thank you, guest77, for those excellent points about Native Americans... a people who more truly exemplified Christianity than the greedy "Christians" who slaughtered them, and than their intolerant "Christian" descendants today.
as for you, Proplog, I take exception to this statement:
"You simply have to be a very self-deluded and narrow minded optimist like Metatron to believe that humans can get past this stage. The danger is not increasing in a straight line fashion. It seems to be following a sigmoid curve."
it seems to me that it all depends on your focus and perception. you begin with an assumption of human hopelessness, because that is what the WT tells you is the case: only god can save us. then you focus on those events and issues that seem to support that view. you may notice a positive event, issue, or trend in the news, and yet you don't dwell on it, because it doesn't support your assumption. you might even spin it in some way, making it out to be negative from the standpoint of god (as with the UN, greater peace and security b/w US & Russia, etc).
I'm not familiar enough w/ Metatron's posts yet to comment there, but I believe as D Wiltshire does; I begin with an assumption of hope, because to live otherwise would be to rob myself of the joy that I assume is my birthright as a human being. To live otherwise would also be to contribute to a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy, were enough humans to allow themselves the luxury of such despondence, and dependence on gods (or aliens for that matter, or new age harmonic convergences, or anything else that people use to convince themselves they don't have to *do* anything since "it'll all be made better FOR us"). From this assumption of hope, I note the positive events & trends in the news and history much more so than the negative; although the events of 9/11 sent me reeling, I'm not such a "self-deluded optimist" that I haven't LONG known that such an event was headed for America. I wept for my fellow humans that died that day, as for all humans who die before their time, and I wept for the arrogance that helped bring that tragedy to our own soil, and I wept for the ignorance capitalized on by religious extremists to cause young men to do such a thing. But... we evolve. We were taught that day, not just mindless pride in being American, but that we can't ignore the rest of humankind, nor trample over them, without suffering some consequences ourselves. As in the traditional scientific view of evolution, it sometimes takes a great tragedy to force humans to grow *emotionally*, *socially*, even *internationally*.
That is what I believe is the real trend of modern history. But who's to say who's right, and what's going to happen? You? Me? Your gods? My gods? I guess we'll just have to wait and see =)
SpiderMonkey