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On Own Now wrote:
If we take a non-B&W view, I think it’s safe to say that there are many things that are much better today but also many things that are worse. The contents of the two sets are defined by each individual’s perspective.
Sounds like…depending on what you’re talking about…you can make the statement the world is getting worse.
For Amy, the health advancements and standards of living are better, so the world is not getting worse.
Yes Sir, that is the truth Sir 
But since we can only by the history/information passed down through the years based on what people knew, didn’t know, didn’t want to know, and didn’t want others to know it’s hard to get an accurate perspective – and that is before you get the bias applied by the filter of what we know know, what we don’t know about the time/circumstances, what we don’t want to know about history, and what we don’t want others to know about it.
So I am a little more comfortable talking about my my “now” because it doesn’t have so many variables involved:)
Heber13 wrote:
Las Vegas massacre makes me pause and wonder what kind of world we live in now, and what direction it is going. I want to believe what others are saying…that despite evils, i wouldn’t want to live a hundred years ago.Perhaps today is just not the day for me to think about these things. It is just horrific.
How much influence does an individual doing bad things have on our overall perception of the direction of the world? Maybe not much. What percentage of individuals doing bad things would it take before our perception of the world starts to become affected?
Flip it:
How much influence does an individual doing good things have on our overall perception of the direction of the world? Maybe not much. What percentage of individuals doing good things would it take before our perception of the world starts to become affected?
I get the feeling that the ratios aren’t the same. There’s no way of knowing but I’d be interested in what the ratio is. 10 good acts to balance out one bad act? 10,000 good acts to balance out one bad act?
We live in a world where the average individual has access to more destructive powers than they have had in years past. Assault rifles, nuclear arsenals; heck, even cars become weapons. 200 years ago people got drunk and their potential to inflict harm may have been limited to their fist and their words. Now people can get drunk and drive a two ton vehicle at 100 mph. New ballgame.
Individuals can inflict lots of damage, or small groups of people can inflict lots of damage. What makes the world decline, the percentage of people that wish harm on others or the magnitude of harm an individual can inflict? And it’s not an either or question.
This is a good discussion. Well, before my faith transition I used to believe conditions in the world were getting better and worse. They would have to for Christ to come. Now, after my faith transition I believe similarly, but some of the things I believed were bad may not be bad at all. I don’t know. Time will tell I guess. I see the world becoming filled with surveillance and fake democracy. I doubt you guys have heard much about Catalonia and its referendum but a perfect example there. We also have a serious problem with plastic and a collapsing ecosystem.
nibbler wrote:
We live in a world where the average individual has access to more destructive powers than they have had in years past. Assault rifles, nuclear arsenals; heck, even cars become weapons.
And yet homicide rates have gone consistently down. Just because more destructive power is available doesn’t mean more destruction happens. Death rates in modern war are consistently lower than they were 100 years ago and yet we have access to way more destructive power.The fact that we are able to be increasingly responsible, as humanity, to harness increasingly potentially dangerous things shows that we are advancing.
Corruption IMO is mostly caused by cruft of an aging system, unmanageable growth, and the indifference of the people. If the average Joe actually cared about liberty, we rebooted our government every so often, and we decentralize more things, there would be
wayless corruption. It’s just that most of us do not want to put in that kind of time or effort. Monolithic systems are the natural tendency of any organization, and past a certain size, that breeds corruption and inefficiency. At a macro level, governments have been tending to get better in design, so long as you throw out the communist and fascist regimes in recent history. I realize that’s a total copout considering there are a sizable number of them, but those frequently come from hostile takeovers and dishonest politicking, and as such, represent the actions of outlier bad people rather than humanity as a whole.
I my personal opinion… the overall theme of the world never changes. Our problems are newer and different from what we’ve seen in the past. What was once our worst vices have turned to virture, and our best virtues have turned to vices. But as a whole, I think we’re moving in a positive direction. Few examples: -We are absolutely 100% the most educated. We have practically all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips.
-We can freely communicate, discuss, and exchange ideas across the globe.
-Our healthcare is phenomial. 99.4% of babies survive their first year. We’ve erradicated polio and smallpox. And we can literally transplant organs without killing the recipent.
-We have got the best emergency response teams on the face of the earth. House of fire? A firetruck will show up in 5 minutes, with access to an obscene amount of water at incredible pressure. Hurricane is coming? Let’s transport you a few hundred miles away; then the government, religious organizations, non-profits, and charities will swoop in and clean up the damage.
-I don’t have to worry about bandits, raiders, etc.
-With the advent of the nuclear bomb, the world has been a relatively safe place. As Robert A. Heinlein put it, “Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”
-We’ve got the EU, which has practically unified Europe and made it a very prosperous and industrious place. We’ve also got the UN, with their global treaties, alliances, and pacts.
-Womens rights are better than ever. No more wife-selling, no more strapping a muzzle on her for nagging or being a gossip, plenty of boons to education and employment…
-Even the poorest among us is rich compared to what life was like 200 years ago. With the federal minimum wage at $7.25 (yes, it’d SUCK to get paid that little), you can still buy a couple decent meals for every hour you work. Until recently, if you have a bad harvest or couldn’t find work, you starve to death. Don’t get me wrong, there are still way too many kids in the US who go hungry. But no one is starving to death in the USA.
Don’t get me wrong, the US will crumble sooner or later. The environment is wreck us. Someone is going to drop a nuke. There’s bound to be an infastrucre collapse. But the world will learn from it and bounce back. I have faith we’ll progress; and if we don’t, the universe will carry on without us.
Beefster wrote:
In many church conversations, we mention that society is deteriorating morally…But perhaps, as a whole, despite these problems, humanity is ascending into greater truth, knowledge, understanding, and love. We have better technology and medical understanding.There is more acceptance for LGBT+ people. There is (arguably) more tolerance of peoplefrom many different faiths and beliefs. We don’t label people as heretics or burn people at the stake for being who they are.
SamBee wrote:
The mistake to make is to link it to sex. Look at all the other stuff– people are self obsessed.
I think that’s precisely why we repeatedly hear about how the world is supposedly so bad and getting worse, because Church leaders are focused so much on other people’s sex habits compared to everything else. Imagine what most people would think is an ideal society with no crime, war, poverty, disease, etc. but with some people having sex that are not married and/or straight. Would Church leaders tone down their rhetoric about supposed moral decline much in that case? I doubt it; my guess is that to them that would still be a filthy, wrong, and completely unacceptable state of affairs. So of course Church leaders see moral degradation compared to the supposed pinnacle of moral societies: 1950s America (based on the way Church leaders talk). It is a self-fulfilling prophecy based on the unrealistic and impractical way they have defined what success is supposed to look like when most of the rest of the world already have more pressing concerns to worry about than sex between consenting adults.
Of course there is another possibility, we could be coming up to the time of the Great Filter. Wonder why the skies are not crawling with ETs (other than the odd UFO sighting, but let’s leave that business aside for one moment)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter Quote:The concept originates in Robin Hanson’s argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies the possibility something is wrong with one or more of the arguments from various scientific disciplines that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable; this observation is conceptualized in terms of a “Great Filter” which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species with advanced civilizations actually observed (currently just one: human)
Quote:consequences of human activity could be the thing that prevents our civilization from advancing much further. In a particularly extreme scenario, it could even wind up wiping us from the face of the Earth.
That may sound unlikely, but it’s the answer some scientists are giving to a perplexing question: Why haven’t we encountered intelligent alien life?
In other words, if nature doesn’t get you, intelligence will. Perhaps the cosmos is littered with civilizations who never made it to other stars because they destroyed themselves.
DevilsAdvocate wrote:
I think that’s precisely why we repeatedly hear about how the world is supposedly so bad and getting worse, because Church leaders are focused so much on other people’s sex habits compared to everything else. Imagine what most people would think is an ideal society with no crime, war, poverty, disease, etc. but with some people having sex that are not married and/or straight. Would Church leaders tone down their rhetoric about supposed moral decline much in that case? I doubt it, my guess is that to them that would still be a filthy, wrong, and completely unacceptable state of affairs. So of course Church leaders see moral degradation compared to the supposed pinnacle of moral societies: 1950s America (based on the way Church leaders talk). It is a self-fulfilling prophesy based on the unrealistic and impractical way they have defined what success is supposed to look like when most of the rest of the world already have more pressing concerns to worry about than sex between consenting adults.
I believe Western Civilization is in terminal decline, and has been all my lifetime. In fact, I think WWI may have been the beginning of the end.
* The Spanish lost their power base over the 18th & 19th centuries, although the Spanish state is still losing power – Catalonia is declaring independence on Monday. The Spanish Civil War was the end of a long decline though.
* The Ottoman (Turkish) and Austro-Hungarian Empires went belly up around a century ago.
* British power ended effectively with WWII, its colonies being gradually hived off in the decades following.
* French power probably ended around the same time, but it hung on into the 60s. Vietnam, Algeria and Syria were among its colonies.
* Soviet power collapsed abruptly, in the late eighties.
* American power has been taking longer to fall, but I believe it has been occurring since the 1970s. I believe Vietnam was the turning point, but that the decline of the Soviet bloc gave it a powerful second wind. However, by around 2000 or so, I believe America’s decline in power resumed in earnest.
* Japan is not a western country, of course, but it has been overtaken by China in the last twenty years.
SamBee – It seems to me that empires have always come and gone. The British probably was the climax, but there has been a Roman empire, Napoleon, Genghis Kahn, etc. I think westerners are too comfortable with their power. America has been unique in some respects but it is not as exceptional as some of the people there think. It is likely that one day America will wake up to find itself of little consequence… if only for the simple reason this has happened to everyone else. SamBee wrote:
Of course there is another possibility, we could be coming up to the time of the Great Filter.
The “great filter” idea could fit into scripture and doctrine nicely, just worded another way.
SamBee wrote:
I think westerners are too comfortable with their power. America has been unique in some respects but it is not as exceptional as some of the people there think. It is likely that one day America will wake up to find itself of little consequence… if only for the simple reason this has happened to everyone else.
I agree with you. America’s dominance will not last. History says so. We can be cocky SOB’s. That even goes for the church exporting American culture around the world as “gospel”.I am watching a Ken Burns documentary on the Viet Nam conflict. It was a bit before my time. But the early history is making me
😯 at the actions taken, even when knowing it was an unwinnable war. There was the great scare of communism taking over the world and we have a different perspective of 50 years of history since then, but I am still flabbergasted at how arrogant the US was (even though a few people even in the government were saying, “we are on the wrong side of this conflict”)I think the collapse of the Soviet Union was a massive shot in the arm for America. But the USSR for all its dissimilarities to America is a grave warning to the USA in some ways – it did have grumbling problems for decades (heavy industry decline, race issues, violent policing, political corruption, Muslim extremists – to name some issues shared with the west), but its collapse was speedy… lots of people ask whether it was Chernobyl, Polish issues or Afghanistan which really finished it off… either way, we’re talking a period from the early to mid eighties to 1990/1991. Less than ten years for a political and scientific power to go to the dogs! The question is whether the USA is going to be replaced by China or a one world government. Either is possible. China has been there before having collapsed several times over the millennia.
The USA has three jokers up its sleeve though – Hollywood, NASA and the English language. The first two may fail in a severe economic crisis, but English will go strong for decades. It doesn’t require funding – it is the most common international language on every continent. Chinese just doesn’t have that pull.
I was reading a book on the late Roman Empire, and it listed some of the symptoms and causes of decline:
* Huge vanity projects which bankrupted local governments and had to be bailed out by Rome.
* Political corruption and nepotism.
* Excessive gambling.
* Diseases including STDs affecting or killing large numbers.
* Barbarian attacks.
* Agricultural and environmental issues.
* Long sports festivals in Rome.
* Defeatism and apathy
* Collapse of the old religion
We can recognize many of these today. Promiscuity, and homosexuality, it is worth pointing out took place throughout the Roman period. In the long run promiscuity led to disease, which probably helped destroy Babylon or at least had that image amongst the Jews.
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