Time After Time

This week David and Curtis dive into the issue of time and how our understanding ...

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This week David and Curtis dive into the issue of time and how our understanding of time horizons can profoundly impact our perspective on the world, whether it is getting worse or better, and what actions that should lead us to take. As Christians who believe in eternity, we should be good at “playing the long game,” but we often let ourselves get caught up in the issues of the moment, and let our compressed time horizons lead us to fear or despair, rather than hope.

Show Notes:

–Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling

–“Imagine That” by Picture This

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  1. Alice Hawkes

    I try not to miss the Good Faith Podcast. On the abortion issue, I think it never should have gotten to the courts. If one is not convinced by his/her relationship with God it will continue, probably in secret with more injuries and death. The Foster system on the other hand is overrun with needy children that are already here. I am not aware of any outcry for these children. I happen to know of many case where the children are told by their parents that they are unwanted. When these children turn 18 they are dropped from the system with no-one to care for them. I don't the answer for this I only know it's heart breaking the way children are cared for in this society.
    One more thing as the Dispatch guys would say, many of these children are pumped up with psychotic drugs at an early age.
    I like the music that is played at the end of the Good Faith Podcast and would like the title so I can play it.

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    Denise Cote

    This is such an important topic. Having beem born in 1953 I've seen a lot of improvement in a lot of things. I will, from time to time, post some of these on social media for the edification of my young friends and family. Two prime examples: women had few employment choices in the 1960's (I was told in the sixth grade I would not be able to be a pilot in the Air Force as was my dream); rivers in the US would catch on fire due to pollution (see Naugatuck River in Connecticut).

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    Rebekah R

    I loved this episode! Thank you for verbalizing a feeling I’ve had but didn’t know how to express about why the Evangelical turn toward trump is so unchristian. It’s Christians playing the shaft game when the entire Bible is about Hod playing the long game.

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    LeighAnnNC

    Good pod…. I too was struck by the stats saying divorce has gone down… I think that may be because people are just living together rather than getting married? Glad abortions have gone down…perhaps because people are getting better at preventing pregnancy in the first place - all better than killing the unborn. I normally LISTEN to this pod while walking on Saturdays… and seeing the later video weirds me out…. Curtis sounds like a man of his years (Mature etc) - but looks about 25 (this from an old person no doubt)…. David - you look about right :). I’m still older than you both so I can make silly remarks like this…. love the Dispatch and the whole team.

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    Greg Williams

    Great episode of the podcast. Thanks for the book reference.

    Listening reminded me of the old quote from George Santayana - “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I wonder what he would think about cultural movements of people whom have never learned the past and, if they actually did read history, would probably suspect much of it of being a false flag operation?

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    Ben Connelly

    I knew the first and last answers to Curtis’s quiz! Yesterday, I listened to a TED talk given by Katherine Mangu-Ward (haha, never imagined I’d be name-checking a nonbelieving proto-anarchist in the comments of the Good Faith podcast) and she gave those figures.

    Someone referenced Factfulness recently. Can’t remember where but I think it was something I listened to in the last couple weeks.

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    Ben Connelly

    RE: recency bias - my dad keeps saying that some commentators are saying this year’s New York Yankees are the greatest Yankees team of all time. I’m immediately thinking, “you lived through Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris’s contest to break Babe Ruth’s home run record. The decade the Yankees won a majority of World Series.”

    You’re absolutely right about recency bias in sports. A lot of it is a case of, “how could we possibly know that until after this is in the past?” But people don’t want to wait to discover what they already want to believe.

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    Mr. "B"

    “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit” – Greek proverb

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    Will Roberts

    Listening to this podcast I realized that our perspective around abortion has been drastically skewed.

    Yes abortion has decreased since 1980 though I think David may have got the stats wrong

    He said 39 abortions per every 1,000 births,

    I found 359 per 1,000 births

    https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001243.htm

    Which I am wondering if he misread the stats because the numbers have two numbers in common.

    This would show that there has been an even greater reduction in abortions going from 359 to 13 per 1,000.

    So I would like to ask some clarification on these statistics.

    But I realized for the first time in my life that the abortion stats are designed to skew our perspective as to what is going on.

    Most other stats may they be crime or maternal mortality are done by numbers of deaths per 100,000.

    Not per 1,000.

    If you have a small denominator this will give you a small numerator.

    Assuming David's numbers are right 39 and 13 don't seem that bad. They lack the shock value of larger numbers. But that is because the denominator for some reason is per 1,000 births not per 100,000 births as everything else is counted in government statistics. I think this is done purposely to hide the shocking amount of death we condone as a society.

    Yes we have improved. But it is basically going from a Super purge levels of violence to a normal purge level of violence.

    For example in 1980 there were 3,612,258 births and 1.55 million abortions. This works out to be about 42, 909 abortions for every 100,000 births. That is an absurd level of violence if we granted any value to fetal life at all. 39 per 1,000 obscures the scale of the violence. We don't use that stat for any other government statistic.

    13 per 1,000 births. 13 doesn't sound to bad. That sounds like "safe and rare" to me. But the denominator is different than any other government statistic.

    In 2020 there were 3,605,201 births in the U.S and 930,160 abortions. That's about 25,000 abortions per every hundred thousand births. Yeah that is less but it is still an absurd level of violence if we bothered to care about it.

    In comparison the murder rate in the U.S is 6.52 per every 100,000 people. Again we are not measuring in the same units. Births versus total number of people. I am not exactly sure how to make a correct comparison here but here are some ideas.

    There are about 64,543,832 women of reproductive age in the United States (15-44) as of 2020.

    https://www.marchofdimes.org/peristats/data?reg=99&top=14&stop=125&lev=1&slev=1&obj=3

    Since women are the ones having abortions this might be a good denominator. That works out to be about 1,441 abortions per 100,000 women of child bearing age.

    You can also compare directly based of the total number of people to get the sense of abortion compared to population as murder is compared to the total population.

    As of 2020 there are 329.5 million people in the U.S. That works out to be about 282.29 abortions per every 100,000 people in the U.S

    That's about 43 times greater than the murder rate in the U.S per hundred thousand people.

    El Salvador has the highest murder rate in the world at 52.02 per 100,000.

    That's still five times higher than the rate of murder in El Salvador.

    So we've moved from having a full week The Purge to maybe a weekend of the Purge.

    Not a great improvement overall if you use the right metrics.



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