Since you condemn atheists I suppose you can condemn the pagans in the Roman Empire too. They also killed unborn children but perhaps not as many as today, true. I would however dare to say that more newborn children was killed during Roman times than in the West today. They also thought that gladiator games and a widespread slavery was normal, waging war against other people, slaughter villages and towns etc.
Modern America wages war against people all the time. The main foreign policy debate every Presidential election seems to boil down to “Shall the next administration invade three countries, or only two?”
At any rate, we’ve managed to kill 50 million infants in the United States alone since Roe v. Wade. I believe that’s unprecedented. If I’m wrong, let’s split the difference and say we’re only slightly better than the Romans at their worst – with respect to infanticide. (On some other issues, such as homosexual “marriage,” we’re markedly worse).
But the thread was about the world and not America and I think that the world is better now than it was during the 50s. Probably the United States of America is a better place now too and the racial segregation was a big issue, but I admit that I don’t live there so you don’t have to care much about my opinion if you don’t want to, I suppose.
The world as a whole is certainly better
in some respects. Communism and its manifold horrors are largely gone, for instance. It’s worse in others, though – America is falling the heck apart and of course we’ve become total mad degenerates.
Note, interestingly, the trend there. The world is better to the extent than one particularly extreme manifestation of the leftism (communism) is gone. It is worse to the extent that leftism has metastasized in broader Western society (i.e., “The Sacrament of Abortion,” gay “marriage,” 40%+ illegitimacy rate, etc. etc.).
In what other respect is the West doing well? We still have segregation, just de facto instead of de jure. We segregate by economics and by choice (i.e., what is now euphemistically called “white flight”) instead of by force of law. American blacks certainly aren’t doing any better. I read the other day their illegitimacy rate is north of 70% now. Their families are falling apart. Their communities are riven by violent crime. They are substantially poorer than they were during the bad old days of segregation (everyone is, of course, but black Americans have been beaten the worst in this respect). The numbers of young black men that wind up in prison or dead before their 21st birthday are astounding and I believe are not paralleled by any other group in present society. The problem here is that desegregation was part of a larger package deal (i.e., of leftism) which was on the whole net-bad for society as a whole and especially American blacks.
But then I’m coming at this from a much different place. I think that segregation was an evil only to the extent that it denied blacks the opportunity to form a real, coherent, thriving subculture of their own. They should’ve been asked to form ethnic ghettos of their own, wherein they could order their social structure however they pleased and behaved accordingly, rather than live in and among whites but with fewer privileges. I really fail to see segregation as an evil qua evil, because it isn’t one. It’s everywhere among us, even now, in our nominally integrated, society. People just prefer to be with their own, and all our efforts to force them to live with and among one another are failing, and failing violently. So clearly this loyalty to particular groups and ties corresponds to a real and permanent need of the human spirit.
That’s quite a rant, sorry! But I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about these things and CAF is the only forum where I can/actually do express them.
I agree with you about what is happening these days, but when I read Church history, I find out it’s not the first time, so I do not think it is a sign that end times are coming.