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The Anglosphere is about 1.5 to 1.6 with Canada worse.  That suggests that in two generations half of the people you think of as England or Australia or America will be gone.  Unless birth rates keep dropping, which they will.

Spain is at 1.1.  Each generation halving.  I feel grief.

Every country everywhere has radically dropping birth rates with no end in sight.

We Saints are following the same trend, just a few years behind..  More temples, less people. I sometimes hear optimists and visionaries say someday every stake will have its own temple!  Man, I hope so.  But I wince because what I am afraid I hear is someday every temple will have a stake.  Wo to him who says all is well in Zion.

Our minds our set up to think of population destruction in terms of deaths.  But the scale of population destruction happening here is the equivalent of a massive universal bloodshed without end.

The Book of Mormon populations died by the sword.  What if they died like we do?
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There once was a bird who wanted to go higher and higher.

The bird spent much of its time beating up into the sky.  Its wings grew strong.  It also became a master of currents and convection.  It grew wiser and subtler in its knowledge of air.  It even, in its desire to go higher, learned things and did things for high quality food surfaces–so that it could spend longer times trying to get higher before it had to come back down–than any bird had before.

But it grew old.

As it lay dying, struggling to launch itself for one last try, and failing, a wise old creature came by and told it sadly that in fact the air grew thinner the higher up one went and this is why the bird had in the days of its great success only been able to eke out a few more feet of height in each attempt.  In fact, the creature explained, eventually the air grew too thin to breathe and vanished altogether.

“Then I will make more air,” the bird defiantly exclaimed.  The dying bird struggled once more to get off the ground.

A voice from heaven said, “that is right.  Soon you will come to a place where I have already created infinite air.  The muscle you gained in  your glory I will return to you along with all your knowledge.  You will finally be able to soar like you were meant to.”

Mormon adds a note in 3rd Nephi 5:20

I am Mormon, and a pure descendant of Lehi.

He says ‘Lehi,’ not ‘Nephi.’  Mormon was aware that a lot of crossbreeding had happened with the Zoramites, the Mulekites, and with the surrounding peoples who were not descendants of Lehi.  Though Mormon here seems to be acknowledging some Lehite Lamanite ancestry for himself.  It may be Mormon’s Lamanite ancestry that  makes him fair to the Lamanites from time to time despite being of the sole survivors of a genocide himself.

The second notable thing here is that lineage was very important for the Book of Mormon peoples, especially for elites.

Which leads me to my extremely tentative working hypothesis about race in the Book of Mormon.

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There’s an ongoing story about a Kansas State fan joining the Church which may be the weirdest thing you’ve heard all week.  It’s weird enough that I feel Joseph Smith and Brigham  Young would approve.

Last week Kansas State football came to BYU.  They were highly ranked and expected to trounce the unranked Cougs.  Instead BYU did the trouncing, 38-9.  With a fair amount of what looked like divine intervention along the way.

(Link if the embed doesn’t work)

It so happens that before the game some Kansas State fan was so confident he said that if the Y won he would get baptized.  He got a lot of joshing after the game which he silenced by saying, ‘nope, I’m meeting with the missionaries and reading the Book of Mormon now.’

https://x.com/koltonemaw/status/1838766011337539598

Link

All-knowing Cougarboard has been able to verify at least part of his story.

My theory is that this guy was already meeting with the missionaries and the whole thing was just a lark by him, but who knows?

I picture K-State fans in heaven cussing up a storm when this kid made his rash promise and they looked over to see the angels of intervention smirking at them.

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The winnowing of modernity accelerates. In thirty years, you will be either a radiant saint or a raving addict. Your attention is already the apple of discord over which every corporate body (government, MEGACORP, religion) on earth fights. The “rules”, such as they are, will be evolved to aggressively exploit simple compliance. If you have in place discipline and the ability to be disagreeable, then you have in place at least some defenses. AI will only sharpen the assault on your attention. (The “open” in “OpenAI” must be of the same nature as an “open marriage”.)

-thus a friend of the JG

On the sweetness of Mormon life

In your small rural ward on the high plains, its your resident Britisher’s turn to speak. She talks about when she was a free-spirited hippy student at art school back in England. She had a dream. She was walking with two dowsing sticks. The sticks came together and light erupted from the ground. The light went before her to a quarry. When she went down to the quarry, she found that the rock walls were painted with animals and trees. Then Christ came out to greet her.

After she graduated, she got a job at a natural history museum. She worked in a kind of open air well in the center of the building with exhibits and displays all around her. She decided to check out the local LDS church for curiosity. She tried to sneak in inconspicuouly but didn’t succeed (hippy, torn jeans, tank top, frizzy fro, one wonders why). As the missionaries were talking to her one day she learned about the stick of Judah and the stick of Joseph. The Spirit told her that was her dream.

She then went old school LDS talking about light both physics and metaphysics. Her inner artist was showing. She concluded—this was obviously very important to her—that we spirits had come to earth to be bodies because bodies gave us more ways to interact with light.

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.

Czeslaw Milos

Or for our mediocrity

Rabbinical Judaism, Islam, most midwit varieties of christianity, and voodoo are all solutions to the same problem.  The death of God.  In other words, the problem that the Almighty no longer seems to be speaking (and that if he did speak, it would not be what we want to hear).

I was reading a high level anthropological survey of voodoo and of related West African religious systems.  Their basic structure is a belief that there is in fact a creator who rules and has the power, in other words, God, but who is very remote and inactive in human affairs.

The solution is to make deals with lesser spirits.

The normal abrahamic religion response to the same problem is to get scholarly with scripture and philosophy.  The difference just seems to be if you are in an educated area with written materials and a scholarly tradition or not.

“While most bridge-jumpers are attempting to commit suicide, and others fall accidentally, it should be noted that there are two further groups of voluntary jumpers, both gamblers in a sense. The first of these are those, usually young males, who jump on a bet. Strangely enough, we have only one case of a known ‘bettor’ who has been killed. But frustratingly enough, there are seldom records of such cases, and the individuals usually, presumably clutching their winnings, elude official searchers. In recent cases of this nature, a Rhode Island youth leaped 60 feet from a bridge while his companion stood by yelling encouragement, and another jumped 135 feet and was last seen swimming to a pier. In Ohio, a 17-year-old boy jumped 65 feet, and in New York a 32-year-old man jumped 107-feet — for the third time — from a bridge on which 67 other jumpers have been killed.”

from Survival of High-Velocity Free-Falls in Water by Richard G. Snyder, Ph.D., April 1965, Federal Aviation Agency, Office of Aviation Medicine

There is a scripture that perfectly combines ambition and humility. Two virtues we usually think are in tension with each other.

For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts, and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have.

-thus 2 Nephi 28:30

Humbly learning bit by bit, always recognizing that you don’t know as much as you could, is not the opposite of ambition. It is the core of ambition. It is the stuff of which divinity is made.

Accounting for the difference in stations, this is morphologically the same as God saying

Worlds without number have I created…. The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine.

And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.

For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

The original insight was not mine. It was a family conversation. Let me tell you how it came about.

I don’t remember how it started out. Maybe some silliness about Canada. Yeah, that was probably it. We were probably laughing about that Babylon Bee headline, If Elected Trump Promises to Create a Cool New Slur for Canadians.

President Polk

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I’m doing a chronology comparison for Nephite modernity, the extremely critical period from King Benjamin to the Savior’s return.  I wanted to give myself a feel for the events by comparing them to American and Church history.  You know, like the distance from the beginning of the reign of the judges to 1 AD is the same as the distance between us and the beginning of WWII.  You’ll see that posted over the next day or two.

Meanwhile I ran across some interesting points.  Probably nothing original, but new to me.

Omni —

-not all Nephites came with Mosiah.  Some of what the Nephites called ‘Lamanites’ were probably stay-behind Nephites.

-the chronology doesn’t add up here.  We have a son, a brother, and the brother’s son and grandson covering a period of 180 years.  Probably like with the genealogies in the gospels, ‘son’ just means ‘descended from’ and ‘brother’ means ‘related to’.  In support of there are indicators that Amaleki the last writer in Omni was not alive during the King Mosiah exodus though he still wrote about it, there probably wasn’t anyone acting as a custodian at that time, or at least not one who wrote

-the leading theory about the continual dissensions and wars in Nephite modernity is that it was some kind of subsumed ethnic conflict between Nephite and Mulekite elites.  But its interesting that the last of the Nephite-descended chroniclers was named Amalek, and the two leading dissenters were named Amlici and Amalickiah.  Similarly, Amulek strongly emphasizes his descent from Nephi.  Could the actual basis of the dissent be the old Nephite priestly lineage claiming preeminence once the kings abolished themselves?

After Cezoram is murdered in 23 BC, there still appear to be chief judges but none of them are named until Lachoneus in 1 AD.  Is this because the chroniclers considered them illegitimate in some way?

A history podcaster apparently went on Tucker Carlson’s show with a number of revisionist takes on WWII.  While I’m told the podcast itself was at least somewhat nuanced, the guy responded to attacks on Twitter with flamebait responses like Churchill Was WWII’s Greatest Villain.

A bunch of boring argument ensued.

FWIW I pretty much share the conventional view on WWII (Nazis boo, Soviets boo but not as boo in the short term, America yay, England yay, victory mismanaged) though I also don’t get worked up about people with chops arguing points or entertaining counterfactuals.  But here I am going to try to say something that hasn’t been repeated elsewhere already  (and I invite you to do the same).  It’s something that should have some application to Mormon history. (more…)

A rowing coach is looking at his freshman tryouts and musing on the coming years.  Victories?  Losses?  Championships?  The Olympics?

All that Ulbrickson knew, had to start here on this dock, with the boys who were now wandering off into the waning light.  Somewhere among them–those green and untested boys–lay much of the stock from which he would have to select a crew capable of going all the way.  The trick would be to find which few of them had the potential for raw power, the nearly superhuman stamina, the  indomitable willpower, and the intellectual capacity necessary to master the details of technique.  And which of them, coupled improbably with all those other qualities, had the most important one: the ability to disregard his own ambitions, to throw his ego over the gunwales, to leave it swirling in the wake of the shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the boys in the boat.

-The Boys in the Boat

Thanks to the felicities of the LDS website’s ever-improving search function, I messed up last time in counting the references to ‘wives and children’ in the Book of Mormon.

The phrase ‘wives and children’* appears 32 times in the Book of Mormon.  25 times in what I call Nephite Modernity, or the Nephite Warring States period, the books of Mosiah and Alma.

The great majority of those are references to defending wives and children as a justification for warfare.

Outside of Nephite Modernity, the two ‘wives and children’ references that refer to defense are Mormon 2:23, where Mormon uses wives and children rhetoric to inspire this soldiers.  It kinda works–“and my words did arouse them somewhat to vigor.”  And Ether 14:2, where each Jaredite man has to sleep with his word to defend what is his during the night, including wife and children.  Its pretty clear that fighting to defend their homes was a huge part of Nephite ideology during the Mosiah-Alma period.  The other two references are, I suspect, Mormon being a Captain Moroni fanboy.  The first one is clearly Mormon modeling his speech on what worked during the Nephite glory days and the Ether chapter could be a Mormon summary where he inserted his own concept of what the Jaredites were fighting for, though I don’t know for sure.

*or some variant thereon, such as ‘our wives and our children’.

* Some decisions only success can justify.  We don’t like that because we want the rightness of our acts to be judged by our intentions. Even so.  Power is good, and holding power only lends more weight to preaching, so giving up power in order to preach is one of those decisions. In the case of Nephi Helaman’s son the decision succeeded spectacularly.  He and his brother converted thousands in areas they could not have gone to had they still been Nephite leaders

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