Are We Really More Immoral Now?

I want to address the RR's insistance that we live in a time of uncontrolled immorality. They always harken back to a "better past" where people followed God's word, never had premarital sex, or took drugs.

I have a theory here. I’m sorry that I do not have much data to support it, but I think the argument speaks for itself. The reason things “seem” so much worse is because of the growth of the media and the internet. Nowadays, information reaches us faster than ever, and we have a vast repository of information at our fingertips. In my grandparents’ day, they didn’t have that. They’d see the news at the movie theater in clips such as “The March of Time.” It would condense a weeks worth of news into a ten minute clip. At home, all my grandparents had was a radio that only recieved a few stations. Most of those stations were only concerned with local news and major national events. The “immoral” activities of the nation were not important enough to make local headlines and were therefore discarded.

Furthermore, a recent study has shown that 95% of all Americans have premarital sex, and that trend has held steady since the 1950s at least, when the study was started. This trend probably goes back much farther. Futhermore, alochol is just another form of drug, and there has been rampant alcoholism throughout our counrty's history. It’s my theory that things are much the same now as it always has been in America. We just "feel" like it's worse now because information travels much faster and in far greater quantities. The “moral past” is a mythical age that never actually existed.

Here’s a CNN article discussing the study I referenced.