Well you did a bang up job explaining it, so thanks for that. What is amazing is how child mortality has been almost completely wiped out largely by medical advances.
It goes underappreciated too, for the same reason things like abortion don't prey on people's minds much. I get aggravated just because it's such a common misconception, I didn't know better until recently, though I did know old people existed so it couldn't have been that bad. But the thing is, although that mass death was mostly concentrated on babies, they were the majority of people. That's absolutely insane to think about, on several levels.
First, that the "average" person, at least if we're thinking in terms of the demographics of Heaven, was a little kid.
Secondly, child death was not just common, not just accepted, but the rule, and was so up until very recently. Not just childbirth, actual children. We freak out about it nowadays, it's a huge tragedy if a kid dies. Back then you EXPECT your children to die.
I would ponder what it would be like to be a kid in a world where you know, because they drop like flies around you, that you too are most likely going to die. But then I realized that two and three year olds are probably too simpleminded to pick up on that concept?
Roll the dice on reincarnation, again and again, and most of the time you never make it to puberty. It'd be like an endless Sisyphean cycle of childhood.
