Because... there's less war than ever.

Key to the doctrine of Jehovah's Witnesses is that we’re in the last days of this world, and to demonstrate that we only need to look around and see that there are more wars now than ever before. Sure this is a sign!

Except it’s not.

Consider how many people have died in war. For example, World War II killed between 40-70 million people. That’s terrible! That’s almost as bad as the Muslim conquest of India, which happened between 1000-1525 and killed 60-80 million people. The Taipeng rebellion in China may have killed 100 million people.

You want to hear something crazy? The Mongol conquest killed half of Asia. Genghis Khan lowered the Earth's temperature due to all the people he killed. So many died that farmlands were reclaimed by forests, which lowered the earth's temperature.


When we see large death tolls in war, we have to remember that there are more people than ever before. For example, let's drop a nuclear bomb in the middle of Japan in the 1st century. How many people would die? Sure, there would be a lot of people dead, but would there be as many as there were when Hiroshima was attacked in 1945? Definitely not.

Even with there being more people on Earth than ever before, war is still not the killer that it's claimed to be. Of all of the causes of death in, say, 2002, "war" accounted for 5% of all deaths worldwide for men and 0.5% of all deaths for women. That was with war raging between the USA and Afghanistan and countless other small skirmishes worldwide. That's about 170,000 deaths worldwide due to war. Clearly, war isn't the biggest killer out there.

Not only that, but it's important to remember that war has happened on far worse scales than we’ve ever personally seen. There are wars that have faded into history, wars that shaped the world, wars for the sake of wars, and more than we’ve dealt with in our life.

This is when your Jehovah's Witness spider sense might start tingling. You may say,“The Bible warned me that there are people who would say that war has always happened!”

But… it has. Look, think carefully: Just because the Bible says that there are people would make this claim doesn't make the claim invalid. For example, I prophesy that you're probably reading this on a phone or computer. For the vast majority of people, that's true, but the statement doesn't make me a prophet. So too, if I say, "People will say that war has always happened," and people say that war has always happened, that doesn't make me a wizard. It just makes me someone who's telling the truth.

So, you tell me: Is war getting better or worse? Is it more of a threat to daily life than it was in times past, or less?