Category: Latter-day Saint Thought

  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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A part of the graph, the link below has the whole thing.  Of the big AI players, Anthropic’s Claude is quite good at making diagrams, so I used it to generate an infographic I’ve always wanted to see, something that conveys in one visual how far away from Christ a book in the NT was written, the size of the work, and whether it’s considered “authentic” by scholars, either in the sense that it was written by whoever it claims to be written by (the undisputed Pauline epistles), or whether it has authentic first-hand reports from the time of Christ not found elsewhere (The Synoptic Gospels and Acts). In other words, I want to see which sources are closest to the “historical Jesus.” On one hand I think most historical Jesus research and thought processes get a little carried away about their narrow false negative confidence intervals, but at the same time the premise that the manuscripts closer to Christ could tell us more about Him is valid for most purposes. In order to show the data in year-by-year and to scale the size of the block proportional to the size of the book I created a graph that could not fit onto one page (and I don’t know how to embed it into WordPress), but you can see the a version that you can scroll through here. (Claude now has an “artifacts” feature where you can share the results…

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Monument in Warsaw to Janusz Korczak’s “Last Walk” as he accompanied his orphans to the Treblinka trains. Janusz Korczak is a remarkable figure that is surprisingly almost unknown in the United States despite being quite famous in Europe. A children’s author and pedagogue, his books, particularly King Matt the First about a child who becomes a king and rules like a child was as well known among Poles and Germans as Peter Pan was among British children. (while a lot of classic works of children’s literature don’t hold up anymore, this charming work still does, and is highly recommended). Raised in a formal, upper-class home, he came to envy the street children who were able to play outside, and the rest of his life was spent trying to free children from the unreasonable strictures of adults and to grant them some measure of respect and dignity as individuals. But it was not his writing or child-raising theories that granted him immortality. He was the headmaster of an orphanage of Jewish children during the time that the Jews were being forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, an open-aired, barbed-wire prison. As the Nazis squeezed them tighter and tighter the streets became cluttered with the bodies of frozen and starved refugees and children. While dead adults are obviously tragic, there is.a particular twisted horror and injustice that accompanies the corpses of innocent children (or as Dostoevsky puts it in Brothers Karamazov, “[adults] ate…

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