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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Angel showed Soul the earth below where it would go and explained how life was in a body.  Soul in Body would be helpless and need to grow.  This would require food, which would require planting seeds and preparing the ground, and raising animals, and, oh,  a myriad of things.  And shelter!  And clothing!  And warding off dangers! And relearning the gospel and sociality and…. Soul began to weep.  It is too much, Soul said.  I am just a little soul.  How can I do so much?

O little soul, Angel said, you don’t have to.  You will have Parents.  They will give you food and shelter and teach you the gospel.  They will help you grow.

And so it happened.

Soul was now an Adult in mortality.  Soul looked around and wept.  I have to figure out food and shelter and clothing and safety for myself in these wild and unpredictable times, and courtship, and marriage, and I have to take care of children and raise them and I don’t know how.  It is too much.

Angel said, o little soul, it is too much.  It is impossible for you alone.  But you are not alone.  Christ will lead you.

The next night after dreaming about the drowning prophet, I had this dream.

It was on the huge capital city of a decaying interstellar empire. The capital itself was run down. It had grand old architecture and futuristic architecture too but it was subject to the late-stage processes of physical and moral decay we are all familiar with at that stage in a civilization. It was dirty.  It was shabby.

There were refugees. They were simple rural folk of the founding stock of the empire, perhaps even from elsewhere on the planet. They had fled their homes because of natural disaster and because of the devouring of all things that happens in decaying, corrupt polities. Like everyone and everything, they had gravitated to the imperial center.

I will pass on describing the atmosphere of the dream at this point, but it struck me immensely. The cobble stone streets, the stone and brick and stucco buildings rising many feet high only a step or two from the road. The heaps of trash. The gleaming metal arches crossing half the sky overhead. The broken drones. The sullen police standing by and staring vacantly at the middle distance.

The refugees were widely disliked by both the high and the low in the city and as the dream began a number of them were being casually chivvied through the nighttime streets by street gangs.

There was a man they were particularly after who had some sort of preeminence among the refugees, though he was also simple and uneducated.

Turning down one street he saw a door opening directly onto the street for a large imposing structure. Blank towering walls, fortress type architecture. His pursuers were close behind. He stepped in and the refugees with him came in also.

It was a college. Inside the door was a hall, the entrance area for the college, and it so happened that the dean of the college was standing there. The rural refugee and the dean recognized each other with some shock. Brother? Brother?  They were literal siblings.

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When I first heard this idea, I was horrified. Yet, even bad ideas in the hands of a talented author can be well written. Hollywood, in general, just isn’t well written.

What I imagine…

Young 15 year old Aragorn is pining after Arwen, and Elrond can see there are mutual feelings.

Elrond and Aragorn chat for a minute…

“Do you love her? She is a princess and she deserves a king.”

“I don’t know that I could become king. Or if I want to.“, Aragorn protested, more out of trying grasp the magnitude of this task, than genuine rejection.

“It is your gift, what some might call destiny. If you do not do it, you will feel dissatisfied all your life. It will weigh on you as a burden you can never put down. What was once fresh will become foul. If you are capable of it, and refuse, you curse yourself.

And I will not allow my daughter to marry someone who refuses to live up to his potential. I am not faulting your father’s. Their trials were different. But you can be king. You are the rightful king of Gondor.

Will you do what is necessary?”

“I really don’t know how.”

“No one can tell you how. That is your life’s work to figure that out.”

And with that, the difference between men and elves became immediately apparent. Aragorn wasted no moment. He devoured books and maps. He practiced sword play with Elladan and Elrohir. He learned all he could in Rivendell, until he knew what he had to do. A king could not stay safe within an Elvin kingdom all his life. He needed real experience. And he rode off into parts unknown, far lands where the stars are strange, among both noble barbarian kings and vicious savages, that even the Noldor knew little of.

For the love of an elven princess.

This is his tale.

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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Who are these dashed people one sees everywhere on the TV these days?  The woman of indeterminate pronunciation and the elderly bridge player fellow?  I dare say that the marked American cussedness is more than a little marked.  In fine fettle, as it were.

On the sweetness of your second primary program this year.

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In Sunday School this Sunday someone summarized 3 Nephi 8-10 as “Christ punishes and pleads.”  There is a magnificent oratorio waiting to be written from those chapters culminating in Christ’s appearance.

In 3 Ne 11 (insight not my own), the people first hear, then see, then touch.  Amazingly physical.  Amazingly bodily.  Appropriate for the resurrected Lord.

Source: Area Seventies page at ChurchofJesusChrist.org
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What if the fairy tales were true?

Once upon a time, there was a boy who found a great treasure in the woods…

Christ’s in his heaven,

delightful’s his earth,

The Saints are a leaven,

bubbling with mirth.

https://nitter.poast.org/UniverseBYU/status/1848507056581709921

I just took G’s numbers and did a crude simulation.

These are for US national and LDS numbers, where P0 is the childbearing population and P1 is the older non childbearing. Can you tell the difference?

We are the one with the tiny bump. But both show a half life of childbearing population of about 50 years and a total population of roughly 150. Basically indistinguishable.

This is a crude simulation and I don’t promise there are no mistakes. Still, all is NOT well in Zion.

And just for fun, this is the ratio of childbearing vs non-childbearing populations.

So, mostly old people.

The grandmaster is back.

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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