Category: Latter-day Saint Thought

“God, I thank you that I am not like other people: even like this jock. I watch my language, am always worthy to pass the sacrament, am on the honor roll, and I give a tenth of all my income.” As a note, I put this post in the queue for the 5th a long time ago, not realizing that it was General Conference weekend, I’ll keep it up, but in posting on General Conference Saturday I’m in no way trying to draw attention from what should be drawing your attention today.  With high school almost 20 years in the rearview mirror for me now it’s interesting to see individual trajectories and how they surprise or do not surprise me.   There are myriad topics that could stem from this theme (for example, who would have thought the X-Box junkie became the most objectively accomplished person in our graduating class?) However, given the subject of this blog, and the fact that my high school  was nearly all Latter-day Saint, an obvious variable of interest here is later-life relationship to the Church.  And on this I noticed a seemingly paradoxical theme that I’ve also picked up elsewhere. Many (though not all) of the “goodie good” kids have left. These were the ones who were into seminary council (when that was a thing), drama, and The Beatles (in kind of a faux rebelliousness borrowed from their parents), and who actually read the book…

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Apologies for doing another one of these so soon after the other one, but when it rains it pours. Since I last posted OpenAI released “advanced voice mode” to all plus subscribers. What this means is that the lag we’re used to when talking to AI is now gone, and now it is indiscernible from speaking to a real human being, up to and including detecting sarcasm, humor, and the like. I have been using it to brush up on my very rusty mission Spanish, and now any pre-missionary who wants to go above and beyond and practice, say, giving a first discussion in French with a personalized tutor that will correct their grammar doesn’t have to wait until they enter the MTC. They have put some safeguards in place so that it can’t just clone your voice, but the day when anybody can clone anybody’s voice and automate a thousand bots to call everybody in your phone is coming, so once again please be aware and discuss with your old and sometimes not so old-relatives that a phone call from somebody that sounds just like you asking for money isn’t necessarily you.   Google is still very much playing catch up in the AI wars (and no matter how good they get, their AI will probably always invoke images of Black Nazis). Notebook LM has a fun new functionality that automatically generates a podcast-type back and forth based off…

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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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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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  A few days ago Latter-day Saint apologist Jacob Hansen of A Thoughtful Faith had a debate with noted Catholic apologist of Pints with Aquinas fame Trent Horn that has been garnering some attention.  At the outset, I love these sorts of things. A respectful but straightforward debate about contrasting religious views can help both sides articulate their beliefs and responses better. When a faith does not face explicit doubts and pressures their scalpels become dull. Another example of this in our tradition is Stephen Robinson’s excellent back and forth How Wide the Divide? With Craig Bloomberg. Eminently respectful but not holding anything back.  There’s a long, venerable tradition of structured interfaith debates; even in the Middle Ages Christian kings would sponsor religious debates between Jews and Christians in the great “disputations” (which, given the power imbalance weren’t exactly “anything goes” debates on the part of the Jewish rabbis), and prominent, structured debates between Proto-Protestants and Catholics played a vital role in the early religious fermentation of the Reformation.  However, anybody with proselytizing experience knows that the following literally never happens: two people get into a debate about this or that theological point, one person marshals their argument and convinces the other by sheer reasoning, the other person concedes, loses their faith, and converts to the other faith. When somebody has a strong faith to begin with, some people see the conversion as a two-step process: 1) destroy their initial…

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In the AI world there is a debate swirling about how much AI providers should censor their image generation. Of course there are plenty of things to mock in past attempts to censor or otherwise put a thumb on the scale of AI to be more socially appropriate. Exhibit A of course were the racially diverse, Black SS stormtroopers created by Google Gemini, but anybody who’s spent a decent amount of time using AI has run into these guardrails, and sometimes they can be annoying. I had a tragicomical experience myself in the early days of Midjourney when they didn’t have the fingers right, and when I tried to create a picture of Adam and Eve it gave Adam multiple genitalia. I tried to regenerate the image specifying “no nudity,” and got a warning that I was using a forbidden term and would be banned if I continued to try to create nude images.  The guardrails around religious topics in particular are so strict that it becomes difficult to do anything religious per se, one has to describe a religious scene without invoking religious vocabulary. (I assume the skittishness about depicting religious imagery is really just about depicting Mohammad, but they’re trying to be consistent). However, in the past week or so the world was exposed to an almost completely uncensored AI tool with the release of Elon Musk’s Grok 2 (because of course it’s Elon). All of the sudden…

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I assume they aren’t actually this dour, but what some people envision a disciplinary council looks like. Here I’m not addressing the normative question of whether we should excommunicate, I have already said my piece about that here.  A while ago I was speaking to my stake president and made some humorous quip about him excommunicating people, and he had responded that he had actually never excommunicated anybody before. I was kind of surprised at this, as my father who has served in bishoprics in the 1990s and 2000s referred to disciplinary councils and excommunications during his time. (And yes, I know it’s not technically called “excommunication” anymore, but here I’m using the term to be more pithy).     I have no hard data on this, but I would not be surprised if excommunications are less of a thing nowadays for several reasons.  To some extent the excommunication process requires the consent of the person being disciplined. They could just not show up and/or request their records be removed. Whereas before the Church may have had enough sociocultural heft in some geographic areas to get people to show up, even if there was a call to a disciplinary council I suspect many people just wouldn’t bother (unless, of course, they want to invite a bunch of media and make some point of it).  Of course, they can have one without the person, but generally speaking completely inactive, members-on-records-only are…

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