General Conference Retrospective

Elder Holland quoted G.K. Chesterton on gratitude.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

— thus G. K. Chesterton

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My poor kiddos!  They are all going to drown from rising sea levels, and in the meantime there’s no beach house for them, they’re just too expensive.

I was listening to a recorded speech and noticed the platform had an option for an AI-assisted summary.

Here is what I got

In today’s society, the dynamics of loyalty and commitment are shifting due to changes in the availability of certain proteins in food. According to Speaker 1, the body’s ability to produce these proteins has been affected, leading to a decline in loyalty and commitment. Unknown Speaker, on the other hand, argues that the rise of fragmentation in times has led to a growing inner Scorpion that stings even when it will lead to mutual destruction. Both speakers emphasize the need for social technologies to insource loyalty and commitment over the long term.

Knowing the original does not make this any more sensible.

It is either nonsense, or deep wisdom.

General Conference retrospective

(The title is with apologies to Elder Holland, whose talk Where Justice, Love, and Mercy Meet is still the best talk for listening to on a Sunday while making dinner)

In marriage and business there is a concept called commingling of assets. At its fullest, the idea is that you have two nominally separate people or entities but they are so mixed up with each other that you can’t really sort out where one ends and the other begins. Legally the court will then throw up its hand and declare them to be one entity.  Its not just that their assets now belong to both.  For legal purposes, they are one entity.

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One of my favorite sorts of talks in Church is the origin story.

This one was a doozy.

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There has been much talking and LARPing and movie-making about civil war. We are not so much in the “Loot the Treasury” stage of decline, as the “Burn the Treasury Down” stage of decline. And who will win? That betrays a fundamental misunderstanding. There will be no winners. The only winning move is to not play. This is a war of complete mutual assured destruction.

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Your little daughter wanted to play a four-person card game this evening.  Everyone said, sure, some time … but now everyone is gone.  Busy family.  It’s just you and your wife and your youngest daughter.

So for the fourth player you substitute in a stuffed giraffe.  You pull his cards at random from his hand.

You get slaughtered.  Its not even close.  Giraffis wins going away.

My first series of dreams last night was a jumbled series of vignettes with me as an American kulak being hunted and harassed by a tyrannical revolutionary American regime.  It was not completely unjustified from their perspective.  Though an extremely insignificant figure, I was a thought criminal and had done some mild activism in opposition.

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General Conference Retrospective

Here’s a juxtaposition

Elder Kearon, God’s Intent is to Bring You Home

My wife and I were visiting another country for various Church assignments, I woke up early one morning and looked blearily outside our hotel window. Down below on the busy street, I saw that a roadblock had been set up with a policeman stationed nearby to turn cars around as they reached the barrier. At first, only a few cars traveled along the road and were turned back. But as time went by and traffic increased, queues of cars began to build up.

From the window above, I watched as the policeman seemed to take satisfaction in his power to block the flow of traffic and turn people away. In fact, he seemed to develop a spring in his step, as if he might start doing a little jig, as each car approached the barrier. If a driver got frustrated about the roadblock, the policeman did not appear helpful or sympathetic. He just shook his head repeatedly and pointed in the opposite direction.

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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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We climbed a steep trail that was a mile long. The trail was wet and muddy.

At the top we could see for many miles all around. There were a hundred happy people and a dozen dogs up there. We used eclipse glasses to look at the sun.

When the moon completely blocked the sun, it was dark like it is an hour after sunset. I could see the planets Jupiter and Venus in the sky near the sun. Because the moon was blocking, the sun looked black with a white fringe all around it.
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The Church’s latest statistical report has 17,255,394 members as of the end of the year.  With 93,594  new children of record.

Taken at its face value,  that is a rate of 5.42 births per 1,000 people.  That is lower than any existing country, lower even than vanishing countries like South Korea and Japan which have achieved all time low birth rates.  The good news such as it is: we are up slightly from last year’s 5.24 births per 1,000 people.

However, you probably shouldn’t take it at face value.  What these statistics probably actually mean is that the actual number of members who have any relationship at all with the church is around 3-6 million people and that our birth rates have been dropping pretty badly.  If you assume even fewer actual members the birth rates look better and vice versa.

For comparison, in 1986 we had the same number of children of record with a membership of 6  million (link).

Here’s a more detailed analysis of what our membership and new children of record numbers could mean.

Just How Bad Is Our Birthrate