past couple of weeks? i personally identified as a secular i m one of the four me lennials who aren t affiliated with any religion. athere are four of you? i m sorry. one out of four. there s only four of us. i was thinking, you know, religious freedom, fine. what about secular freedom. that s what i was thinking. over the sort of church/state debate, what about those of us who are secular. yes. i feel there s a lot of cross-speak with religious freedom virz take your religious freedom out of my government. it s very confusing. yeah, indeed. i think the very fact that you can be here openly acknowledging your secularism shows that, in fact, we don t have theocracy and that is a very, very good thing. but, you know, melissa, i don t define myself by a particular birth right. i define myself by the values that i share with other people. i m very much a pluralist. and what i found interesting about the question that the candidates were asked about the
qaeda operation in the yemen operational peninsula shows signs of doing that. we need to be careful. this dispersed al qaeda, i don t think will close the threat of massive spectaculars like 9/11. a lot of angry people this morning thinking of ways to settle scores. nobody should be sitting back saying, whoo, that s over. that s not the case. i agree. three circles to the al qaeda phenomenon, al qaeda central and al qaeda s network and franchise, second, and with broader al qaeda movement, individuals, unrestricted free agents that aren t affiliated with a specific group all impacted in a different way because of al qaeda s death. al qaeda central continues to have operational capability and we will continue to go after it. most recently, arrests in germany. one if not two of those individuals went to the al qaeda training camps in the afghan pakistan border, still a threat
switch to groups as they have more members and so as a group grows it becomes more and more attracti attractive. and the second effect is people switch to groups that they perceive have higher social utility, which could encompass factors like spiritual or moral agreement but also political, economic and social benefits. and what our mathematical model says is there s really a couple of possibilities. one is this rapid growth of religious nonaffiliation could level off and the group of people identify themselves as not being affiliated with a religion cocoa exist stably with those who do identify as belonging to a religion, but another possibility is that it s headed towards almost everyone in these sew sites become nonaffiliated with religion. that s interesting, professor. does this differ between religions? let s say christian versus muslims? we only looked at these societies where we examined people who aren t affiliated with any religion and people who belong to any religion.