I purposely selected the words, "less important than before." to indicate which direction things are headed, not to compare today with the past.
But since you've brought it up, what we're witnessing is indeed comparable to some of the darkest periods in human history (e.g., genocide, slaughter of innocents, ...). If you don't think so, I invite you to visit liveleak.com
Obvious atrocities and disrespect for individual human life are getting worse - not better.
“Obvious atrocities and disrespect for individual human life are getting worse - not better.”
If I didn’t know much of anything about history I might believe you. But what’s going on today is nothing new, it just seems shocking if you don’t know what people have always been doing.
When we get around to flaying the skin off our prisoners, burning off their fingers and noses and keeping them alive and suffering for as long as possible then maybe you’ll have a point. That was a common American Indian practice that our ancestors were familiar with. Plus the kidnapping and gang raping of women.
There’s a reason the Constitution includes prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. Torture was being practiced by governments in the living memory of the Founders.
Aztecs routinely ripping the beating hearts out of their living captives, by the thousands. The flesh not going to waste.
More recently we have the mass murder and mass rape of Nanking Chinese by Japan in the 1930s. In the 1940s the barbarity of Japanese soldiers upon POWs, starving them, working them to death, cutting off their heads. Conducting “medical experiments” on them ala Dr Mengele.
Nazi mass war, mass murder and “medical experiments” on innocent civilians. Nazi rule by terror in Germany itself. Hitler hanging his enemies by means of piano wire.
Total war employed by all sides in WWII. Civilians considered legitimate targets. Entire cities firebombed burning tens of thousands to death in each raid.
Soviets using mass starvation to wipe out kulak farmers in Ukraine. Soviet rule by terrorism, the midnight knock on the door. Soviet mass imprisonment in the gulag archipelago in conditions resulting in mass death.
Turks using WWI as an opportunity to exterminate the Armenians. Poison gas warfare in WWI.
Cannibalism practiced in central Africa and the Congo as recently as the early 1900s.
There’s no shortage of atrocities to list. These are just ones off the top of my head.
And regarding abortion, abortion was legal outside the United States when it was mostly illegal here. I remember women flying to Europe for abortions when I was young. And the thalidomide tragedy being used as a reason for legalizing the practice. Abortion was legal in several states and practiced sub rosa in others in the years before Roe v Wade. Women’s hearts aren’t any harder today than they were, it’s just more convenient for them to act on it.