If you're like me, one of the first things you see when you get online is the top headlines for the day. Usually one of those is the number of people or soldiers that were killed in Iraq today. It weighs heavy on my heart to read that every day, but not only that, I have become desensitized when the number is small. However true it may be, I think our media is being very irresponsible in their "bean counting" of deaths in Iraq. Not to trivialize the violence and death that occurs in Iraq, but here are some actual statistics from a valid source on death in the world:

There is an estimated 6,379,157,361 people who live in the world at present.

The death rate estimated for 2004 (based on last year's numbers, I'm assuming) is 0.886%. So that means 56,519,334 die in a year which is 154,847 per day! Now this is just the flat number of people who die for whatever reason whether it is natural causes, disease, violence, etc.

Of that number, 3,209,354 deaths in a year are from infant mortality.

I couldn't get any death stats on anything else, but the point is alot of people die and they aren't even involved in the war in Iraq. But the media would like to focus on death in this area while ignoring all the death that occurs everywhere else.

One could argue that because this is a war, people should know how many people are dying as a result of the choices our government is making. So let's look at some statistics of how many people have died in wars where America invaded another country:

I'm trying to get these numbers from a source that looks legit. They aren't exact numbers, but they are close. These are just U.S. soldier casualties. It's hard to find accurate numbers on civilian casualties. Not that a good number could be found, but I don't think I need it to prove my point and I don't have the time to be looking up all these numbers.

World War I - 53,402
World War II - 291,557
Korean War - 33,741
Vietnam War - 10,789
Gulf War - 147
Afghanistan - 120
Iraq - 580

Not very big numbers since Vietnam and certainly very small numbers considering about 150,000 people die each day. You also didn't see the media bean counting the deaths from wars before now. I think this is because no one in my generation or the generation before mine has ever had to fight for their freedom, only for the freedom of others. It's easy to outrage people when the headlines say "100 Dead from Attacks", but imagine if someone printed "150,000 Will Die Today and Every Day Following".

In light of all of that: 353,737 are born in the world every day which is more than twice the number of people who die every day.

The bottom line is death is coming for us all at some point. The real tragedy isn't how someone dies or that someone died, it's where they spend eternity. The Bible says the way to salvation is narrow which means most of the people who die will spend their eternity in suffering and it happens to alot of people every day. Those numbers are far more tragic than any casualties in Iraq.