Before we go any further, let me ask the rhetorical question: Are the people of the world, right now, the most wicked and sinful people in the entire history of the world?
I say this as a rhetorical question, because right now, we face a plague so fearsome as to make the combined black plagues of the 14th and 17th centuries combined look like puny in comparison.
Some estimates put the potential mortality of the Avian flu at well over a billion people. Even the most recalcitrant and isolated governments of the world, such as North Korea, have been persuaded by their medical doctors to fully participate with any means the world can come up with to try and mitigate this horror.
If one million people a day died from this disease, it would still be almost three years to kill a billion people. And it may kill one billion people in just six months.
The United States will likely do well, compared to many other nations. Perhaps only one out of every 10 people you personally know will die. On average. Entire families you know might be wiped out. Every person in a small town. Most of the people in an apartment building. Others will likely survived unscathed, except psychologically.
In the 1980s, I interviewed some of the survivors of the Spanish flu epidemic. It only killed about 3% of the world’s population at the time, and 1/3rd of the world’s population was infected. It only had a mortality rate of 10-20%.
The mortality rate of those infected with Avian flu has remained at around 60%. If 1/3rd of the world was infected with Avian flu, at that mortality rate, 1.2 billion people would die. 1,200,000,000.
30,000,000 American sinners? If we are lucky.
In a high tech world I imagine that would have devastating effects on just day to day living for those not infected, considering the loss of manpower in certain industries.
I'm not particularly inclined to suppose the answer to that question is "within my pay grade." I'd rather let the answer to that come from the one source capable of being authoritative: God Himself.
However, it is clear enough, on perfectly objective grounds, that our current generation, within former Christendom anyway, is p4retty near the top as far as sinfulness goes. Why? Well, on the whole, we have abandoned the Christian Faith in staggering numbers, and cannot possibly plead ignorance while doing so. We live in an era of (more-or-less) universal literacy, with instantaneous communications ability in a variety of different media formats. Anyone can learn the basic tenets of the Christian Faith at his or her leisure. The very culture still, in spite of everything, has a Christian underpinning to its most basic assumptions.
We are entirely capable, then, of informing our consciences and acting on the promptings of God's grace - which we presume He makes available as a norm - within the context of Christian life and morality. Yet, for the most part, the Western world refuses Him. Europe - the former heart and soul of Christendom - is effectively mission territory, and the EU is consciously distancing itself the Christian heritage of Europe with little protest from the citizenry. The Christian Faith of most of the rest of the West is, despite the bluster, pretty "soft" really. Were it otherwise, the political situations found in the countries involved (and the US is "Exhibit A" of the problem) would be radically different. The very sense of "sin" is gone, even in the minds of many people who consider themselves to be Christians. It's all about "personal failures" now, and offenses against Almighty God, considered directly as such, are not regularly contemplated by anyone. The best-known, and most trotted-out, Scripture verse in the West is "Judge not, that you not be judged," used out-of-context by unthinking hypocrites everywhere to bludgeon into silence anyone protesting even the most sordid and vile behavior. That's what Christianity has devolved down to! We call ourselves "Christians" even while we make a perversion of Christianity's most basic teachings!
So, yes, I believe that our generation is proportionately more evil than most others. I'm just not in a position to give it some sort of exact ranking. A chastisement is probably long overdue. Perhaps that is about to change. I wouldn't be surprised, and, while I suppose I don't have to "like" being caught-up in one, I can't deny that, collectively, we certainly have it coming.
I can think of fifty million pieces of evidence (in these USA alone) that support the charge.