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Nick,
Hi KW,
“If the outside is not clean then you do not bear Spiritual fruit.”
Any scriptures ?
I am using two of them. The first is when Jesus said to wash the inside of the dish and the outside will be clean and the second is in Galatians 5 and tells us about the fruit of the Spirit and those fruit and actions.
Jesus teaches his followers that they must be more righteous than the Pharisees; who had the appearance of doing what is right.
Hi kerwin,
Yes, I’ve looked at the stats. And yes there was a minor counter trend beginning around the 60’s but that reversed and continued its much more significant downward trend. You know about the upturn beginning in the 60’s, but seem somewhat unaware of the last 20 years. The upward spike is a minor bump when you look at the much much larger massive decline over the centuries.
Over the past few decades, a guy named Manuel Eisner looked at many many European countries going back 600-800 years. Comparing a person in England back then to today, they were about 35 times as likely to be a victim of violent death (outside of warfare). An Italian back then was about 90 times more likely. So saying “it’s still better than the Middle Ages” is an understatement. It is orders of magnitude better.
But it’s not really that there was a spike in violence in the Middle Ages. The further back you go, the more likely it seems a person was to die from violence.
There is a guy named Steven pinker who wrote and 800 page book with a 100 graphs in it showing the decline of violence over the ages. He also looks at the psychology of why people have such wrong perceptions. The availability heuristic cognitive illusion is a mental shortcut that makes us believe air travel is unsafe or you should be afraid of sharks or violence is increasing. It has to do with the news and how our minds evaluate risk. It’s a fascinating book. Anyone interested in this subject should read it. Or watch any of his YouTube presentations.
Including wars,
…in the 20th century, including the world wars, 3% of people died from violent deaths if you include man made famines, connected to wars for example…that is, if we push the number as high as we can.
….in the Middle Ages it was around 10% that died from violent deaths.
….in prehistoric times or tribal societies it was around 15% that died from violent deaths. (So this was before the leviathan or before a monopoly on violence was formed by governments.)
And I could add that in this century, so far it’s about 1/100 of 1%.Today homicides are globally around 6.4/100,000 people per year. War deaths are around 1/100,000 per year. For war deaths it was around 300/100,000 per year during ww2. It declined to the teens around 20 years ago. And about 5 years ago it was around 1/3 or 1/2 of 1/100,000. But after Afghanistan and Syria it skyrocketed by about 100% all the way up to 1/100,000 per year. We can play with the numbers and make that look like war deaths are increasing but given how low they had fallen, the increase from 1/2 to 1 isn’t that bad.
The bible condemns murder. If the bible didn’t condemn murder, would murder still be viewed as immoral? I would think so. I would think that the massive increase isn’t because more and more people are picking up a bible. There are many other reasons, such as the Flynn effect, the growth of abstract thinking which allows people to hypothesize and put themselves in another’s shoes, to empathize. The expansion of the circle of empathy, the expansion of the tribe due to an explosion in literacy rates. Reading about others that are different humanizes them. The increase in science. We no longer believe that black people are half ape, or that native Americans have no souls, and thus these can be owned or killed as if they weren’t human. A lot of things have lead to the massive decline in violence.
It’s highly likely that in the far past, all war was genocidal in nature. The war of the bible was such. Of that trend continued, the world wars would have killed billions and not just millions. But we no longer kill the family and preserve the women or children. Rather, civilians are almost never targeted at all any more.
Where does our morality come from? What is causing it to change? From my perspective, it really doesn’t seem to be the bible.
Nick
Of course these things exist and always existed. It’s the trend that surprises me. Pompeii provides a great picture of Ancient Rome. A snapshot. The amount of brothels staggers the mind. There were also prostitutes at the inns. There were panic images pointing to these brothels. I did the math. The amount of brothels in Pompeeii would be the equivalent of ever restaurant in my city being a brothel. This used to be legal in the entire world. Today, not as much. It’s the trend that surprises me. Not that it exists.
Or Greece, that practiced pederastey. Basically every teen male had a mentor but it was also a sexual thing. They didn’t even have a word for homosexual in Ancient Greece. It was just so common. The naked male body was idolized. Statues of goats having sex with men, could be found in the parks, visible to anyone. Extremely graphic. Today, the visual images, it’s easier to access but isn’t as public or in your face as it once was.It’s the trend that I am interested in.
Hi David,
Because lawlessness is increased most people’s love will grow cold
Mt 24.12
We could go tut tut at the sin in the world but God can rescue any man from sin.
Unbelief is the only real barrier.
Jn 16.9
“…concerning sin, because they do not believe in me,,”
It is a far bigger problem that men are entrapped in religious denominations of the whore and cannot hear the call of the shepherd.
God hates the whore with a vengeance.
Rev 17, 18
Nick,
Hi KW,
So scripture does not say what you say.
Scripture says it but you may not understand it.
I think you will if you meditate on it.
You tell me what you hear when Jesus says “First clean the inside of the cup, so that its outside may also be clean.”
David,
If you are interested about what they believed may have caused the increase decreases of homicide this historic study of it by New York Times.
I read it but I am a skeptic by nature as I have a firm believer that vast majority of humans live according to their flesh nature and not according to the Spirit of God.
hi KW,
By flesh nature do you mean SIN IN THE FLESH nature?
God created both the inside and the outside of the cup [lk 11.40] and creation is very good.
Hi KW,
The DEEDS OF THE FLESH spoken of in Gal 5 are the fruits of the evil occupants of men.
Sin in the flesh alive in him, that Paul spoke of in Rom 7.
Hi kerwin.
The only thing I disagree with in this article is the idea that it was because of the baby boom in the U.S. (And Canada) that saw the up spike in crime and violent crime. (Since younger people commit more crimes and then when they aged and entered their 40’s or 50’s this population boom of course committed less crimes.) I’ve actually told people this same idea for a couple years. It’s such an elegant simple believable story. But the math just doesn’t work. This would only account for a fraction of the reason for both the spike and the decline. It’s probably a part of the reason but it’s definitely not the whole story, and maybe even a very small part of the reason. There are just so many things. Everyone was on cocaine in the 80’s but this died out at the end of the 90’s. A large thing is lead used by car companies, as well as in toys. Lead creates aggression I believe. Or abnormal behaviour at least. Pretty sure aggression. Once that stupid idea was taken away and we stopped pumping the lead into the atmosphere somehow crime began to plunge and the main downward trend continued.
I don’t know if the article was old. I do recognize the name of the guy who was quoted.
Nick, one of the first things I did when I discovered the downward trend in violence is locked up the word that is translates lawlessness in the Bible. It doesn’t seem to mean: breaking the law or committing crimes. It seems to mean, unrighteousness.
Regardless, of what we feel because of the availability heuristic, violence is decreasing. We see in the news a black hate crime death. We are shocked and feel things are getting worse and worse. Except today there is only about one of those a year that result in death. But when that stat began to be tracked in 1996, there was 5 per year. And hate crimes of intimidation have also decreased. But more importantly, going further back, we had lynchings which died out in the 1950’s. At the end of the 1800’s the U.S. Was lynching 150 people a year on average. There are these pictures with little girls and boys looking up smiling. It was just normal. It was entertainment. Going back further things get worse. The further back you go the worse they get. For a couple hundred years, European countries used to burn cats alive for fun. Kids would watch and kings and queens would cheer. Sometimes in sacks or baskets. Sometimes they just lit the tails I fire. They would hear the screams and cheer. In the plague times they burned so many cats that the rat population exploded which may or may not have helped the Black Death to kill the 30% (25-45%) of Europe that it killed.
There was a time when human sacrifice was legal and practices by every ancient civilization. Babies. The bible has commands against doing this but the Israelites had trouble following this command. Today we couldn’t think of doing this.
Where did solomons children go? He had a lot of wives. Where are his children. He wa sone who built the high place to mole hill where they would burn their babies alive to that God. Him saying he would cut the baby in half. He wasn’t joking. He would have done it in a second. And what he wrote about beating children with rods in proverbs matches this.Times have changed. Today a person group funded a titanium leg for a cat and it cost 10,000 dollars. In the past this would have seemed ludicrous.
Hi Andrew,
Blue is the code colour for God but you will not see any in rev17-18
For interest see the interplay of these colours in Exodus 35-40
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