Greetings friends, family, strangers, and enemies alike,

My name is John D. Ferrer and I’m a graduate of Southern Evangelical Seminary (MDiv – Apologetics), and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (ThM & PhD – Phil. of Relig.). I will be speaking at the National Apologetics Conference in Charlotte, NC on Oct. 13-15, 2016. My topic is: “How Holocaust’s Happen.”

Have you ever found yourself thinking, “How could people have ever resorted to slavery, genocide, and holocaust? Surely we’re more enlightened now. We know better. We wouldn’t let that happen in our town.”

But DO we know better now? In this talk, we will find the answer to that question. When we scour our historical basement to see what we’ve learned from past barbarities we find that it’s not very pretty. In the first chapter of this talk, we we observe some of the most deadly crimes against humanity to understand the depth and breadth of the problem of human violence.

In the second chapter, we will study 10 different socio-cultural patterns that tie these atrocities together, identifying their collective power to transform ordinary people into compliant mobs.

Third, I will respond to the claims of Steven Pinker who argues that violence is declining. His theory is well argued, in many ways, but suffers from grave mistakes that leave his theory ultimately indefensible.

In the four and final chapter of this presentation I discuss how not only are we prone to forget the lessons of the past, but we readily excuse even deadlier things operating institutionally today. Indeed the most deadly crime against humanity is still happening right under our noses, a holocaust almost 10x’s deadlier than the Nazi holocaust of WWII.