Lot of words here. But not a whole lot of meaning. Proportions count. For example if there is a neighborhood where you had a 1 in 10 chance of being assaulted vs a neighborhood that had a 1 in 1,000 chance which one would be "safer"? Which one would be more moral? But what if that dangerous neighborhood that had a 1/10 chance only had 10,000 people. But the city, group, neighborhood ect that had a 1/1,000 chance had 5 million people then they would have more. The first group would have roughly 1,000 people assaulted. The second would also have about 5,000 people assaulted. Total number is 5x higher but it is still a safer group.
Proportions were not mentioned. Nor do they necessarily mean anything. If we only had two people on earth and both wanted to murder anyone they found we would have 100% even but doubt they could find each other to kill each other. I can construct hypotheticals to mean anything I want them to. What I can't do is create the fact that the 20th century was bloodier than all that proceeded it combined. Add to that that the rates themselves in almost every moral statistic there is show a sharp decline since the secular revolution in the 1950's US.
War has been made more fair over time. We are very good at killing but now we have rules that govern war. Prior there were no rules. We used to do as we pleased. This has very little to do with religion vs secularism and more to do with media coverage.
More fair, do you call irradiating two civilian population centers fair. War is not supposed to be fair, I was a soldier, I am a life long military historian, and work in the DOD. Everything we do is to widen the gap on unfairness. The only rules we have are about things that did not exist hundreds of years ago to require rules and very few follow the rules we have. Only the powerful side tries to follow rules, the other does everything possible. What in the world is fair or civil about flying passenger plains into office buildings or doing everything in their power to procure bombs who's only purpose is to poison. Islam is not even fighting a war Their methods have no possibility of victory) they are mere trying to hurt and kill without any strategic gain. It is pure hate.
And I'm sure you don't want to get into an abortion debate. It can be depressing but I don't see it as a bad thing if is early enough. We will have to agree to disagree beyond that.
What does early have to do with anything. No mater where you draw the line you simply invented it. What makes taking lives actually wrong is that we (secularists without cause) credit human life with inherent worth. The Christian does not know at what point this takes place but instead gambles on life and does not draw any lines out of thin air, the secular person has no idea how or when this occurs but gambles on death for the sake of self interested convenience. If you do not see anything wrong with killing our unborn one day before some arbitrary date then that is why this is so depressing.
Though there are several other ways to measure it. For example racism has gone down tremendously over the last few hundred years. Acceptance of other cultures has gotten more common. Crime has gone down significantly. The chances of you being killed when you leave your house or being raped if you walk down the street is far lower now than it was before. This idea of a golden era of moral upstanding citizenry is a fairy tale.
What? I use US facts because I live here, it is a very diverse nation, and it keeps accurate stats.
I have never see this nation as racially polarized in the last 30 years. Drug abuse is up, violence in schools is up, gang activity in schools is up, violent crime is up, gambling debts are way up, one parent or no parent homes have gone way up, ten pregnancy is up, 74% of those surveyed said we are in a moral decline, and that is despite a sharp rise of those who think there is no objective morality. I have posted hundreds of these before. Here are just a few.
The current prison population of over 2 million constitutes a growth of over 850% in the past 30 years.
From 1960 to 1990 violent crime rose 560%. F.B.I.
Quantifying America's Decline by William J. Bennett http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/usadecline.html
Childhood obesity has more than tripled for children aged 6-11 years. 1999-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity Among Adults: United States, 1999-2002. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The porn industry rakes in an estimated $10 billion to $14 billion annually in the United States. The $4 billion that Americans spend on video pornography alone is more than the annual revenue of the NFL, the NBA or Major League Baseball.
Dillon Fishman Arizona Daily Wildcat http://wildcat.arizona.edu/papers/98/133/03_1.html
60% of all web-site visits are sexual in nature.
MSNBC /Stanford/Duquesne study, Washington Times Jan. 26, 2000;. http://www.spcc-storrs.org/blog/archives/general/
A study of homosexual men shows that more than 75% of homosexual men admitted to having sex with more than 100 different males in their lifetime: approximately 15% claimed to have had 100-249 sex partners, 17% claimed 250-499, 15% claimed 500-999 and 28% claimed more than 1,000 lifetime sexual partners. Bell AP, Weinberg MS. Homosexualities. New York 1978.
I can post these night and day.
1) That has nothing to do with religion. In fact I think that secularism was one of the driving forces that kept us safe in the cold war. If everyone simply believed that they would go to heaven after they died then why not destroy the world? Rapture is comming anyway. There are more than just a few who think this way now that are currently in our government's highest places.
Again what? The USSR was the primary proponent of the cold war and they were militantly secular. They eradicated all faith and posed the greatest threat to human survival in recorded history. Hitler primary motivations were secular and naturalistic and the great Christian nations are who stopped him from taking over the world. Russia helped but they flew our planes, drove our trucks, and shot our rifles.
2) I don't think abortion is wrong in the early stages. Many of our problems in society are caused by unwanted children. I would rather a child be aborted at the 6 week period rather than be born into an imoverished family that wouldn't love or care for it. I agree that abortion the best solution in many cases and it is my opinion to keep children if at all possible. But I am not going to judge someone else becaus of it.
The idea that you can invent a line and suggest that killing humans who have no say so one day before that line is simply another symptom of the disease I am describing.
3) How is this different than two? I think it is religions that claim truth that often warp it. The earth was created 6k years ago and evolution is a lie...right. Not saying you believe that but between secularism and religion which has a greater history of warping the truth?
It is certainly true that religion hijacks the word of God and acts contradictory to it but I am not defending religion. I am defending God and his word. The entire NT does not have a single verse than can be used to justify violence for any reason and the OT has never applied to non-Hebrews and to no one in 2000 years. No open ended commands to violence exist in the bible unlike the Quran. There is little truth in secularism to warp, it is a suppression of the truth.
