Control and familiarity. People are more worried about planes than cars because cars give them the illusion of control (that they can prevent any accidents because they are “good drivers”). People are more worried about nuclear power than nuclear power because people have been burning coal forever.
Hello, Phil!
There are so many people in the world, Phil. Humankind would have to take one heck of a hit to endanger world population. I think of a dirty bomb, but germs that have grown resistant to medicine are more worrisome. A new disease with no cure, like AIDS, a mutant strain of flu, TB making a comeback, or smallpox. These things are worth worrying about and causing misery, but even so, there are so many people, we’ll manage to come back.
Dirty bomb = thinking way too small
Pathogens = can’t survive if they kill every single host
Impact events and flood basalts = when you absolutely, positively got to kill every mother#@$%er on the planet, accept no substitutes.
Phil:
My grandfather would now be in his 90s, and was a war veteran who saw a lot of misery and horror in the 1940s – which is when he concluded there was no deity watching over any of us; he really was the atheist in a foxhole, even though he wasn’t when he shipped out. Anyhow, he didn’t see any reason to change his mind in the decades that followed, and I don’t see that he’d change his mind were he still around today.
I would like to share a lovely song with your Father In Law. It’s one he might know, it’s from 1958. The Kingston Trio, The Merry Minuet.
It’s comforting, despite the ending, because nothing’s changed.
It’s also a little terrifying, despite the ending, because nothing’s changed.
It’s still a good answer to him.
Wars and earthquakes and diseases don’t happen because God’s giving us signs of the impending End. They happen because people fight each other, and because of stress building up in the Earth’s crust, and because of germs. People as far back as Jesus’ time, and almost certainly for ages before that, always thought that disasters were worse than they had ever been in the past, and that that was a sign of something, but it’s never been the case.
Sounds like your FIL is having the same doubts Voltaire did following the Lisbon earthquake. But I too question whether things are really worse recently. I thin that two factors that may make it seem the God is angry is 1) the modern-day media—we know of stuff happening almost instantly today that we might never have heard about 75 years ago. and 2) the more densely populated earth means that they’ll usually be more deaths and strife when nature throws a tsunami, earthquake our way.
Please extend my thanks to your FIL for his service. It really was a helluva generation. My mom is 89 and worked a drill press in a defense plant, and she bemoans the same thing. Though, with her it’s more the state of human affairs than God’s. She remembers being able to walk in Central Park at night with my dad when they were dating and riding the subway to Brooklyn alone after midnight as a teenager going to work at the defense plant. A different world…
Regarding disasters getting worse now, I recently learned that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile and the 1964 Alaska quake released almost half the seismic energy between 1906 and 2005.
Anybody you can ask doesn’t know any more than you do. Some folks might have some interesting theories, but that’s it. It’s the age-old question: If God exists, why does he allow suffering? Is it part of His plan? Who the hell knows. Either you accept the reasoning given in the past by religious folks, or you question God’s intent, or you question God’s existence. Basically, it’s faith. If you look for reason, or a reason, you won’t find it.
Also, I don’t think things are more horrific now than ever before. WW2, concentration camps, the Rape of Nanking, bombings which started firestorms that destroyed entire cities of civilians . . .and that’s just a part of WW2, let alone the rest of history.
Life is hard, and people seem to make it harder through greed, stupidity, sociopathy, and for many other reasons. We’re very inventive like that.
No, that would be homosexuality.
Every single person on Earth dies, its just a case of when.
I can’t speak to Central Park or the NY Subway specifically, but the murder rate in NYC was higher in 1940 then it is now. Certainly a different world, but I’d say a safer one now then then.
You can do those things now, though.
Yeah I was kind of confused by that. I know New York got really bad in the '70s, '80s, and early '90s, but all I hear now is that it’s “the safest big city in America”.
Of course, if you listen to a lot of commentators (or even our own governor) tell it, Phoenix is a war zone where people get beheaded just for speaking English, and yet in my nearly 8 years of living here and walking the streets in all different neighborhoods at all different times of night, the only crime I’ve encountered is my car getting plowed into by a drunk (anglo, for the record) high school kid.
Damn kids. I bet that’s the same one that I yelled at, to get off my lawn.
Tell Phil that God knows his mind, and that HE is preparing him for his next journey by showing him that this earth is no longer a welcome home for him, that paradise awaits.
Just make sure his will is in order first. 
That could be a misleading statistic, though. If murder in the 1940s was more likely to be someone killing someone else they know, like cases of family disputes, cuckolded husbands, etc., AND murders nowadays tend to be more random acts of violence by young gangs, then it could be less safe walking through Central Park today than it was in the 1940s.
I’m not saying that this scenario is true, but it’s a way for the stat to be misleading.
People in general definitely have the impression that the world is less safe. I’ve been in conversations with someone talking about how they used to walk all around town when they were kids, but NOWADAYS they’d never let THEIR kid to that. I ask why not, and the question surprises them. It’s taken as a given that you have to be more careful now. When I point out that the rate of that kind of crime is no higher now than it was then, people tell me that the world is just DIFFERENT now.
Yeah, it’s different. For one, if a kid were abducted and molested 40 years ago, there would be hushed comments in the next week at church. Nowadays it’s headline news over a multi-state area. For another thing, people are less tolerant of any risk to their kids these days.
Thanks guys, I will meet with Phil on the weekend and post his thoughts. I know he has read the posts and was surprised how seriously people take their facts. He also appreciated the friendly tone of the responses.