I wouldnt say a religion left with a handfull is an"alive "one
Christianity is more than a religion, however.
Matt 7:13 "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
Things will happen according to what Jesus said. Place your hope in Him and the anxious thoughts will go away. He wants you to have peace, that only comes by trusting in Him.
I still wonder how that would compare to times where there were no vaccines, no antibiotics, infant mortality of 10%, maternal mortality of 5%, and an average life expectancy of under 50 years. How would the Black Plague compare to anything we have suffered in the last 100 years?
Overall, I think that right now is perhaps the best its been for all of human history.
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For some, not all!
Current rates of poverty worldwide are estimated to be the lowest they have ever been. Over 1 billion people have been pulled out of extreme poverty in just the last 30 years.
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Statistics don’t help an orphan in Haiti or a Rohingyan one in Myanmar, though. (I’m not really disagreeing with you. I’m thankful for dentists and novocain!)
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I will agree that statistics don’t help the orphan. However, if we are comparing time periods through history then statistics seems to be the way to go.
It makes me chuckle when people claim the current pandemic is an apocalyptic sign of the end times. I don’t mean to make light of the people who have been injured or killed by COVID, but this current pandemic pales in comparison to previous pandemics and plagues. The Black Death killed about a third of the population in Europe, and who knows how other continents suffered. The introduction of European diseases to the indigenous populations in the Americas may have wiped out half or even more of the population. Smallpox was a scourge for centuries, killing 300 million people in the 1900’s alone, and it had a 30% fatality rate through history. The closest we have in modern times is the scourge of malaria in some regions.
If someone were scanning through history they would put our era at the very end of the list when it comes to End Times nominees.
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I don’t know that I’ve used the word ‘apocalyptic’ with respect to the pandemic, but it’s being used by the media with respect to fires and floods and other severe weather. You wouldn’t be chuckling if your whole town had burnt to the ground.
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The data really agree with @T_aquaticus on this. I just finished Hans Rosling’s “Factfulness”.
And to also show that Rosling is still as sensitive as you are, Dale, he emphasized that things can be “bad” and “better” at the same time. I.e. the person who observes that “the world today is a lot better than it was” can also simultaneously, and without contradiction also still know: “… but there is a lot of bad stuff we still need to work on.”
It’s just that our brains are kind of bad at holding both those truths simultaneously. And the political tribal associations we partition those two attitudes into don’t help us at all to keep them together.
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50 million deaths, WW2 to 25 million from the Black Plague
I think your numbers are a bit off.
With a much smaller population, that 75-200 million death toll would have made a much bigger impact.
There was also the Great Famine which occurred a few decades before the Black Death:
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The Black Plague killed 25,000,000. Black Death killed more.
In 2007, Israel bombed a site in Syria that was widely assessed to be a nuclear reactor being constructed with North Korea’s assistance. Syria has refused to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s attempts to investigate.
1,200,000 tons of TNT equivalent
Our largest nuke will evaporate millions. We have over 600. Each is 80 times more powerful than Little Boy. These are the most dangerous times for mankind.
Proliferation is a nightmare. IMHO, terrorists are constructing several nukes right now.
I wasn’t aware that you could see into the future.
It is a shame they exist at all and frustrating to see them proliferate but you’ve got to hope we grow into our capacity without exercising it.
I believe that if what you are doing is in vain then doing something else. Many people have a false expectation. That’s one thing gardening has really helped with. You don’t plant a sapling because you want to lay in the shade next summer. You plant because successional design results in a long term transformation. Lots of people also grow up in first world nations with really high expectations. Kids grow up assuming they have a right to food, to health care, work, teachers and so on. Some kids grow up and the daughter knows that even though she’s 10 her 4 year old brother is the one that will have a full stomach and he’s the one that will be in school and he’s the one that will inherit the house and property and money.
Expectations are cultural and based on personal experiences.
Every century the world changes a lot it seems.
I imagine you remember the Cuban Missile Crises when the world held its breath. We came within a split second of life being extinguished.
Well said, T.