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I know I am giving myself away as old and out of touch. Is it good, or bad, or something else, to be "gobsmacked", according to the current lexicon among our young people?

We might have forgotten to watch the videos today.

I feel like we need another meeting to discuss the new schedule 😅 I teach GD and a guy in our class who attends every week was gobsmacked to learn that he would be attending Sunday school AND priesthood every week. I told him it was his fault that we had to spend the entire class time watching the videos. ☠️🤣 and then we had to go to RS and watch another video and discuss yet again! Apparently I did not get enough because here I am talking about it again. Heaven forbid bigger changes than this.

Best to you too, Navidad. God brings good out of bad, out of weakness. I hope you and Mrs. Navi the best. God knows what that is for each individually. Its a tough life for most. Keep on. We are getting towards the end. Keep on. We still have maybe greater strength than ever we have known, when we are frail in body. God love you and Mrs. Navidad.

I get this idea and I somewhat agree with it and personally think that one can have meaningfull worship on a noisy, crowded bus too, but if the decorations, the music, the sounds, the design don't help people be in the right headspace why does anyone have them at all? It's because it helps those who are willing to try to get in the right space get there. I think what is wanted in chapels by those who complain is a change of focus. It wasn't all that long ago that the church said the hallways and foyers should have pictures that focus on Christ, yet the room where he is worshipped in a meeting house has no pictures/statues of Christ. So are most of those who are complaining they are not ornate enough really meaning they are not fancy enough or do they just mean the chapels themselves don't remind them of Christ?

That is the hardest part of my health issues for me.

I posted within minutes of your non-edited post. I did not see the part about the catacombs. I assumed you were talking about unadorned simple Catholic churches where the mass either could or would not be as meaningfully experienced as in Notre Dame. I reacted, because my little community has two very non-adorned Catholic churches. They also have no heat or air-conditioning. So they are quite uncomfortable for the parishioners. Ditto for the Pentecostal Assembly of God church in our village. But I would not call them dreadful and undesirable settings. I thought you were doing so. Then, I left the room for a few minutes and came back and deleted my post (still not having seen the catacombs part). I just decided that my one post today was one too many, so I deleted my second one. My truth about today is that my wife and I both are having very bad health days today. I regret it when I am not up to taking the very best care of her. I was worried that truth was eeking out into my posts. That in and of itself might be a dreadful and undesirable thing. Best, Navidad

I am unclear which lane you picked. What binary lane do you put someone who is born intersexed?

For sure. The church would do well to make that effort a bit easier.

Personally, I don't care what the reason is. People are keeping their covenants. I think that's awesome.

In terms of the life of the Church, not at all! Less than two millenia. I tried to emphasize that dreadful settings, necessarily endured with our Lord are wonderful. You might have missed my edit? The importance has to do with necessity. When it became unnecessary to celebrate our faith in ancient tombs, it seemed to be inoffensive and even pleasing to God if we should celebrate in a more congenial atmosphere. I am saying that it might be good if none of God's people assume that a particular of worship, imposed by particular circumstances should be thought to be normative for all times and places. I was giving an approval, for what my approval is worth, if the Latter-day Saints are being led towards a worship space that welcomed a more visual experience of God as well as the auditory. I am not forgetting that "faith that cometh by hearing". But I am thinking that all of our senses can come into play in our worship. PS: I see you changed your mind about posting. That's fair. I did not take your remark in an adversarial way. I hope that my reply clarifies my thoughts in a way that you and our LDS friends find to be reasonable.

Are you referring to this ongoing discussion here?

changed my mind

Maybe my church's best days were underground (the catacombs of Rome). Today we can still see the primitive images of biblical stories painted on the walls. Thank God for our fathers and their best efforts under their circumstances. But when we could freely come out, it would have been unreasonable for my fathers to argue for continuing to worship in a truly dreadful and undesirable setting. Skeletons and skulls in the dark with a candle and Jesus where we gather, can be wonderful when persecuted. But when we can, the truths of the faith of the catacombs has inspired beautiful human art and architecture which in a different culture is an aid to worship too. Thank God for my later fathers who recognized that the Church adapts to every circumstance, and especially with our best efforts to honor and glorify the One that we worship.

That is very well said. I had a friend who became rather well known for saying, "A true friend is one who offers you a different view of the world without making yours wrong." I really like that a lot. If I come across as offering my opinion/belief in order to make yours wrong, then I have failed my friend's test. That wasn't my intent. If your comment was in connection with my latest post, then I receive and accept the kind rebuke. I just hope that doesn't mean that I can no longer offer the same in the future. Please be assured that I will and have offered the same to any church or organization of every kind, just as I have done to organizations all my life. It is how I earned my living. Having said that, I don't want to be in denial because I have blind spots. @bluebell thanks for your comment whether it was offered to me, or not. You have made me think as you so often do. I appreciate that.

Those who are convinced that we are not doing things the “right“ way will often tell us we need to change and behave more like they behave and believe more like they believe. We do the same. We are just honest enough to acknowledge it.

I don't have any comment, really, about retrofitting chapels, or what might be needed to do so. Personally, if I'm not in the right headspace, my exterior surroundings cannot do anything for me to put me in a more worshipful mood. I rather suspect that some of the most meaningful worship has been done in foxholes, or in grass huts, or in other, similar "facilities." Could our worship spaces be improved? Perhaps. But it does seem as though Latter-day Saints can't win. On one hand, our chapels aren't ornate enough. On the other hand, why does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints blow such massive "fat $tax of ca$h" [my term, obviously] on Temples rather than feeding the poor? (I say that when it comes to building Temples and ministering to the temporal needs of the poor, the Church of Jesus Christ can "walk and chew gum at the same time," but ... that's another subject for another day.) This does seem like a very first-world problem to me. For example, as humble as the Church "building" in the link below is, is it an improvement (and, in many cases, a vast improvement) over where these Saints worshipped previously? I would say yes. I think a healthy sense of perspective is in order. [Note: I know someone posted previously on the "Meetinghouse Plus" project here, and I know I commented on that thread, but my efforts to find it have been unavailing. Please pardon the duplication.] https://www.thechurchnews.com/members/2026/07/20/simple-meetinghouse-plus-project-remote-pacific-islands-light/

Are you sure the real problem is you aren’t listening? Let me address this another way. I worked really hard to create an unbiased prompt that asks AI to address this issue. The prompt says to ignore the wellbeing of transgender individuals and focus only on the wellbeing of cisgender women and girls. I then fed the prompt to Grok, Claude, and ChatGPT. All three models gave the same answer: if the objective is to minimize the expected harm to (cisgender) women and girls, then people should be free to use the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity. Prompt: Grok's full answer: I agree with ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok on this: your preferred solution--requiring people to use the restroom that corresponds to their biological sex rather than their gender expression--harms women and girls. I then did a follow-up question: which group does your preferred solution harm more: transgender women and girls, or cisgender women and girls? The answer here was obvious: your policy harms both groups, but harms transgender women and girls much more.

Whoa! Just goes to show, one never knows, does one? Never say "never"!

I am certainly more pro-LDS than not. I would simply like to offer my thought. Putting statues, paintings, or mentions of Christ in the buildings and literature would not be nearly as effective, (in my opinion—nothing more) until the Church itself emphasizes Christ more than it emphasizes itself. I think I hear more about "the Church is" than I do about "Christ is." Of course, I say that from the place that my primary spiritual identity is as a Christian first and foremost. My Evangelical identity is a distant second and describes (when accurately understood) the branch of Christianity to which I belong. A distant third is my affiliation (membership) within Christianity, which most recently has been Mennonite. Ok, and while I am in trouble, I would suggest that the beauty of a temple would never create within me more of a desire to worship there, than would a simple building. I guess that is my country and Mennonite roots. My guess is that Christ would have been more comfortable in the latter than the former. I submit that in the same spirit that I recommend the missionaries get better training in missiology before hitting the road. I want the LDS Church to draw people to Christ, not to itself. I would love for the LDS Church to better minister to people based on the truths of their lives, not based on the truth, however unique or not, of the organization. In our village there is a massive gap between the spiritual need and the spiritual thirst. No one is filling that gap (not any church, at least). Our new village priest came to visit us last week, but like the LDS missionaries, he didn't ask a single question about us or the truths we are living with right now. He pretty much got right into his truth . . . . They need new pews to make the sanctuary more comfortable. Our needs? Not so much.

So they don't get fined by the government for failure to provide access to wheelchairs?

I think the 7–10% is model error on natal sex, not a percentage we can characterize as “these people are trans.” If transgender people’s brains tracked identified sex, the model would have failed on them when scored against natal sex. It did not. Accuracy for trans people was in the same ~90–93% band as for everyone else. That means most trans scans were still called male if the person was male, female if female. The misses are the same overlap you get with any male/female brain classifier: size-controlled features still go across the two groups. Here's the quote I have in mind: After they stopped the model from using brain size, they asked: "Do trans people’s scores drift toward the 'identified' sex?" For trans men there was a weak wiggle in that direction in one sample (not statistically significant). For trans women, that drift did not show up. Also, 7-10% of adults are not transgender. I don't think we can place “many trans people” in that gap and treat the gap as identity. The study did not take the cis people it got wrong and ask whether they had a trans identity. That would be a different paper. The study showed that if they strip out head size, the scan still follows sex, including in the trans sample. The leftover 7–10% is not a third sex, and it is not a head-count of people whose "identity" is their sex. It is ordinary classifier error plus overlap between male and female brains. Thanks, -Smac

Just want to point out that the 7-10% gap is large enough to be able to include many transgender people. If there were non-trans men/women that were incorrectly identified, it would be interesting to compare their self-identity to trans men/women. Is there something that the 7-10% gap that shows up in self-identity?

Thank you. I had already looked at both. They do not show that “brain scans prove a female brain in a male,” which I think is the wishful thinking / urban-legend version on display in this thread. The ScienceDaily article from 2018 is not a journal paper. It is a conference write-up of Julie Bakker’s ECE talk. The headline, that “transgender brains are more like their desired gender from an early age,” goes beyond, I think, the abstract. Structure was already hedged as “more similar, but not identical, to those typical of the desired gender of GD boys and girls.” The second link is a real paper and better than the press release. Kurth and colleagues scanned 24 men, 24 women, and 24 "trans women" who had not taken hormones. A computer model scored each brain on a male-to-female scale (men averaging 1, women averaging 0). The trans women’s average score was 0.75, which is a bit less typically male than the men, but still much closer to the men than to the women. The sample size was small. The authors also acknowledge that sexual orientation might be mixing in the result, and that bigger studies are needed. These findings are compatible with “some average features sit between,” which is what I have been saying. I think these findings are not compatible with “the brain matches the identified sex” or “sex is a spectrum.” A 0.75 on a 0–1 male–female axis shows that "trans women" are still on the male side of the overlap, which overlap we already know exists in every large brain-sex study. I found this article worthwhile: Accurate sex prediction of cisgender and transgender individuals without brain size bias (Scientific Reports (2023)). These guys trained a computer to guess sex from MRI scans. A lazy model just uses brain size (men’s brains are larger on average). They built models that do not cheat that way. Those "debiased" models still guessed male vs female correctly about 90–93% of the time, both for non-trans men and women and for transgender people. Accuracy was similar in both groups. In other words, once you ignore head size, the scan still tracks natal sex, not the subjective "identified" sex. It did have some limits: the trans samples were small, and the study classifies group patterns, not “this one brain is female.” I am not dismissing MRI studies. I am declining to go along with the slogan the scans are asked to carry. These two sources are why. If the next paper shows a pre-hormone sample where trans women are indistinguishable from cis women on a size-controlled classifier, that would move the needle. These two do not. Thank you for sharing these articles. -Smac

As an introvert I’m totally ok with them reinventing the wheel on my account.