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Hi ed. Of course violence still eists in the US. It’s just less and less every year over 4he long term.
I at one time also just refused to believe 5he stats. Maybe the government had reason to fudge the numbers. But no. Hospital records match. And there are several reasons for the decrease. And it’s not just in areas that we a unsure about. It is also in areas that we know once existed and have ceased to exist. When is the last time a president was in a lethal duel? It’s been a while. Times have changed.
It’s not just homicide. Assault also. Rape also. (In the US I am now talking)
Wives killing husbands. Down. Husband’s killing wives. Down.
Yes the middle east today is a focus of the news. But looking at actual evidence and numbers is the only way to know what is real.
T8, I didn’t even know I was having this conversation with you. I thought it was Ed. I have been typing very fast on m phone while at work.
I was was pretty sure Ed was from the U.S. I know you aren’t.
T8, I didn’t even know I was having this conversation with you. I thought it was Ed. I have been typing very fast on m phone while at work.
I was was pretty sure Ed was from the U.S. I know you aren’t.
t8, think of the Muslim world as being how most of people were in the past. You picked up Sticks on the wrong day, you got tortured to death by stones. In the past rape was never that big a deal. It didn’t make it into the Ten Commandments. There is a law where if un-engaged woman is raped, she must then marry her attacker (presumably because no one else will marry a non-Virgin and it was shameful back then not to be a wife and mother). And so she would essentially be a part of institutional rape, regardless of her will. She would be married to her attacker and he can now have sex with her when he wants. For most of history and in most places, women were the property of men, first of the father and then the husband. It was regarded as a crime against the owner (father or husband) if you raped the woman. It wasn’t a crime against the woman. For most of history women had no rights. For centuries in England you could legally rape a woman provided she wasn’t nobility.
But for beatings, just like slaves and children were considered the property of men, so too women, and what you own, you may hit apparently. The Middle Ages Europe was bad given that they didn’t drink water and had 3 strengths of bear. (X, xx, and xxx). They drank the lowest strength like it was water. Kids too. So a lot of women were the victims of a lot of alcoholic rage. The men for centuries believe there was this rule of thumb where they were legally allows to beat their wife as long as the stick was no thicker than their thumb. This wasn’t a law and several judges had to remind people it wasn’t a rule. It was just acceptable. The men believed that as long as the women wasn’t beaten severely or to death, all was good.
Women have had no rights, not able to own land or property. Not allowed to legally get a divorce. Allowed to legally be beaten and raped for the most part.
But this changed in most of the world. And today things are better and improving every day. Again, in 1910, in the U.S. It was still legal to beat your wife in some of the states!!! And today there are countries where women are the head of state!!! The world is changing. It’s changing for the better for women….and children, and animals and men. But it’s just not changing in Venusala or some Latin American countries or some of the Middle East. But on the whole, the world has been following a major decline in violence over the last few millennia.
The only counter argument that I can even inderstand is the idea that we now have the ability to annihilate ourselves. But the capability to produce violence does not equal violence. We could have that capability for a thousand years and never use it again. We can only measure what happens, not what MAY happen. And countries have been reducing their nuclear stockpiles for years. And continue to.
There was a UN stat that came out about domestic violence towards women and it was 30% of women are victims routinely and 35% will one day be. I emailed 2 of the people responsible for this research and asked them what the numbers were before. One asked when my report or paper was due. When I said I wasn’t doing one she never got back to me. The other never responded at all. I believe they didn’t know. But given how women were viewed and owned as property and had no rights I can’t believe things have risen to that level but rather they likely fell to that level from much higher levels
David,
There are more people so even if the rate is decreasing, which is controversial, the occurrences may be increasing.
I understand that there are more people and hence more births and more deaths. And so of course we can have a falling rate of something while the absolute numbers grow.
Imagine 2 islands. One has 100 people and 10 murders a year. The other has 1000 people and 15 murders a year. Which is more violent? I think it’s not good thinking to say the island with 15 murders a year is more violent. The chance that you will be a victim of murder or know someone who is is vastly greater in the first island. The first island is more violent despite greater mumber of murders in absolute terms.
Now think of these islands as different times on the planet with growing populations. For some of the trends this is what is happening. Minimally larger numbers but still a declining rate because the population has risen.
This is a sore point for me because some like to point to absolute numbers as proof of something. But we can come to any conclusion we want that way. We could say today is the most generous time on earth just because bill Gates gives more to charity than all of the US did in the 1700’s combined. But this is because of inflation of the money supply. More money. So more goes to charity. It doesn’t mean we are living in the most generous time in history, although we may well be. Similar with violence.
And I think the trend of global violence is only controversial of you haven’t spent a lot of time looking at the actual numbers.
Poverty or extreme poverty is a good example. Imagine that it were to stay at 1 billion people as an example and not budge at all. But in that time let’s say the earth’s population doubles. This means only half as many people as a percentage of the world would be in poverty even if in absolute terms the number is the same. An now imagine we grew to 100 billion and only still had a billion people in extreme poverty. Let’s say we added one more person. 1 billion and 1 in extreme poverty now. Has poverty gotten worse? No now only 1% of the world in this scenario are in extreme poverty. The situation has vastly improved despite a 1 person growth in absolute numbers. We can’t use absolute numbers when thinking about two different time periods with different populations. And given the population explosion in the past couple hundred years, we should definitely be using rates rather than absolute numbers.
David,
I have heard of researchers using court records to determine the murder rate in England and a few other countries from hundreds of years ago and from what I have heard even if the findings are correct and can be applied to all developed countries they do not necessary cover the undeveloped ones.
If you look up the United States the intention homicide rate has actually increased from 1900 to peek in 1980 and is currently lower than that. I use Wikipedia as a source but I have obtained those same basic statistics from other places.
kerwin, yes, as you say, homicide in the U.S. has gone from 11/100,000 per year down to about 6/100,000 per year since 1980. Yet I would guess if you asked, almost everyone believes it is getting worse and has been for decades. The reason people feel this is because of the way the news works and a cognitive illusion called the availability heuristic.
(This heuristic or mental shortcut is the reason people are overly afraid of sharks or overly afraid of flying. Statistically the time spent in the airplane is the safest part of your day. You are much more likely to die in the car on the way to the airport and even more likely to die in the airport. Yet people are afraid of flying. It’s because news organizations show rare, spectacular and uncommon things, such as planes crashing. And they don’t show every car crash. And these rare things stick in our brains when we are assessing danger or risk. This used to be a good way to do this in the past in tribal society when TV didn’t exist. But it’s a bad way today. And we do this with all sorts of danger–war, rape, assault, hate crimes, homicide, etc)
So as you say in the U.S. homicide has gone up and down and up and then down again in the last century. I’m interested in what the global trend is, and also a bit longer term than one century. But what do you think the homicide rate was more than a century ago in the U.S.? In an era where lynchings were something kids might go and see, an acceptable public hanging possibly followed by burning, or at a time when you could legally beat your wife, or for half of the 1800’s, legally beat a cat to death, at a time when duelling with guns was a respectable way to defend your honour, why would we think homicide was any better? Blood sports and cruelty for entertainment seems to grow the further back in time we go.
You are right in that the European countries data from Manuel Eisner which goes back 500-700 years depending on the country, should not be applied to developing countries of the same time period. The poorer countries were likely worse.
I view you more like a cousin who I only see on the holidays.
This is one of the biggest problems with the denominational structure of Christians. It divides them and waters the message of the Kingdom down because of that division.
Jesus prayed in Gethsemane that we would be one as he is one with the Father. He concluded that this was so the world would believe in him. But Christians have let their Lord down big time in this respect.
Is there any evidence based reason to believe violence is rising globally?
In the part of the world that the Bible focuses on and where most prophecies are centered it certainly is getting more violent.
As for other parts of the world, some parts are and other parts are not. These days lots of people in the west play video games instead of being involved in brawls etc.
What is the point you are heading toward with this discussion david? Is it about Bible prophecy or is about general knowledge.
Hi t8
the bible says things like the “whole world” is lying in the power of the wicked one. I don’t know that the bible anywhere says violence would increase in the Middle East and not the rest of the world. There seems to be this mental distortion or brain trick that things are getting worse and worse. But infant mortality is vastly down globally. Poverty too. Infectious disease as well. We simply don’t have situations where 25% of the entire world dies from something like the Black Death any more. Or where up to 50% of the world dies from the Justinian plague which was 800 years before that. I can’t imagine the suffering and pain with that many people dying and not understanding why. Many believed the world was ending. Many believed it was punishment from God. They would whip themselves and walk though the streets naked to appease God for their sins. Blood being splashed on the walls.
Past times when there was no ambulance to come get you or good medical care the entire world must have suffered horribly. It’s a very painful way to die–the Black Death. Most people seem to believe morality is getting worse and worse as well. But if you actually look at the way people were treated in the past when slavery and human sacrifice and judicial torture for petty crimes were all legal and acceptable, it’s hard to see things that way. There is a cognitive illusion at work. Even people living in the best of lands in areas where everything has obviously become much safer and easier also feel as though things are getting worse and it’s because of the way news works and how our brain works. I haven’t been posting graphs but I have hundreds of graphs covering what I would call the best markers of morality. Homicide, war deaths, human sacrifice, slavery, child beating, wife beating, assault, etc. There is an unmistaken global trend over scales of thousands of years, centuries and even decades for the most part.
WHAT WAS LIFE LIKE IN NEW ZEALAND a hundred years ago? Or 2 hundred. How many more children died of diahree dehydration or pneumonia or infectious disease before the age of 1? How much longer does the average person there live today then they did 100 years ago? How much pain would you have experienced at dentists or with teeth or anything medical what pain killers would you have used Would your life have been one of pain? If you injured your foot would you just live with the pain unto you died? How much work with washing clothes and finding food? How good was sanitation and hygiene?
I know some parts are getting better and some worse But most of it is getting better and a much much smaller part is getting worse as far as violence goes Those places like Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq, that is sort of what the past was like. But most of the world has had enlightenments and reformations and become moral as far as beating and toetureing and killing other humans. Treatment of woman ad children and animals globally is improved drastically Just not in some parts of the world. It’s sort of like rose parts are frozen in the past. But most of the world has moved on.
oh Sorry am I in the bible prophecy section. You can relocate this if you like It was never meant to be about the Middle East but about the entire earth and the overall global trend of violence.
David,
I do not believe the same thing happened in Western European country but I have never heard a reason for it except for the availability of guns, which were also readily available before.
I view you more like a cousin who I only see on the holidays.
This is one of the biggest problems with the denominational structure of Christians. It divides them and waters the message of the Kingdom down because of that division.
Jesus prayed in Gethsemane that we would be one as he is one with the Father. He concluded that this was so the world would believe in him. But Christians have let their Lord down big time in this respect.
Hi T8,
Yea funny that david should say that considering that the Watchtower
Society will not let any of their members celebrate the holidays.
But it was a cleaver response to my question none the less.________________
Your brother
in Christ
Ed JViolence is declining globally. It has been for a few millennia.
But potential, ability or capability to create mass violence has increased in the last century. This, along with the way the modern news works, and how the brain handles any potential threats, creates a false impression–that things are constantly getting worse and worse.
While people use anecdotal information, pointing to the worst countries, the worst neighbourhoods, or the worst people, overall, things have gotten and are continuing to become much better, safer, and less violent for people overall.
I think that statement is too flexible. To get the true figure, you would need to include drug crime in South America, murder rates in Africa, and the list goes on. But the harder part would be getting stats from ancient times.
If you count all forms of violence, then I doubt that the stats look good today, albeit yes there is probably a decline since the two world wars, but another world war could certainly happen and it is logical that there would be some respite between world wars. I certainly agree that the past has been very violent, particularly with empires.
To me the world hasn’t changed one bit. It is not really any worse or better. The same problems have always plagued mankind.
Perhaps before the first empire arose, there may have been a time of farming and hunting and people minding their own business. But history is wrought with tribal warfare leading to large tribes that consolidate into empires and kingdoms.
Jesus talked about kingdom against kingdom. Perhaps in the past there was a more dominant kingdom, but Jesus may have been referring to multiple kingdoms clashing in the last days.
But regarding this topic, I have forgotten what the point of it was. I kind of remember talking about the Middle East of which much prophecy is talking about. Certainly that part of the world is not exactly living through one of their best times. In my living memory, now seems like the most dangerous time to be there. I have never been there, but have friends who have traveled around. Not sure I know anyone there now, except for one person in Dubai.
what we should look is the reason for the violence in the world ,
also is the violence purposely guided to a point for a reason and the benefit of some special elites ?
the past 30 years the USA are pushing the NWO and this takes steps to be fulfilled ,and violence in some places ,
for the destruction of the nationalism/religionism/must be broken ,to allow the few to govern in pace and enjoy their lives and the billions they got from the masses ,
It’s beneficial to look at the reasons and possible reasons for the decline in violence. Because if we are doing something right it would sure be good to know what it is.
T8, pick a century that you feel would be safer for you to have been born into, as a random person.
17th?
16th?
12th?
9th?
5th?
3d?
etc.
Pick one. Just any random century.
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