The Concept Of A Second Council Of Nicaea

View an 18-page paper on holding a modern Council of Nicaea to rescue the LDS church from itself. 

20240709 Nicaea in Utah-V13

View paper on LDS Priestcraft.

View paper on LDS Priestcraft. (This still a rather rough draft, with lots of extraneous material, but there are some nuggets to be found there.)

20240606 LDS Priestcraft-V24.pdf

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l-wYSACDgqnZhBCtKxJHO6QUMRorllpy/view?usp=sharing

Introducing my (free) "A Small Library of Religious Research - Restoring The Restoration

Restoring The Restoration

Introducing my (free) "A Small Library of Religious Research" 

After 60 years of focused effort (out of my 82), I make the bold statement that I have the LDS church situation all figured out, historically and theologically, at least "close enough for government work." There are many passionate people who have their own views of the current and historical situation, and what should be done about it, but I hope at least some of them will investigate what I have to say. If a large number of us could agree on a large number of things, then we could actually change that situation -- change current reality into something much better. The real gospel is wonderful, but today's implementation of it is terrible.

I consider an "educated populace" to be the only way we are ever going to fix this very messed up LDS church situation.

By my measure, the church has been diluted down to having only 5% left of the original New Testament gospel. All of this has happened since the church went officially priestcraft in 1896, turning the church into a religion business to generate income for the top leaders. Essentially all of the membership has been tricked because the process was gradual, and no one was paying attention. It was a big mistake to have so much faith in their leaders. It is interesting that Brigham Young worried about this exact thing happening, which makes him a bit of prophet in my view. Of course, now we have hundreds of thousands of church members who are quite confident that there is something wrong with the church, even if they can't exactly describe what it is. What I hope is that these hundreds of thousands of dissatisfied and disgruntled people will grasp onto what I am saying and be the activist, moving force to get the church back on track.

Understanding and re-creating the missing 95% is a huge task for everyone involved, but it will be worth it. What is my educational preparation for what I claim to have accomplished? I have two law degrees and then spent most of my life as a computer consultant working on the design of large-scale computer systems. (One project had 900 programmers.) Finding all the missing but critical factors has been my job for most of my life, and that turned out to be a very useful preparation for trying to understand the many secrets and intricacies of today's church. 

To see all of this for free, and make your own judgment, click the link below to download the searchable PDF document which contains 5 books and 12 articles, and is 2462 pages and 22MB, entitled:

20240328 Restoring The Restoration, A Small Library of Religious Research, V.01.pdf

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FZxHfGn8OUZ3PeqphrDoDnNCBNw2hnO7/view?usp=sharing

The Priestcraft Gradual Dilution Graph

What follows is a brief summary of what the church leaders have done to the gospel since they adopted full-blown priestcraft policies in 1896:

 

Description of points on the dilution graph:

1830 Full gospel restored +100%

1896 Officially (but secretly) installed priestcraft, started leader salaries -50%

Once priestcraft is officially installed, all other aspects of the gospel will eventually be analyzed for whether they add income to the church or increase its expenses. In almost all cases, the idealistic gospel principles require the expenditure of valuable resources to carry out those works, so that those principles must be terminated as soon as possible to maximize the net income of this new priestcraft business unit. And any rationalization for the changes that comes to mind seems to be good enough for the naïve and lazy church membership who have been lulled to sleep. 2 Nephi 26:31 "for if they labor for money they shall perish."

1899 Justify priestcraft, drop charity, add tithing, facilitate all future changes -2%

Lorenzo Snow requested that tithing be paid to the central offices as a short-term Christian courtesy. Later, that requested temporary gift was turned into a permanent mandatory tax on religious activity.

1910 Declare disavowal/cancellation of Christ's original gospel -1%

The church leaders today often press the argument that the gospel which Christ restored almost immediately apostatized so that there is nothing we can learn from that time about church doctrine and administration. This supposedly then leaves today's leaders with a clean slate on which they can write anything they want. Of course, this is not historically accurate. The 2.2 billion Christians today and the rise of Western civilization are all part of the massive good effects of Christ's original gospel. Joseph Smith's implementation of the gospel was intended to be a second-stage booster to take Western Civilization to new heights, known as Zion or the Millennium.

1923 Drop common consent, take all property -10%

The members were dispossessed of all ownership in any previously commonly owned church property, and the option for them to vote on churchwide measures was ended.

1935 Drop US constitution, fully abandon charity -10%

The church officially abandoned the last vestiges of New Testament-style charity by supporting the new "government charity" tax-and-spend Social Security system without even attempting to implement an explicitly allowed substitute. In effect, the central church executed a bait-and-switch strategy and now gets to keep and squander ALL tithing receipts, with no charity expense demands whatsoever, having outsourced all charity/welfare responsibilities to civil governments. 

1938-1942 Church goes globalist, abandons freedom -5%

By implication, the church officially removed from the Book of Mormon the story about Captain Moroni and his constant quest for freedom for church members, and thus officially declared the end of LDS central support for the US Constitution. The First Presidency’s 1942 statement on war in effect declares the central church’s intent to operate above all scriptural and worldly laws. Also, by implication, the church declares a "United Nations-style" global kingdom that accepts Satan's goals of centralizing all control, not Christ’s goals of universal freedom.  The church chooses to support all the tyrants of the earth as possible future supporters of a (Satanist) one-world government and related state religion (which the LDS religion business hopes to supply for a nice fee).

1909-1978 Take all money and power from women's organizations -2%

All property and money and charity initiatives were taken from the women's organizations, part of thoroughly canceling New Testament-style charity.

1960 Enforce tithing with recommends -5%

Enforce permanent mandatory tithing with recommends/temple licenses. Make the local leaders tax collectors for the central offices.

1977 The Gathering and building up of Zion ended -5%

Canceled Article of Faith 10 concerning building up Zion in America, the Gathering necessarily being a big part of that process.

2010 Cumulative smaller debilitating changes -3%

2020 Current status – only 5% left of the original action-oriented, works-oriented gospel.

-----------------

A 5% remainder does not give us much to work with, but that is where we are today, by intentional design.

Think Celestial! Post

Can the LDS Church Think Celestial! after 127 years of thinking terrestrial?

This title, of course, refers to the admonition of President Russell M. Nelson in the October 2023 LDS Conference to "Think Celestial!"

Link to complete 13-page post.

An Appeal to the Modern Day Church

 

An Appeal to the Modern Day Church

I appeal to the modern-day church, and to its apologetics supporters, to overcome about 120 years of the accumulated "traditions of the fathers" which have moved it backwards in time so that it is now mostly an Old Testament church in concept and operation, and to reform itself into once again being a truly New Testament church.

I have prepared about 500 pages of information, some detailed, and some which contain summaries and advocacy (about 50 pages), which are intended to demonstrate the following:

1. My main published book (about 450 pages) quotes extensively from three different books which are from 200 to 400 years old which demonstrate that the mandatory payment of tithing had no part in the New Testament church, being in complete conflict with the New Testament concept of charity. Today's tithing processes are an indication and a relic of slipping back into an Old Testament mindset which the New Testament church had escaped.

2. That same book demonstrates that all of the FAIR Mormon arguments about the current day LDS church not being a priestcraft church prove exactly the opposite if read sensibly and in proper context.  And there is much more scriptural information available that could be presented indicating that the Church today is in fact a priestcraft church, but hopefully 64 pages of material will be enough on that point.

3. The actual effect of the church organization today is to greatly limit the growth and influence of the gospel, making the church's behavior completely at odds with the hundreds of scriptural evidences that the mission of the church in these latter days is to support the spread of the gospel and its influence, rather than suppress it for the benefit of a relatively small central organization.

There is every indication that the decline of the church documented in 4 Nephi, and the ultimate dissolution of the church and the very society of which it was part, will again be our fate today if no vigorous compensating action is taken.

I realize that it is almost inconceivable that a deteriorated church can revive itself to what it should be, pulling itself back up by its bootstraps, so to speak, without some intervening cataclysmic event.  Such a spontaneous self-correction process would alone be a miracle.  I know of no other case where that has happened.  But that is what I request happen today. We have the interesting historical case of Martin Luther where he objected to the behavior of the prevailing church in his time. He did not see a reforming of the prevailing church, but from his beginning efforts arose the Protestant Reformation which offered some much better substitutes, although still imperfect.

The trail through 500 pages of information begins on my blog website at FutureMormonism.blogspot.com.  There are about five blog posts on that website which are all relevant, plus a link to the full text of my book.  A paper copy of the book can be purchased on Amazon.  Links to the full text of all six of my books appear below.

LDS Church Business Model in 2020

 LDS Church Business Model in 2020 

At this point in its history, essentially all LDS church management rules of operation can be summarized into two main categories:

1. Never let a group of Mormons practice their religion without paying a franchise tax which is set at 10% of their annual income every year.

2. Never allow the church to disturb society, or let the members disturb society, in any way, by engaging in any social or political activism that could generate any enemies or social or political pushback. This rule helps maximize the income from rule number one.

According to the same underlying analysis, the church today is about twice as big as the church leaders would prefer it to be, the main indicator being that it pays twice as much tithing as the safest amount, meaning that the tithing paid is twice too big for long-term uncontested operation of the church. If that is correct, we should expect to see the church leaders tend to make decisions that will keep the church from growing and may actually cause it to shrink further. By my calculations, using church-supplied data, the year 2020 saw the church actually shrink by 25,000. The mortality rates on a group of 16 million people should be about 150,000 per year. With a reported 125,000 converts, that would indicate a 25,000 decline in membership. 2020 was a bad year, probably because of COVID-19, but, historically, the church has often grown during hard times because of service rendered.

Materials For Further Research and Proof

There are several layers of materials available for those who wish to check and verify everything I have to say on all topics about the current church. The first four layers, consisting of relatively summarized information, exist on my blog at FutureMormonism.blogspot.com.  If one wishes to go deeper, the further layers of information are in my five books which are available in their downloadable fulltext form (PDF).

Hopefully of most immediate interest will be my 2020 book entitled Is the Church As True As the Gospel? A Constitutional Approach. As far as space devoted is concerned, the two main points in that book are 

1) The fact that tithing had no place in the New Testament church,  and so should not be in the church today, and 

2) That the church today claims to not be a priestcraft church, even though it perfectly fulfills every measure of a priestcraft church. 

The church and its supporters have tried to put out extensive arguments claiming that it is not a priestcraft church, but every one of those arguments is complete nonsense, as demonstrated in multiple chapters in the 2020 book.  There is actually a great deal more material available which could be presented on that topic of priestcraft, but hopefully what I have presented will be sufficient. If what I have written is not sufficient or not self-explanatory, perhaps I can add a supplemental chapter later on.

Going even deeper into important and relevant analyses of church history and doctrine are the earlier four books. 

My six books and their Internet addresses:

1. Joseph Smith's United Order: A Non-Communalistic Interpretation, 387 pages

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vdGyWMj224qoOQdWwAuw6jxx4QKA0YE2/view?usp=sharing

2. Brigham Young's United Order: A Contextual Interpretation, 365 pages

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nI4Y-kNi-78cxCxu0m-s1c1XPLGn56rn/view?usp=sharing

3. Brigham Young's United Order: A Contextual Interpretation; Volume 2, Related Anomalies and Side Issues, 604 pages

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aSxaC-G4HepTiPZV9mAmdeRJ3UsFj9uD/view?usp=sharing

4. Creating the Millennium: Social Forces and Church Growth in the 21st Century, 279 pages

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cpZabZlCmcrA3nKjDc43JnV7ClCxz60O/view?usp=sharing

5. Is the Church As True As the Gospel? A Constitutional Approach, 470 pages

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jF7EVRz4XyvygHhpIbwLFd2K44LVAoOS/view?usp=sharing

6. Save the world by ending Old Testament-style mandatory tithing, and vigorously starting New Testament-style free-will charity, 149 pages

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DZGtWgoI3AMNK_KIUKK5mbMlRN4cemN1/view?usp=share_link

An online post for discussion: 

7. "After only 200 years, theologically the LDS Church has already mostly become the Catholic Church. Is everybody okay with that?"   14 pages
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SCHBEI1ucUFo2tMki5Zp25zBiYkAczh8/view?usp=sharing

8.  Imperial Church: The (5%) True Church

9. Can we "Restore the Restoration" and make the LDS church relevant again? 
20231004 Deal with the devil-V27  --October 4, 2023 -- 73 pages
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KoDCxEBs6UEeCLAn2HuqHGzNpB4ePCs7/view?usp=sharing

10. A Short Version of LDS History and Theology. Can And Should Men Become Like God? Do We Still Believe That?

October 19, 2023  -- 6 pages

20231022 short theology-V07-trim - Copy.pdf

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17RraoJy1i4K2JqY6AX_35WfqA-mLjfS2/view?usp=sharing

11. LDS theology anomalies
20231021 email on priestcraft-V04-trim.docx
Oct. 21, 2023 -- 2 pages
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I_znWxYidSq3ZRvHITkUZDTd-icNo_Q_/view?usp=sharing

To go down one step further in levels of detail refer to other books which deal with more specific aspects of church doctrine such the church's treatment of atheistic organic evolution. (To be added.)

LDS Artificial Growth Constraints

  

LDS Artificial Growth Constraints

(See graph at the end)

Summarizing and quantifying the effects of priestcraft on limiting church growth

For 60 years of my 80 years, I have asked myself why the church was so small and growing so slowly. I finally have an answer. The church is not growing because the leaders don't want it to grow. And why don't they want it to grow? Because they would lose personal power and importance and income and fear they would have more problems to solve and so would lead a less comfortable and more chaotic life.

Over the last century, millions of people have probably asked themselves "if the gospel is so great, as the Scriptures tell us, then why hasn't it achieved a much more powerful influence in the world, perhaps creating a Zion or a Millennium?" Well, the answer is that the gospel is indeed that remarkable, and should be that successful, except for the fact that the gospel itself, plus the process of spreading it, have been sabotaged for the last 120 years by the church itself. It is a commonly heard observation that many bureaucracies are eventually taken over by the enemies of the original purpose of that bureaucracy, and we have a perfect and most serious example of that hostile takeover in the governance of the LDS church. At the moment, it seems almost impossible that this hostile takeover of the LDS church could be reversed while keeping the whole organization intact, but that probably should be the first action attempted.

If the benefits of the true gospel were allowed to be too obvious, "by their fruits ye shall know them," then the church leaders would lose control and the gospel would explode across the world, leaving them in the dust.

The gospel is indeed itself such a powerful force that in order to keep it from growing in size and influence, there must be enormous brakes placed on it, and our leaders have gladly supplied those brakes for their own personal purposes. In other words, the church is relatively small and noninfluential because that is the desire of the church leaders.

 Considerations and techniques for the “right-sizing” of the LDS church

If one can correctly postulate the general values and intentions of the LDS church leaders, then one should be able to roughly quantify the sizing parameters for the personnel count of the church membership and of the related headquarters offices. There is a management algorithm operating here and we just need to figure it out.

The overriding concern is that the convenience and entertainment and opportunities and feeling of wealth and importance for church leadership and staff is to be optimized, since that is the point of having an independent and autonomous church headquarters unit in the first place. These choices that always favor church leaders are never intended to benefit the membership or to benefit anyone else in the world, except perhaps by accident or except in cases where benefits to church members and other people are unavoidable because of some unique circumstance.

Here are some of the rules that appear to be operating:

1. The church needs to be large enough to produce enough tithing revenue to be able to send church leaders and staff around the world to visit interesting places while traveling in relative luxury to and from those places, and residing there, and along the way.

2. The church must be small enough so that it is of little interest to all the other competing layers of government in the world extracting taxes and commanding loyalty and obedience, so that the church is not considered to be a threat to be watched and suppressed.

3. The church must explicitly avoid influencing any social changes in host countries such as allowing its members to press for freedom or having the church leaders themselves press for greater freedom.

4. The church must do the absolute minimum amount of charity work, preferably keeping it all unobservable, in countries where it wishes to have a presence, so that it does not in any way appear to compete with existing governments for the hearts and minds (and money) of the citizens there. If the church feels driven to do any large amount of charity work which could have an actual noticeable effect on the world society, it must be done either in places that do not matter to anyone, and where the recipients will never object about the church presence there, or, even better, charity offerings should be limited to places where the church has little interest in having a presence there for the sake of interesting travel or recreation or collecting much tithing money. Haiti, and its extensive 2016 hurricane damage, might be a good example.

5. There is great peril to leadership interests in letting the church get beyond a certain size, perhaps an active and effective membership of 1% of the general population (even less in less free and more jealous places), because otherwise the church becomes too visible, and all the competing governmental forces in the world will become jealous and strike at it. Perhaps we could have a membership of 3 million to 6 million in the US, assuming many are inactive in the case of the larger total number. One of the problems with that extra size is that people become a great deal more curious, and the pressure to reveal what is actually going on inside the church administration will be much larger, and then some secrets will finally be discovered, and that information getting out will itself help to expand this spiraling exposure process, and all this activity will eventually act as a depressing factor on the potential optimum and sustainable size of the church.

In other words, the church has found, through a long process of trial and error, where that sweet spot is between centralizing the most money and power, while avoiding any serious conflict with any other political, tax-collecting organizations in the world. It is a constant juggling act to stay in that sweet spot.

Apparently, the right size for the church in the United States is probably about 1 million fully active families, making up about 3 million people. If each family unit contributes $10,000 a year, that would provide a church income of $10 billion. If all the world membership together is twice that effective size, then the church could have a $20 billion income, which is obviously about twice too big for long-term uncontested operation. Taking in an extra $10 billion each year for 10 years is presumably why the leaders now have $100 billion in the bank. In other words, the church is about twice too big in its operational, effective size, and the leaders are probably feeling pressures to shrink the size and influence of the church in half if they wish to live a calm and peaceful life (and also keep their convenient nest egg).

6. If the church stays small enough, with as little influence as possible, it can maintain a high level of secrecy from its own membership and from the world. So there is this exponential danger of getting a little bit larger and letting out a little bit more information because of the many outside pressures, so that an increase in size and an increase in information and an increase in notoriety will all act in concert, multiplying each other, to depress the size and winnings of the church below the optimum point which it has reached through decades of experimentation.

For example, if the members knew more about the internal workings of the church, they might be less likely to contribute to the church, so they must be kept in the dark, however unfair, deceptive, and unChristian that may be. In a similar way, the church must remain small enough and bland enough to be considered of no importance by the competing political entities, else these external entities would work to push the church size and income down below its current optimum point, as seen through the eyes of the extremely self-centered church leadership and staff.

Putting this another way, if the church were to make declarations to the world of its intent to change the world for the better, as Joseph Smith tried to do and as the 12 actually did after his death, then that would raise the visibility of the church and at the same time increase the outside criticism and pushback. So the situation of being noticed by the world by its sheer size or by its effect on changing society, must be carefully limited.

As an example, if there are missions in the world, as there have been in the past, where a missionary might spend his entire two years and never baptize a soul, then it would seem extremely counterproductive and a waste of resources to keep missionaries in that country. On the other hand, if one of the goals of the missionary system is to keep down the number of converts so that the church remains invisible, then one might need to keep in mind some countries to send missionaries to where the leaders can be assured that very few people will join, so the church will not be noticed and the equilibrium disturbed. It is good to keep the church members desiring to do missionary work, so there needs to be a place to send out a certain number of these young people, but, at the same time, they cannot be allowed to have overall worldwide baptisms that exceed a certain number.

Perhaps one of the intentional reasons for constantly maintaining such seeming randomness in the assignment of missionaries, is that, otherwise, if missionaries could plan ahead and were fully prepared with good language skills and good teaching skills and good social skills, before their mission even started, then they might be too successful, and again disturb the balance between providing missionary opportunities for a large number of young people, while constraining their actual success to protect church headquarters interests.

Of course, another issue concerning a beautiful place like France is that the leaders and staff would like to keep a presence there, however small, so that they can justify making numerous official visits there to enjoy the scenery and ambience.

However, again, part of the calculation must be that the church can only allow itself to invite in a certain number of people worldwide because if its serious growth is noticed in one place, then whoever the reigning political entities are there, and everywhere else in the world, they will notice the church and create some kind of pushback situation and cause a loss of money and power to church leaders.

However, observing the enormously expensive temple complex established in Rome, one might suspect another long-term goal kept in the back of leaders’ minds. If they could gradually and eventually take over the Catholic Church in France and other such places, the Anglican church in England, the Lutheran church in Germany, etc., they could gain a large extension to their desired earthly empire

Leaders might be especially wary of going into Africa, or even Russia or China, where there are people who have studied the gospel who are asking for missionaries to come there to create religious organizations. This offers the opportunity for extremely fast growth, but that also becomes an immediate danger to the church's cushy and untroubled lifestyle because if there is a large growth in church members, and the necessarily large change in the social functioning in that country or those countries, almost certainly competing with local religions and governments, then that makes the LDS church HQ uncomfortably publicly visible and it will likely experience pushback and resistance everywhere, not just in the places where it is growing the fastest. In other words, it has to carefully regulate the growth of the church and the influence of the church lest the inherent power of the gospel to change lives and change societies might thus work against the income and ease and convenience of the church leaders who only seek power, adulation, and wealth and convenience, not improvements to the world.

Using this line of logic, the church appears to have made an enormous strategic error by allowing itself to become too successful so that it now has more than $100 billion in liquid assets, plus an unknown number of increments of $100 billion held in real estate assets, all centrally held. This $100 billion in cash demonstrates the inherent selfishness and greed that drives the church leadership, and, at the same time, shows the risks it is taking in allowing itself to grow in size and riches. It cannot spend those resources, especially not to improve society, else it would further make itself visible and cause itself many more problems as an organization. Right now, it is probably feeling an enormous pressure to simply separate from the membership of the church, abandon them, and "take its money and run." Otherwise, it is in grave danger of losing all of that money through any number of processes, whether from the members themselves, or from external competing organizations. It could take decades to further constrain the church enough to prevent any more growth and actually see a significant shrinkage. And what to do with all that unspent money seems unsolvable as things stand.

It may have gotten itself into a cul-de-sac where its size and riches can become its undoing. It appears that it now has about twice the number of active and wealthy members that it is safe for the church to have, and can expect a large number problems to be experienced in the future if it cannot make the necessary adjustments. The actual New Testament gospel is intended to grow at a very fast pace and to cause no problems whatsoever because of that fast growth, because the tendency of the church members to gather to places where they are welcome, and to stay away from places where they are not welcome, should take care of most of the transient political problems that might arise. This political balancing is done almost automatically and requires no expensive and complicated central command and control system to regulate it.

The problem with the current church's situation is that if it cannot suppress the growth and influence of the church, through fairly simple means, then it needs to accelerate or escalate its means of depressing the size and influence and income of the church. One way that can be done is by simply treating members badly and broadcasting scorn toward members and ignoring their complaints. Probably at this stage of the game, it is very beneficial to the church leaders to have church members leaving in large numbers.

Actually, that rate of leaving is probably not large enough still. Perhaps that is one explanation for why the church felt perfectly unconcerned about closing the temples for two years. The relatively minor social difficulties of the Covid pandemic were a very poor explanation for why the church left so many of its young engaged couples high and dry concerning getting married. They have been told all their lives they should be married in the temple, with their salvation depending on it, and suddenly when the time came, it was not possible to do that. Surely that would put off some of these eager young members, which apparently was one of the results intended. We already have too many successful families who are too devoted to the church and who support it too vigorously. (It would be interesting to find out if one of the reasons the church leaders are reaching out to and tolerating gay members so much is because they pay more tithing.)

If its big problem today is to get rid of the too many members who are too faithful who are sending in too much money, to buy and assure their salvation, because it is those members who are "blowing its cover" in the larger world, then we might see more of these strange policies and activities that we have seen during the last two years. As an example, ending or weakening the missionary program would be one solution to excess size, allowing the church to shrink by normal death rates and other attrition. But then it would probably have the membership rising up against it, and questioning it, and so on. The Covid pandemic offered an opportunity to greatly limit the effects of the missionary system, which the church leaders would probably see as a great benefit. The church appears to have actually shrunk in 2020. That would probably be counted as a plus to church leaders.

One might reasonably wonder if the old "raising the bar" missionary initiative was really just a way to cut down on the number of missionaries, squashing their enthusiasm, and cutting down on the number of converts because the church was growing too fast, and having too much good influence for the leaders’ greatest benefits to appear and remain.

Turning a New Testament church into an Old Testament church was an interesting move because it maximized the amount of income to the church, but, just as importantly, it made the gospel less attractive and less successful, so it would not grow too fast and cause the leaders the many problems they wanted to avoid, including loss of control over growth. Still, with all these intentional impediments, the church is still growing too much and having too much good influence.

It may be that the old home teaching program, for all its faults, was still too successful so it had to be downgraded to the much weaker ministering program, and the old youth program, incorporating vigorous scouting programs, used to work quite well, so it had to be shrunk to be almost meaningless, as in the new content-free and expectations-free and guidance-free youth program.

In other words, one way to help keep the church small is by polluting it and weakening it. it looks like the church leaders reached their main goals in about 1960, finally demanding a full tithing from everyone before they could attend the temple, and that year became an inflection point; everything went downhill from there.  The church is too big today, which causes the leaders problems.

A quick review of the graph entitled "LDS Artificial Growth Constraints:"

The main message of the graph is that "It appears that the church is not growing because the leaders don't want it to grow, not because the world is too wicked." In fact, if the church were to be untethered from the constraining leaders, it would have unlimited potential to grow worldwide.

The leaders themselves are the biggest constraint on church growth. It is true that competing political organizations would be upset by a quickly growing Christian influence, but there is not really much that they could do about it. The church leaders have found that by suppressing the church's growth, they can maximize their own income and feeling of importance. That is really the main operating consideration here. If the leaders would get out of the way, the church could explode across the earth and do a great deal of good.

As the leaders see it, the church needs to be big enough to provide the life-style they prefer, and the church leaders want to stay in control of everything and benefit from everything related to the church. But if the church gets very large, then the pushback from contrary worldly elements will fall heavily on the church leaders, and they don't want to be part of that. If these leaders were out of the way, what little pushback there would be would fall on the millions of members, instead of being concentrated at the leadership level, and those members could easily take care of those problems as they arose.

Many members actually believe in the gospel and want the church to act as their agent in spreading it throughout the world. Those members also want to live the Commandments of the gospel, and enjoy the social blessings associated with living those commandments, and not have the gospel diluted and distorted by a large influx of pagans. In contrast, church headquarters wants to stay synchronized with all worldly governments, to the extent they dare, so that they can lower the apparent contrast and make "friends of Mammon."

Explaining the options explored there:

1. Church leaders 'take the money and run."

With at least $100 billion in the bank, and other hundreds of billions of dollars centrally held in real estate, there is probably an enormous pressure to simply have the church leaders cash in on their high-stakes hedge-fund business venture, "take the money and run," and leave the church members to fend for themselves. In spite of the great loss, this would be a good thing, because it would wake up the membership, and help them realize that they have been hornswoggled for the last century and need to do better in the future.

2. Church members abandon headquarters.

This would require the members to wake up on their own and leave behind the thoroughly corrupt church headquarters which has been exploiting them for the last century. It is hard to imagine the level of shock it would take to do that "waking up," but a few articles on the topic might help.

3. Church follows members' initiative.

If the members left the headquarters behind, the headquarters could exist forever in its current form simply by living on the interest income of its many investments. However, some of the people at the headquarters unit might finally end their self-centered, cynical view of religion and decide they want to be part of something bigger than themselves.

4. Church goes full pagan – makes more money.

The church headquarters unit cannot seem to decide whether they should shut out all the new pagans before they completely corrupt the church, or to fully embrace those pagans as a new source of members and money, with the extra political benefit of having a highly politicized group who will fight for their rights to be pagans and can fend off other pagans.

Maybe, concerning the gays, the church will decide it is better to join them than to fight them. Maybe a 100% gay Mormon church would be the most lucrative of all religious businesses. There seems to be room for a large number of professional counselors who could meet with so many gays and trans-people who are mentally ill and who seem to constantly need counseling to deal with their feelings of guilt and their urges to kill themselves. The church would then also be capturing and co-opting this most vocal of political groups. They always seem to have political influence far beyond their numbers. It might be an interesting way to protect the LDS church from incursions by other kinds of crazy greedy people in various governments such as the Marxists.

The pagan priests of old did very well financially. Maybe it would work again in our time. Making the transition from a straight church to a gay church could be rocky, but profitable. Maybe the two could operate separately, in parallel; that would be an interesting arrangement.