Here’s a post that looks like it was meant for the election news but its actually something I’ve been noodling for the last couple of weeks.  This is a little deep for me, so if you can think of a pithier, better way of making the point I’m struggling to make, please drop it into the comments.   Here goes.

Having possibility feels great.  The more possibility the better.  Like Christopher Columbus on the edge of a new continent, or Brigham Young looking down at the valley and saying ‘this is the place.’  That is a deeply spiritual feeling.  In fact its literally spiritual, that is what it is like to be a spirit.  As a spirit you are undefined and have every option in front of you.

But mere possibility is a prison.  Possibility without actuality is dead.  It is a horrible sin for the spirit to want to live forever in that sense of possibility and shrink from coming to earth as a mortal.  Not because God has arbitrarily defined it as a sin but because it is in the very nature of possibility, the very thing that makes it good, that it demands to be converted into a reality.  Spirit is possibility but body is actuality, and the spirit needs the body.  What we find limiting about mortality is what makes it valuable.  The struggle, the fact that as a body you can only be in  one place at one time with a limited life span in which to do anything, the fact that you interact with things around in a way that radically constrains your choices, the fact that you have to heave overboard most of the possibilities to even sorta achieve one of them, the fact that  mortality is difficult, is precisely what makes the mortal experience necessary and good.

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The title is deliberately provocative, obviously, but there’s a real point there that came out in Sunday School.

4th Nephi through Mormon 6 makes very grim reading.  It’s more horrifying when you think that the Book of Mormon was written for our day, as Elder Bednar confirmed recently.  Here is the good news.  The end of the Nephites was and is awful but they also could have stopped it at any time.   They had multiple chances to repent.  If they had taken any one of the off-ramps they would have been fine.  Perhaps they could even have repented on the very morning of the last battle.  The tragedy of the Book of Mormon is the tragedy of the addict who doesn’t even enjoy the addiction any more but who just won’t stop.

Here’s a way of looking at it.  Suppose we had a book of scripture that was written about one particular person in Moses’ time who was bitten by a snake but refused to look at the brass serpent representing Christ because “of the easiness of the way.”  The book of scripture  could be pretty hard reading as it chronicled the person dying.  The wound turning black, the creeping paralysis, the person turning pale, the struggle to breathe, the death rattles.  It could be arbitrarily awful to read.  But the ultimate message, as applied to oneself, would still be optimistic.  All of this can be avoided if you just look.

That is essentially what we have in the book of Mormon chapters 1-6.

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The beasts were preparing for a great assembly at which to choose their next king.  The candidates were a lion or a wildcat.  One bird spent all its time for many months of its short life flying back and forth all over the wild telling every critter it could find that the wildcat was a menace to birdkind and all small things.  The assembly happened, and perhaps in some small part due to the bird’s efforts, the animals chose the lion.

The bird flew back to its favorite tree.  Safe–but with no nest, no mate, and no younglings.

The bird died sad with no descendants.

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As both Zen and Bruce Charlton have pointed out here, having low birth rates is bad but having low birth rates that are dropping is worse.

It’s bad if your expenses exceed your income.  Its worse if every year your income gets smaller and your expenses get larger.

Here’s the bottom line.  Based on recent trends, the really low American birth rates are declining by about 1.5% per year.  Based on recent trends, the low LDS birth rates are declining by 3.43% per year.

At these rates of decline, it will take America 52  years to get to the catastrophically low unprecedented birthrates of South Korea.  YtSK=52.  For the LDS, 34 years.  YtSK=34.

However, there is some small glimmer of hope in the LDS numbers for the last couple of years.

(Figures are based on limited data, should be treated as ballpark and directional only).

From here.  There was another drop in 2023.  The number of births per is now 54.4.

The  implication is that every year more people look around and decide to have less children, or no children.

I don’t believe we will continue to decline at the same rate.  It will slow once we catch up (catch down?) to the Gentile population.  The gospel is true and beautiful but for many LDS in First World countries the fruits of the gospel are increasingly only in areas that are unmeasurable and intangible.

Analysis below for those who are interested.

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Success is dangerous, but good.

Elder Bednar this conference taught that success is a challenge.  Our choices can make it a curse.

He was talking about the Book of Mormon, and of course this is a very Book of Mormon viewpoint.  The promised land is blessed and cursed and the blessing and the cursing are the same.  At one level, the blessing and the cursing are that here the people will get what they deserve.  At an even deeper level, the blessing and the cursing are that any little bit of righteousness will get rewarded with success, and our choices too often make success into a curse.

Whether we live in the promised land or not, I believe we Saints have the same blessing and cursing.  If we try, we will often succeed–but that’s dangerous.

Many of us try to avoid the danger.  Probably we shouldn’t.  Elder Bednar’s point isn’t that success is bad.  It’s that success is a challenge.

Success with humility is godliness.

My brain is trying to be subversive again.  I bear it with patience.

A few days ago I was studying in 3rd Nephi when the brain popped up to say that Christ’s injunction not to contend sure hits differently when you realize he had just finished destroying the 2/3s of the population that his audience would have needed to contend with.  Hard filter = “no contention!”  From that perspective saying contention is of the devil is like saying wickedness or opposition is of the devil, or the Gadianton robbers were of the devil (which they were).

I don’t 100% agree.  There’s some truth to it, but this last conference had several messages about avoiding contention that shows it goes beyond just the narrow confines of the in-group.  What I do think is that many of us, including me, spend a lot of time thinking about hard task of avoiding contention in the abstract with people who are our opponents or even in the scriptural language our “enemies,” while we are failing at the easy task within the in-group: not being contentious with the people in our family or ward.    I’m not sure that being civil across big partisan divides matters too much if you are quarrelsome and nasty to your kids or your cousins or the Sunday School 1st counselor.

I was a stern practitioner of the religion of Doubt, and almost nothing could dissuade me from it. In my teens I focused my doubt on the things of the Right: the religious traditions, the various hierarchies, and (especially!) the vestigial prohibitions on certain hedonic pursuits. Later I extended Doubt into the sacred ground of the left as well: the believability of Science, the evilness of white people, the awfulness of the past…

You can probably see where the next step was taking me. For better or for worse, doubt performs poorly in recursion. And so I began to doubt it.

-a tiny excerpt from the Depths of Crackpot Illogic, by our friend Sol

His list of things he was looking for in a church is meaningful to me, especially 1, 2, 4, and 7, and 8 only slightly behind.

On the sweetness

You have a new missionary speak.  Brand new.  He is terrified.  He reads his talk, eyes glued on the page.  He starts with jokes.  Very deadpan, since his eyes are glued to the page.  It somehow makes them very funny. Your bishop is shaking with laughter.

Then he gets to the serious part.  He is testifying and pouring out his soul to the wooden stand and the piece of typed paper on it.  He still can’t raise his eyes.  It moves you.

I was doodling about Elder Bednar’s talk in a free moment.  The doodles showed me something about  the relationship pride has to despair.

To recap, Elder Bednar’s talk suggested to me that one aspect of pride is a fixation on present circumstances whereas humility recognizes that the future is uncertain.  More specifically, pride refuses to believe that the present can change or refuses to do what is necessary to change it.

The difference between pride and despair is only one of degree.

These are two simple examples of pride and despair.  The proud man or woman is doing well and is certain it will always be that way because they deserve it.  The despairing is doing poorly and refuses to  believe that can ever change.

Here are some more complicated examples.

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So many things only make sense when you consider the time factor.
Elder Bednar’s talk on Saturday is an example.  He illuminated what humility truly is for us mortals.

He said that humility is awareness that you can fail.   Which is different from demeaning yourself.

(All thoughts after this are my own, Elder Bednar bears no fault for them.)

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Here’s some perspective on Nephite chronology.  All I have done is take the events of Nephite history from the perspective of a Nephite at the time of Christ’s coming to the Americas and how far in the past it would have felt by relating it to events in our past from the perspective of 2024.  I am just following the standard chronology in the Book of Mormon notes.

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(ref Gen. 3:21, Moses 4:27)

What does the coat of skins represent?

The garment, obviously, although it would be more accurate to say that the garment represents the coat of skins instead of vice versa.

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You hear less about authenticity than you used to.  That’s not because our culture has stopped caring about it.  It’s because its become so widespread that its just an unspoken assumption.

I’m feeling out a few ideas about being authentic that I think have a bearing on our current situation and on  the Book of Mormon.

(Reminder that we have quite a bit of prior work on authenticity that many of our JG readers contributed to–

The Contradiction of Celebrity

tag The Cult of Authenticity)

Fear, anger, depression, victimization, pleasure-seeking, “identity” are all aspects of authenticity gone so mainstream that its just an unspoken assumption.  Lets start with fear.

We live in fearful times, with much to be fearful about.  And that’s the point.  Fear is always going to be authentic. (more…)

Two countries can have the exact same population but a very different age distribution.  A population pyramid is a graphic way of showing what a population looks like.  Many modern countries have population pyramids that are more like columns that taper at the top.  Less developed societies historically looked like the Afghanistan pyramid above; a high birth rate and a high death rate meant the population was always on average very young.

We don’t know what the Nephite and Lamanite population pyramids looked like.  It’s possible that the Nephite modernity affected birth rates, that’s a pretty common thing to happen in a society’s modernity and the Nephites do seem to be vastly outnumbered much of the time.   On the other hand there is an absence of Book of Mormon prophets condemning birth limitations which is at least some evidence.  And in historical societies undergoing modernity, the low birth rates were more concentrated in the upper classes and did not penetrate the lower classes and rural people (and they were still mostly rural people) as much as in our society.

So although we don’t know what their population pyramids looked like, we can at least speculate that they were something like a typical pre-industrial revolution agricultural society with a lot more youth than middle aged or old people.

If so, this helps explain why the Nephite society was so variable.  And also the Lamanite society, its not as obvious because Mormon isn’t as interested in it but the Lamanites also are constantly making radical changes. (more…)

And it came to pass that those Lamanites who had united with the Nephites were numbered among the Nephites;

15 And their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites;

-thus 3 Nephi 2:14-15

If you believe in God’s power but also in history and anthropology, its difficult to know what is going on here.  Is a major widespread miracle where a people jump across a major demographic divide possible–or at least where they just change skin color?  Sure, miracles are miracles.  (Though this one wouldn’t be my first guess).  Is God perfectly capable of performing miracles that seem offensive or meaningless to us because it makes sense within the world view of the people he’s working with?  You bet.  Read the Old Testament some time.

On the other hand, we have too many examples to count of the petty narcissism of small ethnic differences.  The Hutus and the Tutsis, for example,are both Black by American standards but are actually very physically distinct by historic standards.  Equally bitter hatreds have been founded on much less.

Paul Kagame, a Tutsi (who are ‘light-skinned)

Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu (i.e., ‘dark-skinned’)

We also have too many examples of the way ethnicity can be tied to culture and practices in ways that are not always clear to the people living them to be confident that what happened to the Lamanites was a miraculous change of skin color.

I would love, love, love to have various secular histories of the Nephite cultural area.