what they're interested in.
   
5. Spend time thinking about or writing about mormon/exmormon issues.
   
6. Listen to transcendent music (lots of classical and old choral stuff, but sometimes newer stuff and crazy stuff, too).
   
   There seems to be a propensity for a checklist mentality in LDS culture, and I've enjoyed not doing the above things in any checklist kind of way. I just do them, but mostly when I feel like it. It's not to say I don't push myself to do some things on schedule or that are difficult (I woke up before 6am this morning to play racket-ball, for instance), but I am less worried that I will fall into the clutches of Satan if I neglect something for a day or even a week. Even if I forget or am too busy to shower for a day or two, I still always end up showering; the same can be said for all these kinds of spiritual activities. I should note that much of my current mindset and activities were derived from watching or being with my wife and seeing how she does spirituality.
   
   Also, I do almost everything barefoot (running, cycling, hiking, walking, racketball, around the house, driving, [but not mowing, because safety first] etc), which is a great way to connect with the world, at least for me. The thermo-tactile feedback as the world progresses through its seasons is really invigorating to experience on one's feet. Warning: if you choose to do this, please know it comes with risks (I broke a toe playing ultimate frisbee, and I've gotten frostbite running too long in the snow once--but the black tips fell off and my toes healed up very nicely) and give your feet time to build up to it (take it slow at first).
   
   ---
   
   > I would also be interested in peoples theories on why prayer and scripture study can help you even if they are not "true".
   
   They (can) emphasize free-will (encourage pro-activeness), the inherent worth of other humans (one of the pillars of moral conscience), help a person to become more aware of the short and long-term consequences of their day-to-day actions, and give examples of self-deprecating behavior which can help a person swallow their ego when it is necessary or helpful. Reading classic novels and meditating are likely to achieve similar ends.
   
   ---
   
   Keep us posted on how your spirituality develops!

>That's a rather simplistic, and incorrect, view of both animals - who can behave in a manner where they "only care about themselves", but can also live in a much more cooperative setting, depending on the species, and humans; pre-agricultural humans weren't busy "defending property".

Again you are completely misunderstanding what I am stating here. Human beings had to work with non-kin to become "human". That's in fact what separates us from animals and made us capable of becoming greater. So that's really the birth of human species. Read this book if you actually want to learn it. It is well researched and makes the detailed argument for it. I am not going to be able to simplify and say whats in it with a paragraph, because there is a lot you need to know about human beings to understand why that is and how that came to be. It is not "selfishness" as in caring for themselves (although Western societies are leaning to that even worse extreme), but rather the idea of only caring for kinship. Seriously do look into the kin selection and Hamilton's rule on wiki. These are not ideas that I am just making up, but actually ideas that are well supported and studied in biology.

>http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7269/full/nature08366.html http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7786.full.pdf

Quote from your first source that supposedly refutes my claims, but doesn't:
>Firm evidence of reciprocity in animal societies is rare and many examples of cooperation between non-kin probably represent cases of intra-specific mutualism or manipulation.

The second study you shared is more interesting. However, the reason why it is that way, is different from what you think.

>Although rhesus macaque and baboon females bias their behavior significantly more to their paternal sisters than to nonrelatives, such biases are not nearly as strong as those displayed toward
maternal sisters (21–24)

The primates tend to only have stronger kinship bias towards maternal brothers, over paternal brothers. This is because they are not good at identifying them:
>This point, our finding that male
chimpanzees do not preferentially interact with their paternal
brothers, and the lack of a reliable paternal sibling identification
mechanism in primates suggest that paternal kin effects may
arise as a byproduct of individuals maximizing their own fitness
by cooperating with age mates, who only sometimes happen to
be paternal siblings. [...] A second potential explanation is that male chimpanzees do not preferentially cooperate with their paternal brothers because they cannot reliably recognize them.

So now the test they did to support the idea that they are equally likely to cooperate with kin and non-kin, is based on the paternal brothers, rather than maternal brothers. Because they already know that primates prefer to care for maternal brothers as they are able to recognize them due to kinship.
>To determine the extent to which indirect and direct benefits
influence patterns of affiliation and cooperation among male
chimpanzees, we examined the number of related and unrelated
pairs that engaged in each of the six social behaviors more than
expected by chance. [...] Because chimpanzees can presumably readily identify
their maternal siblings (13), we excluded the 12 maternal sibling
dyads from this analysis.

That being said, I am a supporter of evolution. So if primates show rare signs of behavior that helped make human species great, then that's not surprising. In fact that is to be expected and only supports the theory of evolution, and my explanation of history.

I do appreciate you using science to debate back though.

>No, I'm posting a reference to a very long, very detailed, very well-researched book from an anthropologist that says that the "conventional wisdom" story told by historians that money replaced barter has no supporting evidence, while there is a lot of evidence to support his counter-claim.

So you are supposedly making the claim that "conventional wisdom" story told my historians has no supporting evidence? You do know that we are living in the 21st century and that we do take history more seriously than just believe some story with no supporting evidence as one of the main historical foundations of civilization right? This is just not a strong argument frankly. You can't say that historians are all completely wrong, because this guy selling this book, says otherwise. That's 1 guy against a whole field. To claim that that field doesn't care about evidence in making up their stories, is just a ridiculous claim and I think any historian would be appalled by that accusation.

It’s not post modern at all :) it’s incredibly relevant and contemporary primatology, as well as some philosophy especially in the realm of ethics. There’s some wonderful books on the this and I’ll list the links for them if you ever want to check them out

In the Shadow of Man (1971) this one is a bit old but incredible considering it was one of the first accounts of primate behaviour so accurate.

Sapiens (2014) now this book is an incredible read if you want a brief , easy and wonderful account of humans over our evolution. And what makes us “different.”

Primates and Philosophers (2006)

A personal favourite of mine, an excellent account at how something as “human” as morality is something perhaps shared amongst at least some great apes


The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary(2005)

And a rather analytical text, tracing the interpretation of the human-like great apes and ape-like earliest ancestors of present-day humans, this study demonstrates how from the days of Linnaeus to the present, the sacred and taboo-ridden animal-human boundary was constantly tested. The unique dignity of humans, a central value in the West, was, and to some extent still is, on the minds of taxonomists, ethnologists, primatologists, and archaeologists. This book thus offers an anthropological analysis of the burgeoning anthropological disciplines in terms of their own cultural taboos and philosophical preconceptions.

Well, what questions do you have? Are you looking for holy books, general information, etc? I would be happy to help with anything you may need. I personally started with the book Baha'u'llah and the new era. It is not a holy book/text, but it covers the basics of every aspect of the faith in plain language.

Here is the book on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Bahaullah-New-Era-Introduction-Bahai/dp/1931847274/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417447332&sr=8-1&keywords=baha%27u%27llah+and+the+new+era


And here is a link to a website that contains a free ebook version, as well as many other free ebooks:
http://www.bahaiebooks.org/ebooks-by-title

Good luck in your search, and let me know if you have any questions! I was a Christian once myself, and was aided in my search on this subreddit, and by meeting with Baha'is in my area. There are plenty of knowledgeable people here who I'm sure will be as willing to assist you as they were to assist me! :)

The Kitab-I-Aqdas means The Most Holy Book, but I don't think it's fair to equate it with being the Baha'i Bible or Qur'an. It is one of literally hundreds of books and tablets which comprise the Writings of Baha'u'llah, the Prophet-Founder of the Baha'i Faith, all of which are sacred, all of which are equivalent in importance to the Bible for Christians/Qur'an for Muslims. It's also not the best reading for someone completely new to the Faith, as it is speaking to a Baha'i audience who is asking for laws, some of which might not be understood out of context.

On top of that, the Baha'i Faith has the Writings of the Bab (the Prophet-Founder of the Bab'i Faith, Predecessor to the Baha'i Faith) and 'Abdu'l-Baha (son of Baha'u'llah, authorized interpreter of the Writings of Baha'u'llah) which are given nearly equivalent weight. That brings the total volume of sacred Writings of the Baha'is to several orders of magnitude greater than that of most any other world religion. It can be difficult to know where to start, and overwhelming when someone heaps book after book after book upon you. We're not even getting into Shoghi Effendi or the Universal House of Justice yet.

God Speaks Again by Kenneth Bowers is a great starting point for someone who knows nothing.

Baha'u'llah and the New Era by J.E.Esslemont was the starting point for decades before this.

The Hidden Words by Baha'u'llah is my choice for a first read of the Holy Writings.

The Kitab-I-Iqan/Book of Certitude by Baha'u'llah is much heavier reading, but is the core of Baha'i Theology, if you want to dive into the deep end.

Thief in the Night by William Sears is my starting point for people who are intimately familiar with Christianity and the Bible.

My advice is to start with only one book, then move to others. Have fun!

Edited for grammar

Hi, great that you're taking an interest to get him a book on cartography. I've recently began doing the same, and books are definitely superior over wikipedia etc.

• 'Great Maps' by Jerry Brotton: Very accessible, kind of a coffee table book that you can look into when you have some minutes to spend.
  
  
• 'A history of the world in 12 maps' by Jerry Brotton: Bought this one together with 'Great Maps'. Gives a more academic point of view on maps and on their origins/purposes. Haven't finished it yet though. Kind of unaccessible because there aren't really maps included (some maps, but pictures are way too small). Definitely recommend it, in combo with 'Great Maps'.
  
  
• As /u/churizurd mentioned, Atlas of Remote Islands is pretty fun too. Pricing seems kind of strange on Amazon (1130$ for paperback lolwat)
  
  
• Transit maps of the world is on my wishlist, looks cool

You are exactly right. Humans have a few unique properties, but the interesting thing is that expert throwing was probably the very first unique human trait to evolve.

In military science terms, humans were the first species to take advantage of Lanchester's square law. Consequently, the coercive power of early Homo increased superlinearly with group size.

In all other species, the best strategy to defend your self-interest against conspecific competitors is to increase your personal individual "strength" relative to the species mean. In early humans, the best strategy was, for the first time on Earth, to align yourself with the largest coalition, thereby utilizing the Lanchester's advantage.

This shift in strategy for self-defense gave rise to the first animal with democratic instincts (since any strong man attempting to usurp the coalition would be militarily disadvantaged against the group, influence on the group had to be approached democratically).

Bingham wrote a book exploring the evolutionary ramifications of expert throwing that I strongly recommend to anyone who finds this topic interesting.

Death from a distance and the birth of a human universe, by Paul Bingham and Diane Souza

I'm in the middle of Homo Deus currently. Its great so far, Yuval is a great writer and his books are a lot more accessible than traditional history books. I'm sure there are a lot of liberties taken with some of the history but I think Sapiens is a must-read. Homo Deus is more assumption based on current reality but its very interesting so far.

Gulag Archipelago is one I read based on the recommendation of Jordan Peterson. Awesome book if you are into WW1-WW2 era eastern europe. being an eastern european myself, i devour everything related to it so this book tickled my fancy quite a bit. good look into the pitfalls of what peterson warns against.

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning is another history book discussing that time period and how it all transpired and the lesser known reasons why WW2 went down the way it did. some surprising stuff in that book related to hitler modeling europe around how the united states was designed at the time.

apologies for inundating with the same topic for all my books so far but Ordinary Men is an amazing book chronicling the people that carried out most of the killings during WW2 in Poland, Germany and surrounding areas. The crux of the argument which I have read in many other books is that Auschwitz is a neat little box everyone can picture in their head and assign blame to when in reality most people killed during that time were taken to the outskirts of their town and shot in plain sight by fellow townspeople, mostly retired police officers and soldiers no longer able for active duty.

for some lighter reading i really enjoy jon ronson's books and i've read all of them. standouts are So You've Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test. Highly recommend Them as well which has an early Alex Jones cameo in it.

> No. Privacy is more important than ever, precisely because the Internet is a ravenous copying and archiving machine. A photo, once leaked, can never be destroyed. It is copied billions of times and stored in millions of repositories around the world with no hope of auditing or tracking.

My only disagreement with you is here.

I dont think its more important than ever across the board. I would say it is much more important in a few areas (stuff that is encrypted like Bitcoin keys, Smart Phones ect) but less important in most things. People are sharing intimate details about their lives current day that most people would never dream of 100 years ago via social media like FB and Twitter.

The Transparent Society is a great book that goes into great detail about how its in our nature to voluntarily sacrifice privacy in return for the massive benefits of doing so.... and it was written 15 years ago. The dude really knew what he was talking about.

Maybe he is (like many) afraid of the consequences of choosing to challenge and/or walk away from the cult. JW's are really good at shunning friends and family members and most people can't deal with losing everyone and everything they have ever known.

Using the internet is not against the rules and he might think that he can convert Atheists by talking to them and debating them. He also probably thinks that doing this makes "Jehovah" happy.

Try to sneak this or better yet, valid points from it, into conversation. I wouldn't be very blatant about it, but if you're digging in, then that book is a GREAT place to dig. Be careful though, because he is trained to adamantly reject "apostate" (aka any former member who says JW's are NOT the one true religion) material. The author of that book was shunned as an apostate and is/was loathed by any JW who knows of him. THAT is how you know it's such a good book! ;-)

All in all, the JW cult is full of A++ mind control...you're friend is probably a victim.

The Rise of The West is probably the best book on general history I've seen anywhere:

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-West-History-Community-Retrospective/dp/0226561410/ref=sr_1_36?keywords=history+of+west&qid=1572706758&s=books&sr=1-36

It does not talk specifically about the Russian revolution that much, but it goes very deep into analysing how the modern world became what it is, starting at the very beginning, at the time of primal hunters, and going all the way to the modern times. It is not an easy book to swallow, and you have to do a lot of thinking and reading suggested sources to start getting the whole picture. But the central message is this: very early societies split into two groups, free trade-based and crony market-based, and that split sent ripples throughout the history, affecting the evolution of every single society profoundly.

The author is absolutely impartial in his analysis, and while he demonstrates that free trade-based systems have significant advantages over crony market-based ones, he never really states it explicitly, letting the reader form their own opinion. This is another aspect making this book so amazing: no opinion is ever forced on you. The author lays down facts, states possible interpretations of them and lets you judge which interpretations are more reasonable.

In terms of the writing style, I would say that this book is somewhere between academic and popular writing. If you are a history major, the writing will probably seem a bit light to you, but you still can get a lot of information and ideas out of this book. And if you've never read a history book before, then the material might be a bit challenging, but you absolutely can read this book recreationally, as long as you don't mind putting in some effort.

This book is HUGE, over 800 pages, so don't expect to finish it in one weekend. :) But if you do go through all the material, your knowledge and understanding of history will have grown dramatically.

Gombrich's 'A Little History of the World' is fun and lighthearted but little covers everything from the beginning. Seriously, this book could prove a great jumping off point for more in depth study of a wealth of topics. It was written for kids but it is incredibly enjoyable, though the history is...brief, and well, it is written for kids. To be honest I decided to suggest this before I actually read the rest of your post.

Check it out, if only for yourself or your kids.

> Gnosticism is actually really interesting once you get deep into it, and I say this as an atheist. Tons of focus on dualities.

Excellent. Have you heard of or read Dr. Shlain's book?

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess : The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain
“Making remarkable connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, Dr. Shlain shows why pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove cultures toward linear left-brain thinking and this shift upset the balance between men and women, initiating the decline of the feminine and ushering in patriarchal rule."

Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
The Gospel of Thomas

I recently picked up Great Maps, and think it's really good introduction to the history and the craft of mapmaking. It has great, large photos of the maps, detail insets, and excellent commentary. Both a great coffee table book and super informative.

It’s crazy to think about, but during the dawn of mankind (a couple hundred thousand years ago) there were actually several sapient species on Earth at the same time.

Homosapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and a handful of others all lived on the Earth together. There’s a lot of evidence of them intermingling, socializing, and mating with one another. Some of these species didn’t die out until relatively recently (30,000 years ago). There were also notable physical differences between them, such as Neanderthals being significantly stronger and more robust (and contrary to popular belief, equally or more intelligent) than their Homosapien counterparts.

No one is entirely sure why, but our species ended up dominating and the others went extinct. The theory I personally believe is most likely is a combination of two:

• Homosapiens tended to socialize in very large groups (a couple hundred) compared to Neanderthals (groups sized around 30) which gave us a huge edge for obvious reasons.
  
• Unlike Neanderthals, which due to their robustness, were able to face large prey with a head on melee approach, homosapiens were too weak and fragile so they had to invent alternative methods. This led our species to develop very effective ranged throwing weapons that led us to be able to out-hunt the Neanderthals. Our weakness ultimately led to our domination, because it forced us to think outside the box, unlike Neanderthals.
  
  If stuff like this interests you, I strongly recommend the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
  
  Some more fun facts:
  
  Humans are able to throw projectiles farther and with more power than any other animal on Earth due to our superior balance.
  
  Humans are better at stamina running than any other land animal due to our unique ability to regenerate stamina while running (because of our high concentration of sweat glands). In fact, some ancient African hunting techniques involved chasing after prey for over 15 miles until they collapsed from exhaustion.

You might be interested in a book written by demographer Eric Kaufmann called "Shall the religious inherit the earth"

In it he plots how the shape of nations and communities can be determined pretty reliably by current birthrates. He looks at everything from Ultra Orthodox Jews in London and Israel (and how both are on track to be a majority) through to Wahabbis in Egypt and the Amish the North East. He does not touch a huge amount of Christian communities in the west but similar trends are appearing in the West. I know from personal experience that while normal Catholic congregations are growing grey and fading away the one area within Catholicism that has been experiencing a heck of a lot of growth is the Traditionalist communities. They attract a heck of a lot of young people and they tend to get married younger and have huge families (I have never seen more minivans in one pace as I do when I attend)

Here is the author talking about this trend at the Sydney Opera House if you are interested at all.

During the age of disease reduced deaths (mortality rate) was the most important indicator of health.

A primary notion of progress.

History has been rewritten. Most of the credit is unwarrantedly given to vaccines for the reduction of infectious disease. Not taking into account improved hygiene, nutrition, water, electricity, etc.

Right now this either sounds like a reasonable theory or an outrageous assertion. The book dissolving illusions documents the overall history and background of this claim. Makes a compelling argument.

> The overall improvement in the health of Americans over the 20th century is best exemplified by dramatic changes in 2 trends: 1) the age-adjusted death rate declined by about 74%, while 2) life expectancy increased 56%. Leading causes of death shifted from infectious to chronic diseases.

> At the beginning of the 20th century, the leading causes of child mortality in the 1- to 19-year-old age group were infectious diseases, including diarrheal diseases, diphtheria, measles, pneumonia and influenza, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, typhoid and paratyphoid fevers, and whooping cough. Between 1900 and 1998, the death rate from the major infectious diseases declined 99.7%, from 466 to 0.7 deaths per 100 000 (Fig 9). The percentage of child deaths attributable to infectious diseases declined from 61.6% to 2%. This decline incorporates the emergence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS which in 1998 accounted for 0.3% of child deaths. Once again, nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.

> “Thus vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century.”

> During the first 8 decades of the 20th century, the infectious disease mortality rate in the United States declined substantially, consistent with the concept of epidemiological transition. Improvements in living conditions, sanitation, and medical care probably accounted for this trend.

https://vaccinesafetycommission.org/pdfs/45-2000-Pediatrics-Vital-Statistics.pdf

https://vaccinesafetycommission.org/pdfs/49-1999-JAMA-Trends-Disease.pdf

Chart

> most people in power would rather do good

If the people in power would rather do good.

Why did pharma force congress to let them off scott free. Granting them total liability free from vaccine injury and deaths? They are not held accountable in the court of law.

This undermines the safety of a product. Civil liability products the consumer. It products us from wealthy corporations. Who sometimes sell us hazardous products that slide through federal regulation standards.

We could talk about Big Pharma. How it’s a destructive force.

But we would be here all day.

Vioxx stories -

• https://www.forbes.com/2005/08/19/merck-vioxx-graham_cx_mh_0819graham.html
  
  
• https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/business/despite-warnings-drug-giant-took-long-path-to-vioxx-recall.html
  
  
• https://www.npr.org/2007/11/10/5470430/timeline-the-rise-and-fall-of-vioxx
  
  
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1779871/
  
  Here’s a fantastic quote from Merck: (vaccine manufacturer)
  
  > Merck made a "hit list" of doctors who criticized Vioxx, according to testimony in a Vioxx class action case in Australia.
  
  > The list, emailed between Merck employees, contained doctors' names with the labels "neutralise," "neutralised" or "discredit" next to them.
  
  > Merck emails from 1999 showed company execs complaining about doctors who disliked using Vioxx. One email said:
  
  > ”We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live.” (1)
  
  Hm. A drug that passed FDA regulations and killed over 60,000 people. Trusting the pharmaceutical companies is a no-go for me. They’ve bought out the regulatory agencies (FDA, CDC).
  
  I wouldn’t trust your doctor either.
  
  https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-america.html
  
  https://anh-usa.org/are-physicians-given-financial-incentives-to-vaccinate-our-children/

Well, I was a Jehovah's Witness until I was 24.

If you're serious about trying to get to them, the book that finally woke me up was Finding Darwin's God by Ken Miller. It's about evolution but since he's a nominal Catholic (and also head of Biology at Brown University) it isn't at all antagonistic toward religion (though it is insanely badass in shooting down all of the intelligent design arguments).

http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Darwins-God-Scientists-Evolution/dp/0060930497

That's only going to work if the person's faith is evidence-driven. As the old adage goes, you can't reason someone out of an idea that they didn't come to through reason.

This one's good for witnesses, too: http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Conscience-Raymond-Franz/dp/0914675044

Sort of. Outside of the extant christian denominations in the US which went through different phases of popularity (the variant streams of Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and also the Catholic and Orthodox [large O]communities) the 19th Century was a time when several factors saw the birthing of many unorthodox offshoots from Protestant streams- examples include the Millerites in the 1830s, itself spawning the seventh day adventists a few years later; but also the Jehovah's witnesses. Of these, Mormonism is the first, but many radical revisions of Christianity - including Protestantism itself - happened over several centuries previously. The Quakers, Mennonites, Unitarians and Anabaptists, as well as the more 'mainstream' or 'orthodox' [small o] denominations I listed first, are all examples of where political, ideological, theological, or other motives lead people to revise their belief system, or understand it differently, or coalesce with others on a similar journey.

Generally, Christians tend to distiguish between denominations and cults by asking whether a 'denomination' has claimed an absolute monopoly on truth. That is, the reason Evangelical Baptists and Methodists both consider each other Christians is that their differences, though proper disagreements in themselves, are seen as superfluous enough in the light of general Christianity for them to be seen as largely in agreement. What many of the groups I listed (though not all completely, nor none to no degree) went through was this process of establishing themselves as fundamentally Christian in particular ways, whilst going about their ideological differences in ways which promoted them as superfluous.

The social context you're referring to did exist, but it is such a large nebulous contextual amalgamation of all things Modern, that it's difficult to describe except in big books like this. at the end of the day, Mormonism was created by one person, and then a bunch of people who felt that the changes they made to Christianity were necessary, and all of their motivations and accomplishments are reasonably well documented. the social context in america, particularly for mormons, included the Westward expansion, the possibility of new power, and nationhood, which gave them more of a possibility of surviving the process I described above, where the other streams of Christianity criticised it as a cult because of its large departures from orthodoxy [small o], and closed communities.

To sum up, the social context which encouraged experimentation and heterodoxy with doctrine and practice has been present since Christianity's inception.

I'm currently reading Alan Jacob's The "Book of Common Prayer": A Biography.

Next up is Economic Shalom: A Reformed Primer on Faith, Work, and Human Flourishing by John Bolt.

Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic ed. by Michael Allen and Scott Swain will jump to the top of my list when it comes out in April.

I don't generally plan what I'm going to read very far in the future, but here's an (incomplete) list of books I'm wanting to read. I almost certainly won't get to all of them this year (if ever).

• A History of Western Philosophy and Theology by John Frame
  
• Baptists in America: A History by Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins
  
• Church History: An Essential Guide Paperback by Justo L. González
  
• Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought by Marilynne Robinson
  
• Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation by Jamie Smith
  
• Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine by Kevin Vanhoozer
  
• How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor by James K. A. Smith
  
• Knowing Christ by Mark Jones
  
• Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel by Russell Moore
  
• Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume by Herman Bavinck.
  
• The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus by Michael Bird
  
• Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church by Todd Billings.

>historically, Jews have at least six defined genders (three on the male end of the spectrum, three on the female end)

Source for this? Not doubting you, but I'd love to learn more. It bothers me that I don't know more about my own culture's historical attitudes/practices around this stuff.

ETA: A friend who's Jewish and studied theology in grad school loaned me the book Balancing on the Mechitza by Noach Dzmura. It's a great place to start for folks looking to learn more about this.

Actually there is some debate over the translation of the piece of text. If I remember correctly (sorry, I don't have a citation), I read somewhere that it specifically says, in one translation at least, that it's only applicable if you defend your faith, i.e. if you are attacked first.

Also, the Qu'ran is pretty explicit about not killing or harming other people in plenty of other passages. But this doesn't matter to those who want young men to do their dirty work for them. You don't tend to see the masterminds behind this blowing themselves up, those who do so are just pawns.

If this is a topic that interests you, I can't recommend How to Win A Cosmic War highly enough for a really interesting perspective on the topic. It is certainly explained/debated better than I can

>So, if we can agree that being bereft of a shared language for discussing human dignity and flourishing is itself detrimental to human dignity and flourishing, then to that extent at least, I have made the case.

But you haven't. You're implicitly claiming that the center is, in fact, empty until and unless someone occupies it; while simultaneously claiming there is always, already a center.

From such a perspective, the statement:

>We can formulate the discrepancy as follows: the more the distribution of goods and status is centralized, the more vehemently we deny the existence of any center.

is reinterpretation of the lack of any such center's justification; or even more accurately, the meaninglessness of justification itself. This appears like Postmodernism 101.

>But the reliance of a political order on hysterical and escalating delusions is an indictment of that order.

According to whom? You're presupposing exactly what you've previously claimed doesn't exist:

>But we don’t have such a shared language, precisely because the effect of the direct relation between state and individual created by the system of rights makes any such shared language impossible: any assertion of shared values or virtues would inevitably privilege one group over others and therefore be the ground for a claim that the former were violating the rights of the latter.

In fact, assuming you agree with bobby’s statement:

>Language transcends the physical; we merely associate physical marks or sounds to "get" a meaning that inheres in nothing but shared conventions of attention.

This “shared language’s” absence is indicative of the dominance of your own perspective. Why would you expect language users to accept “shared conventions of attention” which mark such users as “hysterical” or “delusional?” Especially if these conventions prohibit the most grand resentment and desire.

"The March of Folly" is a pretty easy read. A good place to start. The focus is primarily on the Vietnam War, though.

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel argues that the origins of civilizations are closely tied to the invention and spread of agriculture. Also an easy read. Won the Pulitzer Prize.

I'd also recommend William McNeill's A World History for a broad overview of human history, starting with the ancient civilizations.

Don't do it. You will feel invisible at best.

It's easy to like the idea of Orthodoxy, but life is difficult enough for transgender people who were born Jewish, even when their communities are supportive. As far as Jewish law is concerned, you hardly exist. Unless you're going stealth, I don't know how far you'll get with "an extra sense of community" as you convert. And then where is tradition getting you? Maybe you actually love the gender binary, but do you really want to join a religion that can't affirm your journey?

I'm sorry that I'm writing such a discouraging comment, but it's in solidarity. You'll know when you arrive at your homecoming.

Check these out:

• Siddur Sha'ar Zahav
  
• Torah Queeries
  
• Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in the Jewish Community
  
• Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval, and Modern Jewish Stories

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years gets recommended quite a lot. I'm only part of the way through, but it's a great book. Unfortunately, I don't see a large print edition, but you can get the ebook if that's an option.

If you like podcasts, I'd recommend starting with Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean and moving to History of the Papacy. There are also classes/podcasts on the history of the Orthodox and Coptic Churches, as well as the Reformation.

Thanks for the detailed reply! It's interesting to get another opinion on these topics. I just read [After Tamerlane by John Darwin]( https://www.amazon.com/After-Tamerlane-Global-Empires-1400-2000/dp/1596916028) and (to me, as a history enthusiast at least) it seemed like he was taking a different view on these subjects - that the Indian market was pretty crucial to the British Industrial Revolution.

Seconded for sure. Watch some soccer and, if you like books, go read up on the game. There’s a fairly short but really high-quality list of books that you can hit to get a varied taste of soccer, from history to tactics to biographies to silly books about English soccer clichés.

But there is no substitute for watching the game, and even playing around in your back yard a bit. Enjoy!

(Edit: there are other books on the shortlist out there too. Also, there are plenty of fun and informative podcasts related to the sport if you’re into that sort of thing)

I'd recommend you read Yuval Noah Harari's, "Sapiens." It's a great perspective on where we came from and how we got here and whether or not we're better off. It may help you put your observations in context better.

In India it's not uncommon for older, upper-caste men to quit everything and take to the Himalayas to live out their lives in prayer, meditation, and reflection - living entirely on charity. I've met some of these guys in Rishikesh. I'm sure there's a lot of bullshit and phoniness in that scene. But it's sort of reassuring to know that the option is there, you know? They're called renunciates, because the renounce all this BS, right?

But anyway, Sapiens. I think you'll find a lot in it. It's from a scientific rather than a mystical point of view. So I think it anchors psychedelic observations within a factual framework.
https://www.amazon.ca/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/077103850X

This is or A Little History of the World by E.H. Grombrich. Little History is a nice introduction to World History which is much larger in scope than American History which frankly is a bore to me (I say this as a history major). I will warn you it is a children's book so it will become a little corny, but it is an easy read and a solid introduction to someone looking to gain a background of the history of the world. It might pique your interest.

Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

This could be a safe bet. Not about English football, although it obviously addresses it. It's about the history of tactics and how they have involved through the decades and how major rule changes have changed how the game has been played. So regardless of what team or country you support you can get a better understanding of the game as a whole.

I found it interesting.

I think there might be.

The tactics that you see being used to subvert the faith would not be charitable nor respectful for a Christian to use to try and get people to join the faith.

If you want to learn more about the origins of our secular society I'd recommend the work of the Canadian Catholic Sociologist and philosopher, Charles Taylor.

I'd recommend this book about Charles Taylor's work.

I'd also recommend reading Pope Francis' first Apostolic Exhortation: Evangelii Gaudium. In it Pope Francis specifically addresses how to evangelize in today's world

Great Maps seems to come up sometimes when people are talking about good geography books, as well as Maps: Their Untold Stories. I have a list somewhere of good map books, I'll check when I get home.

For geology, Assembling California is pretty accessible, as are most of his books.

If they haven't read it, Guns, Germs, and Steel is pretty great for people who are interested in geography. It's more anthropology, but he talks a lot about how the physical spaces people built settlements in affected how they developed.

Do you know any more details of what kind of geology in particular they like?

I would venture that you need to get a more complete look of a game. Take your eye off the ball to see what movements are ahead of the ball carrier. Wherever there is space there is an opportunity and creating or blocking that space is kind of where most of the game is based on.

You can also read about that. Zonal Marking (Michael Cox) in his blog explained the tactics very well with idea + consequences of that however it has become almost defunct so you would need to read old matches reviews but it may help you better understand what is there and what isn't. Also I recommend the book "Inverting the Pyramid" by Jonathan Wilson; it is a very thorough compilation of the tactics/formations evolution throughout the years.

People have already told you but let me reiterate that watching more games more intently and even repeat viewing will let you start noticing patterns on the strategy of play.

This is a much better explanation of what the whole "invention" of Al Qaeda was. Anyone interested should read "How to Win a Cosmic War" for an interesting background on the whole idea.

I agree with a lot of what /u/Diet_Victreebel wrote. The idea that "belief" is solely a head-based, intellectual exercise is actually quite new and shaped by Western cultural thinking. These days I understand faith more in the sense of trust. For example, believing that a Ferris wheel is operating under a set of mechanics that will support its structure is different than trusting in those mechanics enough to step inside it and go around. The book How (Not) to be Secular has helped me understand how we have come to understand belief in its modern sense, and how we can conceive of other possibilities. I don't always agree with the author but I highly recommend it.

Links down, here's the original article on benswann.com

Further reading: The Skeptic's Guide to Vaccines: Poxes, Polio, Contamination and Coverup

This is the best book you will read on vaccines:

Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History

It's very encouraging to see this all come out and not get buried, even on /r/conspiracy.

Hopefully it's not too little too late.

https://www.amazon.com/After-Tamerlane-Global-Empires-1400-2000/dp/1596916028

^A modern history-focused look but it's a nice practical example of a non-Eurocentric thesis that doesn't treat history like it has a single teleological arc that all the world must follow or else.

https://www.amazon.com/Gunpowder-Age-Military-Innovation-History/dp/0691178143/ref=sr_1_25?keywords=rise+of+the+west&qid=1573350651&s=books&sr=1-25

^This presents a nice revision of some older narratives and gives the Qing Dynasty more of its own due in military terms.

A broader global standard across the entire expanse of European and Chinese history is too broad a category across too much of a timetable to really be useful in more than a popular historical sense, if that. Historians always select what to omit, and that's where the problems begin and they go downhill from there.

Depending on what's omitted and how it's omitted from either Europe or China either way you get a skewed perspective that raises more questions than it answers.

Bahá’u’lláh And the New Era by J. E. Esslemont is the standard introduction to the Bahá’í Faith in the United States. It has been updated several times since it’s first publication in the 1920s.

The Bahá’í Faith: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert H. Stockman is a 21st century introduction to the Faith that is slightly scholarly.

Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh by Bahá'u'lláh, it isn't available right now on Amazon, but here is a link to a PDF you can download for free.

The book: Dissolving Illusions by Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk.

Until recently, this book had ~90 completely perfect/positive reviews and only 2 critical reviews, and the comments on both of those reviews was overwhelmingly packed with antivaxxers to shout down any opposition.

Recently some science-minded folk have reopened the debate in there, both helping out in the comments as well as posting some additional critical reviews.

In the thread I've been watching mainly, one antivaxxer in particular challenged us to explain the author's claims on page 306 with respect to Whooping Cough. I realize full well that very little will convince these zealots, but I've been hoping that someone might take on that specific claim (or perhaps others made in the book), just so I can see personally what the real answers are.

I was able to have Amazon's free book preview to jump around randomly until I got page 306 and the two preceding pages, hence the image link.

You are correct that many Christians take offense, and of course they do. Their fundamental sense of self is rooted in belief. However, the atheist is no different. You yourself indicated this with the last line of your post. When one's paradigm is challenged, it is normal for those who are not used to dialogue with other paradigms to lash out like white blood cells attacking a foreign body in the bloodstream. At the very least, if you're looking for academic dialogue about Christianity, you'll need to stop going to non-academic Christians. The examples of Trump representing (and in my opinion, "Christian" Trump supporters) true orthodox (correct) theology is simply false, along with any Christian institution that "bears fruit" of violence, etc.

As an aside, I also picked up a small but strong presupposition common among many atheists/agnostics (assuming atheism/ag from your post, correct if wrong) that the book is closed academically on the existence of God. I would assume that you're aware that at the most basic level, the belief in or not in God is indeed still a belief and can never be proven; this is much more problematic for the positivist than the believer. Fortunately for us all, the metamodern landscape has resulted in the contesting of all things secular and religious. There is no longer (nor ever was) a separation.

I would recommend these books to you for some further reading on the point: #1 and #2. Here are to qualifying reviews on the first text. 1 and 2.

Hope it helps.

Diarmaid Macculloch's History of Christianity: the first three thousand years is pretty thorough.

Universal reconciliation has had a pretty interesting history in Christianity as well.

I'm baking bread so I'm gonna be in and out!

The International Medical Council on Vaccination is a anti-vaccination group promoting the anti-vaccination agenda (they publish a lot on sites like Natural News, to boot). They've been active for a little while apparently

But let's not just take some guy's word for it, because we're analytical motherfuckers, yeah?

I googled them and found a LinkedIn page for them, this is a good sign. I've worked with a lot of nonprofits over the years and networking is vital to raising funds and keeping your nonprofit alive.

But their LinkedIn page is blank and they only have one employee listed on LinkedIn. None of the doctors listed on the site are associated with the organization, which is an enormous red flag. Networking is big for doctors and clinicians, they want their names on as many prestigous things as they can get, it makes them look good when applying for grants and the like (and there are anti-vax research grants up for grabs!) The website linked on their webpage as their official portal is an abandoned blank placeholder.

Well not everyone is on LinkedIn, right? The LinkedIn page gives us a zipcode that is linked to Racine Wisconsin, let's check it out and see if we can find their headquarters. A lot of nonprofits end up in little stripmalls and everything so it's not a red flag if we find some shitty storefront, that's just how these things go sometimes. Here's where I googled it to find information so you can follow along too

The first link that turns up is to a Dr Michael Berglund! Alright! A medical professional associated with the nonprofit actually exists, this is a good sign! And then you look at his page and he talks about fluoridation being a bad thing and lowering IQ and other quack shit. Fuck.

Well, let's look for other people related to this organization. One quack in the bunch doesn't mean they're all quacks, right? He might just be the one that slid in under the radar, it happens in every organization. Oh wait, he's not a doctor at all, he's a chiropractor. Goddammit.

Okay, let's keep searching.

Alright, found someone else associated with that organization! This is good. Oh shit, it's someone that lists themselves as being a graduate of the "National College of Midwifery a few years back". Crap.

Okay, let's keep searching.

See that link at the bottom with the IP Address and it's a WHOIS site? Let's check this shit out, for science.

Fuck it shouldn't take this much work to figure out stuff about a nonprofit. The same IP hosting an anti-vax site is also hosting a church and a doctor's website, looks promising, let's check that shit out. Alright! An actual doctor! Ehh... "Medical training"? "Participant in the conventional system from 1989 until 2011"? 2011 is about the time when news articles about the International Medical Council on Vaccination really started popping up. Alright, we're on the right track here, fucking finally. And it's the same Dr Suzanne that wrote that article! Rocking!

So I'm scanning her site and seeing a lot of the usual homeopathic woo-woo that I usually do on these kinds of sites. I see she gave a talk to something called ABF Sweden, so I click on the Vimeo link for the lecture Alright, let's see what Dr. Suzanne is all about, because I'm not going to take some asshole's word for it that she doesn't know what's what. Right off the bat she starts talking about "Allopathy" which is apparently heavily related to homeopathy. Not looking so great, Dr. Suzanne.

Let's check out her CV to see what her qualifications are on her website She let one of her licenses lapse in 2007, and her other one will lapse soon too. She's also selling a book but that's to be expected, she's a doctor on the anti-vax front of course she'd have a book.

Six loaves of bread later and we've finally gotten somewhere.

Most of what I'm seeing here is standard rhetorical and copywriting tricks. Borrowing credibility from PhDs in physics, cross linking stuff that may or may not be weakly related, using deceptive language (i.e. "medically trained", "allopathy", "vitamin C can cure everything", etc. etc.) Lots of emotional pleading too, especially in the vaccine article on her page.

It really sucks that you have to plow this deep into sources to figure out people's angle to see what lens they're presenting the data through. I couldn't find any other people connected to the organization, but it looks like anti-vaxxers use this website for a lot of their facts and it's not even updated all that often. From the information I pulled in the last hour it looks like the International Medical Council on Vaccination is headed by a doctor that no longer practices conventional medicine started to lose interest 8 years ago at the very least. The only people I could find associated with the organization currently is a midwife and a chiropractor that believes fluoridation causes retardation (I live on top of a naturally fluoridated water supply, I'm not retarded but I do have yellow teeth from it).

Her website has a testimonials page, which is very strange for a doctor, but not strange for an alternative therapy practitioner. The top testimonial talks about how the "doctor" cured her baby of whooping cough with Vitamin C shots. Holy mother of fuck.

TLDR; Spent an hour? doing research, found out how deep the rabbit hole truly goes. That doctor isn't really a doctor, and the International Medical Council on Vaccination seems to be as international as Racine, Wisconsin is cosmopolitan. Doctor is selling a book and massive Vitamin C injections, believes that people don't need antibiotics to cure massive bacterial infections, and other insanity. Damn.

You are asking me to condense Early Modern History to a comment on Reddit? Uhh, no. But you can read a book if you are interested!

Try After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000

Great read, with a new Global perspective on the rise and fall of Empires.

If you want to continue, you should then dive into the arbitrary/flexible notion of the Empire and read The Comanche Empire

Good stuff.

Massive immigration has never been a gain for the host society. In Roman society, they had both massive immigration AND accumulation of wealth at the top.

Have you read John Zerzan? He writes something similar like your quote.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Running-Emptiness-Pathology-Civilization-Civilisation/dp/092291575X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1368215938&sr=8-3&keywords=john+zerzan
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Against-Civilization-Reflections-John-Zerzan/dp/0922915989/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1368215938&sr=8-2&keywords=john+zerzan


Very good books.

I can't stress to you enough. However you can get Raymond Franz's book Crisis of Conscience you can find it here http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Conscience-Raymond-Franz/dp/0914675044

heck I'll but it for you if you can't purchase online. It is a must read for anyone like you who need help seeing things more clearly.

Buy this book and read it fast, it's on the JW history of ridiculousness. None of them probably know their own church's history.

http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Conscience-Raymond-Franz/dp/0914675044

> Franz does not detail doctrinal problems with the Watchtower. Franz most likely holds to many of his old Watchtower doctrines. The Watchtower does have doctrinal problems when compared with the beliefs commonly held by the Church throughout Christian history. In fact the Watchtower is in my opinion just another apocalyptic group founded in the mid-late 1800s. However, Franz is not concerned with issues like the Trinity or Christ's divinity. He is more concerned with what makes a group truly a cult, which is control by the leaders over its members. Franz details this marvelously, and explains how the Watchtower even monitored its members bedroom activities. He speaks of disfellowshippings where families were encouraged to "shun" other members who had been kicked out of the Watchtower, effectively ruining the lives of thousands people. Franz also documents and explains failed prophecy, which caused many trusting members of the "truth" to sell homes, postpone college, and other goals in order to be ready for the end. The entire book is a calm and sober, yet highly personal, account of Franz's life deep within the Watchtower and his eventual exit.

This is an awesome book about Jews that are trans. Beyond The Mechitza

I'm Reconstructionist and the movement is very accepting of queer and trans Jews.

I've also felt accepted by Reform Jews and Conservative Jews. I don't know any Orthodox Jews personally, so I couldn't say.

But you are totally fine buying into the narrative that you've been given that vaccines are safe, check out humphries book on amazon,
https://www.amazon.com/Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines-Forgotten/dp/1480216895/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526997935&sr=8-1&keywords=suzanne+humphries

Just skimming through the free sample is enough to make me question things. Vaccines are a religion at this point

What is your background and what are you trying to learn?

The most essential spiritual teachings are enshrined in the beautiful little book called The Hidden Words of Baha'u'llah.

If you want an introduction to the history, teachings, and community, Baha'u'llah and the New Era is a wonderful book:

https://www.amazon.com/Bahaullah-New-Era-Introduction-Bahai/dp/1931847274

I encourage you to read Crisis of Conscience by Raymond Franz. Franz is the nephew of Frederick Franz, and was a member of the Governing Body from 1971 - 1980. He was disfellowshipped and declared an apostate when, while leading chronology research for the Aid to Bible Understanding encyclopedia, his findings led him to question key teachings of church.

Again, this was Ray Franz, from a family of JWs, who rose about as high as you could possibly rise in the church, and who'd devoted over forty years in the service of the church. The GB ran Franz out on a rail for asking simple and logical questions that, per them, should have been ludicrously easy for them to answer.

I can get you a copy of the book. I'll send you a PM.

Well, that handles history of science mostly and perhaps more through anecdotes than proper research. However, I would recommend A World History by William H. McNeill. He has a good handle of the big picture as well.

The best thing to do is to start searching for "eugenics." For some reason that stuff hasn't been buried as much and you can see more of it. And, since links in English are favored by the web over links in German, you get more of an allied perspective on it. You can start here, move on to here, spend a little time here and then dip in here for a little light reading before going down the rabbit hole for ever and ever.

Dissolving Illusions came out pretty recently and does a great job of covering the history of vaccination.

Currently reading A little history of the world. Its amazing. Definitely recommended.

I agree with you.

I think you might be interested in reading this (excellent) book:

http://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448

Also, come check out /r/natalism if you're interested.

It's a reference to "revenge of the cradle" a plan put in place by Catholics in Quebec to out birth other groups in Canada as a way to shift politics through demographics. Considering most demographic studies are showing that religious radicals of every stripe are having more children than secular folks, that phrase might strike fear into your average, atheist leftist in Canada.

Great book on the topic....

https://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448


>Dawkins and Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularisation process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families.

>Within Judaism, the Ultra-Orthodox may achieve majority status over their liberal counterparts by mid-century. Islamist Muslims have won the culture war in much of the Muslim world, and their success provides a glimpse of what awaits the Christian West and Israel. Based on a wealth of demographic research, considering questions of multiculturalism and terrorism, Kaufmann examines the implications of the decline in liberal secularism as religious conservatism rises - and what this means for the future of western modernity.

Never had enduring stability? Are you kidding? I mean if you think that area is unstable then what do you think Europe was, a paradise of reason and peace? And you can't just dismiss the West's involvement in the region.

I've become predictable!

If you want to dig into the concept a bit more, I highly recommend "How (Not) to be Secular." Definitely not our term.

That's an excellent question. If you'd like to broaden your thinking a bit, check out:


http://www.amazon.com/Against-Civilization-Reflections-John-Zerzan/dp/0922915989

Wow, the vaccine industry has the shills out in force. Here's some knowledge;

It's easy. Do NOT ever vaccinate. Ever. They are created by scum bag companies who DO NOT GIVE A FUCK AB HUMANS.

Mandatory vaccines are unreal. This is Brave New World stuff.

Big Pharma has the net crawling with trolls and the inherently brainwashed.

It boggles my mind how all these people GET MAD and attack people who don't get vaccines from Corrupt Corporations which have literally committed dozens of crimes and been convicted of these crimes.

Ignorance is bliss I guess.

Don't trust big PHARMA GUYS! I wouldn't trust these companies to wash my car let alone INJECT an unknown highly toxic cocktail into my body.

http://www.naturalnews.com/036417_Glaxo_Merck_fraud.html

According to U.S. federal investigators, GlaxoSmithKline (http://www.naturalnews.com/036416_GlaxoSmith...):

• Routinely bribed doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs • Fabricated drug safety data and lied to the FDA • Defrauded Medicare and Medicaid out of billions • Deceived regulators about the effectiveness of its drugs • Relied on its deceptive practices to earn billions of dollars selling potentially dangerous drugs to unsuspecting consumers and medical patients

Books for further research,

http://www.amazon.com/Vaccine-nation-Poisoning-Population-Shot-Time/dp/0984595422/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418724787&sr=1-1&keywords=vaccine+conspiracy

http://www.amazon.com/Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines-Forgotten/dp/1480216895/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_z

The whistle blowers are coming out in droves, protect yourself, protect your children/family.

The Rise of The West by William Mcneill. A grand narrative history of the entire human civilization. Very humane, thoughtful, and relevant (I am reading it for the second time these days).

David Brin(yes, the science fiction author) talked about this years ago in his book : "The Transparent Society"


It was a incredibly good book, and i wish it had gotten more press and reception.


http://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Society-Technology-Between-Privacy/dp/0738201448/ref=pd_bbs_sr_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220249895&sr=8-10

check out Eric Kaufmann: Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?. Lecture doesn't touch on all the numbers you want, but he take a good look at the issue from a number of angles. (not just conversion rates, but disparity in birth rate among various religious groups)
His book of the same title will probably have the numbers you're looking for.

As an amateur anthropologist with an interest in evolutionary psychology, this was one of my favorites:

https://www.amazon.com/Alphabet-Versus-Goddess-Conflict-Between/dp/0140196013

Try his other books as well. I've enjoyed the 2nd: Homo Deus and recently purchased the 3rd: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

Vaccines are a $35 Billion year business. That buys a lot of shills and trolls. Yes, people who like making $35 Billion a year attack scientists who put children first.

I recommend everyone read Dissolving Illusions. One of the most important books ever written.

I'd be more worried about the manipulation of social media, nowadays. Especially astroturfing stuff that isn't distinguishable from the actions of regular anonymous political fanatics. Good luck policing that without just flat out making all exchanges of money between anyone public (actually do consider making all transactions public though, I'm fairly sure that society wouldn't be a bad place to live)

Also: Sufficiently advanced civic analysis is indistinguishable from a service that people would pay money for.

You have to just pay attention to where people are getting their information and try to make that thing democratic imo.

Camera's aren't the problem. Those are probably inevitable. The real issue will be who can access the footage. If you haven't read David Brin's The Transparent Society I would recommend giving it a look.

I'm not in any way a historian so I was waiting to see what others said, but I would have suggested The Rise of the West by W. H. McNeill. Admittedly it's quite old (my edition was published in 1963) but I was wondering if proper historians would think of me as a dribbling shaved ape if I said I was impressed with it.

For JWs:

http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Conscience-Raymond-Franz/dp/0914675044

For other Christians:

http://www.kwdaniels.com/wib/WhyIBelieved.htm

Just awesome books:

http://www.amazon.com/Letter-Christian-Nation-Sam-Harris/dp/0307265773

http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469

There is a great book about trans Jewish people. “Balancing the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community” It’s an anthology of people’s stories.

One of them has inspired me to have my Hebrew name changed. It’s currently Esther but I want to change it to David, after my father who passed away April 4, 2014.

> The basic problem is she is interfering with their narcotics enforcement operations.

Living in a society pretty much means that members will interfere with each other. Every action causes interference with others. The role of ethics and laws are conflict resolution.

> They work undercover, and she posts their photos, gives out their names, gives addresses, and tips people off as to what their doing.

Cops and politicians share information about non-cops and non-politicians and tip each other off as to what we are doing. Do we want to live in a caste society? Why should they get all the fun?

> This impacts their ability to do their jobs.

So does smoking weed inside your house rather than directly in front of a cop.

> It's also illegal.

I suspect it is, but that brings us into a dangerous area where truth becomes illegal. The best thing that could be done to eliminate corruption is to bring it out into the light of day. Read David Brin's The Transparent Society for more information on the elimination of privacy for both sides in general.

> Free speech means she can criticize them, write about their operations, discuss the legality of anti-narco enforcement in general, etc. However, she crossed the line when she repeated interfered in an attempt to thwart what they are doing. She's running a counter-intelligence operation against them. There are laws preventing this in every state.

Your rights are whatever enough other people agree they are. I believe in the societal contract, but I also believe that either party can breach it. Through either a disinterested populace, active roadblocks to reform, or both, the law has largely been removed from the hands of the people expected to obey it. One solution is to just decide to be in a different society. You can do this without even moving. However, you have to expect that you'll be judged by the ethics of the society that you're leaving unless you get enough people to come along with you that you can physically prevent that from happening.

> You also have to ask yourself why someone would want to do this. I mean, I understand the anti-cop thing here on Reddit, but I just don't buy justifying this particular behavior, no matter how spirited / biased you are about the issue.

Every good cop that I've ever met has been heavily involved in community work. They believed in walking the streets and interacting with people not sitting inside a cruiser or being on a power trip. They also all quit after a while. Coincidence? If cops want to live the Bad Boyz fantasy life then they (and their families) can take the risk. If the same number of SWAT cops and police dogs got killed as no-knock warrant people and their pets, some changes would occur.

I'll have to check out The Master and His Emissary some time. It was mentioned in 79 - Professor Andrew Gurevich. They also discussed The Alphabet Versus the Goddess which I've read and enjoyed. It relates neurology and linguistics.

He showed a video of chimps throwing rocks and sticks and they were really bad at it. He had tons of support for his stuff man. We only became able to throw well after we became bipedal, developed opposable thumbs and our hips changed. Chimps are knuckle-walkers.

He actually released a book recently. Its kinda pricey, but if money is not an issue then check it out:

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Distance-Birth-Humane-Universe/dp/1439254125/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265069239&sr=8-1

And this is what we had to do for his class besides attending lectures:

http://rothmanmedia.com/tbobh.html

these are actually taped lectures and in them he uses videos and fossil records and tons of other stuff to provide support for what he's saying. There are also supplementary texts in this edu-pack. Don't remember how much it is though, or if you'd be able to get it in the first place since youre not a student at my uni.

excellent observation but these fellows only hunt, they don't fight one another this way (water shots in water don't go very far). thus do not cause cooperation as the amazon! look inside view suggests .

I'm reading Against Civilization, a compilation of essays by thinkers (from Rousseau to the Unabomber) edited by John Zerzan, cool guy and referent of the actual anarcho-primitivism movement. Reading it will give you an insight to the mindset of the anticivilization movement and probably encourage you to GTFO civilization ASAP.

Most people here say that you'll still need to trade with the nearest town at some point to get enough food (winter, etc). And that's the reason of why hunters-gatherers are nomads. So, maybe this shared fantasy of settling alone in a cabin in the woods has nothing to do with a natural/primitive/sustainable/possible way of living. Forget your cabin, your supplies, nomad is the way to go!

It's a very interesting topic indeed. I am entry level in this subject, gathering some books about.

In my seach I have found this book called Alphabet vs The Goddess where the author makes a parallel between the rise of patriarchy simultaneously with the phonetic alphabet.

I just leave this here.

Personally, I think that we will realize how little we care what other people are doing.

After Tamerlane

Goodreads

Covers world history from shortly before the start of the game to the present day. It's a good read and most of the book covers the eu4 time period.

Hate to break it to you, but David Brin came up with the same idea like 20 years ago.

https://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Society-Technology-Between-Privacy/dp/0738201448

I have a very good book that discusses this in depth (but it isn't a very difficult read). The main thesis is the failing battle of the feminine way of doing and knowing versus the masculine written word, and how societies have changed once ridding themselves of their female deities and taking up masculine alphabets. If you're interested in it, I'll be finished with it in a week or two and can mail it to you (if you live in the states).

You cannot link to David Brin talking about privacy without linking to his book on the subject.

The Transparent Society - wiki

>The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy. The work first appeared as a magazine article by Brin in Wired in late 1996.

amazon link

She listed her one source. Showed it to Bryce. He backed that one source. Was in a magazine a bit ago. https://www.amazon.com/Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines-Forgotten/dp/1480216895

https://www.amazon.ca/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/077103850X

Re-inverting the pyramid?
https://www.amazon.com/Inverting-Pyramid-History-Soccer-Tactics/dp/1568589190

http://www.amazon.com/Little-History-World-E-Gombrich/dp/0300108834

It's not professional/adult in tone, but it's famous for a reason.

Where? It's not even available in the US as a Kindle?! https://www.amazon.com/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow-ebook/dp/B01BBQ33VE/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=

Which book?

edit Found The Transparent Society

http://www.amazon.com/The-Alphabet-Versus-Goddess-Conflict/dp/0140196013

"Alphabetic writing, Shlain believes, "subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook" at the expense of feminine values.""

Yep. Someone saying the alphabet is an instrument of patriarchy gets published in academia, your argument is invalid. This turd is just the tip of the iceberg of the "women's studies" shithole.

Hate to be that goy, but actually the conservative whites are gaining in numbers. They have more children than liberal faggots, they are generally healthier, and have higher reported life satisfaction (urban/rural).

https://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448

It is indeed so. I think that atheism today is doomed, because atheists have too few children, which gives them strong evolutionary disadvantage. There's a good book about it:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448

Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History https://www.amazon.com/dp/1480216895/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_bk0zDb2F41KM7

Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History

And Amazon of course for a dead tree version:

https://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Conscience-Raymond-Franz/dp/0914675044

https://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Conscience-Raymond-Franz/dp/0914675230/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

There are good reasons to believe it's true. But perhaps what I want to encourage you with is that everyone has seasons of doubt like this. I think it's easy for Christian communities to demonize doubt and dismiss it as somehow bad or sinful. But as Smith says in How (Not) to be Secular, most ordinary folks live in between the extremes of belief and doubt, between fundamentalism and new atheism, in a world haunted by the other: believers are haunted by doubt and skeptics are haunted by belief. It's only human to live in this space. That said, I encourage you to find a way forward, seeking truth, because if Christ is true, you'll find Him.

Please ignore idiots like that, they appeal to fear because they have no recourse to reason, fear is one of the lowest most primal human emotions. They are idiots.

Check out Sherif Gaber on Youtube and Masked Arab.

I'd also like to recommend you this book "

https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-History-Humankind-Yuval-Harari/dp/077103850X

Check out my post on an alternative theory of history based off of the book "Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Human Universe"
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Distance-Birth-Humane-Universe/dp/1439254125

https://www.reddit.com/r/HelloInternet/comments/43jwyq/theory_of_history_social_development_is_tied_to/

1. Society gets rich
   
2. Stupid irrational people breed rampantly
   
3. Society gets poor
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I1JM02ODVBPXHE&colid=URIGRGJ3G3O4

> If a woman doesn't want to gestate a fetus, that's her business and her business, period...

Depends on how far along the child is. At some point, its no longer simply a zygote. At some point, the brain has formed, and its now a human being. At that point, I don't agree with abortion.

> This shouldn't even be a discussion. It's a woman's personal medical decision, and no one else's.

Yes, it should, for yet another reason that I didn't get into, and that's the fact that the religious people are "winning". What I mean by that, is that they're having more babies than us. And not by any small amount either. Too many western civilizations are below replacement birth rate, while Muslim and Christian communities are having babies left and right.

The problem with that, is that it won't take too many generations before us secularists are outnumbered. Significantly. And then its just a matter of time until we go away... either bred out completely, or we're persecuted so severely that we just "give in". Don't believe that? Read this - https://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448

So whether secular women (and men for that matter) like it or not, we need to be having babies, at at least the same rate as the religious.

A big problem I see with a lot of atheists is they believe they're not at war with religious extremism. Well you are, because they're at war with you, whether you like it or not.

It would be a hell of a thing to see 5000 years of Western civilization turn to shit because women got "liberated" and then sat around with a "Now what?" attitude. Like it or not, women exist to create new humans. Men exist to help create new humans. That's just the way it is. It might be unfair, it might not be politically correct, but that's the reality of our situation.

If you're interested in the topic check out the book by the British political scientist Eric Kaufman "Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?"

He explains that demographically social conservatives and religious fundamentalist in countries around the world are quickly beginning to dominate due to their large population expanses. The Orthodox Haredim will soon outnumber the Reformed Jews in Israel, evangelical Christians are overtaking Anglicans, the Amish population is doubling every 20 years, Hutterites are exploding in population, Mormon populations are growing very fast as well as is the Quiverfull movement.

If you combine high birth rates with very low rates of people leaving these extreme forms of religion, then you can see how it's religious moderates who are being destroyed, not extremist.

Interview with Eric Kaufmann, Author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?

>Question: This trend of “quiverfull” Christian families and large Catholic families (to name a couple) has been around for a while… And yet, the percentages of non-religious people keep increasing according to recent polls. Does that contradict your thesis?

>Answer: No. The composition of a population is always a product of the relative pace of secularisation and religious growth. I use the analogy of a treadmill. Seculars are running on a treadmill that is tilting up and moving against them because of their low fertility and immigration. The religious — notably fundamentalists — are standing still or walking backward, but their treadmill is pushing them forward and tilting downhill. So in Europe in the late twentieth century, seculars were running fast enough to overcome their demographic disadvantage and overtook the faithful. But today, secularism is slowing down outside England and Catholic Europe, and is facing a more difficult incline from the treadmill of demography. London is a good example: it is more religious now than 20 years ago despite secularisation, simply because of religious immigration and fertility.**

Here are some interviews with the author...

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century

Battle of the Babies - A new book argues that liberal secularism and high birth rates are fuelling a revival of religious fundamentalism. Caspar Melville speaks to its author Eric Kaufmann

Home schooling it its! Sucks I still have to pay school taxes though.

For all you jellyfish vaccine pushing tardtards I recommend you read some of the following informative materials:

• Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History
  
  
• Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines--The Truth Behind a Tragedy
  
  
• Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children

Hah! Just mention Ray Franz and his first book, "Crisis of Conscience", in which he strips the mask off of the Watchtower Society leaders. Ray Franz was one of the leaders of the Jehovah's Witnesses until he was driven out in a real witch hunt, whereupon he wrote a tell-all book that exposes most of their dirty secrets.

https://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Conscience-Raymond-Franz/dp/0914675044

I'm very sorry for your situation but the unvarnished truth of the matter is that your relationship with your father as you knew him is probably over, at least for a while. This is a high-control religion that values membership in itself as the highest of priorities. Your father will likely be unable to stop himself and in the short-term it will adversely affect your relationship with him.

My father has been a Witness all his life and we have a great relationship, so the good news is that it is possible. But my father has been jaded by many years of listening to unfulfilled promises of imminent paradise, so the religion is not clouding his thinking as deeply as it is clouded in a new convert like your father. With time, he will - as all humans do - get subconsciously bored with it all and while he won't likely be shaken from his beliefs he won't be as forward about them.

In the meantime, I suggest that you reconsider your supportive attitude and especially as regards your children, make it very clear that any attempts at indoctrinating your children will NOT be tolerated. With regard to families, this is perhaps the most dangerous of religions, as it perversely destroys them in the most unnatural of ways. It may behoove you to understand the religion a bit so I recommend that you obtain and read a copy of the book Crisis of Conscience so that you can understand why your father's decision to be a part of it does not deserve your support.

I'm sorry you have to be put through this, but do become educated and do be vigilant. This religion is a dangerous mind virus.

Edit: holy smokes, Crisis of Conscience is out of print it seems and those prices are crazy. Here is a pdf of it.

You would think those were legit, but it's not so. This book by Suzanne Humphries does a great job of explaining.

https://www.amazon.com/Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines-Forgotten/dp/1480216895

"Not too long ago, lethal infections were feared in the Western world. Since that time, many countries have undergone a transformation from disease cesspools to much safer, healthier habitats. Starting in the mid-1800s, there was a steady drop in deaths from all infectious diseases, decreasing to relatively minor levels by the early 1900s. The history of that transformation involves famine, poverty, filth, lost cures, eugenicist doctrine, individual freedoms versus state might, protests and arrests over vaccine refusal, and much more. Today, we are told that medical interventions increased our lifespan and single-handedly prevented masses of deaths. But is this really true? Dissolving Illusions details facts and figures from long-overlooked medical journals, books, newspapers, and other sources. Using myth-shattering graphs, this book shows that vaccines, antibiotics, and other medical interventions are not responsible for the increase in lifespan and the decline in mortality from infectious diseases. If the medical profession could systematically misinterpret and ignore key historical information, the question must be asked, “What else is ignored and misinterpreted today?” Perhaps the best reason to know our history is so that the worst parts are never repeated."

She has some youtube videos too for anyone who wants to educate themselves.

It's amazingly sad how many redditors support something so terribly evil. Today it's forced vaccines, tomorrow maybe it will be force fed GMO's because "it's better for the economy". Then next maybe forced executions for anyone with a low IQ.

It doesn't really take a lot of critical thinking skills to realize how terrible vaccines are. Just look at the vaccine ingredients on Wikipedia. I guess injecting acetone, Aluminum potassium sulfate, ammonium sulfate, bovine extract, formaldehyde, thimerosal, Aluminum hydroxide, and many other wonderful chemicals into the blood of helpless babies is what you guys get off on.

If you pull your head out of your ass and talk to people that have experiences with vaccines you'll find that there are a lot of adverse reactions; they're just not frequently reported. I personally almost died as a baby from an extreme fever and brain swelling after a vaccine. Here are several hundred horror stories to read if your mind isn't already closed.

And then finally, much of the purported success of vaccines is a lie.