The Decline of Violence

for discussing science, relationships, religion or non-BK spirituality.
  • Message
  • Author
User avatar

ex-l

ex-BK

  • Posts: 10661
  • Joined: 07 Apr 2006

The Decline of Violence

Post03 Jan 2012

In their books, 'The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined' by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, and 'Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide' by Joshua S. Goldstein, a professor emeritus of international relations at American University, the professors of real universities argue that war is in long-term decline around the world, both in frequency and in deadliness. They arguing evidence suggests violence in the world, especially the Western part, has declined both in the long run and in the short.

How does this fare with Brahma Kumari philosophy? Brahma Kumari philosophy says the world keeps getting worse until the end. That it had it high point 5,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago was not so bad and that right now we are at the dirty, vicious, impure "Fag End" of civilisation with no hope. Destruction, the End of the World as they teach it, by Nuclear and civil wars and natural disasters, happened 60 ... 36 ... 25 years ago, and by now India should be a vast construction site where jewel encrusted, golden palaces are being built for them to live in.

So what has gone wrong? How can things be getting better over a long period of history when according to "the God of the BKWSU" they are getting worse? How can the BKs be "celebrating" 75 years when in reality it is a failure of them to cause Destruction 25 years ago? Oh, that is easy ... again they borrow from Christianity the idea that right before The End there is a period of false peace that lulls humanity into an even deeper sleep of ignorance and then when Armageddon arrives, we are all caught with our trousers down and only they gain high status in heaven on earth.

It is called Easy Raja Yoga ... Easy Raja Yoga means, easy to borrow, easy to make up and easy to re-writing because adherents are taught not to think, not to question, not to read books and not to become educated. What could a couple of impure, delueded, body conscious Kali Yuga university professor know about truth?

Oh, and what is the End of the World does not happen? Let me speak to God personally and make a prediction! First I need someone to give me lots of donations to build a nice, big campus ... ah, now here is God's answer ... God says, "it was the Brahma Kumaris saved the world by their purity and He was just testing their faith by telling them He was going to destroy it". Now it is OK to re-writing the Murlis again.

Meanwhile, here is Pinker at a recent TED lecture.


Perhaps the deepest cause of the waning of war is a growing repugnance toward institutionalized violence. Brutal customs that were commonplace for millennia have been largely abolished: cannibalism, human sacrifice, heretic-burning, chattel slavery, punitive mutilation, sadistic executions. Could war really be going the way of slave auctions? Nothing in our nature rules it out. True, we still harbor demons like greed, dominance, revenge and self-deception. But we also have faculties that inhibit them, like self-control, empathy, reason and a sense of fairness. We will always have the capacity to kill one another in large numbers, but with effort we can safeguard the norms and institutions that have made war increasingly repugnant.
“War” is a fuzzy category, shading from global conflagrations to neighborhood turf battles, so the organizations that track the frequency and damage of war over time need a precise yardstick. A common definition picks out armed conflicts that cause at least 1,000 battle deaths in a year — soldiers and civilians killed by war violence, excluding the difficult-to-quantify indirect deaths resulting from hunger and disease. “Interstate wars” are those fought between national armies and have historically been the deadliest.

These prototypical wars have become increasingly rare, and the world hasn’t seen one since the three-week invasion of Iraq in 2003. The lopsided five-day clash between Russia and Georgia in 2008 misses the threshold, as do sporadic clashes between North and South Korea or Thailand and Cambodia. [...]

What about other kinds of armed conflict, like civil wars and conflicts that miss the 1,000-death cutoff? Remarkably, they too have been in decline. Civil wars are fewer, smaller and more localized. Terrible flare-ups occur, and for those caught in the middle the results are devastating — but far fewer people are caught in the middle. The biggest continuing war, in Afghanistan, last year killed about 500 Americans, 100 other coalition troops and 5,000 Afghans including civilians. That toll, while deplorable, is a fraction of those in past wars like Vietnam, which killed 5,000 Americans and nearly 150,000 Vietnamese per year. Over all, the annual rate of battle deaths worldwide has fallen from almost 300 per 100,000 of world population during World War II, to almost 30 during Korea, to the low teens during Vietnam, to single digits in the late 1970s and 1980s, to fewer than 1 in the 21st century. [...]

Return to Anything goes