Originally posted by twhitehead
I deny it.
You are making a serious logical error.
You are claiming:
1. The Bible makes a prediction.
2. The prediction is coming true.
3. The evidence for the prediction is the Bibles claim.
Do you not see your error now?
How would your logic have been different 1000 years ago?
If on the other hand you think you have any actual evidence based on statistics of facts about the world today and in the past, then present it.
Deny it all you want. That's your choice. An article from 1980's. I would guess things are worse now?
Current Surge of Lawlessness
Back in 1945 many persons in the United States were surprised that the total crimes reported to police rose to 1,566,000. But 35 years later the total reached 13,295,000—and is still rising! This is a 750-percent increase, while the population grew about 60 percent! Rape increased over 600 percent! Violent crimes in general, nearly 900 percent! Imagine, in 1981 one out of every three households was touched by some form of crime! And this trend is not just in the United States. “The one thing that hits you in the eye when you look at crime on the world scale,” wrote a leading criminologist, Sir Leon Radzinowicz, in his book The Growth of Crime, “is a pervasive and persistent increase everywhere. Such exceptions as there are stand out in splendid isolation, and may soon be swamped in the rising tide.”
Are all these increases simply the better reporting of crimes to the police? For an answer, a team headed by Dr. Herbert Jacob of the Center for Urban Affairs Policy Research at Northwestern University analyzed the crime statistics, police expenditures and methods, arrest rates, and much other information from 396 cities in the United States during the period between 1948 and 1978. In an interview with a representative of this magazine, Dr. Jacob stated: “Reported crime rates have surged everywhere in the U.S. Part of this is undoubtedly a consequence of better police and civilian reporting of crimes. But this does not account for all the increase.”
“What is surprising,” continued Dr. Jacob, “is that in every kind of city—in the north or south, declining or increasing in growth, with a large minority population or a small one—the crime rose at approximately the same rate. It was a nationwide trend.” Can the police stop this ominous trend? “The police force has been generally ineffective because of several social forces beyond their control,” answered Dr. Jacob.
Of course, crime is not the only indicator of an increasing of lawlessness. Just look at the general disregard for God’s laws. The illegitimacy rate of the United States of 7.1 for every 1,000 single women in 1940 pales alongside the 27.8 figure in 1979. The 83,000 divorces in 1910 have zoomed to 1,182,000 in 1980, a 1,300-percent increase! Now, instead of one divorce for every 11 marriages during a year, as in 1910, the United States has one for every 2 marriages! Similar trends are reported earth wide.
Consider also the shocking atrocities committed in our 20th century. When in all human history was there anything to compare with the carefully planned execution of 6 million Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II? or the total death toll from that war—55,000,000? More recently, consider the 1979 reports of a possible slaughter of over 2 million Cambodians. What other generation ever developed and used a weapon that in a single blast eventually killed perhaps as many as 140,000 persons, such as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan?
Space does not allow us to give further details of contempt for God’s laws, but what has been presented clearly shows that since 1914 there is an increasing of lawlessness on a magnitude unlike any period in history! Yes, among the greater number of professed followers of Jesus, the love for God and neighbor has cooled off, just as Jesus predicted.
Do not, however, let such growing lawlessness affect your heart. Keep your love for God and his laws warm, and it may be your joy to be saved into the promised “new earth,” where never again will there be a plague of lawlessness.—2 Peter 3:13; Matthew 24:12, 13.