Ok Xenu, now I understand what you meant. However, never before this recent article has the Society stressed exclusively "the number of people that have been affected by earthquakes since 1914." They've mentioned it as just one of the things that they've claimed justify their "end times" doctrine, but they've also stated clearly that quakes have increased in both magnitude and frequency since then. Xander gave some references and there are many more. This can be seen in the very quote you posted: "... we should focus not merely on the magnitude of quakes according to the Richter or other such scale but on the extent of resultant property damage and loss of human life."
In 1983 or so the Society did some extensive research about just how much damage and loss of life has resulted from quakes during the past few thousand years. Mostly they relied on information published by the National Earthquake Information Service (or something like that; I'm going from memory here) but they also used other, less extensive sources such as encyclopedias and books on earthquakes. The results were published, if I remember right, in a 1983 Awake!, as well as in the Reasoning book and a couple of other places. The main claim was that during the period after 1914, the average death rate due to quakes was some 20 times higher than in the entire 4,000 or so years before that. Of course, this claim is pure nonsense, as later statements by the Society admit. The latest admission is in this recent article. In their published report they made extensive use of statistics of quakes 7.0 on the Richter scale and up.
How did the Society arrive at such a bogus claim? Easy -- they cooked the statistics. I got hold of the report from the NEIS that they used, as well as the Society's "master list" (see the Reasoning book for a mention of this) and compiled my own figures from it. Guess what? Their counting of quake statistics was deliberately skewed so as to make the figures for the post-1914 era seem way bigger than those for the pre-1914 era. What kind of skewing did they do?
They used three measures to decide how many 'severe quakes' occurred in each year they could get figures for: quakes over magnitude 7.0 on the Richter scale, quakes that caused 100 or more deaths, and quakes that caused $5 million or more in damage. Each of these measures is skewed for a number of reasons:
All statistics on the raw occurrence of quakes prior to the advent of a global network of seismographs beginning around 1896 are bound to be incomplete. This means that far more quakes of magnitude 7.0 and up were not reported prior to 1896 than after. The Society failed to account for this.
Death reports are similarly incomplete. Furthermore, the population of the world was far lower than today for most of the time covered by the report. The Society failed to account for these facts.
Property damage in money terms is rarely reported for quakes prior to about 1900. Furthermore, when it is, it is not corrected for inflation to an equivalent of today's dollars. Thus a great many quakes that would be included if they had occurred after 1914 would not be included in the earlier statistics.
There's a lot more, but the above is sufficient to show why the Society could make such grossly bogus statements about quake statistics.
I have carefully analyzed the data in the Society's own "master list" of quakes for the period from 1500 through 1983. According to that data the period from either 1500 to 1600, or 1600 to 1700 -- it's been awhile since I reviewed the data -- saw nearly as many deaths as did the period from 1900 through 1983 -- and that when the population of the world was 4-5 times lower back then! When I factored in the world's population and divided the death rate by population to get a figure for average number of deaths per year per person, I found that the death rate for the 20th century is actually at least three times lower than for the 16th or 17th century! And that according to the Society's own data! Using very recent and more complete data from the NEIS, I found that the actual death rate is closer to four times lower for the 20th century. And keep in mind that the statistics for the 20th century are far more complete than for prior times, so that any new information about quakes will only make the death rate for earlier times higher. Clearly, either the Society deliberately deceived its readers, or it deceived itself and therefore its readers.
A major question that comes out of the above facts is, How can anyone trust an organization that is either so dishonest or so incompetent that it cannot manage to properly collate simple data and report it correctly? As a JW sympathizer, you need to answer this clearly.
Of course, the above facts also completely negate the Society's long tradition that earthquakes are a "sign of the last days". The fact that quakes occur no more frequently nor with any worse magnitude than before proves at the very least that they cannot be a sign of anything. The fact that the risk of dying in a quake is far lower today than ever before can be interpreted as an "anti-sign", if one puts any stock in the claim that Jesus was saying that quakes would be a "sign". The Society's most recent claim that the mere existence of quakes is a "sign" is completely out to lunch, because if quakes are no different in magnitude or frequency than ever before, and the risk of getting killed in one is much lower, then how can they possibly be a sign of anything? It would be like my telling you to meet me at Joe's Restaurant when you see that the sky is blue.
AlanF
