20230815
Deal with the devil-V17-trim
Analyzing LDS Church History And Theology Today
In which I attempt to compress 80 years of gospel
research into 50 pages of text.
a/k/a The New Mormon "Traditions of the Fathers."
Table of Contents:
1. A Deal With The Devil Or Stopping The Mighty Missouri River, p.1
2. The Secret War On The Saints, p.8
3. LDS Myths – The Battalion of Lies: Some Of The Many Mormon Myths used to extract money from the members, p.17
4. Restoring The Restoration, Reenthroning New Testament Charity and other critical doctrines, And Building Up Zion, p.25
5. Using And Abusing Church History, p.32
6. The Apologetics Of Gospel Trivia, p.40
1.
A Deal With The Devil
Or
Stopping The Mighty Missouri River
D&C 121:33 How long can rolling waters remain impure? What power shall stay the heavens? As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints.
For dramatic effect, I interpret what Joseph Smith once said as meaning that stopping the spread of the Gospel was like trying to stop the mighty Missouri or Mississippi Rivers, where the Missouri River is a tributary of the Mississippi River. (We might recall that the Mississippi River itself froze over on February 24, 1846, allowing a large number of the church members to escape over the ice from Nauvoo.) Stopping such a powerful river seemed like something impossible to do, but our clever church leaders have managed to do it for 127 years, nonetheless. However, with any luck, that figurative or virtual but still very real dam they have created to stop the Missouri and Mississippi rivers will have to break sometime. To continue that metaphor, when dams containing huge amounts of water break, they typically do a great deal of unpredictable damage in the process. That may be the outcome in this case also.
For most of my life I have wondered how the Gospel could be such an inherently powerful social force, and still be stymied by a group of church leaders who wanted to redirect that flow of power to themselves personally and gain all the benefit from it. Christ refused to make a deal with the devil in the three temptations recorded in Matthew, but beginning with Wilford Woodruff, our church leaders have eagerly made that deal with the devil and have claimed as their own all the benefits that came from heaven to the earth in the form of the Gospel.
And they have been managing that for 127 years. However, what we may be seeing now is the long-delayed consequences of their very non-Gospel choice made so long ago. (Maybe that long-delayed "Gospel Stone" will yet roll forth to fill the earth.)
I am thinking about the $150 billion which the church has stashed away in liquid assets. The church claims that this money will be used at the time of the second coming of Christ to do something useful to help Christ or the world at that time. There seems to be a certain amount of pride and hubris involved there. Christ is a being who can command the winds and the tides, and could move the earth out of its orbit if he chose, since he created the entirety of the solar system and the universe himself. It seems strange to even imagine that the puny desires and efforts of a few humans could make the smallest difference in the outcome of what Christ might choose to do in his second coming. Of course, he could direct some humans to do some work on his behalf, but one would want to make sure that those people got the message very clearly before they proceeded to take any action, especially when it includes stockpiling massive amounts of membership money.
One possibility, of course, is that the first things he would do would have the effect of obliterating all of that hoard of liquid assets. Those legal papers or digital records held by the church indicate ownership in worldly property, and if that worldly property is destroyed in some kind of Armageddon event, then, of course, all of the paper indicators of ownership instantly become perfectly meaningless. If he can turn stones into bread or find money in a fish's mouth, he is most certainly not constrained by man's puny computer systems or paper files.
Perhaps the position of the church leaders today is that they have a tiger by the tail, to pursue another metaphor. Obviously, if one indeed has a tiger by the tail, then that person needs to hold on as long as possible because his life will likely be lost as soon as that tiger has control of himself again. A person is unlikely to have the strength to hold on forever, meaning at some time he will be doomed.
I have read that in the seemingly never-ending conflict between Taiwan and Mainland China, Taiwan has its own doomsday scenario. If Mainland China were ever to attack Taiwan with the intention of taking it over, the Taiwanese seem to have a last-resort plan to blow up the Three Gorges Dam, presumably using conventional explosives, but those explosives would unleash the power of several atomic bombs as that enormous amount of water swept through the Yangtze River Valley destroying all in its path. Hopefully nothing will ever come to that point where China is so foolish as to start a shooting war with Taiwan so that Taiwan will not need to go to such lengths to cripple the mainland government. But, if nothing else, the mental image of that potentially overwhelming destruction is useful for several purposes. That current image makes the old reference to the Missouri River seem like a little trout stream.
Perhaps we can turn to a more positive result of an image of a "dam breaking" that involves gospel knowledge as Joseph Smith suggested. Having $150 billion in liquid assets would be enough to conduct 150 US presidential elections, with all the informing and persuading which that would entail. That is one way to look at the possible effects of spreading the gospel by figuratively flooding the world with new knowledge. Presumably that $150 billion would be enough to take over or replace all of the corrupted institutions of higher learning in our country where the doctrines of Satan have almost complete control in corrupting multiple generations of our young people. That would be a great place to start if someone were to begin to use that stored power to correct and uncorrupt our much-abused nation.
It seems likely that if a plan were created to use that $150 billion to begin to purify our nation's ideology, that amount would soon be multiplied by 10 (up to $1.5 trillion) or 100 (up to $15 trillion) as the like-minded good people of our nation added their own stored-up strength to this sweeping of the nation with goodness to wash away the evil.
Our current Mexican
standoff
After 127 years of church leader misbehavior, we have reached an uneasy equilibrium, a stalemate, or a Mexican standoff. I have wondered my entire life why the Church growth rates were relatively slow and now seem to have reached zero or perhaps even a minus. I think I finally have a fairly coherent and convincing answer to the problem.
It is simply the result of a balance of forces. The church leaders have wanted since 1896 to use the church as a vehicle for world conquest or at least for establishing a world empire, patterned after the methods of the Catholic Church. But the group of people, the Utah Mormons, on whose backs they thought they could ride to global glory have not been willing to fully support such prideful and ambitious plans.
The church members are too naturally and inherently good, bolstered by the Scriptures which they have, to follow to where the church leaders would like to take them. These church members are untutored, but their unconscious instincts and inclinations are what keep the church leaders in check. This all seems to be going on below the surface: the church leaders don't explicitly express their plans for global domination, and the church members don't explicitly express their resistance to these grand schemes, but that's the way everything balances out, nonetheless.
The church leaders have been able to bend the church members to their will to quite a large extent, but apparently, we have hit the limits of this jawboning strategy using lies, myths, and propaganda. The church leaders have been able to bend the Gospel from a pure New Testament Gospel most of the way back to a repressive and exploitative Old Testament Law of Moses ideology, but they have not been able to go all the extra steps it would take to turn the LDS Church into simply a modern copy of the Catholic Church.
After 2000 years, the Catholic Church has been able to remove the independent lay priesthood and related religious freedom from all the members, and to centralize that power and centralize all ownership of everything. The LDS church leaders have so far only been able to centralize the lay priesthood to a partial extent. Where the stake patriarchs had authority for all of the higher ordinances and could perform marriages, for example, locally, and for free, now the church has taken away those local powers and moved them to central control. The people who deliver those ordinances now are ordinary people who do so in the temple under the direction of the church leaders. (At least they are not yet professional priests, although that has probably crossed the minds of the church leaders as a way to use their money to further consolidate and centralize their power.)
In the temples now they require paying tithing before one can attend there and receive these ordinances. That is about as far as it has gone. The church leaders have also ended the mission of the troublesome Seventies who I am guessing were too aggressive in doing their scripturally assigned missionary work to Gentiles and Jews, and they have stopped allowing the high priests to meet together, having turned over the normal weekly activities to the probably less philosophical elders to control. It may be that in another thousand years the LDS Church could accomplish what the Catholic Church has accomplished in removing and centralizing ALL local priesthood – which we might think of as local priesthood autonomy – from the lay members, but they haven't done that yet.
So, we seem to have reached a stalemate where the LDS leaders want to move as quickly as possible to the globalist monarchical Catholic format, but the historical pioneer heritage Mormons simply aren't willing to move that far with them yet. Something a great deal more drastic would be needed to move them any further, and that is not likely to happen anytime soon.
We have the interesting case of the Rome Temple where the church leaders have "jumped the shark" as they say today in the entertainment business. They have taken on an outrageously prideful and outrageously expensive project, competing toe to toe with the Catholic religion-as-architecture people. They have indeed finished it, finally, but not without some internal resistance. It was interesting to hear that the church staff in Salt Lake City felt that the Rome project was a "bridge too far," and they hated spending the enormous amounts of money which had to continually be directed towards that project.
I take that as an indication of the inherent good sense of the church members, even those who are full-time church employees, and who have been compromised to that extent. They have been pulled far off course from the standards and practices of the true gospel, but still, there are limits beyond which they will not cheerfully go. I have heard of numerous people who were employed by the church at various times (I was almost one of them), and many of them are quite clear that they would never enter that employment again. One objection was when church leaders tried to get extra hours for free out of the employees by guilt-tripping them about gospel topics.
We have this very interesting situation where the church has perhaps $150 billion stashed away in liquid assets, as a constant and stark reminder of the excesses to which the church leaders are willing to go in their globalist ambitions and fantasies. Luckily, even though they have collected this money, they dare not spend it on pushing things any further in the globalist Catholic direction, so that the church is stuck in this continuous unresolved conflict situation. They could obviously spend that money to improve the society that we live in (something we used to call "building up Zion"), but that would require spending it on good New Testament charity, and that is not at all what the church leaders would prefer to do. They want to use that money to expand their temporal power, but there is simply no good way to do that at this point. The church members certainly would not support them in going any further in the globalist Catholic direction, so they are stymied for the moment. Perhaps they hope that the church members will further bend their standards and their integrity, but apparently, we have gone about as far as we can go. There might be some church members who would go along with this Satan-inspired method of church expansion, but there would be enough who would object, who would further pull back their support of the church, so that we could never really get out of this uneasy equilibrium.
The church has demonstrated many times in the past how extreme its pride and ambitions have been and how far it has been willing to wander off the Gospel Path in search of these worldly ambitions.
Although I expect there are thousands of examples generated by a worldwide church, I only know of a few that are publicly available, so perhaps that will have to suffice at the moment until I am able to do some more research. World War II, with all its discord and conflicts, seems to be a good source of information as to what the church leaders have thought since Wilford Woodruff made that critical choice in 1896 of deciding to receive his living from church contributions, thus introducing official priestcraft for the first time, and starting the general downward spiral which has brought us to where we are today.
During World War II, the church leaders declared that they were pacifists, that they were not willing to support any government organization, not even an organization that was fighting for freedom, including freedom of religion. They declared themselves above the law, above the Gospel, and above the Constitution, even though the Constitution is part of the Gospel. By declaring themselves conscientious objectors, and pacifists, that supposedly left the church free to operate "above the fray," as though they were some United Nation organization which was operating before there even was such a thing as the United Nations organization. Today we might call that "virtue signaling."
As the events moved closer to Hitler and Nazi Germany attacking other countries in Europe, the church at least was able to bring home the American missionaries who were operating in Germany and probably nearby countries. But I believe it is an extremely telling point that the church was not willing to bring home any German members, while that could still happen, and they especially were not willing to bring out of Germany any Jews, even those Jews who had become Mormons as well.
It didn't take a genius to figure out that any Mormons, and especially any Jews, including Jewish Mormons, who were in Germany were in great peril. I assume that not everyone in the world knew of the heinous plans which Hitler had to eventually destroy 6 million Jews, but obviously a great number of people knew this open secret since they were working hard through their own mechanisms to get Jews out of Germany before it was too late. For example, I believe there are stories available about people from Norway and Britain and other countries who were working to get these people out while it was still possible. We now know some of the terrible things which happened during World War II, and I believe the LDS church leaders can be said to have blood on their hands for their failure to act. For example, there are stories of church members in Germany who killed their children and themselves rather than be subject to the Russian soldiers invading Germany from the East.
The LDS Church preferred to curry favor with the Nazis, presumably hoping to remain on good diplomatic terms with those evil people so that after the war, assuming the Germans won, that the church would receive some special favors in being able to operate at least to a small extent in Germany. I personally consider that cooperation and collaboration to be a terrible and anti-Christian sin. The church leaders were willing that a great number of people who were associated with the LDS Church suffer and die in German-instigated wars simply so that the LDS church leaders in the United States could supposedly maintain a small amount of favor with the murderous Nazi regime. This seems like a terrible case of being a traitor to the Gospel cause, simply because they imagined they could gain some power and glory for themselves as a result. I believe that is what one could call craven and cowardly behavior. It is hardly worthy of a good Christian person. There were many much better Christians operating in Germany to rescue the Jews in various ways, and the Mormons were not among them.
Even after the war was over, and we had the interesting situation where the ship renamed Exodus 1947 was trying to move about 4000 Jews from France to Israel, the British apparently wanted to curry their own favor with the murderous anti-Semite Arab nations, and were willing to sacrifice any number of Jews to remain in the good graces of the Arabs, the old Ottoman Empire. The British intervened and kept that ship from landing in Israel. They managed to kill a few people as they boarded the ship and treated those people very badly as they moved them back to Cyprus or back to France where the voyage began.
Again, the Mormons did absolutely nothing, as far as I know, to help the Jews get to the promised land, even the small number of perhaps 4000 Jews traveling on a ship designed for 500 people.
I think it's interesting to wonder what could have happened if the Mormons had been stalwart Christians instead of pro-fascist at that time. They claimed to be nonpolitical and pacifists, but in fact they were supporting the fascist totalitarian types -- not a good look.
We can jump ahead to the time when the LDS Church wanted to build the Jerusalem Center on a hillside in Jerusalem. They were finally allowed to build the structure there, but they were not allowed to do any missionary work in that city. Think of how it might have turned out had the Mormons gone out of their way to save as many Jews as possible from Germany, and perhaps to save the passengers on the widely known Exodus 1947 from the death and suffering of those people. What if they had welcomed them to Utah, helping with visas and travel money, etc.? What if they had been more proactive and had managed to get perhaps one million of the threatened Jews out of Germany or nearby countries before it was too late. It would have been nice if they could have found a way to move out all six million threatened Jews, completely avoiding the Holocaust, but perhaps that would have been too much to expect of a small religious group in Utah. But, on the other hand, they might have been able to accomplish more than we might have expected, had they made a good try.
Going back to the Jerusalem Center, if one million Jews had been helped to escape from Hitler through the work of the Mormons, how do you think the Jews would have received the idea of the LDS Jerusalem Center when it was proposed? Most likely they would have received it with open arms and would have expressed their great gratitude for the huge amount of work done in saving Jews in Germany and Poland and other countries. (Presumably, there were many Jews who could have escaped their peril even after Hitler began his military rampages.)
We read in the scriptures about the Jews eventually joining the church.1 What if the Mormons had been a little more prophetic in their behavior and had saved as many as they could? That alone could have fulfilled the prophecy of showing to the Jews that the real path to temporal and spiritual salvation was through the LDS Church. Would the Mormons have been penalized for potentially jumping ahead a little bit in the prophetic sequence? We might have had 1 or 2 million converts from that simple change of attitude and using our resources to assist these people who were going to be murdered either by the fascist Germans or later by the Communist Russians (or still later by the murderous Arabs).
The war ended with Germany losing, so in that sense, all the diplomatic efforts and abandoning of Mormons and Jews in Germany did not turn out to be of any benefit to the manipulative and hyper-ambitious church leaders in Salt Lake City who imagined they were such great diplomats who were well on their way to world domination in conjunction with all of the other would-be tyrants of the world such as those in Germany and Russia.
But the church leaders were not through with their pandering to the tyrants of the world. Once the Communists got control of eastern Germany, as part of the efforts of the USSR to continue to control Eastern Europe and hopefully take over the rest of the world, the church leaders started to negotiate with those Communists, perhaps through East Germany as a conduit to the Kremlin itself, one must presume, since the rigid hierarchies of organizations like the fascists and the Communists do not allow any significant events to take place without approval from the center.
The LDS Church leaders decided that since there were some church members in Germany who managed to live through the war, in spite of all odds, in spite of not being saved by any church action, and the leaders thought it would be a nice way to continue to pander to tyrants by building a temple in Freiburg, Germany. I am guessing that those church members in East Germany could have, and should have, escaped to the west along with many others before the Berlin wall went up, but I suspect that many of them were convinced to stay in East Germany, to their great discomfort and peril, as part of the logic of establishing a worldwide empire to benefit the church leaders.
The appearance is that during the Cold War that ensued after World War II was mostly ended, the church leaders in Salt Lake City apparently negotiated with the Communists in East Germany or in Russia to "pay for" their temple in East Germany by acting against the security interests of the United States. The church leaders in Salt Lake City organized resistance against the Cold War plan to install MX missiles mostly in Nevada, but some in Utah, which would act as a deterrent against the expansions of the USSR. The LDS church intervened and was able to end that ambitious Cold War anti-communist plan which would have provided a great deal of security to the United States.
As a result of official LDS resistance, that entire MX missile program had to be shrunk back to a shadow of its original self as a few of those MX missiles were installed in fixed locations in Wyoming which were quite vulnerable, as opposed to the very high level of protections those missiles would have had in Nevada and Utah against any USSR first strike capability, simply because no one could know where they all were at any one time.
So here we have the LDS Church acting as a fifth-column anti-American procommunist force at a very critical time during the Cold War when no one was sure whether the USSR was willing to delve even further into insanity and attack the US mainland with nuclear missiles. This treacherous, perhaps even treasonous behavior by the LDS Church was probably not noticed by very many people, apparently, but at the same time, all the people who really understood what was going on would surely have understood that this was a treacherous act by the church with the single goal in mind of being able to curry favor and receive special treatment from the Soviets, and receive special permission for the temple in East Germany.
Of course, that meant that the Church leaders wanted to have church members continue to live in that disgusting police state, and perhaps increase in numbers, meaning that they were willing to coerce church members into staying there as a way to mark their territory, when the more intelligent and Christian thing would have been to help those people get out of there in the first place or leave as soon as practical. In all of these situations I consider the behavior of the Salt Lake City church leaders to be disgusting. There is no reason to think that in a thousand other similar situations the church leaders would not make exactly the same kind of choices, bargaining away the freedom and security and prosperity of their own church members individually, to accomplish what the church leaders imagined was some kind of continuation of a global expansion of the church.
So, it should be useful to describe some of the lies and frauds and myths perpetrated by the church leaders on the church members to get them to bend as far as they have from the pure gospel to an Old Testament gospel format, on the way to a semi-communist Catholic Church, to being a kind of state church or approved or permitted church in a communist/atheist country, collaborating with those evil governments to the extent necessary to allow the church to operate there.
It does boggle the mind that the church leaders in Salt Lake City could imagine that one could be a good Communist and a good Mormon at the same time. I would call it madness to even think such a thing. But apparently, the pride and ambitions of some of the church leaders know no bounds and they are willing to entertain such thoughts without being overwhelmed by the cognitive dissonance of such mixing together of ideologies and consequences, as though God and Satan could be mixed together into some kind of workable religious Mulligan stew.
It seems completely
necessary that the same kinds of trade-offs between political and economic freedom
and prosperity and religious freedom of the church members around the world is
constantly being traded off for the imagined long-term benefit of the church
leaders. One might wonder whether the
church leaders themselves have become atheist-communists even as they pretend
to act as Christlike prophets to the church members. The inconsistencies and conflicts are such
that we cannot have anything BUT the unstable equilibrium that we see among
church leaders and the members today.
Notes:
1. D&C 107:34 The Seventy are to act in the name of the Lord, under the direction of the Twelve or the traveling high council, in building up the church and regulating all the affairs of the same in all nations, first unto the Gentiles and then to the Jews --
For other cases of
missionary work being directed toward the Jews, see also D&C 90:9; 21:12;
98:17; 45:21, 51-53; 19:27; 77:15; 112:4, 18:26; 133:8; 20:9; 109:59-67.
2.
The
Secret War On The Saints
1896 was the year the church leaders declared a
secret war on the members.
127 years later, the battle still rages.
The members have gradually lost nearly everything
important,
and they don't even realize it.
The LDS church produces some of the best con artists
ever seen,
trained up carefully in the "traditions of the
fathers" for their new posts.
Abstract
The greatest impediment to the spread of the gospel and the building up of Zion today is the LDS church headquarters itself. Even though building up Zion would be a great service to the world and would greatly benefit all the church members today, the church leaders have no interest whatsoever in doing so. The church leaders see themselves as the masters, not the servants in this new situation of the two-class socialist society they have created, consisting of the makers and the takers. The gospel indeed has the power to change the world and to bring it to a Zion or a Millennial state, which is especially needed right now. The church leaders do at least partially recognize the power of the gospel to improve the world for everyone, but they long ago decided that all of the temporal benefits of the gospel on earth ought to come to them rather than to anyone else. At this point they are getting all the benefits from the gospel which they feel they need or can use personally, so there is no reason to cause or allow the church to get any larger or have any more influence for good (which might lead to some inconvenient conflict with the rest of the world). They feel that they own the entire gospel and should therefore reap all the benefits of that ownership. After all, don't we believe in the private ownership of property? In other words, when confronted with all the same temptations which Christ faced at the beginning of his ministry, they have all made the opposite choice, and that has brought us to where we are today. More than anyone who ever lived, Christ could have said that he personally owned all the benefits of the gospel and he was going to enjoy those benefits while he was alive on earth, as Satan suggested. But he didn't do that. Instead, he meant for humanity to have all of those benefits, and he even threw in his own life as well to make those benefits as large as they could possibly be.
Wrestling
We
can probably assume that Paul did not ever expect that the principles and
powers and rulers of this world against which we wrestle would be the very
leaders of our church, but that seems to be our predicament today.
Ephesians 6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness [or ignorance] in high places.
Introduction
Millions of people find themselves wondering what is going on with the LDS church – how did it get to where it is, and where is it going? After faithfully reading their scriptures, many of the church members actually believe those scriptures, and expect that marvelous things should be happening in their time. But they don't see any of these marvelous things happening. All they see is complete stagnation of church efforts and accomplishments. This creates a strong sense of (probably mostly unconscious) cognitive dissonance between the Scriptures and the words and behavior of the church leaders. If we could measure the level of that dissonance, we could quantify the internal conflicts of the church. That would certainly make an interesting chart.
Some might notice and theorize that the church leaders have already tried to deal with this cognitive dissonance problem by minimizing the quoting of scriptures in their own discourses, but instead quoting each other, and in carefully explaining to the members exactly how they should interpret what Scriptures they do read. As far as I know, there have only been a very small but important number of actual changes to the text of the scriptures to aid the church leaders in their reinterpretation and misinterpretation of the gospel, but we should expect to see a continuing strong pressure in that direction. Many plain and precious things have been removed from the Scriptures in the past by the Catholics and Protestants, and I think we have reached the point where that process is about to accelerate in our own time.
It actually seems quite possible that one reason the church went to a two-hour Sunday meeting format instead of a three-hour meeting format is simply to diminish the time spent in careful group study in adult Sunday School, Priesthood Meeting, and Relief Society. Ending the separate Sunday meetings of High Priests who tend to have a more sophisticated view of the gospel, and who tend to discuss more esoteric topics, seems to be part of that trend. These are subtle ways to cut down the number of questions that might arise in people's minds. If people discussing the gospel at home (in a "home-centered, church-supported" gospel program) tend to operate at the level of their primary children, that should keep them from sensing and raising too many new questions. This gradual dumbing down of the church members is probably necessary to keep the church functioning for the benefit of the church leaders, although, of course, this can only lead to the gradual destruction of the church and of the society it operates in. It assists in the death spiral that the church and society have already begun.
People outside the church have seen the growth of the church in the distant past and have projected, for example, that this uniquely American church was likely to become the majority religion in our nation. Our Scriptures tell us that Zion is to be built upon the American continent. But none of these things have happened. Instead, our society is falling apart, and it is clear that only a major injection of religious teaching and commitment can ever save us, and yet nothing happens, and we continue to deteriorate at a furious pace. How does one explain our predicament today? This is my attempt at an explanation. See graph below.
I see the LDS church today as having the will and the power to stop the spread of the gospel, and they are doing so quite effectively. As a simple example, if they are not willing to ordain priesthood holders and appoint self-directed leaders in new areas of the world, and maybe send missionaries, obviously, the gospel cannot spread to those parts of the world under current rules of administration (which are themselves suspiciously self-serving). If they decide that a gathering to a central place and a building up of a Zion there is not a good idea, then it probably won't happen.
If the church is constantly doing political calculations and cost/benefit calculations, and a if particular area of the world or group of people seems unlikely to be profitable, that is, the tithing they can supply to the central offices is likely to be less than the cost to set up and maintain an administrative structure there, including the cost of tithing administration, buildings, travel by leaders and missionaries, etc., then no such administrative structure will be set up. The question of whether the gospel might be a benefit to those people is not part of the calculation. It all has to do with Salt Lake City budgets – income and expenses – in that central bureaucracy.
The church has gradually found the perfect no-growth equilibrium point through 120 years of trial and error, and the incentives to stay there at that point are probably overwhelming today. Nothing but something like a remarkable catastrophe could cause any change. There are perhaps 100 different policy factors and influences operating here. Grasping upon any one of them will not provide the answer. Only by considering all of them at once and running a kind of "mental simulation" is there any hope of understanding the strange and complex situation we find ourselves in today. Here is one way to graph that tension between the Gospel's tendency for growth and the church's suppressing of that tendency.
Below is a short history of the deterioration of the church to reach this lowest common denominator equilibrium point. Unfortunately, although the church leaders seem to think otherwise, this is not a stable situation that can go on for very long, in spite of their wishes otherwise. Our host society is itself deteriorating at a furious pace, and it seems obvious that the terrible fate of the church and nation described in Fourth Nephi of the Book of Mormon is close at our heels. In fact, the static and inert state of the LDS church today, and for the past 120 years, is a major cause, if not THE major cause of our dying nation. Apparently, there is no case in the history of the world where a restitution of the gospel lasted for more than 200 years, and we have already had our period of time. (The time period of 1820 to 2023 equals 203 years). Unless we soon have a totally unprecedented set of events in our time, we will otherwise inevitably follow all the past restorations into the dustbin of history. (The church may have lasted up to 300 years after Christ lived his life in the Jerusalem area, assuming his personal presence gave everything an extra boost.)
A Short History Of The Deterioration and Dismantling Of The Church
To
summarize broadly, there are about 10 major gospel points which the church
leaders have either dialed back to zero or have completely reversed, all
starting with the 1896 official acceptance of priestcraft by Wilford Woodruff
and Lorenzo Snow as they decided all the top church leaders should start
getting salaries for the first time. Apparently, when a group of people turn a
totally idealistic religious movement into a profit-making business, every
previously selfless, charitable, and idealistic gospel principle will
eventually end up on the chopping block because those pesky principles always
interfere with the principle of maximizing income to the central offices.
For
example, it may seem like a good idea to help someone in a foreign country get
some education, supposedly so that they can become more self-sufficient and
live a better life. However, if the reason for doing so is really only, or
predominantly, so that they can pay more tithing from anywhere in the world to
the Utah church, it becomes clear that the main purpose of many church actions
is to "increase the tax base." The concept of sincere altruistic New
Testament charity is completely obliterated in the process.
Some important steps in the process:
1820 The Restoration begins with the First Vision.
1830 The church is officially organized.
1830-1896 Mighty struggles were carried out by three prophets to establish Zion in various places, finally ending up in Utah.
1890 The leaders began the Catholic-church-like process of removing priesthood power and independence from the normal members of the church. With those powers they can be much like Abraham who was the ideal independent patriarch. Without those powers the members are on their way back to becoming the Israelite slaves in Egypt, under the thumb of the priests of Pharaoh, so to speak. Authority to administer the sealing ordinances (for free, as Christ intended) were taken away from the stake patriarchs and centralized so that they could begin to be monetized.
1896 The church leaders officially installed priestcraft as they started paying leaders' salaries.
1899 The leaders officially dropped the critical exalting and ennobling New Testament doctrine of charity and added the regressive non-saving Old Testament tithing in its place.
1910 The leaders declare that after Christ's death the original church almost instantly apostatized so that we need pay no attention whatsoever to any of their early policies. More specifically, using circular reasoning, they would argue that the early church must surely have paid tithing, since we do so today, and we are more enlightened, so that we must continue to pay tithing today, even though careful research would show that was explicitly not part of the church which Christ set up. (The Great Apostasy by James E. Talmage was first published in 1910 and it incorporates that argument.)
The leaders constantly argue by implication that the early church only survived a very short time, perhaps only a year or two, and then fell completely apart, leaving us no indication of how things should be done, leaving every question open to determination for the first time by the wise leaders of today. But that is clearly nonsense. For example, the apostle Paul did not die until at least 65 A.D., which was at least 32 years after the death of Christ. 32 years is rather a long time, and he could have instructed many people and organized many things before the end of his life. Surely, he did many more important things than are reported in the New Testament, but none of this extra work is recognized by today's church leaders.
Getting
a few more dates in mind seems to make it perfectly plausible that the gospel
could have run on a fairly even keel for up to 300 years after the life of
Christ. The source of our New Testament gospels is a very important question:
Some
crucial dates
An obvious aspect of such judgments [concerning choosing the four Gospels] was the dating. Chronology expert Jack Finegan calculated that Jesus’ crucifixion probably occurred in early April of either A.D. 30 or 33. “The Oxford Bible Commentary” typifies experts’ consensus in listing these dates for the final composition of the Four: Matthew between A.D. 75 and 100. Mark “probably not long after” Jerusalem fell in 70. Luke most likely around 80 to 85. John about 90 to 100.2
The apostle John, in Revelations, perhaps dated about 100 A.D., seems to be reporting that the seven churches of Asia are doing well. Perhaps they continued on with integrity for 200 more years. Western civilization, with its 2.2 billion Christians today, and its emphasis on personal liberty, seems to indicate that Christ's church has indeed had a huge and lasting effect.
1923 The central church took complete control of all church intellectual and physical property and money leaving the Saints with zero inheritance. The saints had all their previously commonly-owned property stolen and were disenfranchised in the process. Meaningful legal common-consent was ended. The leaders didn't bother to ask the members about the theft of their goods and their organizational rights, then or since.
1935-1942 They officially dropped support for the U.S. Constitution, for all freedoms, and for charity as a religious function, and began to see themselves as a globalist United Nations before there was a United Nations, authorizing themselves to operate above the law of the U.S. Constitution, even though the LDS scriptures incorporate the Constitution by reference, and that Constitution should be treated as serious instructions and limitations on earthly behavior, including inside the church.
1909-1978 The leaders took all money and power from women's organizations, making sure that charity could not happen on a grand scale. That avoids the possibility of diverting vital central tithing money profits into completely optional and unnecessary local charity, as they see it.
1960 The leaders add another major increment of priestcraft and unrighteous dominion by enforcing tithing by denying temple recommends. They fully monetize all higher ordinances, fully embracing simony as the dominant business model.
1977 The leaders officially terminate all concepts of the gospel gathering or of building up of Zion. They declare themselves no longer responsible for these things. They expect generations to pass before anything changes again. Only Christ's coming can cause any progress. Humans have no duties in seeking salvation.
2020
Only about 5% of the original gospel action program is left intact. At least
baptisms and sacrament services still remain. Backward-looking Asian-style
ancestor worship has replaced the forward-looking doctrines of the Gathering
and the building up of Zion. The church has become totally passive,
introverted, even monastic. Promoting monasticism (which I define as emphasizing
temple rituals over helpful action in the real world) has proven to be the most
profitable of available options, since tithing must now be paid to get to the
blessings now only available in temples. Many myths have been invented to
justify tithing rent-seeking and blatant simony. These myths are themselves an
attack on scriptural and constitutional concepts of political, economic, and
religious freedom. They assist in the church's support of the Marxist/globalist
influences in our modern world. The church is now far more Jewish than
Christian. (We were supposed to convert them, not be converted by them to their
Old Testament ways.) And there is now no
real distinction between Protestant heaven and Mormon heaven. The concepts and
responsibilities of exaltation and godhood , including the "continuation
of the lives," are dismissed as meaningless theological speculation.
Description of points on the graph:
1830
full gospel restored +100%
1896
officially installed priestcraft, start leader salaries -50%
1899
justify priestcraft, drop charity, add tithing, facilitate all future changes
-2%
1910
Declare cancellation of Christ's original gospel -1%
1923
drop common consent, take all property -10%
1935
Drop US constitution, fully abandon charity -10%
1938
Church goes globalist, abandons freedom -5%
1909-1978
take money and power from women -2%
1960
Enforce tithing with recommends -5%
1977
Gathering and Zion ended -5%
2010
cumulative changes -3%
2020
current status only 5% left
An
amateur theologian becomes a war correspondent
Perhaps the
easiest way to understand where the church is today is to realize that the
church leaders secretly declared war on the members in 1896 when they covertly
decided to start giving themselves salaries from church contributions, and they
made no announcement or explanation, and "revealed" or printed no new
scripture authorizing it. One might think that such a drastic change in
doctrine would require a written revelation, but they simply skipped that inconvenient
step in this case and maintained complete secrecy. If one wonders why all
written revelation, with one small exception, ended at that time, this seems to
be the explanation. It seems unlikely that Christ would continue to give these
men revelation on exactly how to dismantle his church in the latter days. If
these men were instead anxiously seeking new revelation on how to execute the
gathering and to build up Zion, instead of wondering how best to profit from
their church positions, perhaps they would have received further revelations
worthy to be written down.
This secret
declaration of leadership salaries was a sudden diverging or separation of
interests between leaders and members, to the point of being at war with each
other. Unfortunately, the church members never heard about that declaration of
war being conducted with secrecy and deception against them, and so they took
no action to defend themselves, still trusting in the previously manifest good
intentions and heroic personal efforts of their leaders. That secret war and
related deception has somehow continued until today, even in spite of various
public developments that should have made the members very suspicious, and so
they have remained naïve and have consequently been slowly religiously boiled
like a frog for the last 120 years. That introduction of secret priestcraft had
never happened before in this modern dispensation, and it really did amount to
a declaration of war. And that explains
most of where we are today. I think
ordinary members intuitively feel a sense of conflict between themselves and
the church headquarters, but they have never been able to properly put it into
words. Apparently, the bulk of the church members never realized that the roles
of master and servant have intentionally been gradually reversed, creating a
clear two-class social and economic system as we have today.
Another way
to say this is that in 1896 Wilford Woodruff and Lorenzo Snow decided that they
ought to be able to get their living from the church members' contributions,
and then in 1899 Lorenzo Snow declared that the church members ought to be
paying tithing to the central offices instead of helping their neighbors with
those resources. In this way, in one stroke, they killed the most important
(and most hard to correctly understand, apparently) principle of the New
Testament Gospel, and that was the principle of free-will charity. That is,
people having perfect individual freedom and then deciding to spontaneously
help others. We must assume that God is not coerced into doing good in heaven,
and his exalted children are expected to be self-starters, not slaves to Old
Testament procedures. Does God continually prove his righteousness in heaven by
paying tithing? No. He does good works.
At this
point, we are so far away from understanding the concept of charity which
Christ taught that we cannot even see it from here. I think of the World War II statement by
Winston Churchill that in war, the truth is so precious and so valuable that it
has to be defended by a battalion of lies. Here is the exact quote:
In wartime, truth is so precious that she
should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
The
reality and difficulty with these techniques of warfare is that they work both
ways. Either side of the conflict can use them and usually do. In other words,
an evil and inconvenient truth can be hidden by lies just as well as a more
socially positive truth.
Priestcraft
step one – end religious freedom and partly end charity
That
concept of a truth, even the devastating truth of starting up priestcraft,
wrapped in lies, is critical to us today, but it takes a little
explaining. The first thing that a
determined and aggressive priestcraft group has to do is to get rid of the
concepts of strict individual freedom and of New Testament-style charity, the
most basic principles of the gospel, so that all that charity money can go to
the leaders instead. In order to do that, they have to invent a whole set of
lies and myths to confuse the brains of anyone who decides to think about this
problem. In the situation today, that
requires untangling five or six persistent, embedded myths before we can ever
get to the truth. That is rather a tough thing to do, and I despair that anyone
can even follow what I have to say to get through this thicket of lies to find
out the truth.
In this
case, the real truth is that the church leaders decided to institute
priestcraft, something which is solemnly forbidden in the Book of Mormon, and
they necessarily had to implement some other related evil truths to complete
their plan for looting the saints like the old Pharisees did. So, the church
leaders chose to deploy a battalion of lies against the church members to get
to where we are. I am certain that I will not make any friends in trying to cut
through that battalion of lies, propaganda, and myths, but anything less will
leave us just as confused and misdirected as ever.
Priestcraft
step two – completely end charity
The next
thing those priestcrafters have to do is to kill the urge of all the other
church members, who read their scriptures and believe them, to constantly do
good things and to have a desire to change the world for the better. Doing
those good things that can benefit the world, can sometimes be expensive, but
the biggest "expense" of all, of course, is that that money would be
going to projects that have nothing to do with the church headquarters and
their levels of income. Cutting off this "leakage" becomes a fairly
high priority. The church leaders will definitely stop spending any money on
charity personally or as a church organization. (The historical spending of
money on charity issues by the church headquarters is less than 1% of the money
they receive.) The church leaders have to be a "good example" of
passivity concerning charity to keep the rest of the church members from inadvertently
letting that money leak away to other better causes.
Instead of
using the good Samaritan as our model, we now teach the exact opposite, where
spending a dollar to help your neighbor in need is in fact "robbing
God."
Actually,
the natural man is already attuned and inclined to being lazy, so it is not
very difficult to convince people that they don't actually have to do anything
to be saved. This is the famous "grace versus works" idea. The
"works" idea is that people will be judged by how much good they
spontaneously do on the earth, since that is directly relevant to how much good
they are likely to want to do once they get to heaven (assuming they think they
should have any duties there at all). The lazy useless ones here, will be the
lazy useless ones there, one can predict.
On the
other hand, if one can convince all the people, as the Protestants have been so
successful in doing, that the grace of God takes care of everything, and no
individual person has any responsibility to save the world or his family or
even himself, then people can be as lazy and useless as imaginable, and they
can actually receive praise for being such a strict adherent to the doctrine of
grace-based-laziness. The LDS church today teaches only grace, not works, even
though they manage to muddy the issue by occasionally saying a few empty words
about the need for good works. (Doing temple work does hardly anything to help
people in this life, so I count it as nonwork, largely irrelevant to
exaltation, although a few beginning hours of efforts are probably useful as
education concerning concepts of heaven, exaltation, and proxy works. But godly
"work" behavior is not taught in the temple or anywhere else.)
Priestcraft
step three – keep church small and highly profitable for leaders
It looks
like the 1977 pronouncement by Bruce R. McConkie in Peru that the physical Gathering
was over with, was also a secret announcement that the church had reached the
ideal size, and that if it grew any bigger, that would cause the church leaders
problems. The size of the active membership of the church today is two or three
times as large, having moved from about 1 million up to about 3 million, and,
apparently as predicted in 1977, that is causing the church leaders some
problems, with one symptom being the large amount of money they have in the
bank which causes them public relations problems if they keep it, but they dare
not spend it, either.
Notes:
2.
"Question: Why Did Early Christians Choose Only Four Gospels?"
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionqanda/2023/08/question-why-did-early-christians-choose-only-four-gospels/
The
1910 book by James E Talmage entitled The Great Apostasy argues by
implication that the early church did not last long enough to teach us anything
of value about church organization. The 1974 talk by Mark E Peterson entitled
"The Great Prologue" makes a similar argument. https://speeches.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdf/Petersen_Mark_1974_09.pdf
Similar
Catholic-church-sounding arguments were also made by Mark E Peterson in his
April 1973 talk entitled "Salvation Comes Through The Church."
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1973/04/salvation-comes-through-the-church?lang=eng
In
contrast, the 2010 book edited by Miranda Wilcox argues that the early church
lasted longer and was much more instructive and influential than we give it
credit for. Amanda
Wilcox, John D. Young, editors, Standing Apart: Moral Historical Consciousness
And The Concept Of Apostasy (Oxford University Press, 2014)
3.
LDS Myths – The Battalion of Lies
In This Information War
Some Of The Many Mormon Myths
used to extract money from the members
Introduction
I
have to assume that very few people will understand or believe what I'm saying.
It is possible that if they read six of my books, produced over my lifetime, they
might finally begin to grasp what I'm trying to say. I don't really expect many
people to do that, so it would probably be a waste of time to simply reproduce
selected portions of my six books right here. Instead, I will simply state my
arguments, and people can take their own sweet time trying to decide whether
what I'm saying makes any sense or not. I assume that only the most dedicated
will take the trouble to verify that what I am saying is correct.
Since
1896, LDS church leaders have used religiousy-sounding but Marxist tainted
logic to separate members from their money. This is often results in a perversion
of the natural goodness of the Saints, a twisting of the concept of compassion
and empathy for a bad purpose. Women seem to be especially sensitive to this
kind of logic, which typically includes some elements of fear and guilt. Men
seem to be quite a bit less vulnerable to this kind of rhetoric. This seems to
be one aspect of the question of giving women the vote politically. It is a
good thing when women are willing to use their own resources to help others
through charitable acts. But those charitable acts are naturally limited by the
practicality of what the women can do charitably without destroying themselves
and their family. The problem with giving women the vote is that they may then
have the legal power to give away everyone else's money and time and property,
not just their own, accomplishing this through the police power of the state.
That natural socialism of women can then be used by the evildoers as a weapon
to impose various forms of fascism and communism on the public. There is always
some clever, ambitious, and unscrupulous person who is willing to talk people
out of their money.
My
goal here is merely to explain these myths in a compact form, not attempt to
collect here all the history and theology and logic behind each one of them. I
have done that in other places. Perhaps some day I will create a new collection
of all these explanations into a separate book. But rather than collect and
rewrite that multi-hundred-page book here, I'm merely going to identify some of
these myths. It seems like the common pattern here is that the priestcrafters
are able to use religiousy-sounding, but Marxist tainted logic to separate
members from their money. Basically, they can say that charity is a good thing and
that the best kind of charity is to give the members' money to themselves, the
leaders. That makes no sense whatsoever, since these people are already among
the most privileged people on the planet, but somehow they are able to go quite
a distance with this confidence game, even if the results are absurd. They are
so successful that they are able to spend money on themselves lavishly, and still
collect $150 billion in savings. So obviously, their religious rhetoric and
fakery continues to be quite effective.
It
should not be too difficult to detect a recurring theme of pure selfish Marxism
in these myths. With rare exceptions such as Ezra Taft Benson, the church
leaders since 1896 have all been dedicatede globalists, Marxists, and enemies
of freedom, to the extent they dared reveal their actual thinking.
Some
of the myths
1.
The myth: All the members of the church just after the resurrection of Christ
had to live the law of consecration where they pooled all their resources into
one common-stock operation. Ananias and Sapphira were killed by God in a
dramatic way because they sold some property and held back some of their
proceeds for themselves instead of putting it all into the church communal
pool.
The
truth: The actually true story of Ananias and Sapphira is exactly backwards
from the way it is normally told. There was no required joinder of property
then. What actually happened was that the two people who died were imposters
who were trying to infiltrate the new church and bring in the old profitable priestcraft
principles to continue the practices of the Old Testament law of Moses.
Joseph
Smith made it clear that he was aware of this tendency to invert this story for
the benefit of the priestcrafters, and he completely rejected it. Brigham Young
also rejected this false doctrine vociferously. In Acts 5:13 Joseph Smith
replaced the word "rest" with the word "rulers." It may not
immediately be obvious why this small word-change completely turns the story on
its head. While pretending to be good members, Ananias and Sapphira were
actually members of the old ruling class who used the law of Moses and
Pharisaic logic to separate people from their money in those early times. Their
goal in joining the church was to ingratiate themselves with the membership,
and perhaps be able to install priestcraft principles into the new church right
at the beginning. It was for that chicanery and skullduggery that these
imposters were killed on the spot.
(A
truly suspicious person might even wonder whether their claim of having sold a
building as the source of their money was actually correct. For all we know,
the money they had may have been provided by other people in their ruling group
who were basically funding the insertion of these spies and provocateurs into
the new church organization – an investment in a new source of
religiously-extracted money. If the old law of Moses was going to be weakened
by this new religion, and their income diminished, then they might as well get
on board with and exploit this enthusiastic new version of religion.)
Acts
5 itself should give enough clues to show that the usual interpretation of that
chapter is utter nonsense. We might notice that Peter himself said that these
people owed the church members nothing (v. 4), since there was no requirement
that they share their wealth with others. We also might notice that after the
first wave of fears and questions, the members rejoiced and the church grew
quickly (v. 11-15). That would obviously be an irrational thing to have happen,
if Ananias and Sapphira really were good church members who were killed for
their supposed perfidy. The truth was, as a result of this shocking incident, the
church members could see that there were some strong heavenly-guided
protections in place to keep the new church from being instantly corrupted, and
that would be a good way to calm their fears and increase their faith that
joining this new church would be as good as it seemed, rather than being too
good to be true.
By
happenstance or design, these two imposters who died were apparently in league
with the Judaizers who were the members of Christ's Church who also wanted to
bring in every last element of the old law of Moses, completely mixing together
both the old gospel and the new gospel. This would be like combining freedom
and slavery, so one might wonder how anyone could be fooled by their rhetoric
and behavior, but nonetheless, those pressures were there. Luckily, the
original 12 apostles were not foolish enough to fall for any of this Marxist or
law of Moses logic.
The
priestcraft mythical logic seems to be that since the early church members
supposedly immediately jumped into a religiously required socialist/communist
organization among themselves, therefore we should have the same kind of
socialist/communist organization among ourselves today. And that of course
includes sending all or most of your money to the church leaders for them to
decide what to do with it. After spending on themselves all that they dare, all
they believe they can get away with, then they might have a little money left
over to actually do some charitable acts or build some chapels, etc.
Actually,
the priestcrafters today tell us that they are giving us a great deal because
they only charge 10% instead of 100% of what we have, which 100% supposedly is
our real responsibility. That sounds like a great bargain in the religious
marketplace. We might wonder why they have this massive power to make us such
great deals. They must truly be direct representatives of God to be able to
make such bargains. But, of course, they also have to throw in some guilt,
because, as they say, they really shouldn't be giving you this good of a deal,
and so you should feel guilty about that collusion to cheat. They are even
being a little bit sneaky (imagine that) on our behalf. We are left to wonder
whether if we get such a good deal now, we will have to make up for it later.
Of course, they are doctrinally entitled to nothing from the members, but they conveniently
leave that part out. Christ claimed no religiously required payments to any
church leaders, so why should the leaders today get any such payments?
Acts 5:1 But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira
his wife, sold a possession,
2 And kept back part of the price, his wife also being
privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet.
3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine
heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?
4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and
after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this
thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.
5 And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and agave up
the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things.
6 And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him
out, and buried him.
7 And it was about the space of three hours after, when
his wife, not knowing what was done, came in.
8 And Peter answered unto her, Tell me whether ye sold
the land for so much? And she said, Yea, for so much.
9 Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed
together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? behold, the feet of them which have
buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out.
10 Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and
yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and,
carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.
11 And great fear came upon all the church, and upon as
many as heard these things.
12 ¶ And by the hands of the apostles were many signs and
wonders wrought among the people; (and they were all with one accord in
Solomon’s porch.
13 And of the rest [rulers] durst no man join
himself to them: but the people magnified them.
14 And believers were the more added to the Lord,
multitudes both of men and women.)
15 Insomuch that they brought forth the sick into the
streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that at the least the shadow of
Peter passing by might overshadow some of them.
16 There came also a multitude out of the cities round
about unto Jerusalem, bringing sick folks, and them which were vexed with
unclean spirits: and they were healed every one.
2.
The myth: A rich young man was told to sell everything, give it to the poor,
and come and follow the Savior. The myth is that everyone should sell
everything they have and give it to the church, and make the church rich, so
that the members have nothing personally and then follow the Savior. Mark 10:17-22.
21 Then Jesus beholding him loved him,
and said unto him, one thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou
hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come,
take up the cross, and follow me. Mark 10:17-22.
The
truth: Wouldn't it be nice if all of us were that rich to begin with? For most
of us, we barely have enough for ourselves, let alone great riches we could
give to others. It is not a requirement
of the gospel that we all be personally penniless. I don't think we know all
that was going on there, but this may have been simply a personal requirement
for that young man to become one the disciples of Christ or even one of the
apostles. Perhaps being burdened by the constant administration of much wealth
might keep him from getting deeply involved in the Savior's work. We should
note that the money did not in any form go to Christ himself, or to any of the
other leaders, but was merely to be distributed to the poor, the church getting
none of it.
I
don't recall that Joseph Smith ever spoke about this story from the Scriptures,
but Brigham Young certainly did, and he thought there was nothing there that
related to general church policy. There were always church leaders at the time
of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young who thought that Christian communism was the
right answer, but those two early prophets always stalwartly resisted that. Of
course, Wilford Woodruff and Lorenzo Snow thought it was a great idea, as long
as they were the ones administering all the money, so they changed the policy
to benefit themselves.
3.
The myth: Joseph Smith started a United Order which implemented the law of consecration,
as supposedly existed in the New Testament, which meant that all of the church
members had to join everything they had together in a common-stock communalist
organization and that was his plan for bringing them temporal and spiritual salvation.
The
truth: Part of this money-extracting pack of lies has to do with blatantly misinterpreting
LDS history and scripture. According to the approved narrative, Joseph Smith
set up a United Order which required that everyone pool all of their property
and resources and that was the proper way to form and govern a church. This
would have been in accordance with the preferences of some of the Christian
socialists who actually joined the church shortly after it was organized.
But
this story is complete nonsense – contrived and continued specifically to
fleece the Mormons. There was indeed an organization known as the United Order,
but it was a silent business partnership organized to perform essentially the
exact functions which the current Corporation of the President handles. It was
set up for it short time and then disbanded when it could no longer perform its
work. It seems that the original intent was to have all of the apostles also be
the members of that silent partnership, but I believe it turned out that only
11 were involved. One curious scriptural artifact is that the men who were
members of this silent partnership were referred to by secret names so that
that partnership could in fact remain silent and secret, without anyone knowing
for sure who was a member of that partnership. Today, with our new Scriptures,
in most cases those men have been named by their real names, not by their
secret names, so members today may never have the same question which I had as
to why those secret names were necessary at all. That was the puzzling clue
(that still appeared in my old edition of the Scriptures) that started me on
trying to unravel this ball of yarn which is the mass of myths which church
leaders have invented to so successfully separate the church members from their
money, supposedly all part of good religious doctrine.
4.
The myth: Brigham Young followed in Joseph Smith's footsteps and organized
numerous "United Orders" of his own. This was to establish Christian
communism in Utah, naturally with central church leaders having the privilege
and duty of managing all that property themselves, deciding who worked where, who
managed what, etc.
The
truth: Brigham Young was not for communalism. He used the "United Order"
concept as a temporary replacement for corporations which he could not legally
form in Utah at that time.
The
"united orders" of Brigham Young's time were a clever answer to a
short-term problem and had nothing to do with religiously-required economic
organizations. Very few people seem to understand that up until about 1869, the
church members and leaders in Utah had no basis for the usual kind of legal
ways to structure society. There was no way to hold title to property, there
was no way to form corporations or other formal business organizations, there
was no way to have an efficient law enforcement system, etc. Even though the
Saints petitioned many times to be made a state or even a better organized territory,
they were not allowed to do that. Apparently, the federal government leaders
hoped that if these people could have no law, they would eventually fail and
disburse. So, in that context, what we know of as a "united order"
was a clever religion-based substitute for corporations. Nothing more complex
than a common-law partnership could be organized legally, and they are
inherently unstable, having to be reorganized every time a partner leaves or
joins. But if everyone involved was a church member, then they might consider
it "good enough" to have church approval of their economic
organization, whatever it might have been. For example, the ZCMI organization
began as one of these "united order" types of pretend-corporation
organizations, but it switched to a normal legal corporate form as soon as that
was possible.
5.
The myth: All the early members of the church just after the life of Christ had
to pay tithing to the apostles. But also, we might notice, they were also
supposedly living the law consecration which meant that they had nothing more
to give to anyone. This is obviously incoherent and chaotic, but that is the
church's teaching, nonetheless.
Paying
tithing was not part of the original church of Christ just after the time of
Christ, but church leaders today continually imply that tithing was part of the
church of Christ right after his resurrection (but without ever asserting it
publicly in a form that could be refuted). (Their very carefulness in always
both assuming and avoiding this issue proves to me that they are fully
conscious of what they are doing, and are doing it willfully. If they were not
doing it willfully, they would eventually make a mistake, but so far, they have
not (with one or two possible exceptions – I assume one of the purposes of
"correlation" is to keep the church leaders from making stupid verbal
mistakes of this sort and blowing everyone's cover).) Instead, they pretend
that the Old Testament law of Moses continued on completely into the new church
of Christ, making the leaders today a very powerful group of Judaizers, just
like those troublesome people who were overcome by the Twelve in the New
Testament.
Having
grown up in a completely Mormon environment, I was not aware that most other
Christians are perfectly aware that tithing was not part of the original church
of Christ. In fact, tithing was not added to the apostate Catholic Church until
about 1200 A.D., although it was added in a different government context in
about 800 A.D. I was fascinated to find at least four highly respected books
written by legal scholars and historians demonstrating that tithing was not
part of the original church of Christ. It seems likely that there are many more
sources on that issue, although I stopped my search after about four.
In
other words, it is very easy to demonstrate that the powerful but totally
unstated "implied doctrine" of tithing today (never stated clearly so
that it can be researched and refuted) about Christ requiring tithing, is the
worst kind of nonsense, clearly promulgated as an intentional lie to bring in a
lot of cash money to the church leaders. It is hard to know the state of mind
of all the church leaders, but this looks like one of those situations where
they are "lying for God," as they see it. SOMETHING good, however
microscopic, has come of this investment of $1 trillion, even though 99% of it
has been wasted.
6.
The myth: Religiously paying a tithe perfectly will save you and will get you
to the highest realms of the celestial kingdom. All of this 10% money must go
to the central offices to be effective. There is no other way to pay tithing.
You cannot give money to the poor and get credit for paying tithing. (This of
course totally ignores the original tithing arrangements where 9% was kept
locally and use to help the poor, and only 1% was sent to the central church to
keep the Temple in operation during Old Testament times.)
The
truth: Paying tithing will not get you to the celestial kingdom. It will not
save you. In fact, it will keep you from doing charitable good works which are
the only things which WILL get you to the celestial kingdom.
I
think one of the most fascinating results of doing some theological study is
that it is completely impossible for Old Testament-style tithing to qualify one
for entry into the celestial kingdom as an exalted being and taking on the
responsibilities of a God to continue the "family business" of God
the father who devotes all of his efforts to advancing spirits and
intelligences in the eternities.
If
the question were asked correctly, I don't think anyone could say with a
straight face that living the law of Moses was designed to get anyone to the
celestial kingdom. If they got to the middle kingdom, the terrestrial kingdom,
that would be considered plenty good enough. In fact, as far as I know, the
concept of three kingdoms in heaven was not even mentioned in the Old Testament
times under the law of Moses (it would certainly have been known in earlier
times), so clearly, trying to get to the highest kingdom, and helping
intelligences advance, would be nonsense to them.
As
a logical result of where we are today, since the church has taken us back to
Old Testament behavior and Old Testament doctrine, to be more consistent they
must necessarily suppress and eventually get rid of this nonsense about people
becoming gods and going to the celestial kingdom and continuing the work of
God. All of that sort of "exaltation and continuation of the lives"
nonsense has to be done away with to keep up the religiously substandard and
inferior but profitable Old Testament system.
We
might notice that the tithing idea as it is used today has nothing to do with
the tithing idea in the Old Testament times. In those times, 9 of the 10
percentage points was kept locally and used for taking care of the poor. Only 1
of the 10 percentage points ever made it to the headquarters unit, the Temple
of Herod for use by the priests there. So even our use of the term
"tithing" has nothing to do with anything in the Old Testament scriptures.
This new version we have today of sending all 10% to the central church was
invented out of whole cloth by Lorenzo Snow and his priestcraft teammates to
maximize their profit.
It
may indeed be true that paying tithing will keep you from being "burned at
his coming," but that may have nothing to do with whether you are eligible
to operate properly and as intended in the celestial kingdom. Naturally, they
emphasize how wonderful it would be to be with God in heaven in the celestial
kingdom, but I think you will have a very hard time finding any reference to
anyone continuing God's work there in that particular celestial kingdom. The
new version of the celestial kingdom is simply the terrestrial kingdom with a
nicer cloud on which to play your nicer harp. The church leaders today have
indeed created an extremely tangled web of ideas, and that web of ideas has
completely confused and tranquilized and neutralized the church members today.
I guess we should salute their professionalism as priestcraft theologians, but
that doesn't mean we should follow them or support them anymore.
7.
The myth: D&C section 119 is the final word on having to pay tithing in the
LDS church, that tithing being defined as paying 10% of one's income directly
to the central church, and nowhere else.
The
truth: D&C section 119 did nothing permanent and meant nothing permanent
when it was given. The
historical truth is that section 119 was a small detail in church history with
no lasting effect. It was the answer to a small local question which quickly
was overtaken by events. We might notice that this question of "tithing"
did not even come up again for another 60 years, and even then, when the
concept of tithing was mentioned by Lorenzo Snow, section 119 was not relied
upon. It was as though it never existed. It was not until about 1960 that the
church suddenly decided that section 119 was a critical piece of scriptural
text on which to hang their future financial fortunes.
We
should begin by noticing that D&C sections 117, 118, and 119 were all
delivered to the saints for the first time on the same day at the same meeting,
and presumably had much in common as affecting the current business activities
of the saints. Section 117 directs the affairs of three men, section 118
directs the affairs of the Twelve apostles, and section 119 deals with how the
Saints are going to pay off the land they are living on in Missouri. (Although
nearly 200 years later, that is not terribly clear from the written context and
the religiousy-sounding scriptural language, it was extremely clear to the
people on the ground at the time.).
We
might notice that the headnotes for session 119 did not even exist before the
1960 edition of the Scriptures. Apparently, the church leaders decided that was
a good time to clamp down on people getting too much free use of the temples, as
they saw it, so they had to find a basis to make payments of 10% to the church
headquarters a requirement before anyone could go to the temple, and this was one
of the tricks they decided to use to get what they wanted.
SECTION 119
Revelation given through
Joseph Smith the Prophet, at Far West, Missouri, July 8, 1838, in answer to his
supplication: “O Lord! Show unto thy servants how much thou requirest of the
properties of thy people for a tithing.” The law of tithing, as understood
today, had not been given to the Church previous to this revelation. The term
tithing in the prayer just quoted and in previous revelations (64:23; 85:3;
97:11) had meant not just one-tenth, but all free-will offerings, or
contributions, to the Church funds. The Lord had previously given to the Church
the law of consecration and stewardship of property, which members (chiefly the
leading elders) entered into by a covenant that was to be everlasting. Because
of failure on the part of many to abide by this covenant, the Lord withdrew it
for a time and gave instead the law of tithing to the whole Church. The Prophet
asked the Lord how much of their property He required for sacred purposes. The
answer was this revelation.
Comments:
Doesn't it seem a little bit strange that Joseph Smith doesn't know that
tithing means 1/10? Any primary child knows that, don't they? How could Joseph
Smith be so uninformed? However, before that time "tithing" simply
meant free-will contributions made as charitable assistance to individuals or
as contributions to the central church to pay church expenses, and that
definition has never scripturally changed. It is quite true that "the law
of tithing, as understood today, had not been given to the church." But
the truth is, that the law of "tithing," as described by the leaders
today, has NEVER officially been given to the church in it our time, and it
certainly was not given to the church at the time of Christ. Welcome to the
weasel word world of priestcraft theologians and pharisaic lawyers.
"The
Lord had previously given to the Church the law of consecration and stewardship
of property..." That also is a complete lie, made up for the convenience
of the 1960 church leaders, certainly without consulting any aspects of real
church history. As mentioned above, Joseph Smith did have in place for a short
time a "united order" which was simply a silent business partnership,
the best that could be arranged at the time as a substitute for the Corporation
of the President of today. It had no other doctrinal significance. The church
leaders here are stretching out for this supposedly monumental constraint on
church member freedom, so that they can very kindly take only 10% of your
property instead of 100% of your property. This is complete nonsense, as both
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young always told anyone who asked at the time, as
they did thousands of times over.
Contrary
to the implication of the words in the headnote – more weasel words, newly
generated in about 1960 for a new situation – Section 119 does NOT change any
rules or impose any new doctrinal duties on the church members. Like the other
administrative items read to the church members that day, this was the proposed
solution to how they could finally pay off the purely secular (not religious)
mortgages on the lands which they were living on. Joseph Smith had contracted
for about 250 mi.² of land in Missouri, with the idea that the church members
would move there and use their resources, especially their "surplus,"
to pay off the debts on that land, so that the church members could stay there
forever and enjoy their "inheritance" which they had bought with
their own money, through business arrangements made by their prophet.
We
should realize another important implication here. By arguing that eight years
into the church's organization the Prophet Joseph Smith had still never told
people that a full 10% tithing was required to be paid to the central offices
in order to gain salvation, one might conclude that he was a very uninformed
and even stupid or even deceptive prophet. (Was he trying to get church members
into the church with promises of no expenses, and then suddenly hit them with a
10% charge?) This puts the church leaders today in the position of arguing that
Joseph Smith really had no idea what he was doing when he started the church,
and even with all of his translating of Scriptures, and of all his other
revelations, he was still left as ignorant of all important gospel matters as
he was at age 14. Of course, that must mean that the prophets today are far
wiser and better informed than Joseph Smith ever was, so they can come to the
rescue and straighten out all of his myriad mistakes in restoring the gospel.
The fact that Joseph Smith spoke face-to-face with a long list of heavenly
beings who were surely better informed than any human today, seems not to cause
them any feelings of humility or doubt. Joseph Smith mentioned that one could
learn a great deal gazing into heaven for a few minutes. Based on where we are
today, one might guess that none of the current church leaders have had that
glimpse for even a second.
The
leaders today also have to be arguing by implication that God was unaware of
what was going to happen in the near future. In a few months, the fall of 1838,
the Saints were going to be driven out of Missouri under the terms of the
"Extermination Order." As we will see later in the history of the
church, when the 80,000 converts from England saved the church from extinction
in Utah, getting the Twelve out of this cauldron of persecution, and allowing
them to go on a mission to England, was an extremely important thing to do,
certainly the most important thing to do at that time.
With
the Saints having been driven out of Missouri and off of their mortgaged lands,
obviously, that was an unexpected way for the church members to get rid of
their debts. Obviously, when the state intervenes in that way to drive away the
people, they have no further duty to pay any money to whomever they had
contracted with. Once that payment issue went away, there was not another
mention of this kind of "tithing" for another 61 years, and even
then, when the topic was raised again by Lorenzo Snow, he did not say anything
about section 119 being some kind of a doctrinal duty. He simply informally invited
the church members to start paying tithing into the central offices to help the
church leaders with some of their current financial problems (conveniently not
mentioning their ongoing practice of taking a salary from those contributions).
He even mentioned that he thought this would be a temporary thing and that they
would go back to the way things were of owing no tithing to the central
offices, so that they could take care of their neighbors as they had before.
This invitation to help the central church out of its problems, gradually
morphed into an absolute duty to pay that money to the central offices. Once
again, the compassion and charitability of the church members was used against
them to put them in chains with duties to pay the central offices. This is a
perfect example of pharisaic behavior and incremental fraud.
1–5, The Saints are to
pay their surplus property and then give, as tithing, one-tenth of their
interest annually; 6–7, Such a course will sanctify the land of Zion.
1 Verily, thus saith the Lord, I require
all their surplus property to be put into the hands of the bishop of my church
in Zion,
2 For the building of mine house, and for
the laying of the foundation of Zion and for the priesthood, and for the debts
of the Presidency of my Church.
3 And this shall be the beginning of the
tithing of my people.
4 And after that, those who have thus
been tithed shall pay one-tenth of all their interest annually; and this shall
be a standing law unto them forever, for my holy priesthood, saith the Lord.
5 Verily I say unto you, it shall come to
pass that all those who gather unto the land of Zion shall be tithed of their
surplus properties, and shall observe this law, or they shall not be found
worthy to abide among you.
6 And I say unto you, if my people
observe not this law, to keep it holy, and by this law sanctify the land of
Zion unto me, that my statutes and my judgments may be kept thereon, that it
may be most holy, behold, verily I say unto you, it shall not be a land of Zion
unto you.
7 And this shall be an ensample unto all
the stakes of Zion. Even so. Amen.
8.
The myth: The LDS church cannot legally do anything to build up Zion today,
since that might require doing things in society which might change the
attitudes of the people and the politics of the time. Therefore, they are
required to be totally passive, and if our society disintegrates and goes up in
smoke it's not their problem.
The
truth: It is not legally required for the church to be nonpolitical. In fact,
that is exactly backwards from the truth. The Constitution assumes and even
requires that churches are aggressively involved in keeping civil governments
within their proper boundaries. Our leaders today have totally failed to do
their duty in that respect. It's just too expensive to do the right thing these
days, they would apparently argue.
9.
The myth: The LDS church is legally forbidden from defending freedom, so they
must be pacifists at all times, regardless of the risks to freedom in our
society.
The
truth: Pacifism is not a legal or constitutional requirement of the church as
was asserted during World War II. The Book of Mormon in the case of Captain
Moroni and others, plus the U.S. Constitution, all assume that churches will be
at the forefront of protecting freedoms, even if that means being involved in
warfare. Again, these policies are all about money. If one were to defend
freedom, that might require an outlay of cash, or at least some time and
trouble spent on the project. Being a privileged class, not subject to any
rules they don't approve of, or that they find inconvenient in any way, these
people should not be asked to do any of that sort of thing, such as having a
duty to maintain freedom within the United States.
4.
Restoring The Restoration,
Reenthroning New Testament Charity,
and other critical doctrines
And Building Up Zion
Under
the leadership of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the concepts of the gathering
and the building up of Zion were just as obvious to everyone as anything could
be as mighty efforts were made to gather and organize the Saints for their own
benefit. However, once those heroic and epic efforts were mostly over, since
the subsequent leaders decided that all gospel benefits should go to them
personally, the concepts of the gathering and of building up Zion have been
forgotten and downplayed into oblivion. No one even knows what they mean
anymore, and that shows how effective the leaders have been in leading the
members around by the nose and doing all their thinking for them. If the sheeple
members don't ever wake up to this self-interested brainwashing, apparently
nothing will ever change.
The
only question left then is whether our church and society will self-destruct on
its own, or whether Christ might choose to come and do all that damage himself
before beginning some corrective process, after disappearing major portions of
our society and our church. There is a better way to do things, I am sure, but
with only a zombie church to work with, the worst outcomes are also the most
likely.
It
is strange to read that the ordinary Christians of the world have a better
intuitive grasp of the concepts of the gathering and of the building up of Zion
then do the carefully lobotomized Mormons.
During 1942-1944, C. S. Lewis, a British intellectual, who became an atheist who then eventually converted to Christianity, gave a series of radio talks while Britain was still at war with Germany. Those talks were published in three books, and then in one combined book, entitled Mere Christianity, wherein he was attempting to describe the core principles of Christianity without exploring all the less important differences among various sects. Although he claims not to be a theologian, but merely a lay member of the Church of England, he did a pretty good job of laying out the basics of Christianity in simple language. One of the most basic questions he deals with repeatedly in his book is How should the principles of Christianity change our society? I found it interesting because I see him as addressing what the Mormons would call "building up Zion," and he does it in the simplest possible terms. It seems to me that the original concept of building up Zion has been so watered down and generalized and spiritualized (the language CS Lewis used to describe other concepts in his book) until it has no operational meaning anymore. This seems to have been done intentionally to try to stop church members from thinking about it effectively, and to stop them from encouraging and reminding the church leaders to do something about it.
Here is the CS Lewis discussion of a Christian society:
I have said that we should never get a Christian society unless most of us
become Christian individuals. That does not mean, of course, that we can put
off doing anything about society until some imaginary date in the far future.
It means that we must begin both jobs at once – (1) the job of seeing how 'Do
as you would be done by' can be applied in detail to modern society, and (2)
the job of becoming the sort of people who really would apply it if we saw how.
I now want to begin considering what the Christian idea of a good man is – the
Christian specification for the human machine. p.88.
It should be perfectly obvious to anyone, that if one wants to build up
Zion, the only practical way to do that is to collect together a rather large
number of church members who then have the "natural law" option from
their sheer size and cohesion to control their own civil government. If people
are scattered all over the world in small groups, there is no chance at all for
them to overcome the inertia of the local societal elements of Babylon, but if
they are gathered together, many millions strong, then it will happen almost
spontaneously that they can and will create a government which is consistent
with living the Gospel fully. The leaders today are intentionally making sure
that that does not happen.
Utah transformed
into Zion?
One might think that the first order of business for the LDS Church would be to build up a Zion in Utah until at least Utah was a "shining city on a hill," a perfect example of living the Gospel, getting rid of un-holiness and unrighteousness, to the extent possible, and inviting in all that is good.
The Church certainly has a great deal of influence in the state. A majority of its citizens are church members. The Church's annual income could be as large as the budget for the state government, or nearly as large. For example, if the state has a $30 billion budget, the Church may have at least a $20 billion budget. And we notice that the Church has saved up somewhere around $150 billion which would amount to five years of the state's complete budget. That indicates that if the church chose to make any changes in society in Utah, they could do almost anything that seemed useful. That $150 billion is probably not enough by itself to overhaul the entire United States, to make it a mostly Christian and mostly freedom-loving and patriotic country, but it could provide a very good start, and encourage other people to join forces with the church to make whatever changes were necessary.
So, since that is obviously a distinct possibility, we might ask why it is not happening? Why wouldn't the church headquarters grasp this opportunity and run with it as far as they thought possible or necessary? This seems like a good way to introduce what appears to be church's strange strategy today. What I described was basically the strategy of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young in building up Utah and the Gospel to attract at least 80,000 converts from Europe in about the first 20 years of the saint's being in Utah, and continuing that flow of converts for a long time. So it takes a little bit of complicated and even twisted thinking to finally grasp what the church leaders' current strategy is, and what that strategy has been for at least 50 years, and perhaps 100 years.
First, we begin with the observation that once the church leaders are able to get enough money income from their work as church leaders to take care of all their needs, any more income is just a bother. Someone might expect them to spend any extra money on doing charitable things to help the world, but that simply enlarges their administrative burden and their sense of responsibility, and raises their public visibility, and they would prefer none of that.
So, we might guess that in 1977 when the Church officially ended the principle of the gathering, the church had about 3.5 million members worldwide, with about 1 million active members, and that was probably plenty enough to take care of all their needs without the church growing any further. Certainly, at the time one would not have thought that they were signaling by that policy change that the Church was big enough, and that the church leaders would not do anything more than the bare minimum to cause the church to grow more. But that is in fact what happened
At some point, the church leaders decided that the perfect situation for them was to have small numbers of church members scattered all over the world so that they could justify having to create a diplomatic system where the church leaders were "required" to fly all over the world coordinating amongst the members and negotiating with all the governments. That could make the church leaders feel like VIPs, and entitle them to first-class travel, attending important international conferences, giving and receiving awards, meeting with the pope, etc.
So, the perfect situation would be to have a few hundred members in every country in the world which would then give the church leaders reasons to fly to every country in the world making their "work" and vacations quite interesting, all done at the expense of the members.
If those members decide they want to emigrate to Zion, to gather to Zion, that causes the church leaders a lot of trouble, because they begin to lose their excuse for traveling worldwide any time they feel like it. The religious leaders of these foreign countries might complain that the church leaders were stealing their people like they enraged the preachers of an earlier time, and still today, when the Mormons were called sheep stealers. The secular leaders of those countries would also be likely to complain about stealing some of their best people in a "brain drain" situation. (Actually, this could go both ways, as the church leaders also stole away some of the people in these countries who are pressing for more freedoms. Getting rid of these troublemakers would be a plus for the church, it might be imagined.)
However, the main thing which is a going on is that the church leaders are happy to try to negotiate with any tyrant and would be happy to not only be politically passive themselves but would be willing to exert some effort to keep any church members in those countries passive as well, actually helping those tyrants in their misbehavior as they suppress freedom there and engage in other forms of corruption.
Overall, it would make more sense to use the Zion-building strategy of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young which was to encourage people in other countries to free themselves of their chains and come to a free country where they could also have freedom of religion. In other words, the more sensible thing would be to assist all of these people who join the church in other countries to make their way to Utah or to some other place where they could be completely free in every way, politically, economically, and religiously.
That would accomplish several things. First of all, it creates a tremendous incentive for people in other countries to leave those countries and go to this new place of freedom and righteousness. It was interesting to see in Britain that there were usually no more than 4000 people who were church members at any time during 1800s, because as soon as it was practical, groups of those people would leave England and move to the United States, thus quickly diminishing the numbers left behind. But, presumably because these people sent back good reports, there were always thousands more people who were interested in joining the church and moving to the western United States. That explains the interesting statistic of never having more than about 4000 church members in Britain, but having about 80,000 of them end up in Utah. I assume that tremendous immigration force would continue today if it was allowed to happen. I expect that is what WOULD happen unless you do something to stop it.
So here is where having Zion grow actually becomes a big problem for the church leaders. If there were many more millions of eager church members living in the United States, that would greatly lessen the need for this huge diplomatic corps to be built up in Salt Lake City. People would come to the United States and they would take care of themselves politically, and they would need no more help from Salt Lake City. Simply the ample size of the collection of freedom-loving people would mean that they would quickly bend the politics of any states in which they lived so that it would be a safe place for the gospel to prosper, which is what I consider the real definition of Zion.
In other words, it is an element of FAILURE for the church to keep a large number of people overseas. That itself is a great limit on building up Zion. Again, having those people come to the United States would greatly decrease the need for the church leaders to build up an international diplomatic force to constantly travel the world and make adjustments to the church and to the governments they live under. And all of this central bureaucracy feeds upon itself. Again, as long as the Saints are widely scattered, one can justify a huge diplomatic effort, including spending large amounts of money for travel, foreign buildings, etc. As soon as those people gathered, most of that need for diplomacy and travel goes away. And, at the same time, the need to coordinate among the church members, keeping them in touch with Salt Lake City, also goes away, since those people have gone to a place of freedom, and are taking care of their own needs. Although the church constantly talks about self-reliance, they really are anti-self-reliance in the long run, just like most power-hungry people. When the church leaders speak of self-reliance, what they really mean is people earning enough money to pay tithing. We have the strange situation where the church leaders see themselves as being benefited by a failure to build up Zion, at the same time the members around the world have to suffer in situations which are unjust.
As far as I can tell, it was not intended that the church on the earth have ANY central bureaucracy whatsoever, certainly not one that is paid salaries with contributions that are extracted from the members by "doctrinal taxing" methods, as we see today. It is interesting that in the times of the Book of Mormon, the 12 apostles sometimes simply left the people behind because the apostles were not respected and appreciated there. Obviously, those 12 would never have left behind those corrupt and on repentance members if those apostles were getting generous salaries from those people, and thus were very embedded in the very system of corruption that the apostles were complaining about.
Obviously, in today's situation, it really doesn't matter how corrupt and disobedient the church members might be, the current 12 apostles would never leave them behind out of disgust, simply because they were bound to them by these powerful financial ties. In truth, the church leaders today are parasites, not true leaders. That means that almost no matter how corrupt and foolish the church members became, the leaders and their large staffs would stay with them just as long as they had their incomes continue.
This seems to show us how our church and our nation will finally end. It will end exactly as was described in the book of Fourth Nephi where the church deteriorated and the nation deteriorated and the whole thing finally went up in smoke. In this situation today, the church leaders are going to have overwhelming pressures for them to keep their mouths shut. They would not dare criticize the church members for serious sin lest they stop getting their lovely regular incomes and related perquisites of office. They MUST follow these people in the downward trend, presumably caused by growing corruption in the larger society, so we can't even expect to have any serious warnings from the prophets, just as we have no serious efforts by the prophets to counteract this downward spiral by engaging in vigorous efforts to "build up Zion." They are connected with this downward spiral "at the hip," as we say, and they will never do anything about it until it's too late.
The same kind of logic applies to how the prophets treat the civil leaders. We have many cases in the scriptures such as the prophet Jonah who was sent to Nineveh, and his preaching turned around that corrupt city. We had people like Samuel the Lamanite who warned some of the people of the Book of Mormon. There are probably hundreds of cases of these kinds of warnings given in the scriptures. Christ himself berated the civil and religious leaders of his time, calling them sinners and hypocrites. But we will never hear any such warnings in our own time, no matter how bad our civil governments get.
As we look at the behavior of the church leaders today, their plan is to be as passive and even anti-freedom as they dare (limited by what the members will bear), so that they will receive constant approval from civic leaders, which will allow the church as an institution to operate in its own exploitation of the citizens of their countries. One of the first things that the church does in a new country is to establish banking arrangements so that tithing money which is extracted from the church members there can be sent to Salt Lake City. Obviously, that sort of banking arrangement needs the approval and blessing of the government leaders, or it will be cut off. These civil leaders might overlook money which is coming into the country, but they are likely to be very wary of any money going out of their country.
What that means is that the church leaders must never do anything in the United States or anywhere else, to encourage church members to seek increases in their level of personal freedom. This, strangely enough, makes the church an enemy of freedom, even in the United States. If the Church were to allow or suggest freedom-promoting activities in the United States, that would have a bad effect on their international operations, because people in these other even more corrupt countries would expect that the church leaders would start promoting freedom in their countries just as they allowed the members to do in the United States, and that would be bad for their diplomatic presence in these other countries. From a gospel standpoint, this is totally backwards and insane behavior, but that is what we have today. It is in the church's interest to have the United States be a very low common denominator on the freedom scale, so that it more closely matches the very low freedom scale in other countries. This is a very perverse attitude, but that seems to be how it works.
We might notice that the LDS church today is perfectly following the strategy of the McDonald's hamburger franchise that stretches worldwide. The policy of that company is to be as passive and invisible politically and socially as possible. All they want to do is sell hamburgers at a nice profit, and they don't care about anything else. That passivity allows them to operate in most countries, but not all countries. The LDS church is not selling hamburgers but rather sacrament meeting seats, but they view them similarly as franchise operations. No one is allowed to operate any such church operations without paying very large amounts of franchise fees to the central church. The church has no right whatsoever to charge for these gospel concepts and even the priesthood, all of which it received for free, but it has managed through its imposed monopoly to extract very large fees for the use of these items which were intended to be free by Christ himself. This selling of spiritual "products" is called simony, named after Simon the Sorcerer who is mentioned in the New Testament.
We have several recent events of interest, showing how the LDS Church in the United States panders to the corrupt tyrants, in this case Democrats who are now in power in the United States, and who, if everything goes as they plan, will be able to exercise one-party control of the United States forever. All they have to do is further perfect their ability to steal all elections, and we will be there. We're already halfway there now. The church has adopted numerous leftist Democrat policies already, and presumably will continue down that path. They have forbidden guns in their churches, adopting the "gun-free zone" anti-second amendment position of the current government.
They recently got involved in politics, even though they claim to never get involved in politics, by telling church members that they need to vote for some Democrat candidates in Utah, not just the Republican candidates. The use of vaccines against COVID was a big issue, and the church endorsed the use of these very minimally tested and therefore highly dangerous vaccines. It's hard to know the truth on the effect of the vaccines, simply because the governments and nearly all other public institutions lied about those questions endlessly. It is likely that as many people died from the vaccines or from their related unwise medical treatment as from the disease itself. It is a great stretch to say that these vaccines should be given such a recommendation and support by the church. That endorsement was a purely political act.
The church today
uses a version of our 12th Article of Faith which I would call the children's
version of that Article of Faith, rather than the adult version of that Article
of Faith. The simple version of that
Article of Faith reads as follows, as modified by the current church leaders:
12 We believe in being [absolutely] subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law [regardless of the justice of the law].
However, in stark
contrast, the adult version of that concept is given in D&C 134 where verse
5 reads as follows:
5 We believe that all men are bound to sustain and uphold the respective governments in which they reside, while protected in their inherent and inalienable rights by the laws of such governments; and that sedition and rebellion are unbecoming every citizen thus protected, and should be punished accordingly; and that all governments have a right to enact such laws as in their own judgments are best calculated to secure the public interest; at the same time, however, holding sacred the freedom of conscience.
We might say that this is just one more of the many myths which the LDS Church has created to confuse and control its church members. A longer (but still incomplete) list of myths is shown separately.
There have been recent cases where the LDS Church has promoted itself to being the political representatives of all its members, even though the church claims to never do anything political in nature. It has negotiated away some of the constitutional rights of Americans, to meet the unreasonable demands of those people I would call pagans in our country, those people who would corrupt every aspect of our Judeo-Christian culture, especially including things related to sexual purity and marriage.
In 1923 the church
leaders made it so that church members have absolutely no political or
financial or doctrinal control over the church whatsoever, so it is certainly
incongruous for the church leaders, necessarily acting totally on their own,
without even the possibility of legally recognizable approval from the members,
to act in political matters supposedly on behalf of the members. This is one irritating form of pride among
the church leaders, that they promote themselves to claim such political powers
on behalf of people which they don't technically represent. This is a form of "taxation without
representation" or "political negotiation without
representation." In these cases, although the church leaders probably
claim to be acting on behalf of their members, in fact the church leaders are
acting totally on their own behalf to defend the prerogatives of the church
central headquarters as a bureaucratic institution. That is all that is happening, and if the
church members or other citizens are damaged in the process, or have their
constitutional rights diminished, that is just too bad for them. As I mentioned
elsewhere, the church leaders have been at war with the members since 1896, and
this is just one of the many powerful manifestations of that continuing
conflict.
A Trump-style
version of "building up Zion"
At one point in the recent past, US President Donald J. Trump proposed some ambitious plans to stimulate the US economy. One of his ideas was to build 50 new cities in the United States. I don't recall seeing any more details to flesh out that idea, so I will do that now myself. One of the big problems we have in our country today is the fact that many of the largest cities in our country are controlled by Democrat political machines, which, once entrenched, always deliver Democrats to political offices. And then their terrible policies proceed to destroy any industry and most of the previous society in those cities and states. They are left with large sections of these cities, often filled with minorities, who seem stuck there, unable to move up or move out to escape these inner-city nightmares. Most of these cities are plagued with perhaps 50 shootings a week, with many of those shootings becoming homicides. The educational systems in these cities are terrible, no matter how much money they spend on them, and the next generations of these inner-city people are typically completely unqualified to take a job in the real world, so to speak, so they simply stay in their ghettos and live on government handouts. Perhaps 70% of the children born there are born to single mothers and never have a father to teach them the discipline and the skills they need to succeed in life. There seems to be no way to solve this problem except by some extreme plan to move all the best people somewhere else, leaving the cities to even further collapse in on themselves.
What I imagine is that an aggressive LDS Church which was interested in "building up Zion" might partner with some such government plan and with various manufacturing corporations to make at least some of those 50 new cities "company towns" which were tailor-made for housing the employees and hosting the manufacturing facilities needed to be long-term economic successes. There are other histories of company towns such as in the mining areas of our country where the people that lived there were abused by the companies that owned and controlled those cities, but that corrupt ownership and control is not a necessary part of a "company town."
I have seen some very successful company towns in Saudi Arabia, for example, where the Saudis brought in many different groups of highly skilled people to modernize their country. Of course, there are many thousands of oil workers there, but they also had company towns for installing telephone and other communications systems, to construct buildings of all sorts, including palaces for the elite, to build universities and trade schools, to bring modern medicine and hospital complexes to Saudi Arabia, and even to operate city waste disposal systems.
Surely there are many lessons to be learned from a long history of cities being built in conjunction with manufacturing plans and facilities. Hopefully, part of these systems would provide ways to extract promising young people from their discouraging ghetto neighborhoods and help them to get the education and experience they need to be successful in a market economy. Ideally, that would help to shrink these corrupt cities to a shadow of their former selves so that they would cease to have such terrible effects on the politics and economy and sociology of our country.
There are many other possibilities such as helping to create some new "Silicon Valleys" in other parts of the nation. One idea that has been floated is that the United States needs to create far more computer chip manufacturing facilities. At this point, enormous portions of our computer industry are actually based on manufacturing in Taiwan and China. Those are relatively unstable and unreliable sources, and new sources should be created, perhaps through some cooperative efforts between industry, government, and churches (churches being a new factor in such efforts). The entire process of bringing back manufacturing facilities from China so that the United States is not dependent on that hostile and unstable country for any of their critical goods would add to the security and prosperity of the United States. Since the United States is the place where Zion is supposed to be built, this would all be going in the right direction.
From the LDS church standpoint, that city-building process might be helped by bringing in church members from all over the world, perhaps more specifically from South American. That again might be a way of separating the best people from the worst people. For example, if people from Nicaragua could move to homes and jobs in new manufacturing cities in the United States, and leave their parasitic criminal gangs behind, perhaps that scourge could also be solved by simply leaving the parasites with no one to attack. Perhaps they would have to either get a real job or starve.
There are many other possibilities, but this might be a hint at some larger-scale thinking that people seem rarely to consider.
Moving onto other classes of ideas, the church could certainly do much to improve education around the world. Perhaps they could use it in a coordinated way to prepare people to work in these new cities before they even came to our country. If these people came with the knowledge of the Gospel and a determination to build up Zion, that would help the politics of these new cities start out at the correct level instead of immediately falling back into the corrupt machine politics of all other big cities in our country (perhaps to some extent even in Utah in Salt Lake City and Ogden.) I believe there have been prophecies about the Lamanites, the residents of Latin America, once again being stalwart supporters of the Gospel. It would be nice if we could be fulfilling a prophecy while we are also obviously helping people.
Right now, the LDS church seems to care nothing about the problems of abortions and adoptions. They have ended their support for adoption agencies and seem to simply ignore the abortion problem. Rather than to continue to ignore such basic and critical facilities to help children come into the world into good families, perhaps they could do something a great deal more effective. Presumably they stay away from these areas of society because they are political minefields, but that only makes it more important to take steps to correct these parts of our society.
There are many other such ideas which are easily within the grasp of a determined religious organization, and all of these ideas ought to be explored and carried out when conditions seem favorable. Rather than having $150 billion invested in normal stock market Fortune 500 companies, looking for normal money profits, that money could be invested in society to gain a huge social return on that investment. For example, $150 billion, plus similar amounts of money from other interested parties, should be able to reform or replace the terrible state of our universities and even our K-12 schools.
If it is thought that our entertainment systems are sorely lacking, a church group might sponsor a whole new series of movies with more uplifting and educational themes. The news and social media organizations and Internet sites need to be aggressively augmented with much more wholesome material. And so on. This would all be made easier by having a larger group of Gospel-oriented freedom-loving people here to make these things happen and to reap the benefits from them.
5.
Using and Abusing Church History
As a general observation and statement, the church leaders today do not respect church history or theology. Presumably that is because they individually know so little about either topic. As far as I know, they are all now professional men -- lawyers, teachers, businessmen, skilled pilots or surgeons, etc. -- but none of them are church historians or theologians. It's hard to say that any of them have a lifetime of learning in history and theology. None of them are like the boy Samuel who dedicated his life to learning the gospel, and grew up in the temple, studying and learning under a great gospel teacher, where that boy was eventually recognized as a prophet by all of Israel, a person who both heard the Lord and saw him. 1 Sam. 3.
All of that kind of background information they might be introduced to, various facts and parameters concerning the gospel and its history, is simply grist for their administrative mill. Church history and doctrine and theology is not something important to them, in and of itself, for its own sake, perhaps something like assembling the entire periodic chart of earthly elements, the basis for all earthly compounds and chemicals. Instead, in their case, they should know all the elements of the gospel, which all must be properly in place for the world, as we were intended to know it, to function correctly. However, to them it is simply a set of facts and parameters to be manipulated as desired to reach other goals, administratively determined. It is really like they are flying by the seat of their pants and making up things as they go along, apparently unaware that almost every question which they come upon has already been determined in the past, in the 6000 years of the Earth's temporal history, and it is just that they know nothing about it, which gives them the hubris to imagine that they can consult their own preferences and change anything at any time they wish without respecting the past.
Notes on my own
historical research experiences.
When I was about 38, after having earned two law degrees and working as a computer consultant for a time, I began reading the Joseph Smith History of the Church in seven volumes. I read about Joseph Smith's "United Order" and realized as I was reading through that set of historical notes provided by Joseph Smith, that I was reading about a silent business partnership, formed with 11 men to begin with. They were using secret names to refer to each other in their correspondence, some of which is included in the published history, and that struck me as very strange. A few moments thought allowed me to realize that one would use secret names if one wanted to keep a silent partnership secret from the church's enemies. This was quite a stunning realization, and with that thought in mind, I did a great deal more research to verify that my hunch was correct. The united order of Joseph Smith's time was simply a business organization set up to take care of the business of the church including printing scriptures and selling goods to the saints at reasonable prices instead of at vastly inflated prices as might be charged by their enemies. [We saw something similar again in Utah with the formation of ZCMI -- Zions' Cooperative Mercantile Institution, created to stop the church members from being gouged by hostile merchants in Utah.] The church would probably have created a corporation at Joseph Smith's time, if it were politically possible, but that was not an option for them, so they went with an available common-law solution which was a silent partnership. Today we have the Corporation of the President, while then they had the "United Order" partnership.
A little later, on reflection, I wondered why that discovery was so relatively easy to make, and so consequential, and yet I had never heard of it before. Surely the church has thousands of lawyers as members and even has hundreds of lawyers working for the church organization today. If any one of them had read this material in volume 1 of the history, they might all have reached the same conclusion. So what was unique about my experience? Upon even further reflection, it occured to me that there are many aspects of early church history that are quite inconvenient for the church today, and so it simply ignores those facts and issues, and hopes that those ideological and doctrinal problems will stay hidden and will eventually go away.
For example, people constantly asked Joseph Smith whether there was some required economic communalism -- often referred to in those times as a common-stock organization -- involved in joining the church, as some preachers of the time maintained, but Joseph Smith always steadfastly resisted and refuted any such ideas. In other words, he would have thought the theory that his "united order" was an example of just another Christian communism group was a really terrible idea, and he would have refuted it and published his refutation, over and over again, as he did.
The truth is, of
course, as I've pointed out here, that it is very financially useful for the
church today to pretend that this "united order" was some kind of a
Christian communism organization, required for church membership. The story
they want to tell is that the church leaders today are really doing us a big
favor because they only charge us 10% of our income instead of 100% of our
income as supposedly is required by the Christian communist historical myth
which they wish to promulgate. Obviously
then, they are not going to make the slightest effort to straighten out that
little bit of actual economic and doctrinal history of the church. I assume
they would take the 100% if they dared, showing their many anti-Christian Marxist
impulses. However, that would likely cause the church organization to almost
disappear, as they tried to take too much for members to stomach. That would
certainly be the end of any sane new converts to the church.
But this myth-making logic goes several steps further as well, I have discovered. The church today does everything imaginable, turning itself into a pretzel at times, to make sure that it does not criticize in any way any civil governments, whether in the United States or in any other country. It rigidly follows the business model of McDonald's hamburgers where it makes a silent bargain with the countries of the world that if the church can come into the country and set up a means to export tithing money from that country and operate there without being molested (as it sells its "sacrament meeting hamburgers"), then the church will make sure that it never does anything to criticize the civil governments there (or anywhere else in the world), no matter how atrociously they treat their people. And the church even takes upon itself the task of suppressing any creative freedom impulses or reforming impulses that the church members might feel as they read about the Gospel and learn about the fight for freedom by Captain Moroni in the Book of Mormon, the endorsement and promotion of the U.S. Constitution in LDS Scriptures, or any other pro-freedom impulses that those troublesome scriptures might cause to arise.
Especially, they would want to downplay any comments made by Christ himself about the importance of being free, as he freed the Jews from the chains of the law of Moses and gave them the almost incomprehensible levels of individual freedom that are contained within the true gospel of Christ. In every decision the church leaders make, the first criteria is what will it do to their income, and if anything will put the tiniest shade on their level of income, they will shy away from it or combat it by making some omission or by presenting some lie or justifying myth, using all the tricks of lawyers and rhetoricians. These men are not historians or theologians, but merely legal and rhetorical tricksters. They can often recognize a historical or doctrinal problem when they see it, but they seem to tend to use their business sense to find a way around it.
So the general tendency to ignore 90% of early church history by the church today is simply because so many of the implications of that church history go the wrong ways for supporting the income of the church today. First of all, if they recognized the constant persecution by the federal government, and especially the state of Missouri, as powerful anti-Mormon influences, that might mean they would have to badmouth some state or national government, so they would prefer to simply blot out all of that kind of history from any official church history. For example, the fact that the Mormon Battalion, which is highly praised by the church for its steadfastness, was actually one of three battalions, where the Mormon Battalion was a prisoner Battalion and the other two battalions were sent to be prison guards. That part is typically left out because that puts the federal government in a very bad light. The federal government actually sent a large number of heavily armed men to "recruit" that 500-man group that made up the Mormon Battalion, and their orders were to simply sign these men up (willingly, of course, to be prisoners) as soldiers or kill them and a large swath of the Mormons if they refused. That's another little item that we skip in the histories. The church must maintain the fiction that civil governments are always kind and benevolent, or, at least, that the LDS church will never reveal the sins and depredations of those governments, or hold them accountable in any way for their unchristian behavior.
Skipping ahead to Utah, we had the federal government still trying to crush out the Mormon religion and all who followed them, and scatter or kill them (primarily because they were pro-freedom and anti-slavery, and could become political and economic competitors for political control of much of the West, not because anyone cared about their slightly unusual religious beliefs). That was the mission of Johnston's army who went to Utah in 1857 to either kill or scatter the saints, take over the Utah territory, and turn it into a slaveholding state (and then go on and do the same thing in California). Utah had been originally decreed a free State by the federal legislature, but the option remained that under the concept of "popular sovereignty" or "squatters sovereignty," the citizens of Utah could vote to become a slave state. Obviously the Mormons would never do that, but if the Mormons were all gone, then the Southerners and slaveholders who were part of Johnstons army, then could themselves vote in that state into becoming a slaveholding state, even though they might have fewer than 5000 people voting in such a pivotal election.
Skipping ahead again, it apparently was considered politically necessary for Wilford Woodruff to denounce polygamy before the federal government would allow the Utah territory to become a state. That may sound like a punishment and an interference with freedom of religion by the federal government (something it was forbidden to do under the federal Constitution), but, as it turned out, it was a great "blessing" and opportunity for Wilford Woodruff and his associates in church leadership positions. That offered them a great opportunity to increase their income a great deal. As good leftists, they took this opportunity to "never let a good crisis go to waste," and they changed the whole system of patriarchs. Where the local stake patriarchs had been able to perform all of the higher ordinances of the Gospel, especially including marriage, all of those higher ordinances were centralized in the central church offices by Woodruff with the thought in mind that they could eventually monetize those higher ordinances, as they finally were able to do according to plan.
The truth is, that the gospel does not require grand temple structures in order to operate. It can operate perfectly well on a local basis where all of the higher priesthood ordinances are available through the patriarchs. So, apparently, one of the reasons for finally moving ahead fairly quickly to finish the Salt Lake Temple (which was 40 years in the building of it, causing one to wonder how the saints did without the higher ordinances for 40 years, but of course they did not have to do without those ordinances.) was to allow them to stop using the endowment houses, which were relatively inexpensive for performing temple ordinances, including marriages, in a very nice way, and then they could go the next step incrementally and say that only dedicated temples could be used for those higher ordinances. That put these higher ordinances totally under the control of the central government of the Church and then they could gradually ratchet up the rhetoric requiring people to pay 10% of their income to the central church, before reaching in about 1960 the rule that such payment of tithing was mandatory before someone could enter the temple. This created the marvelously profitable business model of simony, selling these ordinances for a very high price, where all of that money was completely free to the church leaders, except for the cost of providing a few temples.
Jumping back to the time of Joseph Smith, and the 1838 presentation of D&C section 119: the historical truth is that after 1838, that section 119 had no practical meaning whatsoever until about 1960. When the imposition of Old Testament-style tithing was invented for the first time in modern days in 1899 by Lorenzo Snow (where the new definition of highly lucrative maximum tithing was 10% to the central offices, where it had originally been only 1% to the central offices during Old Testament times) there was no reference made to section 119. If he had tried to use that as a basis for imposing tithing for the first time, the church members would probably have laughed at him. It was still understood then, that section 119 was a local solution to a local problem which was very much time-specific, and it had been completely overtaken by events. In 1838, the saints were trying to pay off the mortgages on their lands, but obviously, when they were driven off those lands by the Missouri mobs under the authority of the Extermination Order, they no longer needed to attempt to pay off those mortgages. Section 119 was merely a local solution to a local problem, and it was recognized as such at the time it was given.
We might notice that even though the terms "all excess property" and "10% of the interest (or increase)" were used, they were only referring to the money which people might bring with them to Missouri to help pay for the land they were going to be living on, and, of course, if they were blessed with good farming seasons, then they needed to use those resources to continue to pay off the mortgage. Freedom-loving self-employed farmers, living as God intended men to live (as did Abraham old), have "interest" or "increase," not "income," in the sense of a salary. Notice that it doesn't mention where that money is supposed to go. It does not say that it is to go to the church leaders for them to live in a lavish lifestyle. To the people who received or heard that revelation, it was perfectly clear to them that they needed to take care of their neighbors, many of whom were in some distress, and after that they were to help pay off the price of the land, perhaps even helping others to pay off their mortgages, even after a highly successful individual might have paid off his own mortgage. The idea that this was a new burden which was placed on the church members to last forever to support the church leaders in high style forever never crossed their minds. This kind of exploitative thinking had to wait until the big events of 1899 and 1960.
I expect these Missouri Saints usually lost everything they had put into paying off mortgages on their land, especially including any of their "excess property." This presents the interesting possible situation that those who were the slowest in paying off their mortgages, and perhaps kept back a little bit of their "excess property" might have fared better than many other people who were more prompt in payment. But that remaining excess, if any, might have been used to ease the suffering of the saints on their way out of Missouri. Perhaps that is the real specific issue that was being dealt with in section 119 -- whether to try to pay off mortgages quickly or wait to see if they would be allowed to remain on their land.
Old Testament tithing was tied to the idea that God's control of the weather and of all other factors of farming production determined what the crops might be, and thus the "increase."
There are many
cases of excluded history and scripture
Incidentally, D&C 131 and 132 have been informally deleted from the Scriptures. We simply don't talk about eternal increase anymore. That is just too weird and sets far too high of a goal for living the Gospel here and hereafter. The Protestants and Catholics laugh at us, so we can't say we believe in that anymore. We have another less clear myth or historical modification that, operationally, there really is no celestial kingdom, or at least no top third level in the celestial kingdom. The lower two separate kingdoms are quite enough for us today. Of course, this creates another paradox in the logic of our current church leaders. If there is no reason for us to strive to do the great things which are contemplated for a few church members in the celestial Kingdom, then there is no reason to have ANY temple ordinances here. In order to get to the middle Kingdom, one doesn't need a single priesthood ordinance of any kind. The Protestants and Catholics can get there as easily as we can, and we ought to stop trying to outdo them in any way. What if we thought we had a special duty to change our society for the better, and do such things as "build up Zion." Then we would indeed be weird, because we would be activists for righteousness, and surely that would get us in some trouble. Most importantly, that would seriously mess up the simony business model which the LDS church leaders have carefully crafted.
For me, this partially answers the question as to why the church has been so quiet and uneasy about discussing some of the blatantly obvious historical events that led up to the church members being in Utah. The truth is, that the church members would never have ended up in Utah except for the fact that they were first directed to go to Missouri, where there was lots of high-quality land at a very low price to begin the gathering process. The part that is definitely underplayed is that Missouri had entered the Union as a slave state, and there were already many slave plantations operating in Missouri, and the fact that the LDS people were mostly anti-slavery northerners or anti-slavery Europeans, set the Mormons up for a tremendous clash of cultures. All of the efforts to drive the saints out of Missouri or kill them were based on their resistance to slavery, not on their strange religion. Apparently, the church leaders today find it useful to say that these people, the earliest settlers in Missouri, were reacting to the Mormons' strange religion, and gloss over the fact that it was really the issue of slavery which was being litigated. Again, that allows the church leaders, as they imagine, to ignore the bad government behavior related to encouraging and enforcing slavery, and the murderous government persecution of the saints for their anti-slavery stance. Somehow, it seems more beneficial to church leaders to have been persecuted for their religion by other supposed Christians, rather than to have been persecuted for their anti-slavery stance by civil governments. Again, they can blame some ignorant farmers rather than the government units who were really behind this persecution. This kind of intentional historical revisionism leads to all kinds of strange problems.
To finish that thought about the importance of slavery in the history of the church, the truth is that the church members would never have made it to Utah without the constant prodding and death threats of the proslavery people. We know that in Nauvoo, the saints were not willing to leave when Joseph Smith told them they needed to go west. It was only after Joseph had been killed that they were finally willing to break themselves free from the United States and move into the wilderness. Had they gone much sooner, they could probably have done it without incident, but their fears and lack of obedience meant that they only went west because they had no other alternatives to preserve their lives.
This constant twisting and revising of history has always struck me as rather strange, but finally I have a useful explanation of what the church is trying to do. It is engaging in various kinds of mythmaking when it does this sort of historical revisionism. It seems likely that the official church account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is also full of mythical facts and interpretations. If one actually studied carefully the history of the times, including the way the Mormons were treated as mortal enemies by the federal government, which was then almost completely controlled by proslavery interests, and the fact that the wagon train involved in the Mountain Meadows Massacre was under the direction of southern slave owners, driving about 600 beef cattle through Utah to California for sale to the miners, quite likely having some cowboys who were black themselves, as had certainly happened there before, one might interpret historical facts differently and assign different reasoning.
I assume it is quite ideologically inconvenient to mention the fact that these slave owners were the deadly enemies of the Mormons, since this group of slaveholders wanted to join up with the coming Johnston's army to help destroy the saints, take over Utah, and turn it into a slave state. I'm going to guess that that situation is not covered very fully in the book by the church on this incident. And then there is the interesting fact that this wagon train had 600 head of beef cattle which would look very tasty to perhaps 300 Indians in a war party who were operating in that area who made it a practice to steal or bargain for, or coerce and make threats concerning any passersby to get some of that kind of free beef for themselves. Obviously, today it's politically incorrect to consider the possibility that the Indians might have been murdering thieves, which they most certainly were, where they clearly had killed people and stolen cattle before, and that if they killed off that wagon train, they could claim 600 cows for their tribe. That would be a nice day's work. The actual details of what happened are indeed sketchy, but the incentives for certain kinds of action were certainly clear.
It is incontrovertible that the deaths of those wagon train people were directly connected to the arrival of Johnston's Army, which army had the stated purpose and goal to kill or scatter all the Mormons. Whatever actually happened, it was in this context of mortal danger to the saints in general. Whatever the actual details may have been, this wagon train incident should be considered as another possible early battle in the Civil War, just as the attacks against the Mormons in Missouri were preliminary battles to the soon-to-arrive full-blown civil war. The intended attacks by Johnson's army on the Mormons were mostly thwarted, but that doesn't lessen the intent of that army to obliterate the Mormons, if possible. The anti-Mormon Indians had become allies of Johnston's army, just as the proslavery wagon train people had become allies of Johnston's army. This was obviously a very volatile situation, although the available details of what actually happened are indeed sketchy. The approximately 10 white people operating in the area, presumably with only single shot muzzleloader weapons, were "obviously" much more dangerous and deadly than a mere 300 Indians on the war path who had earlier attacked the main wagon train and the Indians had suffered some casualties. Those highly moral Indians would never engage in exacting vengeance by killing vulnerable women and children, would they? The likely theory of the book that these 10 poorly armed church members decided to kill every person in a wagon train of perhaps 160 people, including women and children, seems like a very long stretch. The far more plausible answer is that the Indians did all the killing, and, if the Mormons had any sense at all, they would simply have gotten themselves out of the way before they were killed along with the wagon train people in the savage melee. They would have been very sad and shocked about the outcome, but there was really nothing they could do about it without getting themselves killed as well.
Through some strange legerdemain, the church leaders today seem to think that it helps their cause to libel and slander the early church members who were living in the area during the events of the Mountain Meadow Massacre. Plus saying bad things about Brigham Young also seems to them to help their business case in some mysterious way. Although I don't understand this, perhaps the church leaders today would like to say that they are highly enlightened and fully on-board with all the current leftist ideological fads concerning, for example, making sure that no one ever says anything bad about any minorities such as American Indians. Only white people can ever be evil oppressors or criminals. It seems highly implausible that anyone else killed all of those people except a group of Indians, but one cannot say today that the Indians were the main cause of that massacre. In order to be a good leftist, one must blame it on the tiny group of white people who were also being threatened.
I think the book that was written using church money about the Mountain Meadow Massacre is most likely completely meaningless as far as a historical document, and can only be understood as an ideological document. I have to admit that having studied that time period to a fairly large extent, when I attempted to read the church book, I found it so full of implausible interpretations and outright lies that I simply could not bear to read more than a small portion of the book. The only way I could bear to read any more is if I had the time and means to write a detailed response and rebuttal to it. Otherwise, my irritation level would simply get too high to bear. I take that book as proof itself of the high level of revisionism and politicization of church history (from the life of Christ until today) that is behind the church's business model today of simony, selling at a very high price ordinances which should be free, because they were free in the original Church of Christ in New Testament times. I guess the church leaders should be congratulated on their cleverly turning a free product into a highly monopolized and highly expensive product for their own benefit. On the other hand, that would be complementing the best work of the best Pharisees, not the followers of Christ.
On the question of why the LDS Church would want to libel and slander Brigham Young himself, however strange that may seem, since it is only through him that they got the authority which they hold, I have a theory. Brigham Young himself would disagree with a large number of the policies being carried out by the church today. He would correctly identify all their current myths as total nonsense, especially on the topic of tithing and related financial issues, (since he had certainly heard them all before) and would not have anything to do with them. Perhaps the leaders today, trying to cast themselves as the most enlightened prophets of all time, even better informed and wiser than Christ himself, certainly far more enlightened than Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, would naturally have to try to denigrate and put down their ideological competition concerning the truth of the Gospel and its history, at least through suggestion and innuendo. Perhaps, if they were put on the spot, they would have to argue that both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were really terrible prophets (and also really terrible at making church profits), because they did not institute this massive use of simony to extract money from the saints by selling them the higher priesthood ordinances at an infinite-percent markup, starting at a zero cost. Obviously, they are more enlightened, and so they can change absolutely anything that these first two prophets did, or even Christ himself did, because those first two prophets were obviously so uninformed and incompetent. Of course, they can't really say it that way, but that is how they view it, I believe.
An eternal gospel,
with no fixed theology?
One of the great shocks of my life was when I read a statement by a church history researcher, who was not a member of the LDS Church, that the LDS church doesn't have a theology but only a history (and even that history is subject to constant reinterpretation and revisionism). And then a little later I read that same conclusion by another person who was a very accomplished scholar and church member.
In other words, the Gospel of Christ is an eternal gospel and has been known forever on our earth and on many other earths, and it is the sort of thing that one should strive to understand rather than, as today, being the sort of thing to be massaged and manipulated based on the events of the moment. Ideally, the reverse should be true, that the Gospel would be the basis for manipulating earthly events to put them in line with the wisdom and preferences of heaven. It is something to be profoundly understood and applied to the extent that men can do such things. But that is not the view which the church leaders today take of the matter. For them, ignorance is bliss (and apparently, a feeling of personal power).
Since they know so little about long-term church history and theology, they seem to assume that it doesn't really matter. They do know something about the affairs of man and the ideologies of man, and they really are so foolish and so prideful and full of hubris that they imagine that their every thought must be wise and inspired and perfectly correct, an example of circular reasoning. In the world of legal reasoning, we have such a thing as a constitution, which was created after enormous amounts of thought and physical struggle. Once having summarized a few thousand years of the struggle of man to understand himself and his world, and come up with a formula to set it aright, then, if we wish to, we can use that reasoning to guide our society into the future. However, about half of our society in the United States, and nearly the whole of the rest of the world, sees no inherent sense at all in having a constitution and abiding by it. Various kinds of tyrannies are all that they understand and wish to project.
One would think and hope that the Gospel has its own constitution, as seen largely in the printed scriptures we can carry in our hand. However, like the U.S. Constitution, the concepts in those scriptures are a great deal more fragile and non-self-enforcing than one might hope. Men quickly and easily misunderstand and misinterpret whatever principles they can even detect in those scriptures, and we are not even close to having a society built on the concepts taught in those scriptures, simply because no one can or will understand what the scriptures are saying.
Speaking in constitutional terms, we have some people who strive mightily to understand and apply the original intent and concepts of the Constitution, and some who care nothing about that sort of thing, but simply assume their own perverted views of everything are what should control the world. Unfortunately, even though the church as a whole could, after 200 years, have created an nearly infinitely large explication of the Gospel (perhaps a "big data" integrated database), we have not done any such thing or even attempted it, but have seen nearly all of our leadership time and effort going into carefully misunderstanding and corrupting those principles to support the short-term goals of men. This is both sad and disgusting to see, and one might wonder whether there is anything that can be done about it. Supposedly unicorns do not have regrets, but I believe any intelligent being living in this imperfect world must have a mass of regrets. Rather than getting rid of all regrets, one might instead try to acknowledge them but not be crushed by them.
After all, since there appears to be no one who can compete with them, they have the standard problem of monopolies, that without any corrective forces, they can simply wander along and do as they wish. They have followed this particular cow path to where they want to go, not to where the history and theology of the Gospel ought to take them. They do not even see the concept of an eternal gospel as a constraint on anything they do, but is just interesting background to be used or not as their feelings dictate. Perhaps that is what they define as being a prophet, simply assuming that whatever they think of must be right because they are prophets. It is this kind of circular reasoning that has gotten us to where we are.
All the writings of all the prophets of all time are of no particular interest or value to the church leaders today, since as prophets today they can make pronouncements on any topic at any time they wish according to whatever criteria they choose. This really puts the entire body of Scripture and history at risk. Joseph Smith took such great pains to record as much history as he could, compiling a seven-volume history, or rather recording much history which then was collected into a seven-volume format.
The Joseph Smith Papers Project could and should provide us a wealth of information about aspects of church history which Joseph Smith might never have had the time to put into proper narrative form, including adding the circumstances and interactions as seems necessary to understand the underlying principles. However, I have no faith that the Joseph Smith Papers Project will ever come to anything useful, simply because we have no one who has a deep enough prior knowledge of the Gospel itself or an interest in any of the either simple or intricate systems of theology that is the Gospel, to ever properly place each of the items in this extra added Joseph Smith history into its proper place in a coherent and nearly exhaustive church history and theology. We simply don't have the brain power to do any such thing. And it seems unlikely that we ever will. If we did have such a person or group, it seems unlikely that anything they created would be accepted by the church leaders. Almost certainly it would interfere with many of their favorite myths about history and doctrine.
After 200 years one might expect that the church would have carefully produced a detailed theology and sociology of the Gospel, resolving and coordinating every aspect of it into one powerful and coherent whole, perhaps something like the enormous body of constitutional law decisions. All of our history would be incorporated and treated as evidences and proof of the real nature of the underlying Gospel of Christ. However, although the first two prophets took that as a staggering challenge, to do what they could on those critical history and theology and philosophical topics, since their time no one has made a serious effort to do that, and we have truly been "driven with the winds and tossed" by introducing man's impulses and preferences on a grand scale, until I would say that although we have many of the words left over and remaining from the Gospel and from church history, we only have about 5% of the content of that Gospel and its history left to guide us individually and as a church.
For example, I believe
that we have completely forgotten what the phrase "building up Zion"
even means. Here is an example of that kind of language:
D&C 39:13 Thou art called to labor in my vineyard, and to build up my church, and to bring forth Zion, that it may rejoice upon the hills and flourish.
It was once a call to improve the world and help shape that world according to the nature of the Gospel of Christ as taught by Christ personally and through his prophets for 6000 years. However, the new definition of "building up Zion" has been reduced to nothing more than collecting as much money as possible from the church members and putting it in worldly savings accounts to potentially be used in some vague way in conjunction with the second coming of the Savior. The idea that we might want to use those resources to prepare a world and a church for the coming of the Savior seems never to be seriously considered. I consider this a terrible, terrible loss and a great source of sadness and regret. The idea that we might be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps to "restore the restoration" by a massive "Manhattan Project" kind of effort seems completely impossible, although it is likely that doing anything else will simply keep us on our path to doom as a church and as a society.
The Apologetics Of Gospel Trivia
The apologetics of gospel
trivia
It strikes me that most of what apologists for the LDS Church spend their time talking about is essentially trivia. Probably without realizing it, they begin by subconsciously conceding that 95% of the Gospel is already gone, the critical sociological effects, without ever actually saying so, and they spend all their efforts on arguing about the last 5%.
For example, which
are the most important religious categories to talk about and argue for? How important is it whether there was iron or
steel or there were horses in the Book of Mormon times or whether today we can
find traces of Jewish DNA among the aboriginal people living in the Western
Hemisphere?
Or, it might seem like an important issue to decide whether there is a God or not, but on the Christian scale of important topics, that is such a basic beginning point, it is like arguing about whether there is gravity or not, and how religiously significant is it that we make the right decision concerning gravity?
So, at the same time that millions of words are spilled on these many trivia topics, the big items concerning what we might call the sociology of religion remain unmentioned, since they are already gone, and they are so completely gone that we can't even remember that they ever existed.
That 95% of the Gospel is what I am talking about when I refer to the expected and intended sociological effects of the Gospel. That is, the gathering of the righteous, the building up of Zion, which consists of an earthly city of God or the city on a hill which is the perceptible signal that the Gospel is here on the earth and seeks to draw to it all the best people on the earth. The apologists today have simply given up on anything related to the gathering or the building up of Zion. They have given up on issues of freedom and New Testament charity.
Perhaps without
realizing it, they concede that D&C sections 131 and 132 have been deleted
from the Scriptures. When was the last time you heard discussed D&C 131:1
or 132:22,24,25,55 concerning eternal lives? Those are two important places
where we can learn that merely being "saved," as the Protestants say,
is really of no significance since absolutely EVERYONE will be
"saved" in the sense that they will be resurrected and go to a
heavenly place. The people of the world
can get to one of those heavenly places without having a single thing to do
with the LDS church and without participating in a single priesthood ordinance,
not even baptism.
SECTION 131
Instructions by Joseph Smith the Prophet, given at Ramus,
Illinois, May 16 and 17, 1843.
1–4, Celestial marriage is essential to exaltation in the
highest heaven; 5–6, How men are sealed up unto eternal life is explained; 7–8,
All spirit is matter.
1 In the celestial glory there are three heavens or
degrees;
2 And in order to obtain the highest, a man must enter
into this border of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of
marriage];
3 And if he does not, he cannot obtain it.
4 He may enter into the other, but that is the end of his
kingdom; he cannot have an increase.
Section 132
22 For strait is the gate, and narrow the way that
leadeth unto the exaltation and continuation of the lives, and few there
be that find it, because ye receive me not in the world neither do ye know me.
...
24 This is eternal lives—to know the only wise and
true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent. I am he. Receive ye, therefore,
my law.
25 Broad is the gate, and wide the way that leadeth to
the deaths; and many there are that go in thereat, because they receive
me not, neither do they abide in my law.
...
55 But if she will not abide this commandment, then shall my servant Joseph do all things for her, even as he hath said; and I will bless him and multiply him and give unto him an hundred-fold in this world, of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, houses and lands, wives and children, and crowns of eternal lives in the eternal worlds.
As strange as it may sound, it appears that most temple work is of no significance to the dead and probably never will be. Probably none of them ever heard (or ever will hear) of the celestial kingdom, and of the highest place within that kingdom, which involves continuing the work of God there by helping intelligences advance, and extremely few would care even if they had heard. Those very few who might care have already been taken care of by God himself, like Alvin Smith, with no help required from us, so the whole "work for the dead" theme of today's church is nothing but a theologically meaningless scam to extract $billions every year from a naïve membership. More specifically, if the same gospel is taught to them in heaven as we learn here today, then there is no "continuation of lives," and the only heavens they will hear about are the lower two kingdoms, and they can get to either one of those without any special religious treatment whatsoever. They don't need to hold the priesthood or to receive any priesthood blessings or ordinances.
Apparently, to appeal to the largest number of people, the LDS church today is exactly like the Protestant church, in that it has extremely low standards for getting into heaven. Among Protestants, all one has to do is say "I believe" and you get to go to some form of heaven. No other actions are required. Apparently, this maximizes the "tent" size of the membership, and, since they're supposed to be paying tithing in the LDS church, it also maximizes the amount of income to the church. However, the "heaven" both the Protestants and the Mormons are preparing for has nothing whatsoever to do with the much higher and more exclusive "continuation of lives" heaven that the LDS Scriptures speak of.
We don't believe in group salvation, but in individual salvation. However, and nonetheless, individual salvation is inexplicably related to group salvation. The most important good works a person can do to be qualified to reach the celestial Kingdom are to do good works to help other people and help their lives be better. All of that kind of activity can best be done in a Zion setting where people can very effectively help each other. People can be educated and learn what they need to do to do their part in this grand eternal process of building up Zion on earth and in heaven. If everyone lived as slaves here on Earth, chances are they would never even conceive of what an ideal society would be like, and have a chance to help create one themselves. They will have gotten a body by coming here, but otherwise they may not have learned a thing that will help them in the hereafter. Perhaps these people can be put in the category of "remedial learning" so that hereafter they can raise themselves up by their bootstraps. They might be able to make up the enormous difference it would take them to become like God by behaving like God, but, to a large extent, their time on Earth would have been wasted, because they hardly ever learned a thing. And what they did learn was probably some of the worst of what the earth had to offer, probably filling them with depressing and disruptive philosophies, anger, etc..
The point of the Gospel is not to teach and exult in the already guaranteed "universal salvation" celebrated by the Protestants, since that is as predictable as gravity. The point of all this is to find "a few good men" who want to follow in the footsteps of God the father and his son Jesus Christ by taking on some of the burdens of eternity by continuing to help intelligences and spirits progress in the heavenly realms. It is only by desiring to continue that grand practice of eternal charity that justifies someone having any power hereafter to continue to affect the lives of others. Otherwise, everyone else will be able to sit on their clouds and play their harps. The only differences will be perhaps, the size and quality of their clouds and their harps. All the real action will be going on somewhere else. The LDS church today teaches pure Protestantism, essentially saying that only by living all the rules of their Gospel can we be "saved." but by being "saved," they merely mean going to a lower kingdom with all of the other Protestants and Catholics, where all the expensive ordinances which the LDS Church sells today through its temples, where a ten percent tithing is the ticket to get in, all of those expensive ordinances are of no significance whatsoever in this Protestant heaven which the LDS Church has adopted. It seems strange that the LDS church has found a way to have it both ways, to talk about paying a huge amount of tithing and doing other extraordinary things which the Church demands in order to get oneself saved, but then realizing that fulfilling all of those demands perfectly still will only get you to the middle Kingdom, and you could have gotten to the middle Kingdom without doing a blessed thing that relates to activity in the LDS church. That just demonstrates how scrambled up our brains are on what Christianity is all about.
As another example,
we have the book of Alma, with its stories of preparation for war and actual
war, which has been essentially deleted from the book of Mormon. The book of Mormon talks about the importance
of individual freedom to the Gospel and points out the correct way for
societies to be operated using what I would call "just-in-time"
charity, without a hint of priestcraft being found anywhere.
The problem with tax-and-spend "government charity," ("government charity" is an oxymoron, since as soon as a government takes on the historical functions of charity and uses its taxing power to MAKE everyone engage in charity, the Satanic form of charity, then it is no longer Christian charity. Spontaneous free-will good works are the test of Christian righteousness, and participation in "government charity" does not count as good works. It actually is counted as a negative, because people have to give up their personal responsibility for doing charity in order for government to move in and fill the void with its "forced charity" or really non-charity behavior. Government charity is really the direct and aggressive cancellation or nullification of Christian charity, and as soon as the nation starts down that path, they have already begun their own destruction.) This Marxist approach to "charity" is not really charity at all, but simply a step along the way to government centralizing all decision-making, all power, all economics, all part of the atheistic philosophy of Satan.
As soon as you
thoroughly bureaucratize "charity," it isn't charity anymore, but
oppression.
This brings up my
objection to women having the vote. On
its face, it may seem reasonable enough and egalitarian enough that women ought
to have the vote as well as the men. [But the deep nature of human nature says
otherwise. It seems to have something to
do with the roles which people are expected to play on Earth.] However, it at least in the United States,
giving women the vote means that it is not long until some form of excess
government control of everything, in the form of socialism or communism or
fascism comes along and gets a grip on the country. My guess that the reason is, these
politicians, constantly advised by Satan, manage to take a good thing and twist
it into something evil. In my
experience, women are natural-born socialists.
They have tender hearts and desire to help everyone else in the
world. That is basically a good thing,
but it has its problems.
if a woman can take care of her family and have a little extra that she can devote to charitable purposes to help those around her, that is a good thing. But, of course, she will be limited by her own circumstances and the circumstances of her husband and other family members. She would not be so foolish in most cases as to give away everything they have so that her family goes without and suffers deprivation and privation while the neighbors around her flourish.
It seems to be that when women get the vote, their charitable impulses can be used against them and against their husbands or potential husbands. With that political vote, which now has the power of the state behind it, she can declare that all the charitable needs of everyone in the country should be taken care of, always at someone else's expense and it should be done through tax-and-spend bureaucracies, where the formal bureaucracies and the taxing authority, uses up two-thirds of the resources, delivering perhaps one-third to the actual needy in a non-gospel fashion. Having given the government that much arbitrary power, it is not long until socialism and communism comes along, and it is the women's empathy and charity that have led us to that point.
Apparently, politicians can give women many feelings of fear and guilt which cause them to go to excess in authorizing "government charity." The men might be accused of being unfeeling brutes, as they mostly ignore the feelings of fear and guilt which the priestcraft radical socialists find so useful against women. In other words, it is my impression that if only men had the vote, and their vote could not be constantly overcome and reversed by their women's vote, where the women typically exist in larger numbers than the men, certainly during war time, and even during peacetime, then we would have men struggling for freedom as did the men in many of the armies of Europe who fought against the corrupt Kings to bring us freedom.
Where we often have men going to war and giving up their lives for the cause of freedom, we have women throwing that freedom away partially perhaps because they did not suffer personally gain that freedom, and they are not wise enough and their impulses schooled enough to realize that they can easily undo all the good results of past wars of liberation. If warriors win the freedom, and then the women give it away through instinctively supporting socialist governments, then we have an incoherent and disintegrating society. Men might instinctively do their Gospel job and defend the women, and the women's ability to bring children into this world, and then the women might stab their own men in the back, perhaps without even realizing it. When the women vote to authorize massive taxes through a central government which destroys our economy, they are also giving the government the authority to tax their men and to tax themselves into oblivion. Once they have given away massive amounts of power to centralized governments, the only way that power can be brought back and freedom restored is through the deaths of more men. In that sense women with the vote actually end up killing men. They may bear children but they typically do not bear the burden of battle, and so they quickly forget the cost of the freedom which they enjoy and who paid for that cost.
Women love all the insurance they can get, even if that nice-sounding "insurance" might eventually bring them into bondage.
We are talking here about very basic aspects of the human animal and of human society. Perhaps the word primeval or instinctual are words we ought to throw in here. In tribal societies, necessity dictates that certain things happen. For example, the young men are necessarily the warriors who die [when needed] if necessary to protect their tribe, while the women are the ones protected and they are the ones who supply the next generation of children to be the warriors and the mothers. There are some very hard truths to be learned from this tribal level of human society. If we ever imagine that we are so sophisticated that we don't need to think about those same values in a modern world, where the men protect the women and children, but instead just become effete snobs who care only about themselves, then that society is ripe for destruction, while the people involved may be completely bewildered and can't understand why things are not going well.
The process of "building up Zion" inevitably has an aspect of tribalism. The Society of Zion must be made up by those who choose righteousness and who instinctively find their place in this new society of righteousness and prosperity. They are there because of the content of their character, not because of anything else. [Strangely enough, the LDS church finds it valuable to keep all of its members divided to the extent possible. That division and conflict of interest makes their centralized bureaucracy even more important, they imagine. They certainly believe it entitles them to take vast amounts of money from the church members to support this bureaucracy which they claim is doing so much good, but it actually is the most important part of the problem. Without this powerful self-interested central bureaucracy, the Mormons of the world would do what comes naturally and Zion would happen almost automatically. The Church central bureaucracy can only exist as long as it PREVENTS Zion from happening. THAT strangely enough, is why we don't see any Zion happening.] The gospel talks about people being united as one. But it's easy to see that the doctrine of Satan is that there should be as much conflict and dissension as possible in society so that people are fighting each other, wasting all their efforts on useless conflict rather than uniting to bring about an ideal society. We have one current example where the brilliance of our socialist leaders leads them to want to "defund the police." The police are typically a force for taking the common interests of a society and enforcing them somewhat equally everywhere, weeding out the bad and encouraging the good. They might be as much a religious or moral police as they are a temporal police, as they embody the general morals of the society, the simple definitions of right and wrong.
The usual reaction to the loss of police protection and the loss of the prosecution of criminals is that the most vulnerable people become even more vulnerable. The inner-city minorities which the elite are trying to use to attack and subdue and control the majority, are the ones who most feel the pain of this lack of enforcement of morality among their own people. [Apparently, it is this very frustration and fear and anger which the elites are counting on to be an effective weapon against the ones they see as their enemies which are the people who support freedom and morality for all.]
Where the elite want to get rid of the police, the poor want to have more of them. [Here, I believe it is only because of the women's vote that these insane politicians can continue to wield so much destructive power. Where the men might "throw the bums out," the women seem to always vote for the people who make the biggest promises, even though what they promise is completely impossible to deliver in the real world. In other words, giving women the vote has made it possible for a corrupt government to destroy those women and their families, buying their votes as they destroy their families in the process. This seems like complete insanity, but that is where we are today. More specifically, the elites have arranged things so that the women can no longer live without the support of the government, a massive and intrusive government which the women have gradually voted to gradually create. They are essentially married to the government, like the nuns were married to Christ, and their votes for corrupt politicians are assured forever. Of course, this means the near-destruction of that entire subculture, but the elites consider it perfectly worth someone else's loss for their gain. That is the sort of self-centered thinking that cannot be allowed anywhere near the highest level of the celestial Kingdom, and someone needs to prove that they won't make those foolish mistakes that hurt other people so much.] This seems like an absurd conflict of interest and conflict of policies, but it only seems absurd if we don't realize that the elites want to maximize conflict because, as they see it, that will maximize the need for them and their oppressive government which supposedly then can solve these terrible problems which they have created themselves by intentional unfairness and the destruction of the rule of law. Obviously, "Zion" would have to have some excellent police who themselves exemplify the Christian morals of this body of people.
We can say that, in the end, these women voted to be married to the government, rather than be married to real men, whom they may perversely want to punish for the fact that they are women. But the government now consists of the evil men which all the women combined have put in those offices. Or we might say, it is a government chosen by women, not chosen by men. The whole thing is twisted beyond all recognition. The lesson should be that the centralizing of power is always a terrible idea, and should be avoided except in the most terrible of circumstances, and that is when there is war. However, it is typically a corrupt government that gets us into war.
If women didn't
have the vote, they would not have been so exploited by the evil politicians,
had their families and lives destroyed, etc. NOT having a vote would actually
have been a protection to women, at least those women, if they could just see
it that way. If men do something like this, they deserve it, but it is not true
for women, who typically don't pay the costs in life and death combat
situations.
7.
How Does It End?
How does the world end, with a whimper or a bang? Does the church end with the world, or does it have a separate fate?
Is it conceivable that church members can ever become sufficiently aware of the problems with the church today, where most of its doctrines and policies have almost nothing to do with the original gospel of Christ or the original gospel of Joseph Smith? Where the church leaders have failed them spectacularly, can the members themselves repair the ship of Zion, plugging the thousand leaks? Such an outcome seems completely impossible, but what other options do we have, other than seeing our church and nation disintegrate right before our eyes?
As one interesting possibility, in this age when there are all kinds of protests and boycotts going on all the time, with the two ends of the political spectrum battling with each other on 100 different social issues, is there any version of this newly familiar kind of social activism which could help to get the church back on course?
It is hard to imagine how radical such a member movement might have to be to get the attention of our current highly insular and self-confident, even monarchical church leaders. What if we became extra obedient to the new concept of a "home-centered, church-supported" set of religious practices, and began a one-year-long complete boycott of the church, attending no meetings, submitting no contributions, etc. We would be taking them at their word, but also taking it to an extreme level so that the churches sat empty for a year and the coffers received no new gold for a year. If this were done on a large enough scale, at least church leaders would not likely try to excommunicate or disfellowship tens of thousands of people all at once. They might even get the intended message that we don't need them, at least not as they are.
It seems likely that one of the big problems we have today is that as new general authorities are called, they are gradually trained in all of the "traditions of the fathers," that very large accumulation of foolish teachings and myths and lies which prior generations of church leaders have invented for their own convenience. Perhaps if the new general authorities went through a different learning experience, they would reach different conclusions. It might seem like the tail wagging the dog, for the church members to simply reject all the current leaders and train up a new set of their own, with men who were willing to live as all the different sets of original apostles have lived in the past. Again, the chances of any such thing happening are miniscule, but something good might come from such an attempt.
Perhaps what we need is a new seminary or training institute to educate a whole new generation of correctly informed church leaders, whether at the local level or at the general level. All I can do at this point is make a general suggestion, and hope something good comes of it. With 95% of our gospel frittered away, and only 5% left, "restoring the restoration" would be a monumental task. But perhaps the ease of communication made possible by the Internet is just the thing to allow hundreds of thousands of people to be correctly informed of our predicament, so that this group can act together to correct our situation. This would be a "crowd sourcing" project of magnificent and monumental proportions.
We might call this
new program COVIDD-23 standing for Church of Very Independent Doctrine and Demographics-23.
This would be a little bit like the rules for COVID-19, but with a very
different purpose.
This is how many
church meetings are conducted in many foreign countries where they do not have
a chapel on every block, as in Utah. We could hold separate home meetings as
needed for adults and children.
