A friend of mine sent me this email the other day. She decided to take some notes during her sacrament meeting, and one of the techno-geeks in the ward spent some time analyzing the last general conference session. I thought it was pretty interesting in a I-don't-know-exactly-what-to-make-of-this kind of way.
There's this guy in my ward who gave a talk yesterday. The topic for
all the speakers was a review of the conference talks from Oct 3-4th,
2008. He is a self-proclaimed 'geek' and said that he was interested in
finding out if there was an on-going theme or topic that ran through the
conference. He downloaded all the talks from this last conference,
including those from the General Relief Society Meeting, onto his
computer. He then ran them through a linguistics program. Here are the
stats he came up with:
Out of 37 talks - these are the top ten references.
111 references to missionary work
125 references to the adversary
136 references to love or charity
150 references to men or fathers
152 references to temples
158 references to prayer
160 references to faith
332 references to families
371 references to women, mothers, or sisters
825 references to Jesus Christ (Pretty good for a church that is
purported to be non-Christian... don't you think?)
He was so compelled by these numbers that he then decided to run the
last 10 years worth of conference talks through the same program. He
found that the lesser referred to topics varied but that the top three
consistently stayed the same.
The interesting thing he found was that during this conference there
were topics that received a disproportionate amount of attention
compared to the last ten years.
This conference there was an increase in the number of times these
topics were mentioned (when compared with the last 10 years):
70% increase in the words service or charity
130 % increase in the words angels or spirits
147 % increase in the word hope
380 % increase in the words sacrament or sacrament meeting
457 % increase in the words Zion or unified people
I don't need science to compel me to believe. I love it when the
affirmation of my belief and faith is proven through science though.
Just one of those "I KNEW it!" things... I was really glad that for
the first time I had decided to start taking notes on sacrament meeting
talks and had my pen and paper ready when he started reading off his
stats.
I just thought you'd find this interesting. I know I did.
2 comments:
Very cool stuff!
That is very interesting. I know that as every conference goes by I think "This is the best conference ever. The speakers were speaking right to me." Perhaps, the closer we get to the Saviors coming, the stronger the messages and the stronger the spirit speaks to us. Thank you for that insight Scott.
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