by LostGeneration 10 Replies latest jw friends
You won't read this one in the WT...
Homicide is no longer a leading cause of death in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
The leading causes of death in 2010 remained the same, the CDC reported, except for one: homicide. For the first time since 1965, homicide is not in the Top 15 list of causes of death in the United States.
http://www.huliq.com/10473/homicide-no-longer-top-killer-united-states-cdc-reports
Reading Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature - How Violence Has Decreased (I think that's the title?). Even though I already kind of knew anecdotally that this was true, seeing the statistics laid out in his book is pretty remarkable.
Great find.
I love finding things like this and sending them to my mum. hahaha.
And it completely trashes that comment the WT always bring up about 1:142 children in the U.S. becoming a murder victim. Heck, in 2009 the murder rate was 5 per 100,000 which doesn't really average out to 1 in 142 anyway, but they still manage to keep the blinders on.
Either way, I consider this very good news. Progress!
Thanks for posting this.
This is particularly bad news for the WT apologist because it goes to the heart of their beliefs about "The times we live in today".
How many times have we all, at some time, stood on the doorstep or the K H platform and claimed that these had to be the days because the Scriptures told us that men would be "lawless, self assuming, disobedient to parents unthankful, disloyal, fierce........etc"
I always had a twinge of doubt when I said it because it was not what I saw in daily life, and since reading more of social history I know for sure that people are just people....some good some bad, most ok...the same as they always have been.
Its tough to break through their WT defined world view. Every piece of bad news=Last days to them. Everything good is disounted like it doesn't matter. The media isn't much help in helping them to think for themselves either.
Well, as I recall, the bible does not specifically say that a high murder rate would be a sign of the end...
Just that a high murder rate (by God) would occur AT THE END. Or something that could be interpreted as such.
This is funny.
I recently shared a similar article with a friend and they promptly threw the article back at me without reading all of it. Any fact or information that challenged his presupposed world view created too much cognitive dissonance to handle. He simply refused to read it and said, "we are supposed to keep on the watch", maybe the fact that crime is dropping, is Satan's way of making us think the end is far off."
I gave up with that person.
SIAM
Isn't it f***ing annoying SIAM?
They will sit there at the WT or Service meeting with all sorts of quotes from newspapers about how good the JWs are in cleaning up stadiums for the convention. But the second the same newspaper reports on their pedophile problem, then it immediately becomes "persecution"?
I agree the Last Days Are Getting Better. My RRSP is starting to increase again but only by a small amount.
Hey, it might be the last days, but at this rate we'll be having a grand old time before ol' Jobo gets here!!
The aim is to die happy, isn't it?
