How do you see our collective moral and ethical cup? Half full or overflowing with goodness?

How do you see our collective moral and ethical cup? Half full or overflowing with goodness?

Not to be a bean counter that ignores the evil that is still with us, but if I look strictly at the statistics for what I call the evil markers, crime, death by violence including war, poverty, poor health and
education; I see them all at the best levels we have ever enjoyed.

This is in spite of the few places where the stats are backsliding, which ironically includes the U.S., a Christian nation; whose
education level is going down, along with its moral sense.

I will let you find whatever stats you might be interested in and will only offer the stats spoken of, at the end of this link.

Richard Dawkins - Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLulcfyqrc0

I see our cup running over in spite of the vile and immoral mainstream religions that we are maintaining, for God only knows why. We can thank all the gods that the religious are not walking their talk and are following more moral ways.

How do you see our collective moral and ethical cup? Half full; or overflowing with goodness?

Regards
DL

 

It would, in my opinion, take quite a "cockeyed optimist" to see "our collective moral and ethical cup" as "overflowing with goodness". Not only the United States but Europe as well are practically paralyzed by partisan divisiveness. rench economist Thomas Piketty shows trends in industrial economies toward income inequality based on inherited wealth instead of earned wealth. Capital in the Twenty-first century. The blue collar middle class is shrinking. The top 1 percent in the U.S. average over 40 times more income than the bottom 90 percent, and the top 0,1% averages 198 times the income of the bottom 90 percent. The environment is under assault from science deniers, and as Global Warming threatens our future survival.We have a corrupt, pussy-grabbing President who can't get through a short tweet without telling at least five lies and spewing divisive rhetoric, and an Administration and its media servants who deal in "alernative facts". Anti-immigrant violence and white nationalism are on the rise not only in the United States but all over the world. Wars are raging in Afghanistan and in Syria, where a terrorist bomber just today killed U.S. soldiers in Manbij. School shootings of innocent children and mass shootings of other innocent civilians have become commonplace. There were more than 11,000 deaths as a result of murder or manslaughter involving a firearm in 2016, and the death toll has been climbing since, including the bombing of a synagogue in Pennsylvania. Slaughter of children in Aleppo and Yemen mark a new lows in inhumanity, and ISIS' was downright medieval in its televised atrocities. Of course, it's all relative to some reference point in the past. Rummel thought the twentieth century “the twentieth century was by far the bloodiest in history" and had the body count to back it up. H estimated a combined total for Communist-induced deaths at about 62 million for the Soviets and 77 million for Mao, giving a total of 144 million! A study by Cirillo and Taleb examining the statistical picture” of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years concludes: “All the statistical pictures obtained are at variance with...claims about 'long peace', namely that violence has been declining over time."http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/longpeace.pdf John Arquilla (Foreign Policy,December 3, 2012) Steven Pinker Sees Peace, I See Dead People focuses on "big kill wars", those in which a million or more soldiers and civilians die. He found that between 1900 and 1950, the number of such wars doubled, and that they doubled again in the second half of the 20th century. "There was nothing of the magnitude of World War II in sheer numbers of dead," he acknowledges, "but the million-mark in war deaths was steadily surmounted, mostly in societies in which such losses had staggering effects." In World War I, perhaps only 10 percent of the 10 million-plus who died were civilians. The number of noncombatant deaths jumped to as much as 50 percent of the 50 million-plus lives lost in World War II, and the sad toll has kept on rising ever since." The"wonders of modern technology" have given us the internet, I-phones and social media, but these have been shown to be threats to our privacy and avenues of mass manipulation in the hands of trolls and bots. On the bright side, there is modern medicine, which has made remarkable advances over the past few decades. Violent crime is declining. We have a superabundance of consumer goods, and a growing cafeteria of knowledge available on the internet if we have the discernment to sift the real from the fake. So I think "half-full" is defensible, if generous. "Overflowing with goodness" is Pollyannish. But the potential is there through spiritual wisdom. "The Kingdom of the Father is spread out everywhere upon the earth, and people do not see it."

Re the video by Dawkins, I think faith in atheism, science and the Enlightenment is misplaced. Medieval Christianity gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials, and the religious wars, but the Enlightenment, while helping to liberate us from superstition, gave us the Reign of Terror in France; the secular religion of nationalism leading to World Wars and the holocaust, the mass exterminations of Staln, Mao, Pol Pot, and the North Korean Kims. We now seem to be lost in anomie. Science can't bridge the gap between fact and values, and it's the latter that we need desperately to get straight. Dawkins offers us another false god.

 

I don't know about overflowing, but I would like to think that it is more than half full. Lets settle for 85%

 

I look at the long term. Not the short term.

You are aware of the damage that poverty causes. Jesus even focused on it.
You quoted todays stats which are just a short term blip. Look at the long view.

Towards the end of poverty

Regards
DL

 

Close enough-----



Regards
DL

 

I think that this better describes me.
Particularly at the end, before I hit the 'post' tab on a few of my replies.

 

I, when in your position, being feisty and usually quite sure of my position and coming from Northern Ontario's hard rock mining area, --- where every third word starts with an f, --- I take more of this attitude to obtuse readers of whatever I put.





Regards
DL

 

Something to hope for, but I'm skeptical.

 

I prefer my cups made from horn, and overflowing.

 

We will all be ruled by demographic statistics soon, regardless of which side rules. Get used to them.

Regards
DL