by Open mind 31 Replies latest social current
I'm not talking in the Biblical sense necessarily. You can argue Scriptural "Last Days" until you're blue in the face. (JCanon & OBVES make that clear on at least a weekly basis.)
I'm talking more big picture. Environment, socio-political, religious fanaticism vs. secular humanism, etc.
Are we living at a point of some sort of "critical mass" in human history?
$.02 sought from all perspectives.
Open Mind
p.s. JCanon & OBVES, if you reply, please keep it to $.02.
Something is always ending.
Something is always beginning.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough for understanding the very human tendency to look for "the end of days" in one's lifetime...
Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millenial Beliefs Through the Ages
Great topic, Om.
This is what got me thinking about this topic:
the very human tendency to look for "the end of days" in one's lifetime...
Thanks Nvr.
Open Mind
mankind is at a crossroad without a doubt
I think many JWs harbor plenty of suppressed doubts and reservations about "The Truth". But even when I was beginning to wake up, I still thought that the "world's going to hell in a hand basket and something's gotta give soon" idea had merit.
Now I'm leaning more toward the idea that everyone wants to think they're "special" and that's where ideas of Apocalyptic change come from.
Open Mind
There are vast time cycles , planetary cycles and astrophysical cycles that we can barely comprehend.
Trilobites were the highest lifeform on planet earth for about 350 million years
Dinosaurs were the highest lifeform on planet earth for about 150 million years.
If you count from the first apelike precursors of "man" man has been here for less than 3 million years.
Each individual has a PERSONAL beginning, a PERSONAL "last days," and a PERSONAL end.
Enjoy the dance while you're at the party!
Thank you, Open Mind:
The very real benefit - among so many others - of JWD is that $.02 thoughts of posters result in what we might individually require. I wanted info such as if found in APOCALYPSES [thanx, Never!]. I do not wish to fashion myself an apoplectic apocalyptic, but it would appear something's gotta give ...
So many JWs talk matter-of-factly about dying in this system ... but, of course, unless the end does come!
CoCo
everyone wants to think they're "special" and that's where ideas of Apocalyptic change come from
Exactly.
Throw a little religious fanaticism in the mix and it gets really fun.
But to be fair, scientists have often predicted a future much gloomier than reality.
We think things have never been so bad.
Are things worse than the 1940's?
Worse than the Vietnam era?
Worse than the period of slavery in the Americas?
Worse than it was in Europe's ongoing religious wars in centuries past?
Worse than the Plague?
Are people dying younger today than ever before?
What affects us more - overpopulation due to conditions allowing for a greater number of humans to survive and reproduce or underpopulation because conditions are inhospitable to human life?
Historical perspective is so important...
One of the greatest threats to the sanity of humanity- HISTORICAL MYOPIA
The all-encompassing media exacerbates the condition.
Ahem, its the age of Aquarius people, worldwide consciousness is at an alltime high. While crappy things are happening, never before has human rights had a voice as it does in this century. Humanity has the potential to leap forward and grow in immense proportions, if we choose to stop expecting someone to save us from ourselves and realize we have the power to do it, all on our own. IMO
Not sure about the Aquarius thing, sweetstuff, but we seem to agree that in many ways, "things" have never been "better".
Just think, some governments have even told parents that they don't have the right to hit their kids, no matter how noble their intentions might be.
Though racism will not be disappearing anytime soon, it's illegal to "own" another person.
People no longer publicly burn live cats for entertainment, they go to the cinema and watch some fake violence instead.
This is a neat article...
ASKED what he is optimistic about, Steven Pinker responds "the decline of violence":
In 16th century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and was slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, "the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized."
As horrific as present-day events are, such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world. This is just one example of the most important and under appreciated trend in the history of our species: the decline of violence. Cruelty as popular entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, genocide for convenience, torture and mutilation as routine forms of punishment, execution for trivial crimes and misdemeanors, assassination as a means of political succession, pogroms as an outlet for frustration, and homicide as the major means of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. Yet today they are statistically rare in the West, less common elsewhere than they used to be, and widely condemned when they do occur.
Most people, sickened by the headlines and the bloody history of the twentieth century, find this claim incredible. Yet as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries and millennia (and, for that matter, the past fifty years), particularly in the West, has shown that the overall trend is downward (though of course with many zigzags). The most thorough is James Payne’s The History of Force; other studies include Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization, Martin Daly & Margo Wilson’s Homicide, Donald Horowitz’s The Deadly Ethnic Riot, Robert Wright’s Nonzero, Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle, Stephen Leblanc’s Constant Battles, and surveys of the ethnographic and archeological record by Bruce Knauft and Philip Walker.
Anyone who doubts this by pointing to residues of force in America (capital punishment in Texas, Abu Ghraib, sex slavery in immigrant groups, and so on) misses two key points. One is that statistically, the prevalence of these practices is almost certainly a tiny fraction of what it was in centuries past. The other is that these practices are, to varying degrees, hidden, illegal, condemned, or at the very least (as in the case of capital punishment) intensely controversial. In the past, they were no big deal. Even the mass murders of the twentieth century in Europe, China, and the Soviet Union probably killed a smaller proportion of the population than a typical hunter-gatherer feud or biblical conquest. The world’s population has exploded, and wars and killings are scrutinized and documented, so we are more aware of violence, even when it may be statistically less extensive.
What went right? No one knows, possibly because we have been asking the wrong question—"Why is there war?" instead of “Why is there peace?" There have been some suggestions, all unproven. Perhaps the gradual perfecting of a democratic Leviathan—"a common power to keep [men] in awe"—has removed the incentive to do it to them before they do it to us. Payne suggests that it’s because for many people, life has become longer and less awful—when pain, tragedy, and early death are expected features of one’s own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. Wright points to technologies that enhance networks of reciprocity and trade, which make other people more valuable alive than dead. Singer attributes it to the inexorable logic of the golden rule: the more one knows and thinks, the harder it is to privilege one’s own interests over those of other sentient beings. Perhaps this is amplified by cosmopolitanism, in which history, journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the contingent nature of one’s own station, more palpable—the feeling that "there but for fortune go I."
My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of force over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate, and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them.
I confess to a certain scepticism about the power of the golden rule, given that at least some version of it was around long before Tamerlane was piling the skulls up by the thousands. It's probably not a very great surprise to learn that my candidate is economic growth. Mr Pinker's statement that "What went right? No one knows, possibly because we have been asking the wrong question—'Why is there war?' instead of 'Why is there peace?' " echoes William Easterly's argument that development projects have failed in part because people were asking the wrong question—"What makes people poor?"—instead of "What makes people rich?" Since poverty has been the historical condition of humanity until very, very recent history, it seems obvious that getting rich is harder than getting poor.
I find it very plausible that the answer to both questions will be found in roughly the same place.
But of course, it is not enough to say "economic growth" in the stentorian tones of a priest attributing all to sacred mysteries. Why would economic growth make us less violent? Some thoughts:
What do our readers think?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/01/aint_gonna_study_war_no_more.cfm
