Here was my latest response. I wasn't sure how to play it, I didnt really want to get into a debate about the 'spiritual' condition of the world because it's such a slippery topic and so subjective. With that in mind, here's my latest reply:
So now you are claiming that when you refer to ‘world conditions’ you are ‘mainly’ referring to the ‘spirituality of the masses’. However, it took until your fourth email to even mention ‘spirituality’ and the quotes you sent in your original email were clearly not referring to a ‘spiritual’ decline in the world. Have you honestly been referring to spiritual matters all along or are you now just moving the goal posts because you can’t provide any evidence that the world is declining in any kind of real sense.
What evidence is there for this spirituality? How exactly does one define, or measure a decline in, the ‘spirituality of the masses’, it is such a nebulous concept. You say that people today are more selfish and that this is evidence of a decline in ‘spirituality’ but what evidence is there for an increase in ‘selfishness’?
For the sake of argument, let’s assume you are right and that ‘selfishness’ has increased. If it is the case that an increase of selfishness is evidence of a decline in ‘spirituality’ why is not also the case that an increase in compassion (such as the abolition of torture and slavery, increase in equality etc) is evidence of an improvement in ‘spirituality’. If you permit that changes in spirituality can affect the physical world shouldn’t we expect to see a deterioration of world conditions parallel to a decline in spirituality? Yet when we look at the evidence we find that the opposite is actually happening. You are cherry picking the facts and arbitrarily restricting the permissible evidence for ‘spirituality’ to only include evidence supportive of your preconceived world view.
In doing this, you are (unwittingly, I think) committing the logical fallacy of ‘special pleading’. Special pleading is an argument whereby someone defends a position by alleging that the argument should be exempt from contrary evidence without justifying the exemption. Special pleading allows pretty much any contrary evidence to be ignored or explained away. Here is a famous example of special pleading:
‘What do you mean, you don’t believe there is a pink elephant in my garage! Oh, well, it’s invisible so you can’t see it and it exists spiritually so it has no corporeal body that you can feel, and it exists ‘spiritually’ so is beyond your comprehension, but I assure you, the elephant exists’
Your argument is the equivalent of arguing for the existence of an invisible, undetectable pink elephant – it is both untestable and unprovable.
And you are right to be sceptical of crime statistics but you are however committing the logical fallacy of ‘guilty by association’. It is not enough to argue that some crime statistics are untrustworthy therefore all crime statisticcs are untrustworthy. You have to show specifically why the crime statistics I presented are methodologically flawed.
Even if you could do this it would hardly help your argument because if crime statistics are not to be trusted then on what basis could you argue that crime has increased since 1914? From what you see out of your window? Should we only be sceptical of crime statistics that disagree with your apocalyptic world view?
And you still haven’t answered my questions. Would you rather live in 1900 or today? If you believed the world was better in 1900 then should be an easy question to answer. Surely you’d prefer to live in what you believe is a better world, so why are you reluctant to answer? I’ll put it another way, if you could pick any era when you most like to have lived? What point in history did people enjoy better health, longer lives, high living standards and more rights that today? Your reluctance suggests a lack of conviction in your belief that the world was better in 1900.
And secondly, do you believe liberal society is a worse moral crime than slavery, torture, subjugation of women, religious oppression, and the exploitation of children combined? Because if not, how can you argue that the world has experienced a decline in moral values?
I wonder what reply I get...
