DiscussMormonism.com

As many of you probably know, Russia is facing an existential crisis: its population is shrinking. This is caused primarily by a low birthrate, although a high mortality rate is also an important factor. The birthrate in Russia is only 11.8 (births per thousand—these numbers all come from the UN). That is even lower than China’s 11.9. The United States is doing a little better, coming in at 13.7.

Pretend the Church was a nation with a population equal to its membership count. Say the “new members of record” represented this nation’s births. If this new nation was added to the UN’s list of 199 other countries, the Church’s birth rate of 8.3 (120k births/14.4MM members * 1000) would come in 199th place out of 200, with a birth rate lower than Japan’s (8.5), and slightly higher than that of Bosnia (8.2).

With a birthrate of 8.3 births per thousand, is the church growing exponentially?

Of course the birthrate of Mormons is really much greater than that of the Japanese. The real truth of the matter is that of the 14.4 million people on the church’s records, many are actually dead, and many more are so inactive that the children they had were not added as members of record. This significant baggage of non-participating members is a major reason why this nominal membership number we’re talking about isn’t going to grow exponentially for the next 70 years.

By the way, I originally made this post on another board.

Analytics wrote:By the way, I originally made this post on another board.

How did that go over?

MrStakhanovite wrote:

Analytics wrote:By the way, I originally made this post on another board.

How did that go over?

It's an interesting thread, but it was pretty-much dead when I posted this.

The thread was a follow-up to my church growth predictions from 10 years ago. Most of the responses were pretty congenial, although there were a few Kevin Graham moments. It did get kind of interesting towards the end when a BYU statistics professor joined the thread to tell me that my analysis was awful and that I was simply lucky that so far, I've been right.

Where did you get 120k new members? I thought it was much higher than that. It doesn't surprise me that the growth rate is artificially low because they are using accurate new member numbers against an inflated 14 million member total.

Analytics wrote:It did get kind of interesting towards the end when a BYU statistics professor joined the thread to tell me that my analysis was awful and that I was simply lucky that so far, I've been right.

Who was this?

DarkHelmet wrote:Where did you get 120k new members? I thought it was much higher than that. It doesn't surprise me that the growth rate is artificially low because they are using accurate new member numbers against an inflated 14 million member total.

120k new "members of record", or whatever they call it now, which presumably means new babies being blessed.

MrStakhanovite wrote:

Analytics wrote:It did get kind of interesting towards the end when a BYU statistics professor joined the thread to tell me that my analysis was awful and that I was simply lucky that so far, I've been right.

Who was this?

Dr. Bruce Schaalje.

Analytics wrote:

DarkHelmet wrote:Where did you get 120k new members? I thought it was much higher than that. It doesn't surprise me that the growth rate is artificially low because they are using accurate new member numbers against an inflated 14 million member total.

120k new "members of record", or whatever they call it now, which presumably means new babies being blessed.

There are a few problems with your analysis. First, the 14.4 million is an inaccurate number to begin with since this includes all possible Mormons, whether they believe in the Church any longer or not (and some may be dead). Also, "members of record" are babies that are only blessed in the church. Due to the ban of women participating in priesthood ordinances, progressive Mormon families bless their children at home where the women can participate in the blessing; or they belong to children of members that go to other churches (or no church at all). These children are not included in this figure and so your count of actual children born to these 14.4 million members is wildly off.

I read over some of the postings on that MDD thread, and I thought that Prof. Schaalje's treatment of you was remarkably callous, uncivil, and antagonistic. I thought I recognized his name when he began posting, and sure enough, it seems that he's part of the Skinny-L/FARMS crew:

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... m=1&id=376

Prof. S. wrote:Critically reviewing this book is difficult in that it feels a bit like critiquing a testimony.

Then why review it? Simply because you are a Mopologist?

My concern and disappointment in this section is that after mentioning the potential advantages of incorporating statistical ideas into the gathering of NDE data, Gibson reverses himself. He claims that statistical criticisms of NDE research could be viewed as the "epitome of arrogance" because NDEs are crafted by God for the needs of specific individuals and not for the needs of researchers. Somehow this means that statistical criticisms are no longer valid.

In the book proper, he gives no details on the derivation of these probabilities. He simply states them, with references to their sources.

Several things about this discussion concern me.

This next one is a real howler:

Second, Gibson's sources for his probability calculations were not from mainstream scientific literature. If the references had been, I would have been more comfortable, trusting that they had been properly derived and peer reviewed.

In spite of all this, Schaalje is relatively gentlemanly in his review--he's nowhere near as vicious as the more typical MI Mopologists; that said, he is much more hostile and aggressive in his responses to Analytics on MDD. I can't help but wonder if one of the MI apologists was watching the thread and sent an email to Schaalje in the hopes that he would "go to war for the cause."