Showing all posts by Ziff

In General Conference

General Conference Predictions

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments

General Conference starts tomorrow, and this provides all kinds of opportunities to speculate about what changes in the Church it might bring. Of course we can speculate before every Conference, but this one is particularly ripe given that there will be two new members of the Quorum of the Twelve called, and that it will be President Nelson’s first Conference. President Monson was unwell for years, so there may have been big decisions that the other Q15 members left unmade. Now, with President Nelson appearing to be in good health, he may move forward with some items that had been on hold.

Here’s my speculation about the new Quorum of the Twelve members: They will be white, and will have a strong connection to Utah. Risky speculation, I know! Seriously, though, I was extremely disappointed in 2015 when, even with three Q12 positions to fill at the same time, President Monson still couldn’t bring himself to call a person of color to the Quorum. My guess is that President Nelson will be even less likely to do so. Also, given how much he clearly loves God’s Most Holy and Most Blessed Order of the Eternal and Most Divine Gender Roles, Which Were and Are from All Eternity to All Eternity, I’m betting that he won’t call anyone like Elder Renlund to the Quorum. Elder Renlund’s wife had (gasp) a career, and to make it worse, only one child. I really doubt that President Nelson could see someone like him as being faithful enough. So my expectation is not just two older white men with ties to Utah, but two older white men with ties to Utah who are descended from polygamists and whose wives were SAHMs and had plenty of kids.

A question that might be even bigger than who the new Q12 members will be is whether President Nelson will canonize the Family Proclamation. This seems like the perfect example of an issue that was left in limbo with President Monson’s deteriorating health, that President Nelson might jump to solve. Really, though, after reading a bunch of discussions on the Bloggernacle and on Facebook, I’ve come to agree with those who argue that it doesn’t really matter if he does or not. One of my sisters pointed out that for the FamProc to enter the canon would kind of be a step down. The canon is what we read now and again and pull proof texts out of. The FamProc is what we love so much that we hang it on our walls! It’s better than canon. What I really expect is that, rather than canonizing it, President Nelson will borrow some lines from Joseph Smith and tell us that “The Family Proclamation is the most correct of any proclamation on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man will get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other proclamation.” That’s what he’ll do: cement its place as super-canon.

It also might be worth wondering whether President Nelson, or any of the other speakers, will mention all the fallout from the Joseph Bishop scandal. My guess would be no, both considering the timing–all the news has broken so close to Conference, and talks are planned well in advance–and the content–GAs won’t want to bring the issue to the attention of anyone who hasn’t already heard about it. This is a topic like polygamy, where the Church will probably be sure to keep any of its responses carefully out of the way of most members, to avoid causing more trouble than they solve. Kind of like the Gospel Topics essays.

What do you think will happen at Conference?

 

In Church Policy

It is the nature and disposition of almost all men

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

Like many Americans, I have had a new appreciation for the existence of checks on the President’s power since Donald Trump was elected. They may not always work as they were intended to, but I’m glad that at least the framers were concerned about the question.

The organization of the US government (and of many other governments) is a striking contrast in this way to the organization of the LDS Church. As the Joseph Bishop story sadly shows, there really aren’t checks on the power of LDS church leaders. I mean, there are in cases where they do outrageous things in public, or if they get on the bad side of leaders over them. But what I’m talking about here is that if a church leader does awful things in private to the people he’s presiding over, then the victims have pretty much no recourse. A situation like this can always be reduced to he said/she said, and the presumption of higher-level church authorities appears to pretty much always be that the accused leader is innocent. The woman assaulted by Joseph Bishop reports having raised years later to her then-bishop, but he said he found her accusations not credible, based on the simple fact that Bishop had been called to several high callings in the Church.

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In GA's, Priesthood, Women

Women Are Like Hydrogen

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

I read some discussion on Facebook recently of a diagram showing the organization of the Church. I think the diagram was something like what’s shown in this post, but I’m not completely sure. Whatever the exact details of the diagram, what’s important about it is that the structure it showed included only men: First Presidency, Quorum of the Twelve, Seventies, stake presidents, bishops, etc. The striking thing was its exclusion of women.

I don’t fault the person who made the diagram or whoever shared it. It looked to me like it accurately captured how the Church is structured. If women are included anywhere, it’s at the margins, and perhaps informally, if any of the men in positions of authority ever discuss issues they’re facing with their wives.

I do think it’s interesting, though, that to be included in the hierarchy, men must be married. Bishops I think have to be married by rule. I’m not sure if it’s a rule for the other positions, but if it isn’t, it’s at least an extremely strong norm. The fact that each of these men is married but that their wives aren’t shown reminded me of diagrams of the structures of molecules that one of my kids was showing me recently. In at least some forms of these diagrams, most hydrogen atoms are not included explicitly. They are just assumed to be bonded at each atom where they would be required for the atom to have the right number of valence electrons.

Here’s an example, courtesy of the NIH’s PubChem website:

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In Belief, Church Life, Statistics

Are Mormons More Homogeneous in Belief than Members of Other Churches?

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

Since she started attending church with the Episcopalians, I’ve heard my sister Lynnette observe that members of her new church appear to have a much broader range of beliefs than Mormons do. I guess I had never really thought about this, but if it’s true, this seems like maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising. There is lots of pressure to conform in Mormonism, all the way from scriptures that have Jesus saying “I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine” to talks that exhort members to set aside the cultures they grew up in to join “the gospel culture.” And of course, this doesn’t even touch on the pressure at the local level to conform. Consider, for example, the immense backlash faced by women who participated in the “wear pants to church” actions a few years ago. They were not even going against a rule of any kind, but rather violating a norm and standing out, and this made a lot of rank-and-file members appear to lose their minds. I don’t have a very good sense of the Episcopal Church in general, but I’m guessing that, like many American Protestants, they are simply less top-down in their structure than Mormons are, so there’s more room for differences of opinion or even belief.

Really, though, what I thought would be even more interesting than reasoning out why or why not Mormons might be more homogeneous in belief than members of other churches, would be to see if there were any empirical evidence of this difference. It occurred to me that a great place to look would be the data gathered by the Pew Research Center in their Religious Landscape Study. It’s a US sample only, so it misses the larger fraction of Church membership that lives elsewhere, but it does represent the largest single concentration of Mormons in one country. I looked at Pew’s 2014 data. As these data are a few years old, they’ve already been discussed quite a bit on the Bloggernacle. I am coming at the results from a new angle, though. Rather than focusing on the particular answers respondents gave, I am interested in how similar the sets of answers are for members of the same church, regardless of what the particular answers are.

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In Fun, GA's

An Agenda for President Nelson’s First 40 Days in Office

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments

Day 1: Demote Dieter F. Uchtdorf to regular old member of the Quorum of the Twelve.
Day 2: Talk to the staff at the Ensign and lds.org, and tell them to get the women out of the centerfold in the Conference issues and off the General Authorities page.
Day 3: Get to work editing hymns. In verse 2 of “In Humility, Our Savior,” change the beginning of the second verse from “Fill our hearts with sweet forgiving; Teach us tolerance and love” to “Make our hearts obedient to thee; Teach us who we must not love.”
Day 4: Schedule a tour to promote Sister Nelson’s book The Not Even Once Club.
Day 5: Compose a letter to be read in all sacrament meetings that exhorts members to leave some positive reviews of The Not Even Once Club on Amazon.com.
Day 6: Work with Sister Nelson on her manuscript tentatively titled The Don’t Even Think About It Club.
Day 7: Announce a new, improved exclusion policy that bans the children of parents in a gay marriage from entering meetinghouses.
Day 8: Demote Dieter F. Uchtdorf to Seventy.
Day 9: Talk to the facilities management staff about getting those pesky “Visitors Welcome” signs taken down from meetinghouses.
Day 10: Send out a decree that all sacrament meetings must include a reading of the Proclamation on the Family.

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In GA's, Statistics

Yearly Church President Probabilities for Current Q15 Members

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments

As a supplement to yesterday’s post, I’ve made the graph below that shows the year-to-year probabilities of each Q15 member being President.

The values come from the same mortality table that I used to run the simulation to find the likelihood of each Q15 member ever becoming Church President. This graph doesn’t require any simulation, though. For each Q15 member, I just used his yearly probabilities of survival to come up with yearly cumulative probabilities of survival (i.e., how likely is he to live through this age). Then for each Q15 member, his yearly probability of becoming President is the probability that he survives the year and that all the members senior to him do not. This is found by multiplying probabilities, so for example for Elder Ballard, who is junior only to President Nelson and Elder Oaks, his probability of being President in a particular year is this:

(Ballard cumulative probability of living)*(1 – Nelson probability of living)*(1 – Oaks probability of living)

The results look similar to what we’ve seen in the past with graphs like this, in that there are big probabilities across periods of years for Elders Oaks, Holland, and Bednar. The one big difference is that, as el oso noted yesterday, President Nelson jumped from a pretty low probability for most of his time in the quorum to 100% when President Monson died. I guess this just illustrates that applying a mortality table that gives general trends to a small group of people as I have here is bound to be wrong in big ways at times.

 

In GA's, Statistics

Church President Probability Changes with President Monson’s Death

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

As you are no doubt aware, President Monson passed away Tuesday evening. As I have before when a member of the Q15 passes away, in this post I’ll show how the probabilities of becoming Church President change for the other members as a result.

All the probabilities come from a simulation I did for a post back in 2015. It’s a straightforward simulation: it uses an actuarial table and each Q15 member’s age and seniority in the quorum as inputs, and it draws a series of random numbers to simulate different possible life expectancies for each member. The life expectancies are then compared to find in what fraction of the simulations each member outlives all other members senior to him to become President. I did 100,000 replications for each run. That is, 100,000 times I drew random numbers for each Q15 member and compared them to his survival probability each year, and then worked out whether each member would become President or not in that scenario, and how many years he would serve if he did. For a more detailed description of the process, see my earlier post.

I realized when writing this post up that I had never done a post to show changes in the probabilities after Elder Hales passed away last October. I’ll start with that. This table shows the changes in probabilities and average number of years serving as President for the other Q15 members after Elder Hales died. Note that all the numbers, including ages, are as of October, 2017.

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In Blogging, Fun

Nacle Notebook 2017: Funny Comments

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments I’ve read on the Bloggernacle in the past year. In case you’ve missed them, here are links to previous years’ posts: 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008. I’m very good with numbers, so I can tell that the fact that there are nine old ones and one new one means that this is my tenth annual post! It seems like this calls for a celebration of some kind, but I’m not sure what form that should take.

Anyway, back to the comments. Most that I’m quoting are excerpts from longer comments or posts. I’ve made each commenter’s name a link back to the original comment or post. The comments are roughly in chronological order.

fbisti, commenting on LDS_Aussie’s post “Lies, Damn lies and Statistics?: Growth and Decline in the LDS Church Membership Numbers” at W&T:

God is fickle (depending on who is the stake president).

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In Fun, Hymns, Music

Ring Out, Mild Bells!

Author ZiffPosted on

The Curriculum Department has received a number of complaints that Hymn #215 was promoting wildness among Church members, particularly some of the youth. There have even been reports of unwholesome recreational activities linked to singing of this hymn. We are pleased to offer this newly revised version, which will replace the existing version when the hymnbook is next revised in 2045.

Ring out, mild bells, but be restrained,
Keep decibels low, keep echoes brief.
The year is leaving like a thief;
Ring out mild bells, but keep noise contained.
The year is leaving like a thief;
Ring out mild bells, but keep noise contained.

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In Priesthood, Temple

Leaked Memo on the Effects of Non-Priesthood Cooties (NPC)

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

In the wake of the Church’s recent announcement that young women will be allowed to hand out towels in the temple (and that priest-aged young men will be able to perform and witness baptisms for the dead), the following memo to the First Presidency that preceded the change has been leaked by an unnamed source in the Church hierarchy.

Executive summary

Recent research and revelation indicates that infection with Non-Priesthood Cooties (NPC) would not prohibit young women from handing out towels in the temple, and it is recommended that the current restriction on them doing so be lifted. No other changes in women’s or young women’s participation in priesthood ordinances are recommended, as NPC infection continues to be a serious concern in all other such situations.

Background

As the adornment of humanity, women and girls are, from birth, infected with Non-Priesthood Cooties (NPC) that prevent them from participating in priesthood ordinances in any way. (Note that NPC infection also makes it possible for women to become pornography.) Women’s NPC may even threaten the efficacy and validity of the ordinances themselves if women and girls get too close to them. The threat of NPC extends even to serving as a witness, a fact which has been known to prophets ancient and modern. For example, it is recorded in the New Testament that when the Savior was resurrected, and well-meaning female disciples attempted to convey this information to authorized priesthood leaders, Peter rightly doubted their testimony and believed it only when he had verified the event for himself. Although the women testified truthfully in this case, Peter was doubtless responding to previous situations in which the women’s NPC infection had prevented them from witnessing correctly.

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In Christmas, Fun

Christmas Classics, Mormonized

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Ostracized by his family and friends because of his freakish red nose, Rudolph the reindeer runs away to the Island of Misfit Toys. While there, he learns about the Unwritten Order of Things and realizes that even though Santa’s secret Reindeer Handbook explicitly says that nose color doesn’t matter when reindeer are chosen to pull his sleigh on Christmas Eve, what this actually means is that nose color conformity is absolutely essential. Armed with this knowledge, Rudolph decides to undergo a painful operation to permanently change the color of his nose. He is welcomed with open hooves when he returns to his family and friends, and he secures a coveted spot on Santa’s reindeer team.

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In Missionary Work, Missions, Statistics, Uncategorized

What fraction of missionaries are sisters?

Author ZiffPosted on 6 Comments

It has been five years since President Monson announced the change in minimum ages at which missionaries can serve. It’s clear that much of the increase in the number of missionaries that followed that announcement came from an increase in how many women were choosing to serve. For example, a 2015 ABC News article on sister missionaries reports (I assume quoting a Church spokesperson) that there were 22,000 sister missionaries at the time, that they made up more than a quarter of all missionaries, and that their numbers had nearly tripled since the age change was announced. Along similar lines, a Deseret News article from one year after the age change reports that there had been increases of 10,000 elders and 11,000 sisters in the previous year. There’s also a Deseret News article from 2014 that gives actual percentage breakdowns: 64% single men, 28% single women, and 8% senior couples.

This increase matches my anecdotal experience. I haven’t tracked anything systematically, but just from following friends on Facebook, it seems like a lot more families who I would have thought were pretty conventionally Mormon have sent daughters on missions in the past few years than did before. I note that they’re conventional because my impression is that having women serve missions before the age change always seemed to me to be a little out of the norm. Like the thinking was that it was a nice thing to do and all, but really shouldn’t women be getting married instead?

It’s great that the news articles I mentioned give some point-in-time snapshots of how many women are serving missions, but what I’m really interested to know is what the trend over time is. For example, I wonder if the number of women serving increased suddenly right after the age change, but then leveled off. Or perhaps it increased at that time, and has continued to increase since then. Or maybe there was a temporary spike and then the number of women serving have decreased.

Like with so many other questions about Church-related data, I’m sure the numbers are available somewhere in the COB, but I’m never going to get to see them. So I did the next best thing and gathered a little data from what I could find. I considered possibilities like counting women and men in missionary alumni Facebook groups, or on a website like LDSMissions.com that allows returned missionaries to register and join a group of others who served in the same mission (although it doesn’t look like the site has been updated in a while). I ended up, though, choosing to gather data from MyMission.com, though, for a couple of reasons. First, it has lists of links to missionary blogs in a nice standard format that was relatively easy to grab. Second, it has missionaries listed as “Sister” or “Elder,” so I didn’t have to make any assumptions about whether someone with a particular first name was female or male.

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In Names, Statistics

Book of Mormon people’s names my parents give to me!

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

In my last post, I looked at how often children in Utah, Idaho, and Arizona are named after the current Church President. I thought it also might be interesting to look at how often children are named after people in the Book of Mormon. One advantage of looking at Book of Mormon names is that it doesn’t require me to limit myself to states with lots of Mormons. If you’re naming your child Nephi, you’re probably Mormon, regardless of where you live. The downside, of course, is that this rules out names that are not unique to the Book of Mormon. For example, someone naming their child Benjamin may be thinking of the Book of Mormon king, but there are many other Benjamins out there that their choice was more likely inspired by.

Because using a Book of Mormon name is a clear marker of Mormonness, there’s even good reason to have a hypothesis beforehand about what the data will look like. In The Angel and the Beehive, Armand Mauss talks about the Church’s shift between the 1960s and 1990s from leaning toward assimilation with the broader world, toward more retrenchment. I think it would make sense to expect that Mormons would use more distinctly Mormon names during a period of retrenchment, when drawing bright lines between the Church and the world is an important practice, than during a period of assimilation. Therefore, I expected to see increasing usage of Book of Mormon names between the 1960s and 1990s.

I got data from the same sources as I did for my last post: the Social Security Administration (SSA) name database for counts of how often names are used by state and year from 1960 to 2014, and CDC Vital Statistics reports for counts of total births by state and year for the same time period. Here is an alphabetical list of the Book of Mormon names I checked:

Abinadi, Abish, Helaman, Jarom, Lehi, Limhi, Mahonri, Mormon, Moroni, Mosiah, Nephi, Omni, Sariah, Teancum, Zeniff

I looked at the girls’ names first: Abish and Sariah. Unfortunately, Abish only shows up in three of the years (1999, 2000, and 2003). The SSA database doesn’t report counts of less than five (for either a state or the entire country), so it’s likely that the name was used in other years, but just fewer than five times. For Sariah, I ran into a different problem. I thought it was a uniquely Book of Mormon name, but while the SSA data shows elevated levels of usage in Utah, Idaho, and Arizona, the name also appears in lots of other states. Overall, Utah, Idaho, and Arizona account for only 11% of uses of the name. I wonder if it isn’t being used by people not referring to the Book of Mormon as an alternative spelling of Saria or another takeoff on Sara(h). In any case, given that the name doesn’t appear to be an indicator of Mormonness, I put it in the non-unique bin with names like Benjamin.

For three of the boys’ names, I found no hits at all: Limhi, Mormon, and Zeniff. Because of the reporting threshold of five, this doesn’t mean these names are never used, but if they are, it’s clearly very rare.

The remainder of my analysis looks at just the remaining ten names. Here’s a graph showing how often they are used in the full US data.

To me, the big surprise here is Jarom. I would never have guessed that it would be used most among the list of names I started with. I included it kind of as an afterthought, since he’s such a minor character.

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In Statistics

Follow the Prophet(‘s Name)

Author ZiffPosted on 6 Comments

Do Mormons name our kids after the current Church President? I’ve known some people who have (or at least I’m assuming that was their inspiration–Hinckley seems like an unusual name to use for any other reason), but I wondered if it was a more general phenomenon.

Unfortunately, I don’t have Mormon-specific naming data, nor do I have data from outside the US. What I do have is the Social Security name database, which gives yearly counts of names used by state. So I thought it might be interesting to at least look at whether states with lots of Mormons use names of Church Presidents more often than other US states, especially starting around the time a Church President is called. I assembled the name data and the yearly birth count data from the CDC’s Vital Statistics reports as described in this post from last year. As in that post, I got data for the years 1960 through 2014.

I checked the first and last names of all Church Presidents since David O. McKay, although as he became Church President in 1951, I couldn’t check whether there was a change at that time. I compared the percentage of babies given those names in Utah, Idaho, and Arizona, and also the percentage in the rest of the US. The Social Security data reports counts separately for girls and boys, so I checked each name for both.  For nearly all the Presidents’ names, I couldn’t see any evidence of the pattern I was looking for. Either the states with lots of Mormons used the name less than the rest of the country, or they hardly used the name at all, or there was no change around the time the President having the name was called.

There are three exceptions, where there is at least a hint that something is going on. All (not surprisingly) are for boys. The names are Spencer (W. Kimball), (Howard W.) Hunter, and Thomas (S. Monson). Here is the graph for Spencer.

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In Modesty

A Correlated Excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

It has come to the attention of the Church Correlation Department that many parts of the Bible have not passed Correlation review prior to being included in the scriptural canon. Rather than go through a lengthy and complex process of decanonization, the Correlation Department has undertaken to simply rewrite the unreviewed parts to smooth off the rough edges. The resulting updated scriptures will preserve the gospel truths present in the original, but will remove the false philosophies of men that have been inserted by evil and conspiring scribes. The resulting version, when completed, will be called the Sacred Holy Inspired Translation.

Today’s updated scripture comes from Matthew 5.

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

But I say unto you, That whatsoever woman causeth a man to look on her to lust after her by any means hath forced him to commit adultery already with her in his heart. And the blame for this adultery shall be on the woman for not covering herself: the man is blameless.

And if the right shoulder of a woman thou seest causeth thee to lust, cover it up: for it is profitable for thee that thy women should be covered, that thou lust not, that thou should not be cast into hell.

And if the right knee of a woman thou seest causeth thee to lust, cover it up also: for it is profitable for thee that thy women should be covered, that thou lust not, that thou should not be cast into hell.

(Previous entry in this series: The Correlated Story of Zelophehad’s Daughters)

 

In Music, Sacrament, Sacrament Meeting, Statistics

Sacrament Hymns, Ranked (by length)

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

I have a priest-aged son, and seeing him administer the sacrament has made me pay more attention to the process than I had since I was a priest myself. One issue that I noticed last week was that the sacrament hymn seemed really short, and my son and the other priest hadn’t finished breaking the bread by the time it was over. Of course this isn’t all that unusual. The organist just played through the hymn again while they finished. It was only a matter of a few seconds, but it brought to mind that when I was a priest, I always worried about this happening, because I could feel the pressure of everyone in the congregation waiting for me to just hurry up and finish.

This got me to wondering, though, about how long the sacrament hymns actually are. I looked up the 30 hymns listed under the topic “sacrament” in the back of the hymnbook. (They are all grouped together between hymn numbers 169 and 197, except for #146, “Gently Raise the Sacred Strain.”) I calculated the length of each hymn given its time signature, number of measures and verses, and suggested tempo (I used the midpoint of the lengths implied by taking the fastest and slowest of the suggested tempos.) I included only the verses actually printed in the music because, at least in my experience, it’s typically only those verses that are sung. I didn’t make any adjustment for fermatas.

Here’s the result. It looks like most sacrament hymns are between 1:30 and 3:00 long. A few are shorter. A few are quite a bit longer.

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In Faith

A Thought about Faith-promoting Stories

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

Every faith-promoting story is also a faith-destroying story. I don’t mean just stories that are passed off as faith promoting but that are more about something else (like over-controlling parents) or stories that turn out to have been embellished. I mean all of them. A faith-promoting story has a conflict to it–someone is stuck in some difficult situation–and that conflict is resolved miraculously. The level of drama involved in the miracle varies a lot, of course. Some miracles are definitely showier than others. Some are quieter, perhaps boiling down to the person realizing that what they thought was a conflict actually wasn’t when they approached it a different way. The reason that faith-promoting stories are also faith-destroying is that for any particular conflict a person faces in such a story, multitudes of other people have faced the same conflict and have not gotten the same miraculous resolution. (It’s the fact that most people don’t get the miracle that makes it a miracle; if it were commonplace, it wouldn’t be miraculous.) This raises the obvious question of why the miracle comes to the one person and not to the others. And there typically isn’t a good answer to this question. God can seem awfully fickle when doling out miracles.

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In Fun

Why steal a sculpture of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young?

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

Four people stole a sculpture of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young from a Salt Lake business park earlier this week. The sculpture, which depicts the two men sitting together on a bench, has already been recovered, but the thieves’ motive remains unknown.

Here are ten theories for why the thieves might have stolen the sculpture. Please share yours in the comments.

  • They were acting on behalf of Jon McNaughton, who had plans to sculpt Donald Trump sitting on the bench next to Joseph and Brigham. Read More