Make The LDS Church Great Again
A high-theoretical-level "CES Letter"-style
compilation of LDS church problems to be solved
Is
It Time For Another Great Gospel Reset?
Here
is How To Do It
beginning
with addressing the concerns of many dissatisfied members
Table of Contents
Introduction,
p.1
The
2015 Jeremy Runnells Mormon Stories video, p.3
The
CES Letter content pattern, p.4
Jeremy's
story, p.4
A
general answer to the Jeremy Runnells-style "CES letter" criticisms
of the gospel, p.6
Research
resources for the CES Letter, p.7
A
study in the policies of international priestcraft, p.8
Drop
any mention of personal political freedom, p.8
Drop
any mention of personal charity, p.9
Worldwide
policy consistency, which is consistently bad, p.10
Cancel
the Gathering, p.10
The
LDS church is at least partially responsible for all evil in the United States,
p.12
Distract
and mollify members with busywork, p.12
Some
new opportunities to reach out to the living, p.14
Meddling
in international politics (just
like the Roman Catholic Church), p.15
A
Christian church willingly abandoning Christian principles for profit? p.17
An
embarrassment of riches, p.17
A
few short examples of church collapse and the abandonment of members, p.18
Experiences
of missionaries and converts, p.19
An
actively anti-Christian "Christian" church, p.20
Advertising
the prophets as infallible? p.20
What
is the solution? p.21
The
new allocation of member resources, p.21
My
own story of inquiry – What's wrong with the church? p.23
A
note to church employees, p.25
The
Priestcraft/Marxism/Gadianton Robber continuum, p.27
Make
The LDS Church Great Again, p.27
Introduction
At this time in history
when the forces of evil are on the verge of finally getting complete tyrannical control over the entire Earth (Russia just invaded
Ukraine today, Feb. 24, 2022), something they sometimes call the great reset,
this ought to be the time when the gospel of Christ is preparing its own great
reset to counteract those evil plans (actually this is long overdue, but
perhaps "better late than never"). This tyrannical great reset may partially
be accomplished by using the godlike powers of the new technologies which God
has allowed us to have. However, those same technologies can be used for good as
well, if anyone has the will to do so.
We
once had a great gospel reset that happened during the lifetime of Noah. It
appears that we are well on our way to the need for another great worldwide
reset. Perhaps we could just wait for Christ to come and destroy the earth by
fire except for a few faithful, but I think it is intended that we try another
solution first. We certainly have the ability to make a good try at this alternate
solution. All we need is the will.
It
appears that before we can come up with an effective plan for this great reset,
we have a preliminary problem to deal with. We don't have anything even
approximating the unity of purpose among church members, such that we could
begin to establish a Zion and then the Millennium and start to create our own
reset, our own gospel-based society. We have an enormous splintering of
viewpoints among the church members. It could be that as few as 1% of the
church members are actually able and willing to understand what needs to happen.
and then do it. If that small group could be mobilized, perhaps they could then
bring another 10% along with them. Trying to spread the movement any further
would likely mean running head on into a host of problems which could include doubt,
apathy, laziness, and even paganism, along with every other perverse philosophy
of man.
We have a large number
of people leaving this church and many of them claim it is because of
historical information which was new and upsetting to them and which they found
on Internet sites. Somewhat unexpectedly, much of this highly confusing
information actually comes to them through supposedly legitimate,
"correlated" sources. One might explain this by the possibility that
the church leaders and staff members themselves do not know what is true and
not true about the gospel and the church and its history.
This certainly does
seem to indicate that church members are very poorly prepared to defend their
beliefs against the mass of seemingly contrary data they find on the Internet, and
constantly have to combat the mass of lies and propaganda that surround us
today. It also does seem to indicate that the church leaders themselves are
poorly prepared to teach church members what they need to know to survive and
thrive intellectually in our new information age and defend the true gospel. One
of the great difficulties and ironies is that if the church leaders were to
fully explain the gospel and fully live it, they could not maintain the earthly
empire they have built which they seem to enjoy so much managing.
In other words, it is
against the personal temporal interests of our central leaders to actually
fully understand and fully explain and demonstrate the original and correct gospel
to us. Such clarity could completely destroy their 120-year plan to profit from
member ignorance, apathy, and excessive trust in their leaders to do all their
thinking for them, temporally and spiritually, as those leaders are well aware.
We are troubled by all the lies we meet in our temporal lives, and so it is
very upsetting to find out that the same kinds of lies are being propagated by
the church itself for its own selfish purposes, just as earthly governments
propagate lies to enhance their own power and wealth.
I believe that many of
those extremely detailed questions, such as the choice of individual words
found in the Book of Mormon, posed by those we might call the "new
historians," who actually know nothing useful about any kind of history,
including church history, while still perhaps presenting interesting puzzles,
will fade into insignificance if the discussion is kept at the proper high level
of actual theology. If we actually attempt to understand all the messages and
principles of the gospel, such as the importance of personal freedom and of spontaneous
personal charity in the entire scheme of the universe, and then spend our time
deciding what those principles mean, and whether they are all internally
consistent in all their interconnections, it is going to be a lot better for
ourselves and for our society.
We might ask ourselves
how many of us are prepared to explain the exact principles of the gospel and
their exact effect on societies if lived properly. If we can't do that, then we
are just mostly wasting our time with meaningless self-centered activities.
We might spend our time
wondering whether men are actually capable of understanding the gospel which Christ
taught, and whether we are then capable of living it. If we begin by having
almost no useful adult understanding of the eternal significance of the gospel,
and then engage in endless arguments about the color of paint used in a ward
chapel, we will be missing the point.
This might be a good
time to ask how we can combat this mass of confusion and get ourselves moving
in a positive direction, but since formulating a plan is such an enormous
question in itself, I will try to delay the answer for a little bit. One
interesting goal would be to attempt to provide an answer which would satisfy
Jeremy Runnells and some of his friends, assuming they are still willing to
consider new possibilities.
The
2015 Jeremy Runnells Mormon Stories video
The website entitled "Mormon
Stories" mostly identifies and documents the disagreements and complaints
of disappointed or disgruntled members, although it covers other topics as
well. John Dehlin manages that very extensive project, with 1555 lengthy
video-taped interviews completed and posted online as of Mar. 3, 2022. This
project supplies a lot of interesting and valuable information about people's
reactions to the church, although it does seem to put John Dehlin in the
potentially uncomfortable position of earning his living by documenting why
people leave the church, with his general success tied to a continuation of
that leaving process.
https://cesletter.org https://mormonstories.org/
Questions
surround podcaster John Dehlin and the quest to build an ex-LDS community
https://usexpose.com/questions-surround-podcaster-john-dehlin-and-the-quest-to-build-an-ex-lds-community/
Jeremy
Runnells inadvertently became semi-famous in the world of Mormon apologetics by
writing an 83-page letter in 2013 to a CES Director who was a friend of his
grandfather, as suggested by his grandfather. In that letter he laid out a
large number of historical questions that bothered him and which bothered many
other people who found themselves in the same situation. He never received the
expected answer from that CES Director, but he has received many other
responses to the letter.
After watching the
first hour of the Jeremy Runnells' Mormon Stories interview, I would say that he
seemed very sincere in his presentation, and that we might indeed be able to
learn something useful from him and his experiences.
He mentioned that he
felt betrayed to learn of various historical discrepancies and other problems. The
reason that he might have felt betrayed was that he had indeed been betrayed,
as have all other members for the last 120 years, although not necessarily in
the way they might imagine or articulate. One must go a little deeper to find
all the real causes.
He said that he felt
like his worldview had been shattered, and that is quite believable, because
the worldview taught by the Scriptures is not recognized or advanced by the
church leaders of today. They have a very different worldview. Their main worldview
is how to exploit the masses to get gain. Whether they realize it or not, they
are really Marxists at heart, not Christians. Centralizing power to get gain is
what it is all about. That is the devil's game. A very typical long-term
outcome in real life is that bureaucracies are eventually taken over by their
enemies. It is only a small stretch to say that the LDS church is the church of
the devil, since it appears that he has complete control over the church and
its effects in the world. He has managed to neutralize the church, neutralize
the members, and stop the church in its tracks, which is almost as good as
destroying it. It might actually be the better strategy, because people can say
that the true gospel is here, although it is not doing anything to speak of. One
might conclude from its ineffectiveness that the gospel itself is of no
significance. So, in this situation, Satan can allow one small truth to survive
which will give great strength to a very big lie.
Part of the correct worldview
is that the gospel is a wonderful and true thing and it should be valuable to
the whole world. The gospel was supposed to make great progress in the world,
but it hasn't. That is because the leaders are teaching the wrong gospel. One
cannot possibly have a test of the truth and power of the gospel if that's not
what the church organization is teaching, modeling, and encouraging.
Instead, this most
valuable set of things in the universe, the correct principles of the gospel,
have been hijacked by a bunch of self-centered confidence men, mostly made up
of lawyers and businessmen as in the Sanhedrin, certainly none of them serious or
exacting theologians, and they are using it to find ease and adulation and get
rich rather than to change the world for the better as Christ would have done
if he were still instructing us in person. What they are doing is blasphemy, so
a member should not be too surprised to find himself reacting very negatively
to such blasphemy and want no more part of it. It is called priestcraft, and we
are up to our necks in it, but we don't seem to know it.
The CES Letter content pattern
I don't claim to be a
great philosopher, but I can understand simple logic. What Jeremy Runnells has
done, and numerous other people have done in their protests against the LDS
church, could be described by a process called "reductionism."
"Reductionism
is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations
between phenomena, which can be described in terms of other simpler or more
fundamental phenomena. It is also described as an intellectual and
philosophical position that interprets a complex system as the sum of its
parts. Wikipedia"
Some people begin by
imagining that one can take a complex entity and break it into individual parts
for treatment. The
next obvious practical question is whether, for example, a living duck is just
some feathers, some skin, and a bill, or is it something greater than that? If
they then go the next step and say that a duck is ONLY the sum of its parts,
have they then gone too far? Is a living duck greater than the sum of its
parts? I think everyone would agree that it is, but would they grant the same
status to the living gospel? The same thing might be true of humans. Are they
just skin and bones and hair, and that is all one needs to know about them, or
is there some eternal essence which cannot be described in such simplistic terms?
I think people use the
term "reductionism" to signify the rhetorical disassembly and
piecemeal analysis and destruction of specific pieces of some larger something
until there is nothing left. That seems to be the methodology used by these
dissenters, whether they intended that result or not. It could be that they
start out completely sincere with their questions, but at some point it may be
only their anger that is left.
My first reaction is
that these people never define what it is that they are taking apart. Is the
gospel really nothing more than the sum of its individual parts, especially
when we cannot even name all of the individual parts? It's easy to find
researchers who recognize that the church in our time has no systematic
theology but only an uncertain history of constant change. So this adds a huge
difficulty for the reductionist researchers. If we don't have the ability to
define what the gospel is, as we most certainly cannot now, or at least the
church bureaucracy has not accomplished that task in the 200 years it has had
available, then how is it that we are able to take it apart and be sure that we
have gotten found, described, disassembled, and accounted for all the important
pieces?
With the billions of
hours of thought which have been devoted to this sort of destructive
deconstruction process, it seems like we surely should have been able to carry
out a constructive process which could give us an actual understanding of what
it is that we are objecting to and tearing apart.
Do we really think that
atheists are the people we should go to to find out about God? That seems to be
the underlying logic for much of this deconstructive effort. That doesn't sound
like research at all. It sounds like we first make our decisions and then we go
looking for information to support the decision we have already made in a
fact-free environment.
Jeremy's
story
Jeremy Runnells
says in his video-taped interview that he is "not the village idiot,"
and that he has read fairly widely about church topics, implying that he ought
to be able figure out the right answers.
I believe he is in fact quite an intelligent person, as far as innate
abilities are concerned. However, I would still say that he was probably quite unprepared
to do any serious research in all the low-level and high-level historical and
theological questions related to critiquing an entire new world religion after
200 years of existence and operation. I
expect that he would acknowledge that profound lack of preparation for carrying
out such a monumental task concerning world history and church history, although he
may not have been able to accurately quantify it. Presumably that is why he reached out for help,
but unfortunately found none. In fact, none of those needed answers exist even
today.
So, Jeremy
continues his search for important knowledge that does not yet exist in an
accessible form. He does this along with all the other church members and all
the church leaders. Without such a reliable general guide, as he reaches out to
various sources of information, he has so little understanding of the overarching
truths, that he cannot differentiate between the mountain of lies of the world
and what is true based on gospel principles.
As we have
seen over and over when people reach this point of doubting and wondering, and
they are starting with this deep well of lack of preparation and even ignorance
which they didn't know they had, they are extremely vulnerable to their first
contact with the 200 years of inaccuracies and outright lies which have been
prepared by all the evil forces since the church was restored. It is quite a shock for a lone person to try
to encounter and overcome the 200 years of falsehoods that have been
accumulating since the time of Joseph Smith.
In spite of all the efforts of the church leaders and the FAIR Mormon
people, there are masses of lies, the philosophies of men, that have invaded
the Gospel and are waiting there to confuse and frustrate people. When one reaches the age of 30, as in the
case of Jeremy, when their worldview COULD have been built up to be able to
engage one-on-one with the mass of lies and propaganda of the world, they are
totally unprepared. They are sitting
ducks, so to speak. The big problem, of course, is that the church leaders
themselves have absorbed and propagated a mountain of lies about the Gospel and
how it should be lived, and so what should be the very source is itself largely
polluted.
Jeremy
should be able to explain the goals and purposes and methods of the Gospel so
that he then has a basis to defend it against all these worldly concepts and
practices. But at the critical time, he
discovers that he has almost no useful knowledge at all to defend the Gospel,
even to himself. Somehow, he has been
kept separated from the truth for 30 years, and suddenly he's confronted with
an overwhelming number of falsehoods and lies and questions.
We have had
200 years to write a multi-volume work on the "book of knowledge"
concerning an exhaustive treatise on the true gospel, but the leaders have intentionally
failed to do it, and now we are so confused and corrupted and polluted by the
world, that it will take an almost superhuman effort to undo the damage and
actually produce what we should have had all along. The management strategy
problem here is that if you have a firm statement of the Gospel, a
constitution, so to speak, then that limits the flexibility of the church
leaders to make whatever changes they want.
They have never wanted to be bound by the actual tenets of the Gospel, but
only by their personal preferences, and thus we see the reason for the highly
flexible "gospel" they teach.
One of the
problems is that the people who have been entrusted with these sorts of things
concerning church history, at least starting after the life of Joseph Smith,
were themselves biased and corrupted.
For example, the historians who were supposed to keep track of the
history of the Church and explain what our history and doctrine means, have
almost entirely been infected with the virus of Marxism or communalism or some
variation of those ideologies, so that their very explanations just make things
worse. Somehow, they have decided that
men were not intended to be free, but were intended to be slaves to some
supposedly greater mind, accepting the argument of Satan (with these men hoping
to act in Satan's stead), and so they do their best to warp the history to
support the logic and goals of Satan, which is to get control over men
completely. The concept that men should
be as free as possible, which is supported by Christ, is rejected out of hand,
and all we hear is the constant drumbeat of how religion can be used to create
a class society in which some self-appointed people are able to rule over
others and exploit them through
the manipulation of information.
We should
note here that a slave mentality is absolutely useless in heaven. Any beings
who go to heaven who are not acclimated to being completely free and completely
responsible for their own thoughts and actions could not be entrusted with the
task of continuing the family business of creating earths and peopling them
with appropriately advanced intelligences.
The Hindu
caste system is a complex example of this use of religion to control the
populace and suppress their freedom. That has been the goal of Satan since
before the council in heaven, and he has been continuing it assiduously ever
since. The world has been filled with
tyrannies, all of them based on Satan's logic.
The great breakaway which Christianity brought to Western civilization
was indeed welcome, but after 2000 years, even that push towards freedom has
been ground down to almost nothing, and the originally supporting institution,
the Catholic Church, has long since become part of the problem rather than part
of the solution. As I see it, the LDS
Church was restored to give this surge toward freedom another big boost, but
the leaders have totally failed to do that in the last hundred years, although
they worked very hard at it for the first 66 years. The Gospel is about freedom and
responsibility and charity, but those seem to be some basic principles that are
quickly and easily corrupted, leading to the downfall of entire nations.
This
problem exhibited by Jeremy Runnells, and probably a million others, signals to
me that without a major upgrade in the teaching of children about the
philosophies of true religion and philosophies of men, there can be no
long-term defense against the attacks of the lies of Satan. Our current church
education system is far too limited and feeble.
Runnells'
grandfather arranged for him to communicate with an institute director. That seemed like a great idea on the part of
his grandfather, but, as a practical matter, if the only possible source of
wisdom on these important questions is the rather small number of institute
directors, then any related program for church members to understand truth
enough to defend themselves would be far too limited.
The things all
members need to know to defend themselves intellectually in this dark and
dreary world must be found available in many places within the church. We might notice that the institute director,
for all of his good intentions, never did answer the letter. We don't know why, but I will guess that he
didn't know the answers either. He is likely
operating at a fairly low level of sophistication concerning the philosophies
of the true religion and the philosophies of men, so he could not actually
answer those questions, whether the detailed historical questions or the cosmic
level questions raised. Perhaps he even
realized that he was totally unprepared to deal with these questions which
challenged the entirety of the Gospel mindset as well as its clash with the
entirety of the Satanic mindset. Perhaps
he realized that he would have to write a multivolume series to answer these
questions, and he was not feeling up to it, and no one should be surprised at
that. (The BYU religion department should have been set up to write the final
version of the Gospel, but that is the last thing which the church leaders
would allow it to do, as we will discuss later.)
Jeremy went
to the FAIR Mormon website and the associated people, seeking further
information. The people who do that as
volunteers seem to have the best of intentions, but, unfortunately, the
database they are promoting and defending is already thoroughly corrupted by
the lies that have carefully been put in place by the church leaders themselves
during the last 120 years. This means
that for a large part of what they might say, they are defending a lie because
they don't know any better. For example,
the arguments that supposedly justify priestcraft in the church today are all
bogus, every one of them. These
arguments are put up to justify the misbehavior of our current leaders, and are
all not only wrong but dangerous and damaging to the church. In fact, I would say that they are the main
piece that has sabotaged the whole Church enterprise today.
A general answer to the
Jeremy Runnells-style "CES letter" criticisms of the gospel
These types of criticisms seem to spend
all of their time far out in the weeds of history, nit-picking on various
topics which may be interesting but are typically not very well connected with
the basic questions of the gospel. They also typically deal with aspects of
history that cannot be verified in any reliable way, since most of them
happened 200 years ago, and were very poorly documented at the time. Do we
actually know exactly what books Joseph Smith owned and constantly carried
around with him, if there were any such books? How many people of us carefully
watched the exact process of translating the Book of Mormon and other
documents? Do we have legally admissible statements or affidavits from his
30-odd supposed wives telling us the exact and complete history of all of their
relationships with Joseph Smith, their husbands, and everyone else? And so on.
If we have nothing better than speculations and rumors to go up, plus the
statements of the church's historical enemies, then we should put most of this
kind of discussion in the category of gossip and not try to prove anything with
it.
For purposes of this little section, I
want to define the gospel to be a set of doctrines which include a great
emphasis on personal freedom and personal responsibility, especially as can be
seen in that person's willingness to perform charitable acts for others. Then
we might add the 10 Commandments, as modified by the Sermon on the Mount. Then
we have the two great rules, love for God and love for your fellow man. We might
further add the priesthood and related ordinances, plus a very strong warning
against any kind of priestcraft. I'm going to let that serve as my definition
of the gospel for the moment.
So I believe when one reads the various
points of the CES Letter, one might question exactly how do each of those
questions and points raised diminish or prove wrong the basic principles of the
gospel? Does Joseph Smith's claimed inability to correctly translate the
Kinderhook plates mean that he made up or incorrectly translated the story
about Capt. Moroni keeping his people safe during Book of Mormon times? In
other words, do the Kinderhook plates disprove freedom as the most important
principle of the gospel? If we are not using all of these small historical
issues to destroy the grand sweep of the gospel as I have mentioned above, then
they are nearly meaningless. There must be a direct logical connection between
these historical problems and the actual nature of the gospel.
It should be very valuable to know exactly
what the gospel is, and compare all the different aspects of the Scriptures to
make sure that we do understand the nature of the gospel. We should also
analyze our experience which should tell us whether the gospel works as
expected in a real-life environment.
On a large number of issues brought up
by Runnells and others, I have no idea what the truth is, and I don't expect to
ever hear it fully explained in my lifetime. However, on one issue, that of
priestcraft, I can agree that we see strong evidence of it today in the church,
and I'm fully confident that it is completely wrong.
Research
resources for the CES Letter
Runnells
mentioned the 1994 book Rough Stone Rolling by Richard L. Bushman as an
important reference item concerning the life of Joseph Smith. The book is
available through Deseret Book, which might give the appearance that it has
been read and approved by church staff and "correlated." From my very
minor sampling of the book, it reads more like anti-Mormon literature than
anything accurate and faith-promoting, but, with no extensive history
background himself, how would Jeremy know that or make any kind of correct judgment? He also mentioned the LDS publication The
Journal of Discourses as a research resource, but not with much emphasis.
Another
major resource for Jeremy was the old FAIRMormon website, which is now the
fairlatterdaysaints.org website or just FAIR.
I happen to know a
great deal about the Journal of Discourses contents, having written and
published two books based on its contents, and I also know something about the
fairlatterdaysaints.org website. When I was studying that website extensively
in past years, it contained a large amount of information on the question of
whether today's church leaders are practicing priestcraft or not. It presented
a large number of answers, arguing that, no matter what the Scriptures may say
on the topic, what the church leaders were doing was not priestcraft. As I have
presented in my last book in great detail, none of the logic supporting
priestcraft among current church leaders is valid, not even on its face, and
there are mountains of other evidence not mentioned there which also indicate
that the church leaders are indulging extensively in priestcraft and have been
doing so for about 120 years.
My conclusion from the
two books Rough Stone Rolling situation and Massacre at Mountain
Meadows and their acceptance by the central church as good scholarship,
along with the historical document frauds perpetrated by Mark Hofman, and many
other examples, is that our current central church bureaucracy is very poorly
educated on Gospel theology and history, and so cannot tell a fake from the
truth on a large number of important topics. They are nothing but business
managers and promoters and anything but Gospel scholars.
The
main point of this article is that although there are a lot of potentially useful
items of detail-level information on the FAIR website, the gigantic and overarching
falsehoods they present on the question of priestcraft invalidates everything
else. Historically, once priestcraft gets a grip on a religion, or on a secular
government, for that matter, it gradually destroys it and even turns it upside
down, as we have seen today, making it the enemy of the people and of
righteousness. At that point, absolutely every doctrine and practice presented
by the church (or other government) is suspect, and one must wipe the slate
clean and go back to the beginning and start over if one is ever to locate and
verify the gospel truth.
A
study in the policies of international priestcraft
So,
having mentioned the issue of priestcraft, I want to expand on that point a
great deal more, since it is the pivotal point for everything that relates to
the LDS church today, and, indirectly, to everything that relates to the world
we live in today.
The topic
of the history of priestcraft within the LDS Church is important enough that it
deserves two or three books to be written about it. However, I don't have the time to do that, so
I'm going to have to just present a very short version of it.
As far as I
can tell, there was no systematic priestcraft during the presidencies of Joseph
Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor, although the question did come up from
time to time in various ways. At one
point a salary was voted for the first presidency, but then that salary was
later canceled. When the 12 were
requesting resources to build the Kirtland temple, there were some hints that
perhaps the 12 ought to be paid for their work in managing this project, or at
least that members who did not pay into the fund should not be allowed to
attend the temple (shades of future recommends), although I don't believe the
12 actually took anything for themselves, at least not officially.
The long
process of embedding priestcraft into the church, and rearranging all the doctrines
and practices to match that philosophy and theology, began in 1896 when Wilford
Woodruff and all his church leadership associates, with one or two exceptions
where there were disagreements with the new policy, decided that they were
entitled to use church contributions to pay their own living expenses. As the next step in this long-term plan, in
1899 Lorenzo Snow had a "revelation" that everyone in the church
needed to start paying tithing, as was done in the Old Testament, although I
don't know whether any Old Testament references were explicitly made.
One of the
arguments for this new tithing policy was that the church had numerous debts
that needed to be paid. I believe
suggestions and offers were made to resolve those debts in other ways, but the
church leaders seemed quite determined that this was a good excuse for them to
begin to impose a long-term tax on the church members which could then change
the nature of church headquarters operations. The process of collecting tithing
began slowly and was not made an absolute requirement until about 1960 when
church members were told they could not attend the temples and receive the
saving ordinances unless they paid a full tithing to church headquarters,
something which had not been required before.
This new
flow of money into the church headquarters would make it possible for the
church to hire its own lawyers. One
might suspect that it was the lawyers in the first place who suggested that the
church do this for the very purpose of giving those lawyers a lucrative job and
organizational power. One of the
immediate consequences surely was that the lawyers began to rearrange affairs
to benefit themselves so that many could receive salaries of $1 million a year
from this rather large new pool of money.
So how
might a new battalion of lawyers, something like the old Sanhedrin, rearrange
affairs to their greatest advantage beyond just voting themselves a nice
salary? Once we can answer that
question, we can check the beliefs and policies of the church today to see
whether they were successful.
If one is
going to create a new religion-based world empire after the model of the Roman
Catholic Church, one might begin by imagining that this new entity is above,
superior to, and more important than, any other government on the earth, and
that it ought to have well-paid diplomats who can travel freely and luxuriously
around the earth negotiating with secular governments to receive permission to
operate within their countries and collect religious taxes, sometimes known as
tithing, and transfer that tithing back to church headquarters through banking
systems.
Drop
any mention of personal political freedom
Beginning with the council in heaven, the
gospel is meaningless without the absolute support of personal political
freedom to make the most important choices.
Even though
individual freedom is a big issue in the stories of the Book of Mormon, one
would want to completely drop from all public discussion the issue of
individual freedom so that these 200 jealous secular governments in the world
would not feel like the LDS Church was any kind of a competitor or disruptor or
revolutionary who was trying to bring freedom to people within their
boundaries.
As a
result, the church leaders would actually want to suppress freedom, or at least
the desire for freedom, within these countries to the extent possible or
necessary. The church, to some extent, would want to become one of the approved
government churches which supported the central government, regardless of how
evil that central government might be.
The church could then expect to receive cooperation and favors from the
central government, even if that central government did not actually pay any
tax monies to that church organization.
Of course, there would likely be times when the church would simply have
to pay bribes to the government in order to be able to operate there, but that
would be just considered a cost of doing business in this particular
country. Of course, if the church had no
official presence there and was not collecting tithing, then church members
there might use their resources to help each other and never get entangled with
this form of diplomacy and bribery in the way that a foreign entity such as the
church headquarters would have to do. We should note that the gospel was not
designed to be a slave religion, although it has served that purpose at times.
It was designed for a free people. Slavery is not negotiable.
We might
recall that Christ himself did not travel luxuriously among his people, but
following the logic used by the Muslim (and Catholic) priestcraft supporters,
since these new religious diplomats were representatives of Christ, and were
acting as his viceroys, they ought to travel in luxury doing his work.
Drop any
mention of personal charity
Personal
Christian charity is the central point of the New Testament church. Removing it
leaves an Old Testament shell of religion.
One of the
more interesting aspects of this relationship with foreign tyrannical
governments is that many of those governments forbid outside individuals and
churches from doing charity work in their countries. They might allow their own indigenous
churches to do charity work, but that is only because those churches have
already been completely infiltrated and co-opted by the secular
government. The idea is that if someone
comes in from outside and does charity work, that might have an effect on the
hearts and minds of the residents, so that they have less love for, and less
allegiance to, the central tyrannical government which typically wants to be
totalitarian in nature and take care of every possible need or issue or
ideological point.
What this
really means is that the LDS Church must water itself down almost to the
thinnest possible gruel, leaving out almost all the important principles of the
Gospel so that it can operate in these normally religion-hostile locations. One
of the great threats to the church operating in these other societies is that
people who read the Scriptures, especially the Book of Mormon, might get
excited about the idea of individual freedom and start to agitate to improve
levels of freedom and justice and prosperity in their home countries. But that would be a direct threat to the
typically tyrannical, totalitarian governments in all of these locations. So, as a practical matter, that means that
the LDS church has to suppress freedom among its members, at least enough to
keep the central church headquarters corporation from losing favor with those
secular governments and being asked to leave which would mean that they would
have to stop receiving money from the people there and transmitting it outside
the country.
In other
words, the church cannot promote charity on any serious basis in any country in
the world without causing some potential feelings of competition with the
church among the leaders of those countries.
In the United States itself, where the church is perfectly legal and
perfectly free, it could indeed carry on extensive charitable operations which
might represent a very large portion of the economy of the United States,
perhaps 10%, where the church is actually able to carry on Christian charity on
the scale which is necessary to keep the United States a Christian country as
opposed to those charitable operations taken over by the civil governments
which are actually promoting Marxist ideology and religion through taking care
of charity through Marxist or atheist methods.
In other words, the LDS Church cannot do any charity in the United
States because it has decided that it dare not do charity anywhere else because
it would interfere with its ability to access members and their pocketbooks in
all of these other countries. So there
goes the principle of charity which is the centerpiece of the New Testament
Gospel.
Worldwide
policy consistency, which is consistently bad
We need to
point out that if the church is going to be a worldwide church, then it must typically
have policies which are the same in every country. In other words, if the church cannot support
movements toward freedom in any way in any of the 200 countries on the earth
where it wishes to operate, then by the same logic, it cannot help promote any
movements toward freedom in the United States, even though that is the church's
home country, and it would be perfectly legal for the church to do that in its
home country. However, if it promoted
freedom projects in the United States, every other country would assume that,
given the opportunity, the church would do the same in every other country, and
that might not be looked on favorably by the local dictators.
In other
words, part of the process of suppressing freedom in other countries means that
it is a requirement that the Church suppress freedom or freedom related
activities amongst its members in United States itself, however irrational that
may seem to a church member living in the United States. In other words, the church has to act against
the principles of the U.S. Constitution if it is going to be a world Church on
the pattern of the Roman Catholic Church, which it is trying to emulate. In past times, the Roman Catholic Church
attempted to control the kings of the earth and cause one king to attack
another based on religious and political logic beneficial to the Catholic
church. The LDS Church has not reached
the point where it can wield much of that kind of power, generally, but it has
shown that it would do it if it could. I
will mention some examples later. The
very fact that it suppresses freedom worldwide even in its own country because
that gives it an advantage in 200 other countries, should be enough to let
anyone know that freedom and the Constitution are not some of the principles it
supports, even though the U.S. Constitution has been incorporated into the LDS
Scriptures by reference and is considered as an inspired document along with
every other scripture-like document such as an official proclamation. Using this line of reasoning, we might say
that the church is anti-freedom and pro-Satan, even though it may only have
fairly small opportunities to exercise its impulse to tyranny.
So there
goes the principle of freedom, removed from the Gospel because it is
inconvenient to a church which has plans to build a grand religious empire on
the earth, mostly for the benefit of the church leaders, certainly not for the
benefit of the members. Those member needs
are considered last, a very distant stretch downward from the needs of the
leaders.
Cancel
the Gathering
We might
notice that the church officially ended the Gospel principle of the gathering
in 1977, supposedly triggered by a talk by Bruce McConkie in Peru (apparently as
a safe far-off launch of a doctrinal trial balloon), and later accepted as
doctrine by the church leaders. Why
might the central church want to end the principle of the gathering? They might give various implausible reasons,
but that is what priestcraft philosophers and theologians do. In other words, the reasons given may have
nothing to do with the real reasons which is what we are concerned about here. We
should remember that lying is thought by some to be a regular part of
governing. The LDS church certainly uses that strategy.
See address
by Elder Bruce R. McConkie entitled "
Come: Let
Israel Build Zion" on 27 February 1977 in
Lima, Peru, later printed for the membership of the Church. Notice the irony here that
this title is exactly backwards from the truth. McConkie claims to be building
Zion while also declaring at the same time that no such thing will happen. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1977/04/come-let-israel-build-zion?lang=eng
As I have
mentioned, it is very convenient for the church to have outposts all over the
earth which gives reasons for church employees to fly around the world in
luxurious fashion to take care of various mostly symbolic and ceremonial
functions in these various countries. That
situation also presents opportunities to experiment with differing messages and
policies, mostly out of sight of the main body of the church. These "helicopter"
people are not going to actually do any of the work of teaching and converting
people, because that takes too much time, but they might show up at just the
right time to dedicate a temple or a chapel. (Doing missionary work in a
first-class seat on an airplane is considered okay, especially when one has
nothing else to do for a few hours. They might take care of a banking problem
to make sure that money can be moved easily from those foreign countries back
to the United States, or perhaps arrange an indirect bribe for an obstreperous
local political organization.)
A real
reason for cancelling the gathering seems to be that it is very convenient to
have all these outposts and to maintain them so that one has excuses to make of
these trips from time to time and have a chance to see the world. (One does not have to join the Navy to see
the world. They can merely become a
church employee and do it in even a more grand style.)
If the
Gospel were to draw people from these 200 countries to the center place where
they could have freedom and work together to build a society which was
consistent with the Gospel, as so many of them would like to do, that could
quickly drain away all of the people in these outposts who can currently be
used as excuses to make expensive trips there.
It has been interesting to actually see cases where church leaders
intervened to keep people from moving from these far-flung places to places of
freedom and prosperity. It seems obvious
that the reason that these movements of church members were torpedoed by church
leaders was simply so that they could maintain these outposts and therefore the
reasons to spend millions of dollars sending people there to visit and take
care of various ceremonial duties as part of their vacation trip.
Looking at
it the other way, if all of these people were able to move these outposts into
the United States, for example, where they could be advocates for freedom and
build up the cause of freedom in the United States, they would also, in the
process, have very little need for the bloated bureaucracy which is operated by
the central church headquarters. Once
these people were all together, perhaps controlling the politics of multiple
states in the United States, they could then take care of all their own needs,
and they would have very little need for the command-and-control features of a
church headquarters. In other words, the
reason for many of the church employees and many of their outposts and expensive
activities would simply disappear. So,
as part of a central headquarters jobs program, one has to keep people in these
unpleasant Third World countries to maintain reasons for church employees to
travel there. This is a very selfish
viewpoint, but I believe that is the actual logic used. I like to call this "labor union
logic."
Looking at
it more generally, if we did have 200 million dedicated church members in the
United States, then we could be sure that we would always be free there, and
that no foreign powers or foreign ideologies could come in to destroy this
Gospel-base of freedom. But, as it is,
in order to maximize the entertainment value of church leader positions, we
have to make sure these people do NOT gather in the United States and strengthen
it and make it a beacon to the world for freedom.
One of the
other things which could happen in the United States in that situation is that
we could "build Zion," that is, create a society where all of our
welfare and charitable needs were handled in a Christian way so that these
corrupt and wasteful Marxist government systems such as Social Security and
Medicare could be done away.
We should notice
that these government systems, especially Social Security, present huge
incentives for people to have a very small number of children or no children at
all. This has a huge effect on the practice of the Gospel as outlined in the
Scriptures, where coming to earth is part of the overall plan. The general assumption is that someone else's
children will take care of old people when they are old, but if everyone
follows the same logic, then we have no children when everyone is old, and that
is what has happened in our country, and in every other country that has
adopted these kinds of centralized government programs.
On the Medicare
angle, notice that, as in the UK, there are tremendous financial pressures to
simply kill people when they get old and might require expensive
hospitalization. About 300,000 people a
year (out of a total of about 600,000 people who die each year) are killed by
using the Liverpool Protocol where old people (or other sick people, including
children) are simply given shots of painkillers, and given no food or water,
and they die within about two days.
Doctors are given bonuses for getting rid of these expensive
patients. Typically, those patients and
their families are not told about these plans for terminating their lives. But it makes perfect sense, because that is a
way for the government to give health care as cheaply as possible for the more
productive (government-controlled slave workforce), without any regard for any
other ethic.
We might
notice that during the recent Covid epidemic there were massive numbers of
deaths of old people in such aggressively blue states as New York and
California where it was treated as an opportunity to clear out the expensive
housing of old people, probably most of them receiving all of their financial
support from state or federal governments. In contrast, red states like Florida
went to great lengths to protect these old people, making that their first
priority.
These kinds
of pension and medical care social functions can be provided using gospel
methods for about one third of the cost that is extracted from the populace by
these government programs, while those impersonal government programs also
teach incorrect principles and use these programs to gain power over people and
reduce their levels of freedom. All of
these bad influences could be repaired by a truly Zion Society.
The LDS
church is at least partially responsible for all evil in the United States
This is why
I say that every problem in the United States today can be blamed on the LDS
Church, simply because it has done everything in its power to make sure that
none of the benefits of the Gospel and the gathering have been able to get a
grip in the United States. They would
rather take their tithing tax money for their own benefit, and they care
nothing that the society they live in could be destroyed by the very fact that
they are withholding the true Gospel and instead are imposing a corrupt and
oppressive "gospel" on the very same people. People do have a natural tendency towards
freedom, but there is only so much that they can overcome to advance that freedom.
If the LDS
Church is taxing freedom, generosity, and religiosity at 10%, that does a great
deal to stop the spread of the religion, and we have the situation we have
today. If we compound the bad influences
of that 10% a year for a hundred years, that we have done trillions of dollars'
worth of damage to our own society just to provide big salaries and pleasant
working conditions for a few self-centered people who operate church
headquarters. The "opportunity
costs" of not making the Gospel fully available to the United States and
to the world, is certainly in the $10 trillion range if not the $100 trillion
range. We might guess that the church
has collected $1 trillion in tithing in the last 100 years, and mostly wasted
it, so that is a great loss, but it has probably actually done about 100 times
as much damage to the intended growth and influence of the properly-taught and
organized church.
Distract
and mollify members with busywork
As another
aspect of the gathering issue, we have President Nelson speaking often about gathering
people to the church on both sides of the veil. But, as I have partially
mentioned above, he's not really serious about that. It is just window dressing, not serious
policy. Those words are in the
Scriptures, so they have to be mouthed every once in a while, but the church
would certainly never act against its own self-interest by carrying out those
scriptural directives.
There are
two aspects of this gathering process, missionary work among the living, and genealogy
work and temple work for the dead.
First of
all, it appears that the best place to start is with the genealogy/temple
teachings and policies and activities.
Perhaps you can see now that the goal of keeping people busy doing
busywork instead of interfering with the interests of the church leaders is
what is going on here. We occasionally
hear the phrase "God can do his own work" which is used as one of the
arguments to keep church members from doing anything of their own. It is a way of making sure that all projects
(and not incidentally, all money) goes through the church headquarters where
they can cancel troublesome projects and make sure that they collect the
maximum amount of money.
If people
did carry out spontaneous charitable works, as they ought to be doing as
believers in the New Testament, then they might come up against some conflicts
with some government or some other religion.
Typically, those same people who started those projects could anticipate
those problems and deal with them. But
the central church seems to fear, or at least claims to fear, that if the
church members start some interesting project that it will cause the central
church a great deal of trouble. For
example, if people got it into their heads that they ought to help people move
from a disgusting Third World country to a place of freedom, then that brain
drain might get the church leaders in trouble with the local governments who
might complain and want to throw them out.
At the same
time, if those people are leaving those Third World hellholes, then there will
be less excuse for the church leaders to visit those places which might also be
interesting vacation spots. That is one
of the kinds of trouble that people could get themselves into as creative and
spontaneously charitable Christians. So
that must be suppressed.
So, the aspect
of priestcraft ideology and theology presented here is that the leaders claim
that "God can do his own work," which means in practical terms that
church members should not try to do any work on their own. This is obviously in conflict with some of
the older ideas of "every member of missionary," and is certainly in
conflict with the New Testament idea that people should do charitable work
wherever possible. "Freely ye have received, freely give." "Spread
your bread upon the water," etc. Charity, the heart of the New Testament
gospel, should not be so lightly canceled out for leadership convenience.
So, if
people are busy endlessly doing busywork, with perhaps 300,000 people each
spending a thousand hours a year, so that we end up with 300 million hours of religious
work which are diverted into useless processes which will not interfere with
the real world, then the church has accomplished part of its goal to tamp down
the impulses which the gospel gives its members to go out into the world and to
do good. It is certainly much safer to
do busywork sitting at home on a computer (much like the many time-wasting
games that teenagers play at home) than it is to go meet with people and teach
them the Gospel. But that vigorous and
friendly outreach could cause the church leaders some extra work and
discomfort, so they naturally discourage it, and are willing to spend billions
of dollars to distract church members and cause them to use up their time, and
waste it on pointless activities.
I use the
word pointless because if one does the math, and I have most certainly done the
math many times over, we have invested enough time into the genealogy projects
of the church to have completely finished all the genealogy for the United
States at least 40 times over since the church computer systems came online
with the family search features in about 1998.
And, using some of those same computations, we could have finished the
entire world at least twice over, incorporating every existing document into
that new computer system.
So if you
believe my computations, which I would be happy to supply, then this is one of
the biggest boondoggles and wastes of Christian time as have ever been
invented, and it was invented and is continued for the very purpose of
benefiting the church leaders. They are
able to live very comfortable, luxurious lives and not be bothered by hardly any
conflicts with anyone in the world.
Also, an
important aspect is that this particular line of teaching and policy concerning
genealogy work seems to require a very large number of temples so that one
could theoretically do all of this temple work.
Now, of course, the actual temple work that is done is duplicated
perhaps 50 times for each person who is in the record system, demonstrating
that there is an enormous, staggering waste of time involved. But it does people keep people off the streets,
and more importantly, these people who are tricked into doing all this
genealogy work and all this useless and repetitive ordinance work, then feel
like they are getting something for their tithing when they see temples being
built. So, the building of temples and
the doing of genealogy work are closely interrelated. (Apparently, we are all naturally timid and
lazy, so we go along with this pointless program of endless busywork.)
The big
benefits to the church leaders are that the church members keep paying enormous
amounts of tithing to build temples and computer systems while also staying out
of the way of the church leaders and not interfering in the world or in
societies by actually trying to do any good.
This is all very cynical, but I can see no other explanation. I know all
of this because I attempted to introduce a much more efficient system, but
finally discovered that the church will actively resist any efficiency
improvements, because of the membership control system they already have going
which works so well for them. They have their people paying the church lots of
money and causing no problems.
It could
indeed be very valuable to the world to have collected and indexed all the
available genealogical records. This would help people appreciate their
families and would probably bring greater friendship among countries who would
find more reasons to have family ties and other links to many countries. However, finishing that project would be
considered a disaster by the church leaders because suddenly they would they
would have 300,000 people with 300 million hours on their hands and surely
these people would go out to do mischief and would interfere in various ways
with the comfortable lives of the church leaders. It would also greatly lower the incentives
for church members to pay in huge amounts of money to build redundant new
temples.
So now
perhaps we can move to something more related to dealing with people in the
real world.
It seems
that good gospel doctrine ought to mean that we spend 99% of our time on the
living and only 1% of our time on the dead, especially if we have already
finished all of their genealogical work that is possible on this earth. The dead are dead forever and getting them
saved a few thousand years from now will be time enough. However, the people who are on the earth
right now are only here for a relatively short time, and we ought to be doing
everything in our power to make their lives as interesting and useful here is
they can be, including learning the Gospel, applying it in their lives, and in
that way learning the gospel very deeply, etc.
But we are forgoing all of that sort of opportunity by our current
policies.
For example,
we might want to take steps to solve whatever social problems there are so that
we could end the need for any abortions.
Many of the people who receive abortions do so only because of family
problems or practical problems which could be solved with a little individual
charity. Certainly, we ought to be
exploring these possibilities. As it is,
the church wants nothing to do with solving the abortion problem, partly
because that would mean trying to improve the society around them which is a
no-no in the church circles [like the Old Testament Levites and priests who
walked by the wounded man], and potentially being in some conflict with secular
governments who think in Marxist terms. Those secular governments ought to be strongly
encouraged to do their constitutional duties, not seek totalitarian ambitions
and expectations. The church ought to be
involved in that work, but it takes great pains to stay out of it and make sure
its members stay out of it, and everyone suffers as a result.
Some new
opportunities to reach out to the living
I have done
some mental experiments about what might be done if we could redirect the extra
time of 300,000 people into working with the living, especially now that we
have such unbelievably extensive and robust communications abilities. For
example, without going through all the computations, that would make it very
simple for that group of people to call every church member on the planet once
a week and see how things were going and offer encouragement and help. That alone
might greatly aid the gathering process.
Using similar computations, that group of telephone missionaries could
call every person in some large city such as Mumbai, India within a day or two
and find out who might be interested in learning more about the Gospel.
This could
all be coupled with very extensive websites aimed at every major group of
people on the planet so that they can learn the Gospel in ways that make sense
to them based on their history and their culture. All that would be necessary would be to alert
them to the availability of this material, perhaps through these telephone and internet
calls and contacts. Certainly, we could
call every person on the planet once a year using this grand telephone system I
have suggested. Just starting that
process would almost certainly make us aware of thousands of opportunities to
help around the world, especially if we had all of our own tithing money to
spend, perhaps $20 billion a year to use in setting up these systems and in
finding good places to spend that money in charitable ways, whether for
education, pensions, health care, etc. In other words, releasing church members
from the bonds, the chains which the church leaders have placed on these people
and on their minds, could easily lead to an explosion in the influence of the
Gospel.
Computation: If we assume that there are 65,000
missionaries working at any one time, and they spend 2000 hours a year doing
missionary work, that would be 130 million hours. If we now have 300,000
missionary converts each year, that means that the missionaries spend about 433
hours for each convert. If we could add another 300 million hours of work to the
missionary efforts, and assume that it takes 500 hours of missionary work for
each convert using that method, that means we would be adding about 600,000
converts year through that channel. In other words, it's quite possible that
adding this new method could triple the number of converts to the church each
year. If we change the message we present to a better one, I believe that would
again double that increase to about 1.2 million a year.
But, of
course, we don't want to start this new process if we are merely going to teach
the people of the world a very bad Old Testament Gospel which is as likely to
make their lives worse as better.
Freedom and charity are part of the New Testament gospel we want to
teach and exhibit, and freedom and charity had no part in the Old Testament
Gospel which was taught before the time of Christ and which is being taught
now. So obviously, we want to get
everything straight before we start any such grand projects, but I am guessing
that if we had the right gospel we would spontaneously have these flames
spreading over the earth using our current communications technologies.
It is a sad
thing that in order to have real success and real progress in our nation and on
the earth, we have to get rid of this enormous impediment which is LDS church
headquarters and their priestcraft mindset. Perhaps this will give a glimpse of
where this new kind of thinking might go.
Perhaps that is all I can do at this point.
My book is Is
the Church As True As the Gospel? A Constitutional Approach, and it is
available online. A few chapters can be
read for free.
To
summarize: The big effects on societies of the Gospel, truly taught and
administered, should have effects on four different things: freedom, charity,
the gathering, and missionary work, which includes work for the dead and work
for the living. If we cover those big
issues, that will set the pattern for everything else.
Meddling in
international politics (just like the Roman Catholic Church)
Their quest for a
worldwide temporal empire has led LDS church leaders to do some strange and
unpleasant, even terrible, anti-Christian and anti-American things. It is
impossible to imagine that Christ would do any of these things for any reason. In
one breath the church might say that it is totally neutral on political
matters, as it did during the WWII, but then in the next breath will conspire
with the worst tyrants on the planet to advance the church's cause as
envisioned by their priestcraft-driven temporal empire builders. This
supposedly nonpolitical organization is the most political organization one
could imagine. We used to call that kind of behavior hypocrisy. However, today,
the political left has made hypocrisy into a strategy, not a cause for shame,
which they now declare nonexistent. I think we can say that pacifism, always
surrendering to evil without a fight, is not a correct gospel principle.
For example, during the
Cold War, the church headquarters campaigned in the United States against the
MX missile system which was intended to completely thwart any plans by the
Soviet Union to attack the US successfully by stealth or surprise. One might wonder
why church leaders would ever get involved in such things for any reason,
since, supposedly, during World War II they had declared themselves to be completely
neutral and pacifist.FN However, we might take note that the church had this
strange idea of wanting to build a temple in East Germany, a communist country,
and it would obviously be helpful to their cause there to help the Russians to
weaken the United States during the Cold War through getting the MX missile
project canceled, so, for international diplomatic reasons, as the church saw
it, they did campaign against the MX missile project in 1981 and managed to get
it canceled, or at least greatly reduced in size and effectiveness.
First Presidency
Statements, 1942 -- on neutrality
https://sites.google.com/site/livingoraclesofgod/topics/war/first-presidency-statements-1942
MORMON
CHURCH OPPOSES PLACING MX MISSILE IN UTAH AND NEVADA
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/06/us/mormon-church-opposes-placing-mx-missile-in-utah-and-nevada.html
The
Mormons and the MX
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/09/opinion/the-mormons-and-the-mx.html
Later, presumably as a
quid pro quo for the help with the MX missile project, the Frieberg Temple in
East Germany was in fact built, with the groundbreaking on April 23, 1983 and dedication
on June 29, 1985. But that has its own bit of strangeness about it. It's hard
to imagine that church leaders would expect people living in a communist
country, such as East Germany, to be good communists and good Mormons at the
same time. Most people would say that is the most silly and impossible thing
one could imagine, effectively joining the Church of Satan and the Church of
Christ and being a good member of both. People cannot reasonably equally serve
such opposing masters, at least not without developing schizophrenia. The
church strongly encouraged people in East Germany to stay there when many of
them could have escaped to the West and enjoyed freedom. But apparently for the
"greater good" of spreading a temporal church empire on the earth,
these people were asked to stay there and risk their lives in this fool's
mission on behalf of the church. It's hard to imagine that Christ would not
what these people out of those distressing and dangerous places and able to
live freely in the West.
One of the difficulties
of practicing priestcraft by church leaders, is that they come to feel an
affinity for other men, other elites, who practice priestcraft, that is, seek
to have power over others simply to enjoy that power themselves, and to seek
that power through manipulating ideas and promoting lies and propaganda. As I
mentioned, the church is pandering to tyrants to benefit church headquarters in
our own time.
If Christ were to be
asked whether he would save "the one," or whether he would seek for
personal global power, which do you think he would choose? Of course, he hasn't
the slightest use for any earthly global power, since in his role as God, he
has millions of times more power than all of them together on the earth.
Perhaps that does make it easier for him to think of trying to form a
religion-based global empire on the earth as foolish child's-play, but anyone
who claims to have his same view of the earth and of humanity ought to reach
the same conclusions.
But this is not the
first time that the church has pandered on a radical scale to dictators,
tyrants, militarists, and warmongers. In the run-up to World War II, the church
did remove its Western missionaries from Germany before it was too late.
However, the church leaders were completely unwilling to help any of the native
German church members escape from Germany, even those church members who were
also Jews and so lived under constant threats of death. One might say that the
LDS church was betting that the Nazis would be successful in taking over
Europe, and wanted to be on the good side of the Nazis if that situation came
into being. In other words, they were betting against the allied powers of
Britain, France, the United States, etc.
As it turned out, their
pandering to the Nazis turned out to do them no good in their empire-building,
but did do a great deal of evil to those church members who were not helped to
escape from Germany before it was too late. Would real prophets have made that
terrible mistake? As documented in a large illustrated book found in the Provo
library, see below, there were many church members who were forced into
military service and who died as a result. There were others who committed
suicide rather than engage in warfare or live in Germany under either the Nazis
or the Communists. Entire families killed themselves, their mothers often being
the executioners, rather than live in those conditions of rape, slavery,
murder, and pillage in war times. As I see it, that puts a rather large amount
of blood on the hands of the church leaders who could have prevented much of
that suffering and death.
With these kinds of
ethics being practiced by the church leaders, one might wonder when the next
time will come that the church leaders will be willing to betray their own
members for what they imagine could be a benefit to the church leaders in their
quest for earthly empire. I assume Christ would always be concerned about the
one, not some potential empire, and would save individuals rather than
sacrifice them to this so-called "greater good" which some demented
church leaders might imagine.
With
these kinds of ethics being practiced by the church leaders, one might wonder
when the next time will come that the church leaders will be willing to betray
their own members for what they imagine could be a benefit to the church
leaders in their quest for earthly empire. I assume Christ would always be
concerned about the one, not some potential empire, and would save individuals
rather than sacrifice them to this so-called "greater good" which
some demented church leaders might imagine.
An
important 2013 book entitled In Harm's Way -- East German Latter-Day Saints
in World War II by Roger P. Minert, published by BYU Studies, is summarized
this way:
When World War II broke out in September
1939, approximately 7,500 members of the Church in East Germany found
themselves in a precarious situation, isolated from the Church and compelled to
live under the tyranny of Nazi Germany and thus to participate in offensive and
defensive military actions. These and other fascinating stories are told
firsthand by the Saints who experienced them.
Here
are some excerpts, pp.367-8:
By the time Red Army soldiers were
approaching Neubrandenburg, Waltraud Meyer was twenty-four years old,
unmarried, and back at home in Cammin. The town of one hundred fifty
inhabitants had swollen to twice its size as the local residents took in
refugees from the east -- family, friends, even strangers. When the enemy
approached the town, Waltraud went into hiding ("because I expected
something terrible to happen") and was for a short time separated from her
parents. When she returned, she was greeted with the news that her parents had
taken their own lives in their home. This was a horrible experience, as she
later explained:
At first, I wanted to go
into our house [to see the bodies of my parents], but the neighbors cold me not
to. I walked back into the village and other people offered to let me stay in
their home for the night because they did not want me to be alone. My parents
were buried the same night. Following that experience, many others committed
suicide also -- even families with up to six children. It was a horrible time.
...
Although hundreds of Latter-day Saint
women later told of miraculous escapes from the conquerors, not all were spared
the suffering associated with physical assault. Such was the case with Ida
Schulz when the hiding place of the Schulz family was discovered by Red Army
soldiers. As Vera recalled, "[The soldiers] took my mother away, and she
kept her hands tightly around her handbag because she did not want to lose it.
It was horrible to see what they did to her. When she came back, she did not
talk to anyone for days."
A Christian church willingly abandoning Christian
principles for profit?
Also
during World War II, the church declared itself neutral and pacifist, refusing
to take a side or to promote freedom as Capt. Moroni did in the Book of Mormon.
The church headquarters only reluctantly offered solace to citizens caught up
in conscription and marshaling for war by offering absolution in these cases
where they were pressed into service against their will. They seem not to have
dealt with the situation where patriotic men gladly joined the military services
of their country to keep that country free.
The
Cold War was the continuation of World War II, and in that Cold War period, the
LDS church sought to assist the USSR in its drive for world conquest by
campaigning against the US MX missile system. In return, it sought to establish
a lasting church presence in East Germany through building a temple there.
Joining with other civil powers engaged in world conquest by any means
necessary seems to be what they are drawn to do.
Was
its goal to be an amoral power-seeking church? Where have we seen that impulse
before? The Roman Catholic Church obviously comes to mind. It is interesting
that in about the same historical period, the church leaders sought to downplay
references to the Catholic Church being the "great and abominable church
of the devil." Could it be that because the LDS church was following the
same pattern of behavior as the Catholic Church, it was actually seeking to
avoid the reference of the "great and abominable church of the devil"
being used as to itself?
The
LDS church's grand scheme seems to be promoting the building of an earthly
empire regardless of whatever ideologies and practices might be found operating
in that empire. In retrospect, their logic seems to have been that by declaring
themselves above the fray and staying neutral concerning personal political
freedom in that great world war, WWII, the LDS church could then abandon
essentially all of its principles in search of building a
"religion-based" temporal empire that took no stand on the issue of
personal political freedom. The declaration of an abandonment of all Christian
morality in its search for earthly power for itself would entitle it to be
called "the whore of all the earth."
An
embarrassment of riches
We
might notice that one of the great priestcraft business victories might also be
one of the possible great worries of the central church headquarters in that they
have managed to accumulate a massive nest egg of perhaps $100 billion or more,
by saving up about $10 billion a year over a 10-year period. (This implies a
normal income in excess of $20 billion a year.) One might wonder if the church
leaders, having finally accumulated such enormous treasure in liquid monetary
instruments, might actually consider completely retiring from this troublesome
game of playacting which they carry out as church leaders. Having "made
their pile," so to speak, there is no obvious reason why they should not
just cut themselves loose from the membership and let the membership fend for
themselves.
They
surely realize that, while it is nice to have a large amount of unencumbered
money in the bank, it is also an enormous temptation to those in the world who
would like to find a way to claim some of that easy money for themselves,
including disgruntled church members. This is especially true of greedy and
jealous governments who think they should own and control everything in the
country. One way to actually protect that money is to disperse it, and who
would be better beneficiaries of that disbursement that would the church
leaders themselves, they might say to themselves. That money would probably be
much less vulnerable in private hands than in the hands of a large and visible
and vulnerable religious organization which, no matter how "woke"
they might try to seem, would still look like a valuable target to depose and
exploit by leftist ideologues who typically also are thieves at heart.
There
are actually a few minor indications that they have considered doing such a
thing. They seem to have tired of pretending to be servants to the members as
demonstrated by their unwillingness to take the slightest risk or endure the
slightest exertion to make sure that at least the basic temple ordinances are
available to those who need them, especially those young couples who wished to
get married during the past two years of the pandemic. The church leaders have
also canceled all future marriages for time only in the temples. This policy
change seems permanent, not temporary, seeming to have no link to concerns
about the pandemic and large gatherings in the temples.
Whatever
the minimal medical risks (and much larger political risks) of the pandemic
might be to the central church, and the tendency to try to minimize marriages
and other uses of the temples, perhaps temporarily, would it not still be a
good idea to encourage people to get married in the temple, whenever they are
married, rather than telling some, who seek to be married for time only, that
they are second class members or citizens and should get married by the civil
authorities in Las Vegas or perhaps get married by a bishop in a chapel, and
not bother the church authorities and the Temple administrators and workers?
The church already offers the most minimal of services to its members, and now
they are paring them down even further. Perhaps church leaders have set a goal
of a reserve of $150 billion, which could be $10 billion for each of the top 15
church leaders, and then they will simply break up the enterprise. If there is
the slightest chance of that, it would make sense for the members to begin
preparations for an alternate leadership method.
A
few short examples of church collapse and the abandonment of members
Not
only does the church do absolutely nothing to improve the general society we
live in, but this "family centered church" doesn't even do anything
to help at the family level. They have abandoned any responsibility for
absolutely everything that happens in our nation or in our families. They have
even ceased to define the good – anything goes.
1.
They support a content-free youth program. In an Eagle Scout program some of
the required learning experiences have to do with citizenship in the nation and
citizenship in the community. The church has dropped any such prescriptive
program as far as youth learning or action. Now a child might set a goal to
wash the dishes with the family, or some other common thing they might do
anyway, regardless of any specific program, and claim success for doing those
simplest and most common of things. There is no great striving for something better
required in this so-called "program."
2.
They turned marriages over to civil authorities, making the temples meaningless
for young people. For up to two years during the Covid epidemic, young people
could go to Las Vegas to get married and be considered as completely compliant
with church doctrine. They might be married by a ward bishop or stake
president, but it was only with those people acting as agents of the state
governments.
And
they declared that anyone who was being married for time only in the temple,
with the people involved often having been originally married in the temple in
other marriages, now would not have access to the temple at all. Again, Las
Vegas is good enough for them. If Temple marriages are important in our
doctrinal structure, the foundation of our gospel, why refuse to do them for
the smallest of reasons? All of these people might have to go shopping and go
to work and everyone has to accept some risk to make those life preserving
functions happen, but the church essentially declares itself much less
important, a "nonessential business," and closes up for these
functions which might be declared critical on Sunday but of no importance at
all on Monday.
3.
The church long ago ended its adoption support services. If the church might reasonably
do something to minimize abortions, and maximize adoptions, for example, they
have decided to do none of that and have nothing to do with supporting the
formation of nuclear families. This is in line with their refusal to even
provide marriage services in temples.
4.
With these program-collapse features in mind, we might wonder whether the
recent "home centered, church supported" slogan and strategy is just
another way of saying that the central church is tired of feeling any
responsibility for anything, and everyone is just to be cut loose to take care
of themselves. The only member duty left is to send money to Salt Lake City to
buy their salvation. and the leaders' only duty is to receive it and spend it
lavishly and pointlessly. Otherwise, you're on your own. This is the perfect
business situation – an enormous rental income with zero cost or
responsibility.
Experiences of
missionaries and converts
For some people, the
experience of going on a mission can be a bad and upsetting thing, especially
for those who may baptize no one at all during their two-year mission. They
might reasonably conclude that the gospel is not very powerful if no one wants
to join up.
The Scriptures tell us
over and over how wonderful the gospel is it and why it should sweep the earth,
and then when it doesn't, what do we do? In my case, the question was delayed a
very long time since on my mission I baptized somewhere in the range of 120
people, plus, as a district leader, I interviewed a further large number of
people that were being baptized by other missionaries. So, in my experience,
the gospel worked just fine.
But the most successful
part of my mission was in Utah. Looking back now I can see that when people can
see the power of the gospel in how it affects society, as it does in Utah, then
they are much more easily convinced that the gospel is a good thing. If they're
living somewhere else, where the gospel is very weak and Christianity has very
little effect on society, then the apparent social benefits of joining the
gospel are comparatively weak. Probably only if they are brought in and become
part of a close family can they feel enough of that good influence to want to
join the church.
The version of the
gospel we have right now is good for dependent children, but there is no mature,
independent, grown-up adult version available. There are a few items which
could be used to construct an adult version, but they have not been put
together in that way. It is still very beneficial to the church leaders to have
non-adults as their subjects. Thinking adults can cause themselves and the
church leaders a great deal of problems.
We might notice that
BYU itself does not have an adult religion program which would allow mature
minds to learn all that can be known and needs to be known about the gospel and
how to manage it. That dumbing down of BYU is a conscious act on the part of
the church leaders, partly to avoid any competition in their exploitation of
the masses, and partly because they don't want anyone to "blow their
cover" by explaining exactly what is going on in the church today.
The church leaders have
found a way to either divert or co-opt those few students who would like to
really understand the gospel. If the only way you can make a living by learning
about the gospel is to work for the church either at BYU or at some other part
of the church education system, then you have been captured. If you dissent at
that point then you might lose your job or even lose your pension after you
retire. This is a fairly powerful form of coercion, even though it is not very
visible. When one tries to enforce a monopoly of money and power, one must also
maintain a monopoly on information flows. After 100 years of a successful con
game, one cannot allow some young upstart pipsqueak to blow the cover on this
elaborate scam. Jeremy Runnells has come as close as anyone to blowing their
cover, but so far they have been able to weather the storm and minimize the
threat by isolating him and attacking him. I believe the FAIR people have done
much good in the world, but in this case, they were destructive attack dogs
rather than distributors of light. They might have taken this opportunity to
flesh out the gospel in a way that it should be completed, but they missed that
opportunity, probably because many of them are on the priestcraft payroll or
would like to be.
An actively
anti-Christian "Christian" church
There are many levels
on which people might react badly to the church they belong to. One of the most
obvious, for those who have reached adulthood and have a sense of social
responsibility, is that the church demands a large percent of our time and
money and then very carefully makes sure that it accomplishes as little as
possible in the world with that effort and that money. In fact, one of its
goals in demanding and accepting and consuming or wasting or stockpiling member
resources is to make sure that the church members are bereft of their ability
to make changes in the world themselves which might then, theoretically, cause
some problems for the church leaders.
The basic logic is that
if the church actually accomplishes any good in the world, that will raise its
visibility, and then the church leaders will receive some pushback from the
world, especially from all of the tyrants and greedy evildoers of the world.
That is the last thing they want to have to deal with. They want to be adored,
well cared for, and have no duties whatsoever to change the world. We might
notice that they never set any goals to do anything at all, except perhaps
build a few more extremely expensive and redundant temples. That makes their
lives as calm and peaceful and pleasant as possible. What they are doing has
absolutely nothing to do with the gospel which Christ taught, as far as making
the world a better place, but the church's behavior is totally determined by
the comfort and convenience of today's leaders.
Advertising the prophets as infallible?
Do prophets need to be advertised and
hyped like a Broadway show or a circus act? Or is it more likely that their wise
and quiet counsel and actions could be expected to bear the good fruit by which
they could be known widely enough? Two news items struck me as strangely
inappropriate concerning LDS church leadership. Using an in-house advertising
agency to cleverly sell prophets to the world as infallible seems to
commercialize the process too much for my taste.
The February 18, 2022 edition of the
church news has an article at page 10 entitled "Ultimate source for
lifetime of trusted answers: Trusting in the Lord draws us to Him and helps us
discover the path He has for each of us." It would indeed be wonderful to
have all of our questions answered the way Joseph Smith had his questions
answered, by the direct visitation and pronouncements of heavenly beings.
However, that is not the experience of most of us, and we must rely on his
church organization on earth to fill in most of the blanks. Presumably, the
intended message here is much more that we should be unquestioning and
absolutely obedient to our earthly church leaders than we could ever be to any
gentle spiritual promptings.
Here is one paragraph from that article:
To
trust in the Lord with all of our heart means we surrender our will entirely to
Him. We rely on His wisdom, His omnipotence and His infinite love. There is no
negotiating, hesitating or Googling for another opinion. When the Spirit
reveals to us what the Lord would have us do, we must trust and obey.
The
Lord Is Ultimate Source for Lifetime of Trusted Answers, Young Women Leaders
Say
https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/the-lord-is-ultimate-source-for-lifetime-of-trusted-answers
Contrary to the implications here, I
don't believe most people have the Spirit speak to them in words that are in
all capitals and bolded so that there can be absolutely no question about the
content of the extremely emphatic message which is being sent to us. We might
get that from an earthly publication, but that is not how the spirit
communicates. I personally believe that the spirit councils but does not
command. Only earthly leaders even have the option of commanding, and I believe
they would be very wise to rarely do so, perhaps only in times of extreme
emergency. I also cannot imagine the Lord wanting us to "surrender our
will entirely to Him." I believe he would prefer wise, willing, and
cheerful friends to unthinking zombie supporters.
In another case concerning a short, 1:45,
video:
President
Henry B. Eyring recounts moments from his youth when he received approval from
people, including his mother, who were in touch with heaven, equating it to
receiving heaven’s approval.
President
Eyring: Hearing Him Through Those in Touch with Heaven
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcmxVT8goMc&t=18s
It is not too much of a logical jump,
presumably the one intended that readers make, from treating his mother as a
link to heaven to treating him, one of the prophets, as a link to heaven. Other
people have noticed this tendency of the central church setting itself up as a
source of absolute truth – as mentioned in some Facebook articles. But this is
a bridge too far under current circumstances.
What is the solution?
So what is
the solution to our plight? We have to completely
dismantle church headquarters, completely end any aspect of priestcraft, and
start over. How do you do that? It would certainly be disruptive, but it is
also quite possible.
The easy
way would be to simply stop sending any money to Salt Lake City to be consumed
and wasted. Perhaps the leaders would get the message and make the necessary
changes, but perhaps they would not. Instead of using sending that money to
Salt Lake City we would use all of that money in individual or organized
efforts to conduct valuable charitable activities. If that amount were in the range of $10
billion a year, one could do a great deal of good with that much money. That money might be used to fix the corrupt
schooling system in Utah as a first step in building up Zion in Utah as a
Gospel-compliant society. We might fix the corrupt city governments and court
systems in Utah, mostly through shining a light on current problems. We might fix the problem of 3000 abortions in
Utah every year. We might find a way to replace failing Social Security and
Medicare plans with church plans which were more efficient and encouraged
correct gospel principles. We might take over the broadcasting systems in Utah
and perhaps elsewhere to make sure that the newspapers and radio stations
taught the truth instead of acting aggressively to teach Satanic doctrines and
try to destroy our nation as most of them are.
One
problem in trying to improve our understanding of the gospel and moving ahead is
that the church members have been fooled at least once, so they are going to be
very skeptical about being fooled again if someone tries to tell them that they
have figured out the correct answer. This kind of massive confusion and
uncertainty was certainly part of Satan's calculation on getting us to where we
are. It could take many years to get people to agree to go a different
direction while actually having faith that it is the correct direction. That is the power of an
existing and incorrect "tradition of the fathers."
Strangely
enough, I see some faint signs that the church leaders are preparing to abandon
church members and take care of themselves -- "every man for himself and
devil take the hindmost" -- since they are clearly unwilling and unable to
advise regular church members on what to do in these difficult times, and then lead
them in doing it. I say let them go and good riddance.
Encouraging the leaders
to drift off into the sunset and leave us alone would make the problem easier
to solve of getting a large group of church members back on the correct gospel
path, not the fake "covenant path" which they have constructed as the
correct thing for church members to do, which is to seek personal purity, Old
Testament-style, through apathy and inactivity rather than seeking salvation
through vigorously doing good and producing much good fruit as I believe Christ
intended.
The new allocation of member resources
Since the priestcraft concept of
collecting Old Testament tithing on pain of losing nearly all member privileges
including attending the temple and use of the priesthood is such a terrible
thing, essentially destroying the gospel from the inside out, it must be
stopped immediately. It is the single
most corrupt and damaging aspect of today's version of the Gospel.
Instead, members must be put back in the
place they were during the New Testament when no one imagined that their
resources belonged to anyone but themselves, there was no salvation tax (aka
tithing), and their main religious duty was in using those resources to do good
in the world. That would naturally
include helping all of their neighbors to the extent that they could, and then,
where possible, branching out to help the larger society.
We might wonder what would happen to the
central church organization if tithing was ended. Actually, nothing would happen to the central
church organization, except that it would probably stop being able to save up
perhaps $10 billion a year as it has in recent years until it has more than
$100 billion in liquid assets stashed away somewhere in our current very
worldly system. The church already has
so much money that if it merely lived off the financial returns from its
investments it could go on forever at the same level it is today. Since it either simply wastes or stockpiles
the resources it gets, having the members take back control of that flow of
money could only have a good effect.
Today's world is filled with an enormous
number of problems from the very basic to the esoteric, and all of them need to
be repaired by member observation, analysis, and input. Our education systems are in a sorry state
since they only teach leftist, Marxist, satanic doctrines and have seemingly
destroyed an entire generation of our young people so that one might wonder
whether our nation can even continue after this terrible and overwhelming flood
of anti-religion confusion, narcissism, and sinfulness.
Probably the only solution is to simply
create a completely parallel education system which operates on Gospel
principles. It is probably impossible to
repair the systems which exist simply by trying to make small incremental
improvements. Just solving that
education problem would surely take all the resources that we can muster for a
time.
The church has stopped trying to do
anything to limit abortions and encourage adoptions, so that entire system
would have to be set up again and done vigorously so that LDS people can
actually be involved in saving lives and increasing the number of lives since
our society is actually shrinking since no one can imagine why they would want
to bring a child into the world in these terrible conditions. This is a little bit like the circumstances
at the time of Noah where almost everything was so corrupt that it was a great
detriment for a person to be born on the earth under such terrible
conditions. It is probably not quite
that bad yet today, but we have essentially the same problem. Obviously, only a Gospel society can fix
these terrible problems.
We keep hearing that our vaunted
government welfare systems, the Social Security system and the Medicare system,
are running out of resources. The Social
Security system is a great depressor of the birthrate, because everyone assumes
that they will be taken care of in their old age regardless of whether they
have any children themselves. But, at
this point, with so few people having children, it will soon be impossible for
the younger generation to take care of an older generation, simply because
where there were once 35 people to take care of each old person, I believe we
are now at two young working-age people for every old person to be cared
for. This cannot continue.
Similarly, the Medicare-style systems in
the United States and in the UK are so corrupt and inefficient that the only
way that these systems can remain and continue having the appearance of success
is that they have to kill off half the old people to lower the medical costs of
caring for them, revealing similar problems to the Social Security system. It was disgusting to see some states such as
New York and California gleefully arrange for their older citizens to be
infected with Covid and die since that was a great way to free up billions of
dollars in government funding of pensions and medical care. I hope no one imagines that they were
following the correct principles of charitable behavior in killing off those
tens of thousands of old people.
Moving out another layer or ring, we
might then began working on inner-city minorities who have been trapped on
government plantations for many decades.
Their education is intentionally terrible, their economics are
intentionally terrible, and they prey upon each other with astonishing crime
and murder rates. Solving those
inner-city problems would make it possible for freedom to come back to these
inter-city war zones, and these people could begin to contribute to freedom
instead of being used to contribute to slavery in their cities and states and
throughout the nation because of the people they are willing to vote for.
Going out another layer, we might deal
with those in other countries, especially those in other countries who wish to
come here. It would be ideal for these
people to have a system invented just for them which would solve their
immediate needs and encourage them to support true religion and true freedom
rather than, as with the inner-city people, be used as another voting lever of
power to keep the socialist tyrants in government positions through legalized
robbery.
More generally we might say that we
should begin to roll back these giant Marxist government programs of Social
Security and Medicare and perhaps a hundred or a thousand other such programs
of a smaller size and replace all of these programs with gospel programs that
teach correct principles and provide the actual information and services
needed. That is the long-term goal, but
we are so far away from the ideal that it probably seems completely hopeless to
even start. However, if we had $10
billion or $20 billion every year to apply to some of these social issues, and
we received assistance from other like-minded people so that we might quickly
move into the $100 billion or $200 billion range, we could then start to makes
some real difference in our country and then in the world.
This is a very simplified version of how
ambitious and far-thinking church members might begin to create a Zion or
Millennium situation. We certainly have
the ability to do this. It is simply
that we lack the information and the conviction. Unfortunately, as long as we are under the
thumb of the mostly Marxist LDS Church priestcraft system, nothing is going to
happen, so we have to throw that off and begin anew. Our own leaders are our biggest impediment to
doing as the Scriptures suggest that the gospel can do. It is hard to say whether all the leaders are
on board with the seamy priestcraft programs they are operating, but it is
obvious that most of them are on board.
Perhaps some of them could be reclaimed if the members take things into
their own hands and begin to change the Mormon world so that the Mormons can
change the rest of the world.
This member rebellion would surely cause
a few problems until the church leaders either saw the light or gave up and
went away. For a time, we would have a
large number of temples which were even more empty than they are today, since
barely anyone would have passed the test to have a recommend. Only when we get rid of recommends do we have
a chance of getting the Gospel back on course.
How that quiet confrontation between the church and its members might
turn out, I can't say, but the church was designed to run perfectly without a
single building to its name. It needs no
chapels and it certainly needs no temples.
These architectural idols have come to represent the main problems that
the church has today. The same
bureaucratic mindset that centered around the Temple of Herod in Jerusalem or
St. Peters Cathedral in Rome is now operating even more feverishly in our own
Mormon minds. Where once upon a time it
was forbidden to make anything more lavish than a pile of untouched stones to
create an altar of some kind to worship God, now we spend hundreds of billions
of dollars on these new idols and have forgotten altogether that individual
charity is almost the only thing that matters to have righteous individuals and
a righteous and influential church.
My own story of inquiry
– What's wrong with the church?
For most of my life,
and especially for the last 20 years I have been trying to figure out why the
church today is so static. If we include the likely number of church members who
died during 2020, the church population actually decreased by 50,000 in 2020.
We could say that the pandemic had something to do with that, but, more
typically, in a real New Testament church, it is in times of trouble when the
church actually expands through the good effects of service.
We read in all the
Scriptures about the great things the restored church is supposed to do in the
world, and none of those things are happening. We are not even inching towards
Zion or the Millennium -- we are "dead in the water" or retreating. I
was surprised to find some of the apologists on FAIRMormon trying to justify
this by saying the church was never supposed to be successful. It was never supposed
to be more than a beachhead, a small innocuous presence in the world. But that
sounds completely wrong to me, nothing more than a justification for failure.
My answer to this
current stubbornly unsuccessful situation is that, beginning in the time of
Wilford Woodruff, the church has degenerated from a genuine New Testament
church to an Old Testament church, while retaining a few of the elements of the
New Testament church, and adding in a few more elements such as some extra scriptures.
However, the restored church does not actually believe those new scriptures or
change its behavior to match the teachings in those new scriptures. It is as
though we don't even have them, as far as many important teachings and policies
are concerned.
Just as the church of
the law of Moses could barely maintain itself amongst the Jews, and was
completely inappropriate for a worldwide religion, we are right back where we
started. The gospel which Christ taught quickly exploded across the known world
and changed that world, then engulfed in tyranny and slavery, until we now have
Western civilization, based on Christianity, which emphasizes personal freedom.
One might expect that the restored gospel would give society another great
boost toward personal freedom, success, and prosperity, but it has completely
failed to do that. In fact, the church has become part of the problem in that
it suppresses freedom and places a great tax on religiosity and freedom of
action so that its spread is completely stopped, and is, at best, staying
static.
The most notable thing
about Christianity, as Christ taught it, and his followers exhibited it, is
freedom in every aspect. The Mosaic law-imposed chains of many trivial rules
and of making everyone support a tribe of professional priests through very
expensive tithes and offerings were cast away by Christ himself, at great
expense, and that very act of ending of those constraints was what got him
killed. Now, 2000 years later, we have gone right back to the same arrangements
which were so oppressive then. We are once again supporting a huge tribe of
Levites and Aaronites with a Sanhedrin which collects all the money and
offerings, and rules over it all.
Given the unchanging axioms
of human nature, it seems completely clear to me that unless the church stops
this taxing and deforming and suppressing of righteous religious behavior, the
gospel can never get beyond where it is now. The ideas of Zion and the Millennium
are as out of reach now as they were under the law of Moses. That centralized
command-and-control version of religion was completely foreign to the spread of
the true religion worldwide, and that is exactly what we have again today. 200
years from now nothing will have changed unless we once more break up the grip
of the professional priests on religion.
I think there is every
reason to believe that every time a restoration of the gospel has failed, it
has gone through exactly the same set of steps where this wonderful and
valuable gospel has the ownership of it claimed by a group of proud and greedy
priests who then proceed to extract value from it, and completely ruin it in
the process. The accounts of the destruction of the church in Fourth Nephi
sounds very much like this. The church itself today is sponsoring and enforcing
a class society and so dare not take any steps to rid our larger society of
classes of various kinds. I wonder if the people at the time of Fourth Nephi
had invented identity politics, complete with an infinite number of
intersectional compartmentalizing of the populace so that one could have the
maximum amount of conflict and the minimum amount of gospel-style cooperation.
We saw that pattern
clearly in the degeneration of Christ’s original church into the Catholic
Church, and today, we have the LDS church which has been working for over 100
years to become the next version of the Catholic Church. Competing with the Catholics
for religiously pointless architectural prowess, as in Rome with the obviously extravagantly
expensive Rome Temple, seems to indicate that the church decided at one time to
compete directly with the Roman church, head-on. Whatever they were thinking,
we can be sure that that was a really terrible idea. This priestcraft idea of
building up an earthly kingdom, as under King David, and as under the Sanhedrin
and King Herod, etc. is always a really terrible idea, but that idea seems to
have gripped church leaders since about 1896 and they have not let go of that
idea. It has worked well for them individually, but it has been a disaster for
the propagation of the gospel.
Today we have the
church trying to "beat a dead horse" or, more accurately,
"driving a dead horse," as it tries to drive its membership to try to
spread throughout the world and bring in more money, but no one really wants to
cooperate with this very old and very sick methodology. The collapse of the new
content-free "ministering" program into near meaninglessness seems to
be a related phenomenon.
The central thesis of
the gospel is found in the parable of the good Samaritan where a person sees a
problem and spontaneously solves it. In contrast, we have the organized
religion of Levites and priests walking by on the other side of the road,
keeping all their money and their "purity" for themselves rather than
serving humanity. We are exactly back in the same situation, whatever
rationalization and obfuscation might be thrown up by the church leaders and
the church newsroom.
The big question for
church employees is whether you want to continue to support the church in its
Old Testament form, as we see before us, or if you want to actually make some
effort to move the church back to its successful New Testament form. Are you
going continue to be part of the problem or are you going to be part of the
solution?
No one dares even bring
up the question of how prophetic are our living prophets, but when a church
leadership degrades a New Testament church down to the level of a totally ineffective
Old Testament level, reversing most of what Christ accomplished (which we now
cannot completely comprehend), do we really want to say that those prophets
were prophets when they canceled the work of Christ?
Christ showed us very
vividly how to lead a church without turning it into a priestcraft scam as we
see today. He went through the three temptations, concerning ease, fame, and
power, absolutely demonstrating that he would take nothing for himself either by
argument or by force. Either his father would take care of his needs, or he
might receive free-will contributions from those who wanted to support him. But
he never took or required anything from anyone, and he would not allow his
disciples to use priestcraft rhetoric to take anything from anyone else. We might
notice that for many decades after the death of Christ, there WAS no such thing
as a central church bureaucracy. (Luckily, it would not have done them any
good, because they could not even communicate in a way that a
command-and-control system would require.) The church was completely autonomous
at the local level, what we might call the stake level, and so it was free to
spread across the world at a furious pace, unhindered by any taxing or
regulation that is so dear to the hearts of those who wish to centralize and exploit
a good thing for their own benefit.
Christ made no effort
to copyright, control, and exploit anything. Perhaps if he had printed up his
gospel in more formal terms and published it and charged for its books, it
might never have spread across the world. Instead, he gave it all away for free
and the people who wrote it down could not themselves claim any ownership of
that which they recorded. In a world where people are constantly trying to
collect rent on things which they did not create, as with the church and the
Scriptures today, there is always a great negative influence.
Of course, it is fair
enough to have people who commit such things to a printed form to be able to
charge for their product, but they should never make the mistake of imagining
that they own the content of that printed product.
I think it is
interesting that the Internet has done something similar. It has made it
extremely difficult for someone to print something and then extract enormous
amounts of profit from that effort which they claim to own. Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia
Britannica are interesting examples. Apparently, the Encyclopaedia Britannica used
to be a reasonably profitable item for salesmen to sell. At this point,
regardless of its likely higher quality, I don't know anyone who would pay
hundreds of dollars for a set of such books.
The gospel was intended
to be just the same thing as a free Internet version of a very powerful
ideology, but we now have a new set of Encyclopaedia Britannica people who want
to claim ownership and control over something which they did not create and
have no rights to.
A note to church
employees
I have generally
thought that contributing to apologetics activities as a good thing, something
I might do if I had more time, but I now have a different viewpoint. I would be
curious to know whether most apologists regularly differentiate between the
gospel, which consists of the actual theology of Christ's original teachings,
and the church, which consists of the bureaucratization of some version of that
original theology. In my experience, the gospel and the church are two very
different things, at least at this point in time. It is that very noticeable
divergence between the original gospel of Christ and what we see in the
bureaucratized church today that concerns me a great deal.
As I see it, starting
in about 1896 with Wilford Woodruff, the church has moved from being an actual
New Testament church to being almost a completely Old Testament church, while
still bringing along a few elements of the New Testament church. So far, it
keeps the new Scriptures supplied through Joseph Smith as useful religious
relics, but ignores the consequences of their teachings on all the most
important topics, at least as relates to church activity in the real world. The
biggest single item is that the church today has canceled the New Testament
concept of Good Samaritan-style charity and instead has substituted the Old
Testament concept of mandatory tithing, making it a religious debt, a tax,
without which one cannot be saved, not a free-will contribution which was the
original intention and implementation. The church organization thus militates
against individual freedom in this area, as it does in many other areas.
It is possible that the
"tribe of Levi" today, the central church bureaucracy, supported by
mandatory tithing as in the Old Testament, is about the same size as, or even
larger than, the tribe of Levi at the time of Christ. I can only find one place
that gives a number, 8,600, which was correct in about 1410 BC. There were
multiple cities allocated to the Levites in Israel, but I don't know how many
people lived there.
The whole point of the
gospel of Christ was that every man was his own priest and he needed no Levite
or Aaronite to take care of religious matters for him as a professional priest.
Just after the time of Christ, the patriarchs in the scattered churches had all
of the sealing ordinances, so that there was no dependence on any central
authority. In our own time, the patriarchs at the stake level had those same
priesthood sealing powers until Wilford Woodruff and his friends pulled them
back and centralized them so that the they could sold and charged for. The original rule was that "freely ye
have received, freely give," but now we sell priesthood ordinances like
the indulgences that Martin Luther complained about. It appears that one of the
main incentives for finishing the Salt Lake Temple was so that people could be
excluded from the Temple unless they paid their tithing. The old Endowment
House had been good enough for 40 years, but it was taken down and the Temple
finished.
The
Tribe of Levi
https://www.israel-a-history-of.com/tribe-of-levi.html
Scripture
gives a detailed list of the clans within the tribe of Levi in Numbers 3:21-33.
To Gershon belonged the clans of the Libnites and and Shimeites. The males one
month old or older totaled 7,500. To Kohath belonged the clans of the Amramites
(Amram was the father of Moses), Izharites, Hebronites and Uzzielites. They
totaled 8,600.
Author
of the Book of Numbers Moses is credited as the author. Date Written 1450-1410
B.C.
Introduction
to the Book of Numbers - Learn Religions
www.learnreligions.com/book-of-numbers-701116
LDS apologetics need to
change. Instead of the defending the corrupt Old Testament church that the LDS
church has become, they ought to help define the real gospel, and then defend
it, especially against the fraud that is now the LDS church.
It is quite possible
that the current devotees of LDS apologetics will not agree with me, but it is
also quite probable that they will at least understand what I am saying,
although many others might not. Their familiarity with church operations, plus their
broad view of the world should make all of this more clear to them than to most.
Here I am talking about
a very different set of doubts than are typical of more detail-oriented FAIR
Mormon questions.
I want to ask LDS
apologists a complicated FAIR Mormon-style question. Would you consider being
less of an activist if I added some new more sophisticated theological doubts?
Since many LDS apologists work for the church, or would like to, in
order to keep their jobs, they are expected to be proponents of various
theories of priestcraft. They might ask themselves if they are perfectly
comfortable doing that sort of thing, especially after I have attempted to
raise serious doubts about the gospel wisdom of how the church is managed
today.
Perhaps the most I can
hope for is that these many LDS apologists will decide to stop putting energy
into defending what I consider indefensible, on a whole host of issues, but not
all. The problem is that actively defending the current situation does more
harm than good, as I measure it.
The Priestcraft/Marxism/Gadianton
Robber continuum
The Democrat party
today is the perfect party of priestcraft, and they are joined with a rather
large number of RINOs. They use lies, manipulation, and rhetoric to keep
control over people who are not educated and informed enough to defend
themselves against these onslaughts of lies. Unfortunately, the LDS church has
joined the Democrat party of priestcraft. They may not support it 100%, but if
they speak out in any way, and describe and criticize its evil practices, it will
inevitably bring into question their own priestcraft, that is, creating
artificial classes within the church where one group of self-appointed people
can exploit everyone else. That would cause the whole priestcraft, empire-building
edifice to crumble.
The Democrats, of
course, are moving toward the Gadianton Robbers, where they explicitly kill to
get gain. As it is, they are willing to kill where necessary to ensure their
power over the nation, and their ability to sell “America by the Pound" to
China and Ukraine and other countries. This is like the case in the Book of
Mormon of the man who killed to enforce priestcraft. as where Nehor killed
Gideon.
Make The LDS Church Great
Again
I believe the gospel
can be made great again. This article is meant to point out some places where
we can begin that process.
