Re: The world in 2030
Reply #55 –
A little over a year ago I wrote
this...and 2014 was even better. You know, whether it's local pub gossip, television bulletins or newspaper headlines, we're more interested in what's going wrong than with what's going right. Judging the world through headlines is like judging a city by spending a night in its jail--you only see the worst problems. Objectively, 2014 has probably been the best year in history. Take war, for example--our lives now are more peaceful than at any time known to the human species. In a century that began with 9/11, the Iraq war, and genocide in Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between delirium and absurdity, but there are fewer conflicts today, and wars don't kill as many people as they did in the Middle Ages, for instance. Also, global rates of violent crime have plummeted in the last few decades and certainly the rise of education has played a large part in that. The Isis atrocities are all the more shocking perhaps, because they come against a backdrop of unprecedented world peace.
As usual however, religiosity continues to play its part in promoting violence and abuse. There has been a large increase in the number of countries with high or very high levels of social hostilities involving religion. Incidents of abuse against religious minorities were reported up, there were rises in religious motivated threats of violence, harassment of women over religious dress, mob violence related to religion, sectarian violence, and religion-related terrorist violence. We've all read the headlines pertaining to this, but look it up if you wish,
in this PEW study, which shows religiously-inspired violence going up and all other violence going down.
I like to balance the good with the bad and try to get the whole big-picture of my reality. Others will continue to read and expound upon all the atrocities in the world which would often include looking at the advances in science as bad or even blasphemous. However, look on the bright side--if science can continue eroding religious belief at its present pace, we may one day soon actually live in a
real paradise.
James J