Insight on the News

World Government Needed

● The problems of nations have become global in nature. Expanding populations, growing industrialization and modern technology have put an ever-growing demand on earth’s material resources. Air and water pollution crosses many boundaries. Nuclear warfare by intercontinental missiles can affect every country.

In this regard, scientist Isaac Asimov recently declared: “Global problems can only have global solutions. Such problems cannot possibly yield to piecemeal treatment here and there. They cannot yield even to worldwide treatment if each nation works on its own.” For mankind’s survival, he said, “there must be​—in connection with global problems—​global decisions, global laws and global enforcement. All this is a way of saying that if we are to continue into the 21st century with civilization intact, we can do so only under the aegis [auspices or sponsorship] of a form of world government.”

But such cooperation among nations is nowhere to be seen. Only God’s kingdom, the one government for all the earth that Christians pray for, will provide the “global decisions, global laws and global enforcement” to unite all mankind.​—Matt. 6:9, 10.

Highly Inaccurate

● The radiocarbon dating method has been widely accepted by many scientists as showing that humans lived back to at least 50,000 B.C.E. That conflicts with what the Bible says.

But physicist R. Brown of Andrews University claims that this radiocarbon dating method is highly inaccurate. After a ten-year study, he concludes that radioactive carbon atoms did not exist in the earth’s atmosphere in significant amounts before 2000 B.C.E. and so cannot be used to date objects before then. Sometime around that date, he says, a major atmospheric change likely occurred, resulting in the buildup of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere.

One such vast change was the flood of Noah’s day, which the Bible indicates to have taken place in 2370 B.C.E. That catastrophe without a doubt drastically altered atmospheric conditions.​—Gen. 7:11, 12.

Family Breakdown and Crime

● Police chiefs in Colorado say that a breakdown in family ties and the indifference of society are important factors in the alarming increase of crime in their communities. Much of the crime is committed by persons sixteen to twenty-five years of age.

A police chief stated: “We raised a generation of people who don’t care about anything or anyone. Many young people of today have no respect for the rights or ownership of other people and society has accepted it. There is no shame in breaking the law anymore.” Another chief said: “There seems to be some kind of moral decentralization going on among families. We’re finding the age bracket among criminal offenders is getting lower all the time.”

But what example has been set for the young by adults? In our time adults have engaged in the worst mass killing in history; there has been enormous corruption in high places; and immorality is rampant at all levels of adult society. The Bible shows that society today is ‘reaping what it has sown.’​—Gal. 6:7.

Fruits of False Religion

● People in nations outside Christendom often express their dismay at the violence, corruption and immorality in Western countries that call themselves Christian. Religious commentator G. R. Plagenz observes that “religious nations are sick from overdoses of violence, greed, injustice, selfishness, prejudice, pornography, crime, drugs and weapons.”

Thus Jesuit editor William Casey, in a special issue of the “Holy Cross Quarterly,” says that he can understand why the non-Western world is “appalled at the level of public morality in those countries whose birth and development owe so much to the role of religion and who still pay lip service to the importance of religion in their lives.”

God’s Word shows that all of this is the fruitage of religion that has failed to live up to its obligations to God and his laws. It shows too that this bad fruitage is part of the clear evidence that this present wicked system of things is in its “last days,” when people would be “having a form of godly devotion but proving false to its power.”​—2 Tim. 3:1, 5.