Slavery was no more a government institution than private ownership is. Yes, slavery was an assumption informing the government's property laws, just as private ownership is an assumption of the property laws. But property pre-exists the state, and you will find slavery in societies that aren't even chiefdoms, let alone states (although all states, in the anthropological sense, have slavery as their CHIEF economic arrangement, while other organization-levels don't; the only states that don't repose on slavery are those in the Common Law tradition of Western Christianity...which arose during a period when the state had devolved into a bunch of complex chiefdoms, i.e. "feudalism").

So...nobody, ever, anywhere, is actually threatened? The world is a perfectly safe place and no agenda is in any way deleterious to anybody's interests? Because that's the only conditions in which your assertion makes any sense at all.

They have actually proved that "peer reviewers" are less rigorous with papers that support the reviewers' view. They demonstrated this by submitting fake papers, with identical methodology but varying results, to a number of peer-reviewed journals. "Myths of Skepticism" is pretty much a sine qua non of having a right to an opinion on the philosophy of science.

And...what makes you think empirical demonstrations are valid? You've got to do epistemology and metaphysics—philosophy—before you can even BEGIN to do science.

It cited the studies. Gibbon cited primary source documents. Of course, Gibbon was later proved to have cited sources based solely on the fact they were about the subjects in question, and simply made up what he wanted to say, without reference to the sources—because he knew nobody would check. Did you read the cited studies? Or just take Komen's word on them?

I'm sorry, what religion impairs judgment to the extent its people cheerfully killed 120+ million people between 1917 and 1989? Oh wait, that was atheists. Atheists exist because it is hard to believe in man as the image of a rational, benevolent God when you ARE a counterargument to the concept.

In most eras, if a human being made it to 20, he had almost the same chance of living to 70 that we do. It was childhood illness and infant mortality that lowered the average life expectancy. His counter argument is specious, but so is your counter-counter-argument.

I vote we start population reduction with you.

It beats your method, believing whatever is shoveled out, despite the known biases of the sources.

Consumption is tuberculosis, not lung cancer.

Egypt actually went over mostly because Islam's rules on lending were advantageous, since their populace had a huge debt problem. What does it say about this religion that two of its selling points are "We can get rid of all those bad debts you've gotten yourself into" and "None of that confusing Trinity business"—are we surprised they went anti-intellectual in the 13th century?