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This post came from http://www.staylds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4065#p54706 ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://www.staylds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4065#p54706 mackay11 wrote:But simple maths tell me that it was never God’s intention for the majority of his children to need mormonism in this life and I imagine it won’t exist in the next.
This may be evident to everyone else here, but this was a profound thought that I had never thought of before. Thank you for sharing it. It bears consideration.
The party-line answer would be that the living members of the church would make up the numbers in doing temple work for the billions who have lived and died on earth. I wonder if anyone good with numbers has ever done an analysis on how long it would take for the adult population of the church who are temple-recommend worthy and within reasonable distance of a temple to do (time-wise) all of the ordinances that happen in the temple for every person who has ever lived. Surely someone could run the numbers of science’s best guess at how many humans have lived on earth from the dawn of the species to today and see how long it would actually take us to do one ordinance of each kind for every person who has lived? It takes 2 hours to do an endowment, a minute to do a sealing, a minute to do initiatory, and probably two minutes to do both baptism and confirmation. There are some time parameters here that can surely calculate, but I’m not good with numbers and would surely make significant mistakes.
What it comes down to is “if the whole church did nothing but temple work day and night for 1000 years, how many people could have their work done?” Is it even possible to give this opportunity to every man and woman who has ever lived (not even considering the question of how we will know the names of the herders who lived on the steppes 4500 years ago, etc.) given the size of the church, or will the church have to expand greatly to just turn into a temple-work steam engine barreling down the tracks doing nothing else for centuries?
I have very little time right now but here’s some numbers to Help you. Modern humans have existed for around 50,000 years and around 107,000,000,000 have been born as a best estimate.
http://www.livescience.com/18336-human-population-dead-living-infographic.html ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://www.livescience.com/18336-human-population-dead-living-infographic.html I don’t care about the math or anything related to interpreting temple work literally. That just doesn’t do anything for me. I love what I see as the cosmology of the temple and believe it’s about what the concepts are supposed to do to us.
I don’t think it is incredibly helpful to look at it this way, but if you just want the math: 100,000,000,000 estimated total people born on this planet.
14,000,000 reported LDS members
20% estimated members have temple recommend (remember the church has a loose definition of membership for record keeping, and a large percentage are children)
So 100,000,000,000 รท 2,800,000 Temple record holders = more than 35,000 sessions each.
Although if the millenium really lasts 1,000 years, that’s not even 1 per week per TR holder so from a pure logistics standpoint, it doesn’t sound all that impossible.
Simple answer – Jesus visited the spirits in prison, so perhaps anyone dead prior to 33AD has a hall pass. Wjclerk, I went through a similar process and thought it must be impossible. I came out with a similar figure, each member would need to somewhere between 2 and 8/month for 1000 years,depending estimates of TRW members and population. Even if it’s 8/month it made me wonder what else the millennium was going to even be for. We’re taught the millennium is for doing the rest of our temple work, but that might only take a few hours/week. What will we do with the rest of the time?
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