End of times?

[Splitpin]

I'm not religious by any means , but my goodness ....I look at whats going on in the world at the moment , and I wonder.
Rumors of war , earth quakes , hurricanes of unprecedented size , fires, volcanoes , Giant ice bergs breaking away, ...all we need is a plague of locusts .
Call it what you will ..... but I'm convinced we are on a slippery slide , for what ever reason ..... add to that the (as I see it) a global moral decline .... same sex marriage etc (again , just my perspective)

But , I'm convinced ...we (humans) as a species , are in the same position as the dinosaurs , just prior to their demise.

Just saying ....

[Splitpin]

Or is it , as my partner suggested ..... cyclic , but just so large that we cant see it.
Not sure ... either way ... I think we are stuffed.

[toprob]

Hmm, it does seem that people equate 'change' with 'decline', but when you compare how people live today compared to 200 years ago, or 1,000 years, or 10,000 years, the direction is onwards and upwards. Sure, we might be seeing global warming and warmongering take a bit of a bite out of modern civilization, but that's happened before, and it will happen again. Humans will survive, even if we need to give up civilisation for a while. (I say 'we', but I don't include me, I wouldn't survive a year without a team of medical professionals...)

I tend to see morality as a contrived construct of civilisation. Individually people really have no need for morality, it's something we need to live together. It has confused the issue that Christianity was accepted for so long in the 'western' world as a moral governor, so a shift away from that might be seen as a decline. Same-sex marriage is a good example -- our idea of marriage is a recent invention, interwoven with religion, but again it is a way to keep people who need to live in a social construct from abusing/killing/enslaving each other. If we evolved to a social system where everyone had the same rights and protections, there wouldn't be such a need for things like marriage. People who wish to enter a same-sex marriage really only want the same rights and protections as everyone else, and this is part of the process of becoming civilized.

I have no doubt that humans will go through a huge number of rises and falls of these social constructs. Seeing our current world as anything outside this is easy to understand, but it doesn't really make sense in the long term. Things change, change can be good, otherwise I'd be writing this on papyrus, rather than as a post on the internet... But change doesn't care for right and wrong, which is why I appreciate this as a positive time to be alive.

[Fozzer]

I see our awareness of what's going on around the world is all to do with the magic word; "MEDIA"!

In olden times our knowledge was gained through letter writing and word of mouth.

Nowadays, its all gained through; "Google" and; "Wikipedia", etc, courtesy of the "Internet".

It's a fantastic method of gaining information, but sometimes that information can be scary and overwhelming!

It must be well over 30 years since I last went to my local Library with my Library Card to obtain some information. which was probably already out-of-date at the time!

I must stop exhausting my life with constantly typing on my keyboard to obtain useful/interesting stuff on the Internet....which may scare me! ... ....!

...its what we all do!

Paul...."Interesting stuff", is what I am having for my Dinner today! ..... ...!