End Times? No Way!

I've been a naughty person today. I said "Bollocks" to a Jehovah's Witness.

He was giving me the standard speil about how the world was getting worse and worse, how crime was rising and the threat of terrorism was increasing. I cut him off before he reached the conclusion that this was proof that the 'End Times' were upon us.

I pointed out that, worrying though the threat of terrorism might be, it's nothing compared with the horrors of World War II. How many million died in that conflict? And isn't crime actually falling?

People, especially older generations, have claimed society has been declining throughout all ages. Wasn't there a clay tablet dug up in Assyria from 2000 BC that read like a Daily Mail editorial?

I've read a couple of theories as to why conservative-minded people think like this. One is that children are shielded by their parents from the darker things of life; my parents were children during World War two, and I'm sure they were too young to realise the full horror of what was going on around them. Because children are shielded from things, when they get older some of them idealise the times of their childhood as an imaginary 'golden age'.

The other theory is that the 1950s were a historical aberration, and really did have atypically low levels of crime and disorder, probably a consequence of a significant percentage of people at the more violent end of the bell-curve getting themselves killed in the war.

Or maybe it's just a consequence of wider reporting of wars and tragedies by the media. Two hundred years ago we'd never have heard of events like the genocide in Rwanda. Probably fifty years ago it wouldn't have the same level of reporting. And in the days before the Internet it would never have occurred to me that anyone I know might have been killed in the Rhode Island fire.

While I'm a Christian, I don't believe in the literal "End Times" in the way that Jehovah's Witnesses and other fundamentalist sects do. As far as I'm concerned the Book of Revelation is very specific to the times when it was written, and "666" probably refers to the Emperor Nero. I certainly don't believe the coming Gulf War II is the precursor to Armageddon.