Personal Questions

[ER]

What's your favorite day of the week?

Hard to beat Saturdays!

[Alex]

Prior to  starting this job id have said Fridays. Now any day can be the start of my weekend.

[Rev. Powell]

Saturday mornings, I sleep late, drink coffee, catch up on my Internet reading. It's my favorite time of the week.

[Leah]

Mondays mainly; I don't have doctor's/therapist appointments on Mondays.

[indianasmith]

I like Saturdays and Sundays equally.

[chefzombie]

do you get trick or treaters? i miss that here at the apartment.

[RCMerchant]

^ Yes!

[ER]

Is western civilization in a moral dark age?

[Leah]

do you get trick or treaters? i miss that here at the apartment.

Not really, which is a bit of a shame.

Is western civilization in a moral dark age?

Can you please explain this to me?

[ER]

Is western civilization in a moral dark age?

Can you please explain this to me?

I don't think we are in a technological dark age akin to that which befell the west after the loss of Rome as a superpower, but I wonder if the term dark age is over-arching enough that it can include other forms of decline to the point that things have become "dark."

While I don't subscribe to the notion that past times were necessarily free of great evils, clearly they were not, it might be argued that each era has held virtues other eras lack, strengths and weaknesses being relative to each chapter in history, with much shared.

Right now it seems to many observers that we are in a period of either moral abandonment or moral decline to the point our civilization has tipped into a kind of interpersonal darkness. At the very least if all eras exist in a state of flux, ours does seem to be deliberately disregarding past ethics as a conscious collective choice.

I am unconvinced we are particularly better or worse than people were in any period in history but I can follow the train of thought that leads to such questions, and I do think we could both do much better, and also that we could collectively pause to consider that some of the societal morals which in the past were given higher billing than they are today were established in the fabric of a culture for the simple reason they worked, which shouldn't be forgotten.

We have far better laws against child labor than five generations ago, but we also don't seem interested in enshrining common courtesy as at the very least an ideal. We have placed materialism higher than veneration of elders, championed the good of a hypothetical collective while seemingly overlooking that a collective is composed of individuals. Never before has more information been available to so many, and never in my lifetime have I seen ignorance so openly championed, or rewarded, while intolerance has become celebrated over free expression.

Are we in a moral dark age? I don't know but I do find it a timely question to be raised.

[RCMerchant]

^ I don't think so. The WWII era was much worse. As was the Crusades, where killing for Christ was common.
Also the Spanish Inquisition, the rape of the America's by Europeans, the Civil War- hell- all of history. I really can't see now as being any worse.

[Leah]

Not much of a dark age as per say. We're exposed to news about s**t that has been happening for a long time, it's only recently that things are being done about it. For better and for worse the Internet has redone the world, so I don't think we're in a moral dark age as much as we're f**king exhausted of seeing s**t people doing s**t things. We cheer for when karma bites them in the ass while also worrying about the innocent and how they'll cope in the present and future.

[Paquita]

do you get trick or treaters? i miss that here at the apartment.

Yes, but not as many as we used to.  Years ago we'd get a bunch of candy but would often have to run out to get more before the night was over.  Now we give handfuls of candy to kids and usually still have some leftover.

Is western civilization in a moral dark age?

Maybe.  I see it as every generation will have a substantial population the rebels against previous generations simply because of an "F them" mentality – right or wrong we're going to do the opposite sort of thing.  Sometimes it works out for progress, and other times it doesn't.  Then there's always another portion of that generation that embraces the previous generations and hopefully we live and learn and things even out, but only for a future generation to start flipping things on their heads again.   

[RCMerchant]

Do you think it was morally just to drop the A-Bombs on Japan?
Those were civilians. I believe it was neccisary for the US to destroy the Axis, but not moral. Nothing in war (ie. murder) is ever moral.

[Alex]

When you start a war, you can't then credibly complain about the retaliation. Dropping the bombs was a tough call, but how many civilians and soldiers would have died had they not?