Well, we are getting faster. I don't know what your standard for better is, besides material well-being which is true enough.
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Life expectancy, infant mortality, health generally, poverty decreasing rapidly, starvation decreasing rapidly violence decreasing rapidly, literacy rates soaring, knowledge growing every year.
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Definitely things are on the up-and-up materially. That's the great thing about the age. Eradication of more deadly diseases is the thing that gets me all starry-eyed.
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This is a direct result of our improved epistemology and ethics, tho? This is secular liberal modernity.
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Partly, I'd say so. Epistemology, yes, we owe much to the great strides we've made in scientific advancement. Ethically? I think that's a mixed bag. Advanced in some respects, regressed in others, mostly about the same.
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Really? When was it better? I admit to thinking of the fact that I can vote, own property, get paid the same now as well as homosexuals and atheists being able to be so openly without dying. And no more workhouses or child labour or torture or death penalties for stealing.
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That's not people, that's culture, and yes, it's definitely improved in many of those respects. "People being better" implies that were the laws and culture different, we good people would voluntarily do none of those things. I do not think that's true.
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Coming from the religious perspective, you won't like or agree with this, but the long slow decline of people's spirits such that they value menial, superficial things over the states of their own soul and fellow men is not an improvement overall.
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And that is the problem; imagine how hard lazy minds have to work, just to keep up... Better to hold on to crappy ideas, and force-feed their word salads on the rest of us. This is how the Ayatollahs manage to remain relevant.
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