Year: 2024

A very, very, particular niche subgenre I find educational (“enjoy” isn’t the right word) are accounts of mental health struggles or extreme circumstances by people who really know how to write. For those of us who have never been starving or so depressed that we defecate in our bed because we can’t get out of it, it is hard to know anything about the internal sense experience of those events. I recall reading one account where the writer who had been subjected to torture dismissed the phrase “burn like a red hot iron.” Unless you have been burned by an iron you have no idea what that phrase means, and at some point words just aren’t useful for describing a sensory experience that you haven’t actually gone through because there is no shared reference point. Still, a very good writer can kind of get us there. (For depression for example, William Styron’s Darkness Visible or Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon.)  In Latter-day Saint epistemology, we rely heavily on the spirit, but for some people it’s harder to clear out the detritus to be able to hear it, or for some people their internal dialogue with God just isn’t very reliable for reasons outside their control. I still think God speaks to them, but it’s trickier to suss out the still small voice from all the other voices in the case of some mental health disorders One facet of Latter-day Saint soteriology…

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As a TBM there are a surprising number of issues dealing with religion where I have some agreement with Richard Dawkins, and one of them is that the King James Version is the best version of the Bible.  When I say “best,” I don’t mean “most accurately conveys the oldest documents.” I know there are older arguments that try to argue something along these lines (J. Reuben Clark wrote a booklet about it, but when I was in Stephen Robinson’s class at BYU he didn’t seem to think his arguments held much water), but I have no reason to doubt the idea that newer translations rely on older texts and have less mistranslations.   Still, when choosing a translation that is not the only criteria. The creation of the King James Version really was lightning in a bottle that will probably never be repeated. The most learned people in the land coming together as the English language was coming into its own and at its most lyrical. (It’s been a while, but the book Fire in the Bones: William Tyndale, Martyr, Father of the English Bible by BYU Religion Professor Michael Wilcox does an excellent job describing all of this).  The English language predecessors they relied on such as Tyndale had enough of a handle on the cadence of the English language to really make it sing, while having enough authority in their own right that they could simply create their…

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A few days ago OpenAI released its much-rumored “Strawberry” system titled Chat-GPT4o1. While previous LLMs can provide an impressive writing at, say, the undergraduate level (especially if prompted well), the new system can “think” and plan better for technical concepts, and it can now answer scientific, technical questions more accurately than a PhD in that field. If Chat-GPT4 is undergraduate level, Chat-GPT4o1 is graduate level.  Of particular utility is explaining difficult concepts. For example, I’ve never had anybody explain to me, at a very high level, Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem; it’s the kind of thing where people who are smart enough to understand don’t have the kind of smarts necessary to dumb it down for us mortals, but I asked the new system to explain it in a way that a high schooler can understand and it led me by the hand, step-by-step, until I kind of understood it, again at a high level. So everybody has a really good graduate school-level tutor now.  So, how this is related to the Church? Its ability to tie concepts together and *think* in less formulaic ways means that every Mormon Studies person has a graduate student-level research assistant–that you still need to check, since hallucination is still kind of a problem, but this will especially take off when you can, say, feed thousands of pages of primary source materials and have it produce rather sophisticated, less boiler-plate essays. (Also, anybody…

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  This morning this headline was prominently displayed at the top of the page of CNN (on the mobile version, the Internet version was much more tame to their credit). The version I snapshotted above is newer, the original version had “Mormon” prominently displayed in both the title and the subheading. (It originally said something like “Small town Mormon doctor is accused of abuse…More than 100 former patients say Mormon doctor abused them.”) Of course, if the doctor was a stake president and systematically used his position to abuse most of his victims, then such a headline would have been completely appropriate. However, it is clear when reading the article that he was a sexual abuser that happened to be Mormon. Yes, some of the abuse leveraged Church connections, but I somehow doubt that if there was a Jewish doctor, among whom some of his 100+ victims were some that he knew from his synagogue, that they would prominently display the word “Jewish” two times in the heading and subheading. Of course it would have been appropriate to discuss the synagogue connection to his victims in the body of the article, but prominently displaying it as the main identifier twice is clearly the editor either trying to get clicks by piling onto a not-cool religious groups, or outright malice.  To be clear, I don’t have much to complain about with the body of the article. Out of 128 victims it’s…

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  Years ago I wrote a very high-level, abstract post where I analyzed whether the Church was replacing itself, arguing that a lot of the “growth” we’re seeing is an artifact of population momentum, and that we shouldn’t pat ourselves on our back too much (although we should some, since we’re doing a lot better than most/almost all).  Now that I’ve run some numbers on Latter-day Saint fertility I am going to be more specific with my numbers to make a related point, although here I am putting conversion baptisms to the side and simply asking whether, without missionary activity, we are treading water in terms of membership in the United States.  Of course, this is still very much back-of-the-envelope, but I think I’m in the ballpark.    For any group in the developed world to replace itself they need to have 2.1 children.   According to the last solid estimate, we retain about 64% of our children in the faith.    Therefore, in order to have enough children to offset the children lost to religious switching, we would need to have an average of 3.28 children.    Latter-day Saints in the US have about three children on average.    Therefore, we appear to be slowly declining from generation to generation without taking into account conversions. At that rate each generation is 91% of the size of the previous one.    It is worth noting that this is probably conservative,…

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