Nate’s Place

I stumbled across this today: http://www.wildcrazy.com/facts3world.htm. It’s supposed to be about what if the Earth were a village of 100.  It then lists a lot of random statistics, and I do mean random.  While the population data seems sound, a lot of it reads like whoever wrote it just pulled it out of his ass.  You can read what Snopes said about it. But, the main point of the exercise was to get one thinking, and that it did.

So I sat down and decided to figure out what the Earth would really be like if it were a village of 100… For starts, only 50 people would actually live in the village.  The remaining 50 would live in the surronding countryside.

There would be…

• 14 Africans
• 14 from the Americas
• 61 Asians (I lumped Oceania with Asia btw)
• 11 Europeans

Religion wise…

• 33 Christians
• 20 Muslims
• 13 Hindus
• 12 non-religious
• 6 Chinese Universists
• 6 Buddhists
• 8 other
• Only two would be atheists

Gender wise…

•  50 men
• 50 woman

Age Wise…

• 27 would be 14 or younger
• 65 would be between 15 and 64
• 8 would be older than 65

10 people would control 30% of all wealth in the community.

Only one in six would have a fixed-line telephone, but one in three would have a cell-phone.

One in six would be an Internet user.

The population would grow by one each year.

18 people live in absolute poverty (>$1 per day).  An additional 30 live on less than $2 per day.

Only 18 people would not be able to read.

Unfortunately, couldn’t find anything about college education, but a college education isn’t that important in most countries.   Also, if you find the statistics on poverty troubling, don’t!  The great news in that area is that the percentage of those living in poverty has drastically declined over the past thirty years, and that decline is even accelerating in many areas around the world.

My sources:

• http://www.prb.org/pdf07/07WPDS_Eng.pdf
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy
• https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html
• http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2040450

It’s so commonly said that many people, religious or not, accept the following proposition as truth:

More people have died in the name of God than for any other cause in history

Is it though?

Lets think about this for a second.  The bloodiest war in history was WWII, in which over 60 million people were killed.  In WWI, over 20 million people were killed.  So in just the two major conflicts of the 20th century, over 80 million people died.  That doesn’t even include the tens of millions who died under Stalin, or genocides like in Rwanda or Bosnia.   None of these conflicts were done in the name of God.

By contrast, the Crusades, from the first Crusade in 1095 to the last in the 1400s saw an estimated of 1,000,000 to 9,000,000 deaths.  Taking the high range, that’s about 10% of the number of deaths caused by the major conflicts over the 20th century, and we’re talking about 400 years versus 100 years.

What about the wars of religion during the reformation period?  I couldn’t find any death statistics on it, but it’d take a wide stretch of the imagination to think even twenty million people were killed during this period as a result of religion; especially seeing as how only 70 million were around in 1700.

So have more people died in the name of God?  Of course not, and no free-thinking person would believe so.  Indeed, saying so ignores all the conflicts that happened prior to 33 A.D.  Most wars are waged in the name of land, greed, personal ego, and nationalistic pride.  Some wars are indeed waged under the name God, such as jihad, but those wars often use God only as a pretext when the real reason is, again, land, greed, personal ego, and nationalistic pride.

I’ve been meaning to fill up my car with gas for a while now, but just haven’t seem to have gotten around to it.  I really meant to do this morning, but didn’t.

So finally it caught up to me on my way home from school.  Right before Nevada on Military Road, I realized I was pushing the peddle but nothing was happening.  I attempted to pull over onto Nevada, but the wheel was locked up and I couldn’t really press the brakes either.  So instead I just let the car hit the sidewalk, and that brought it to a full stop.

I knew it was out of gas, so I just called my Mom as I was only 15 minutes way from home.  She came out with a nice large gas can, but it was hard trying to fill it up on the side of a road that was experiencing rush hour.  Ended up putting just as much in the tank as I did on my shoes.

So now, after two showers and numerous feet scrubbings, I reek of gasoline.  It’s not an entirely unpleasant smell, but I’m feeling kind of lightheaded.

I’ve had this site now for almost six years, but really never changed it once I created it.  But I was looking for another way to keep from studying Civil Procedure, so I decided to re-do the entire place.  For those who’ve been here before, you probably won’t notice anything different.  What I mostly did was to change the coding of the site so that it’s now a lot easier for me to make changes and add new content.

I did a ton of pictures though.