Alfaro: Welcome. It's good to have you here.
Think about this: When you assert that conditions are "worse than ever," you're implying a comparison. Worse than what? Worse than when? Worse than fifty years ago? One hundred years ago? Five hundred years ago? Moreover, the specific conditions that the Bible foretells as leading to Armaggedon are those that have traditionally plagued humanity: Disease, famine, warfare. And, yes, when those conditions occur simultaneously (as the Bible predicts) and with severity, they produce measurable results: primarily a sharp decrease in population. Demographers have studied historic episodes and found that these conditions do cause populations to drop dramatically.
Has this been the case since 1914? If, in fact, as you assert, conditions (meaning disease, famine and warfare) are "worse than ever," then there should be some measurable, quantifiable evidence of that. It's no good simply batting around numbers (like the WT does) and saying, "100 million people died in warfare in the 20th century." That's fine, but it doesn't really tell you anything, because we need to know what proportion of the population that represented. It's a big number, but there were many more people living during the 20th century than any other time in history. There were more people to kill, to put it plainly. And that very fact--that there were more people around to kill--tells us that the other two factors (disease and famine) were not having the same effect on population that they historically have. In other words, people weren't dying in the numbers/proportions that historically they used to die prior to the 20th century. Why not?
A huge turning point was the development of penicillin around the time of WWI. This meant that people might catch a bacterial infection, but they wouldn't die of it. Moreover, medical knowledge meant that mothers and infants weren't dying in childbirth. And better transportation, communication and agricultural methods meant that food could be transported across greater distances, meaning people weren't dying from famine they way they used to. NOTE: I'm not saying that nobody was dying of disease and famine. What I'm saying is that the historic proportions of people dying (compared to the total number of people alive globally) was much, much lower.
I've got to go, or I'd add more. What I suggest you do is some solid research on historic mortality rates. Cheers!
