Not to be depressing or anything, but that birthrate is is about 6 times higher than our current one.   Dooooooom, he dirged. Dooooom! Partly because the of the baby boomer bulge, to be fair.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the marriage rate was also higher than now, though who knows.

Those were good statistics to keep.

General Conference Retrospective

In a wonderful talk about the temple, Elder Andersen told about a young man testifying to the Heber City Planning Commission about the proposed new temple.  “I am hoping to be married in this temple,” he said.  It moved me.

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General Conference Retrospective

Elder Soares refers to being home-centered, church-supported, and temple-bound. Catchy phrase.  Let’s consider it a little.

The temple is a heavenly ascent rite that culminates in being welcomed to heaven and then taking your place as king and queen in doing his work. So temple-bound ultimately means ‘heaven-bound.’

Home-centered, church-supported, heaven-bound.

Temple-bound also means marriage-bound and therefore making-a-home bound, and there we come full circle.

Here’s a follow up to yesterday’s 2023 LDS Birth Update.

Like Mansfield pointed out, the summary of our data and rough analytical methods is either we have comically low activity rates, comically low birth rates, or a combination of low activity and low birth rates.

My guess is that our actual TFR is around 2.4 – 2.7, since we seem to track Gentile TFR with a plus one.

Let’s see what that implies for our activity rates as a rough and ready plausibility check.

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All impressions idiosyncratic or your money back.

Guaranteed to be too ill-written to have been generated by ChatGPT

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From Daughter Number One

I had a dream last night.  In the dream I was someone who resented and didn’t understand commandments.  The stated purpose of the dream was to teach me why the commandments were necessary.

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Jacob is one of the most distinct personalities in scripture.

Jacob 1:8

I would … all men would believe in Christ, and view his death, and suffer his cross and bear the shame of the world;

Jacob 2:15

O that he would show you that he can pierce you, and with one glance of his eye he can smite you to the dust!

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The sun rises, the rainbow appears, the good times come again better than before, you are back home, the winter is over, singing breaks the silence, your friend and master defeats the grave.

Anderson

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Christ raised up on  a tree.

The lamb slain at the paschal feast.

We will be fasting all tomorrow if anyone wants to join us.

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The last supper.  Gethsemane.  Betrayed by  his friends and apostles.

Last year’s post.  Really excellent links on why an angel appeared in the garden and why Christ had to atone twice.

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• Second Nephi 28:30, “line upon line, precept upon precept”—it was thinking about t his verse that first opened my mind to Lehi’s Dream being fundamentally about continuing revelation. It’s a Seminary scripture mastery this year. One of my children was working on it soon after I felt directed to connect Lehi’s Dream to the rest of the Book of Mormon. https://www.jrganymede.com/2024/02/27/why-are-the-waters-in-lehis-dream-represent-filthiness-but-also-the-love-of-god/

• Given Nephi’s discussion of the Law and the Jews in these chapters, its pretty clear that however else we understand Lehi’s Dream, we should understand it as a vision of what is going to happen to Lehi and his posterity. Laman and Lemuel were not just sinners. They were proto-Pharisees. More generally, there is a class of people who are brought to Christ by the Law (the Tree by the Rod) but who “cling” to the Law and are therefore unable to fully accept the gospel. More generally, could we say that a desire for rule and order and system inevitably points to Christ, but you have to be willing to accept that Christ transcends the rule and order and system that brought you to Him?

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As you have probably heard, the Church is buying out the historic restoration era properties owned by the Community of Christ (RLDS) along with artefacts from that era.

From a correspondent:

Yesterday afternoon, the shocking news broke that the Utah-based LDS church had acquired the Kirtland Temple in Ohio and essentially all of the common-history documents of Mormonism prior to 1844. These had been in the care of the “Reorganized LDS” (later “Community of Christ”) since the 1860s. In fact, they’d been the subject of acrimony for decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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An interesting juxtaposition

Isaiah describing a decadent and fallen state

And I will give children unto them to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.

5 And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbor; the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honorable.

Isaiah describing the millennial state of perfect peace

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

The coincidence here could be what conservatives awhile back used to call immanentizing the eschaton, meaning trying to create utopia using secular means. Which usually leads to dystopia.

Or it could be the old, old problem of confusing the side effects for the causes. In an idyllic small town no one locks their doors, so if we just stop locking our doors we will have an idyllic small town.

Or it could be something else.

From today’s Gospel Doctrine lesson:

• 2 Nephi 6:3-4.  General information can be as useful as tailored teaching.
• 2 Nephi 7:1-2, 11; 2 Nephi 18.  Sin brings its own punishment; or sometimes the punishment is God just leaving you to try your luck with the wicked, who can be extremely punitive.  What are some sins that bring their own punishment in your experience and observation? What protection from the wicked does God give you now?
• 2 Nephi 8:1-2.  Pit is usually a bad thing in the scriptures.  Hell, the trap laid by the wicked into which they fall at the last day.  Interesting to see it as a positive origin.  It reminds me a bit of what we were talking about recently with the water in Lehi’s dream, how it appeared to be originally clean (and in fact representing Christ) and then because dirty as it went along.  Your origin an ancestry is good, but trying just to go back to it is a trap.
• Why Isaiah chapters:  God wants us to seek the spirit of prophecy and the Holy Ghost.  Therefore the scriptures aren’t a manual and need to have more challenging sections.  This is  more important than getting all the specifics right.  We live in the  most unpoetic and ametaphorical society of all time.  Poetry and imagery sticks in your mind better.  Assume Isaiah was talking about the biggest events of salvation and world history.  Jot down the 8 or 9 biggest events: that’s his subject.  What are your 8 or 9 milestones, now or to come?
• 2 Nephi 2 and 9 are less an explanation of the atonement and more a statement of the principles about the atonement that an explanation must account for.
• The problem of leadership.  2 Nephi 13:1-7, 12; 2 Nephi 14:1.
• 2 Nephi 9:28-29.  Wo to those who are learned but not wise, etc.  Interestingly, there follows a long list of ‘woes’ but without the qualification that there is with being learned that there is a redeemable version of the trait.  There is no “wo unto the liar, but to be a liar is good if . . .”   Later, despite the earlier contrast between the learned and the wise, the chapter talks about the learned and the rich and the wise going to destruction because of their pride.
• There is a lot of stuff in Ch. 13 and later in  Ch. 15 (they call evil good and good evil) that sounds pretty crazy, but its 2024 and here we are.

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

You are sitting at your kitchen table making notes from the Book of Mormon.  Your youngest daughter finishes brushing out her hair and asks Dad, can I  brush yours.  You agree  She brushes.

Did you know, Dad, dust is partly made of human skin?

You do know.  You  are the one who told her.

She brushes some more.  Some dead skin is on the brush.  She blows it off.

Heavenly Father made us out of dirt but our dead skin is dirt, right?  Isn’t that weird?