According to Steven Pinker, in spite of headline news like the war in Iraq and the crisis in Darfur, the world is a kinder, gentler place today than it's ever been. A provocative statement, no? In the latest issue of The New Republic, Pinker posits that in spite of these and other global conflicts, we're getting nicer and more intolerant of things like "cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, ... rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlests for frustration, [and] homicide as the major form of conflict resolution." He joins us to elaborate on his position, and take your questions.
Blog of the Nation
The most recent issue of Christianity Today states "There are 27 million slaves world wide today, more than at any other time in human history."
Many of these slaves, if not most, are children, and many are in sexual slavery.
Definetly not thanks to the US, as long as this country has existed we manage to engage in some kind of warfare and in the name of our morality
Seems that we tend to overlook violence like the 45,000 people killed and several hundred thousand seriously injured each year in auto accidents, just in the U.S. Is this a form of violence that society tolerates just as they did in previous years? The media gets all excited about "disaster" and "war casualties" of hundreds or a few thousand when the real high percentage killers are tolerated and passed off as "accidents", beyond our control?
We are deeply socially programmed to be involved in a thought reversal problem, where we credit and blame the people, things, conditions and events of our lives, for what our own interpretations ABOUT them are causing. Only our very basic body care matters at all for us in a material world. And because of our own personal truth... "we are the creator of all of our feelings and all of our experiences... and all of the time"... we cannot make matter anything in a material world, just beyond this very basic body care. We can only pretend that we've made something matter and then we get the feelings and the experiences of... not the thing... but what we, ourselves have made of the thing, by givng it a meaning. This is the awakening of the Buddah... we don't get our experineces from the world, but from how we, ourselves interpret the world... making us completely and totally responsible for our feelings and our experiences.
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