Yes, humanists not only have failed in their grand promises re: “ending” poverty and crime – they also tend to live in places that (coincidentally, no doubt) have the highest crime rates, and you’ll find their residential preferences also coincide with the lowest average life-spans (while the longest-lived people live in remote parts of places like China and India).

Ending poverty is easy, if you simply make all the citizens dependent on a ruler who benevolently taxes the citizenry and then generously redistributes the grain. Obama has rediscovered the secret of the Old Testament monarchs’ leadership model.

But I have seen some TED talks that were worthwhile. I’ve also seen some that were stupid. If people want to pay thousands of dollars to think they’re participating in some imaginary monopoly on great ideas, why not? The idea of being smarter than everyone else is worth cash, and someone who really is figured out how to make big bucks selling the illusion. Good on him.

I honestly don’t understand the tizzy Pinker has thrown the right-wing religious commentators into. He doesn’t really present anything new, I’d heard of most of his main points long before he’d published. He just brings a rather enormous number of facts to bear in one book and, in my opinion, makes a pretty air-tight case that we’re WAY more moral than we used to be.

After all, when’s the last time you heard of a King or Queen enjoying a good old fashioned cat burning? We don’t let even NFL football heros get away with that any more. Are you all upset that a major reduction in violence has taken place as religious influence has waned?

i’d live among the amish in a heartbeat if low crime were my only consideration. the last time i checked, they were a relatively peaceful lot, and quite religious.

to be clear once and for all: it was ray who introduced pinker into the discussion with his link to pinker’s talk. i then read pinker’s talk and noted the fuzzy math regarding deaths in the 20th century as a proportion of world population. ray still hasn’t responded to the fuzzy math challenge.

funny thing is even pinker admits “you can make the numbers go all over the place depending on your choice of the denominator.” see this excerpt from RAY’s link to PINKER’s talk:

“The denominator here is the world population, not the population size of countries involved in each war. There are arguments for doing it either way. The problem is that you can make the numbers go all over the place depending on the choice of the denominator, whether you choose the country that initiated the war, the collateral damage in other countries, the neighboring countries, and so on. So in all cases I’ve plotted deaths as a proportion of world population.”

For example: “It’s best illustrated by looking at homicide statistics, which go back in many parts of Europe to the 13th century. The historical criminologist Manual Eisner has assembled every estimate that he could find of homicide rates from records in England going back to about 1200… So a contemporary Englishman has about a 50-fold less chance of being murdered than his compatriot in the Middle Ages… This is a phenomenon that is not restricted to England. It is true of every European country for which statistics are available.”

(I don’t think many people claim that England, or even Europe, is more religious now than in the 13th Century. Quite the opposite, in fact…)

That cat did some big-time self sacrificing too. Most of her ears were burned off, along with most of the hair on her face. I think she may have lost an eye too. I couldn’t see the rest of her body in the picture, but I’m betting it was in bad shape too. And that’s just a cat! Imagine what some human mothers went through to save their children!

We’ve also had virtue and wisdom of a sort, but they didn’t seem to stop murder and war to any noticeable degree.

What’s your theory for the steady reduction in crime and war we’re enjoying? Is it just a coincidence that that reduction has paralleled the reduction in religious influence on human society?

Is it just a coincidence that the most horridly violent places on the face of the earth are also the most religious?

Where would you rather live? Mostly atheistic and post-religious Scandinavia or the totally religously dominated states like Iran or Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Afghanistan?

Were the people who hijacked airliners and flew them and their passengers into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon atheists or religious zealots?

Would you care to compare the murder rates between atheist Sweden and heavily Christian America?

Maybe it has nothing to do with religion or the lack of it. Maybe it’s because the average human, at least in the industrialized world, typically travels more than 30 miles from his place of birth during his lifetime, learns about the world and how the people in it live in school and hears about different people and how they live through the news and entertainment.

Maybe it’s because most of us read now and learn from the words written by the brightest and most knowledgeable people throughout the world and recorded history instead of getting most of our knowledge through localized word of mouth.

One thing is beyond doubt: religion in the industrialized world has only a tiny fraction of the power over society it once had and things are a LOT better today. Life and death better.

Got any theories about why?

But since you’re talking about him, I’ve read his book and also his Edge article (which seems to be based on a TED talk) at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html which covered the same topics.

Let me translate his “fuzzy math” for you. No, on second thought, I’ll just quote from the above article: “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.”

Here’s another quote: “The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.” In round numbers, we’d have 50 times more murders today than we actually have.

Here’s one last quote: “In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, ‘[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.’ ” Michael Vick would have been lionized back then, today he got a jail term.

Of course, that’s France. Google Elizabethan tortures to see what God’s own Englishmen used to do to humans.

Pinker’s book is “The Better Angels of our Nature”. It would be to your advantage to read the article and the book.

i’m confused. you’re the one who brought up pinker, who discusses genocide. why am i to blame? and please address his fuzzy math.

as for “two options,” i guess you can ask dave mullenix. that was his point, to which i replied.

And, additionally – why is it the only options are “self-sacrificial love or gene therapy”? (Heck, even just considering those two, are they mutually exclusive?)

pinker wants to believe that despite all the genocides, the 20th century wasn’t all that violent considering the number of crimes (numerator) in relation to the total world population (denominator).

but surely that’s because the total world population (denominator) has increased dramatically thanks to better medicine, inter alia? this is “fuzzy math” the last time i checked.

dave mullenix,

which has a better chance at combating crime and injustice: self-sacrificial love or gene therapy? virtue or the khan academy? wisdom or “abundance?” as if the billions of dollars floating on wall street were not “abundance” enough….