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Prediction is difficult. Especially about the future.

Prediction is difficult. Especially about the future.

Last updated on: September 17, 2024 at 1:44 pm by Dan Peterson

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Prediction is difficult. Especially about the future. 2024-09-17T13:44:04-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Jason Gallentine took this photograph of Mount Timpanogos a while back on his way home from work. With his kind permission, I share it here. It has no particular connection to the material below, but it’s really strikingly grand. Sometimes, even now, I’m astonished at the beauty of Utah Valley, in which he and I both live.

I want to remind you, yet again, of the Orem, Utah, fireside that is approaching in little more than a week now and of the Interpreter Foundation conference that will follow on the weekend thereafter, on the campus of Brigham Young University:

“Unveiling History: Six Days in August Fireside” (Wednesday, 25 September 2024). Incidentally, I’ve just seen a 32-minute slide show, created by Russ Richins, the producer of Six Days in August, that will, as I understand it, be running prior to the beginning of next week’s fireside. It contains still photos from the movie, as well as photos of cast and crew and sets and so forth, with music running behind them. I liked it very, very much. It gives a sense of the remarkably complex operation and the many people that are required for the production of a feature film. And ours was a relatively small shoestring production team.
Temple on Mount Zion: Seership, “Craftsmanship, and Fellowship”: The Seventh Interpreter Matthew B. Brown Memorial Conference (Saturday, 28 September 2024)

And I call your attention to two new items that have just gone up on the monotonously unchanging website of the Interpreter Foundation:

Interpreter Radio Show — September 8, 2024

During the 8 September 2024 installment of the Interpreter Radio Show, Terry Hutchinson, Kevin Christensen, and Mark Johnson discussed Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon lesson 40, “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” and several other topics.

Recorded and with commercial breaks removed, the 8 September 2024 show has now been archived and made available for your listening pleasure. The “Book of Mormon in Context” portion of this show, for the Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon lesson 40, will also be posted separately on Tuesday, 24 September 2024.

Each and every week of the year, the Interpreter Radio Show can be heard on Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640. If that doesn’t work for you, you can still listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.

Come, Follow Me — Study and Teaching Helps (2024): Lesson 39, September 23-29: 3 Nephi 8-11: “Arise and Come Forth unto Me”

Editor’s Note: Four years ago, Jonn Claybaugh began writing the Study and Teaching Helps series of articles for Interpreter. We now have these wonderful and useful posts for all four years of Come, Follow Me lessons. Beginning this year we will be reposting these articles, with dates, lesson numbers, and titles updated for the current year’s lessons. Jonn has graciously agreed to write new study aids for those lessons that do not directly correspond to 2020 lessons.

John William Waterhouse, “The Crystal Ball” (1902)

Prediction, as the saying goes, is very difficult. Especially when it’s about the future.

Somewhat more than eleven and a half years ago on a far-away message board, a pseudonymous critic took it upon himself to prophesy. And this is what he said. This is what that critic said:

By Jan. 1, 2014 Interpreter will be dead. . . . Either totally dead or down to token “blog” style postings. (Bond James Bond, 25 January 2013)

The Interpreter Foundation was about five and a half months old when he pronounced his oracle. Today, it’s somewhat more than twelve years of age.

He seems to have disappeared for quite a while, not emitting even token “blog”-style postings. But he’s now back (under an abbreviated but recognizable pseudonym). And, obviously buoyed by the precision, accuracy, and success of his previous exercise in vaticination — Interpreter has long been almost totally dead, and barely on life-support — he has recently returned to prophecy.

Within a hundred years, he predicts, there will be only a million members in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, although it will have an investment fund of a trillion dollars.

Alas, though, it will obviously be a little bit difficult — a century from now — for him, or for anybody who saw his latest prophecy when it appeared, or for any of us here to confirm or deny his accuracy.

Happily, though, one of Bond’s disciples — “Deutero-Bond,” one might call her — has stepped forward to revise the initial prophecy: Says Deutero-Bond, the Church will count only a million members (and a trillion dollars in assets?) within just ten years!

Now, this is a prophecy that many of us living today will still be around to verify.

Curiously, the zest for prophesying seems to have become contagious. Another in the same online location has declared that Dallin H. Oaks will prove the downfall of the Church. Which should, given even a minimal knowledge of actuarial science, be a testable prediction. I’m reminded of a little-known textual variant of 1 Samuel 10:10-11:

And when they came thither to the hill, behold, a company of prophets met him; and the Spirit of Bond came upon him, and he prophesied among them.

And it came to pass, when all that knew him beforetime saw that, behold, he prophesied among the prophets, then the people said one to another, What is this that is come unto the son of Shirts? Is Kerry also among the prophets?

I’m also reminded of an editorial that appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune following the death of Brigham Young on 29 August 1877. It read, in part, as follows:

The Mormon church was stronger at four o’clock Sunday afternoon than it ever will again become; the remarkable will and organizing force of the dead leader departed with him, and have been transmitted to none other in his church; and we may now watch with complacency, if not with joy, the gradual disintegration of the whole Mormon fabric.

It’s understandably tempting to gawk. But is it worth the accompanying traffic jam? Is it worth the delay? It’s far better, I’m convinced, to just take an alternate route if one is available.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I’ve been accused by at least one (predictable) anonymous critic of being obsessed with Hulu’s miniseries The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. The accusation is (predictably) false; I haven’t watched so much as a second of it, and I very likely never will, not just out of principle and protest but because I’m just not interested and I have too many other, better, things to do. And I probably won’t ever think about it again after it has receded into the rear-view mirror. My world will go on quite unchanged.

Right now, though, my news feed is absolutely bursting with articles about The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, very often to the exclusion of anything else, and it’s apparently drawing considerably more attention than its subject merits. (As I’ve said before, I’m astonished and somewhat discouraged at the interest it seems to have generated in some circles.) Here are two pieces on the subject that I did read, however, and that I can recommend to you and to others:

Travel and Religion

History and Religion

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives

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