Quote - Give us a little time: we'll come around to it.  We've already come around on so much else.  You know: cultural advancement and all of that.

Well, concerning the imminent collapse of civilization, thousands upon thousands of self-appointed "prophets" throughout all of history would agree, except in regard to their own times and their own cultures. A few were right, the vast majority were wrong. History is replete with Chicken Littles screaming the sky is falling and the end of the world -- or at least as they know it; and occasionally -- as one might statistically expect -- they were right.

Perhaps you will be one of them. On your death bed perhaps you can let me know.

And really, Xeno, on the rest of it, you insist on missing much of my point.

That all these things happen today I don't contest.

Much of my point was that much of what happened in yesteryears was simply never documented and the information never disseminated, either because they were not considered crimes or because those who documented and disseminated such things were nonexistent or in such short supply. We simply don't know how many abortions there were when it was only midwives and pregnant women performing them. We don't have a very good idea how many people were killed in the streets either. We don't know how many kids were abducted or sexually abused.

Of course, we can guess, and historians can infer, but the fact is that there was simply not the ubiquity of law enforcement or news media or scholars or researchers or institutions which kept track of all these various statistics -- or at least certainly not even remotely on the scale that we have today.

As far as having TV way back then, too, I said several decades, and then, it was 3 channels, no internet, and in a social culture in which most "national" news was almost exclusively about Washington and major metropolitan areas, and many parts of the country strove mightily (as some still do) to keep their crimes and "weird goings on" under wraps for fear it would give their community a bad reputation.

And as far as 410 A.D. goes, and whoever the original owners of Greek and Roman civilization were (who, based on your argument, apparently must have lived for hundreds of years, i.e., not being dead yet), I'll read a little bit more if you will ... but Rome went through a lot of upheavals, up, down, and sideways, and though it was once widely accepted among historians like Gibbon -- whose work is now well over 200 years old -- that 410 was the "official" date of the "fall" -- more recent scholarship suggests that particular take on things is very much an oversimplification ...