There are about 7 billion people on the planet and only a few million active, "worthy" members. This always made me wonder about things. Then when I went on my mission I saw how ineffective our message was and how few people joined the church, and I saw what "type" of people joined the church and how few of them actually stuck around. It just didn't seem logical to me that this could really be the only acceptable, God-approved path in life and so few people were on it.

well if your from Utah mormonism makes more sense, if your from Spain then be a catholic, if your from Japan then shinto, England then it's Anglican, Irish then be a Catholic, Mexican be a catholic. German be a Lutheran. I don't know that there is a wrong religion?

...Being one doesn't necessarily cancel out another religion you happen to be a part of. A Japanese person could theoretically be a Buddhist, Jain, and Shinto or a combination of two of these. I think even some Japanese Christians are the same way, but I'm not 100% on that. I have no idea how it would work with Mormonism, but maybe that's why Mormonism didn't take off like the cult leaders expected.

Yah, Uhhh, MORmON Jesus is real failure when it comes to effectiveness and his MORmON Heavenly Father is a real screw up too.


According to MORmONISM, Its critical that God have a prophet on the planet at all times. So after getting Jesus to come to earth, what does MORmON God do? drops the ball ! for 17 Hundred years!

In the mean time the vile corrupt despicable catholic church has been much more effective at spreading the hopelessly apostate form of (traditional) Christianity than MORmONISM will ever be at spreading the MORmON version of supposedly true MORmON Christianity.

then there is the deal where MORmON heavenly father allows 1 / 3 of his spirit to be lost to permanent condemnation over free agency, only to completely ignore free agency later on when the *need* arises for MORmON latter day prophet Joe to start up a wife collection. If MORmON Jesus and MORmON Heavenly FaTher god performed that poorly at a place of employment, they would be fired as screw ups.

Ok, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Jesus allow the three Nephites to remain on Earth until his return so the gospel would never be gone? If this is the case, then God didn't screw up, Joseph Smith did by claiming there was a need for a restoration.

But to answer the OP, as a true believer, it never crossed my mind how few belonged to the only true church. Or why God couldn't have been more imaginative or answered more important questions or been less like a Nazi about conformity, or, or....If I ever allowed myself to question such things, I very quickly put it out of my mind.

In addition, the Apostle John (of Peter, James, and John fame) was also to remain on earth without death until Jesus return. D&C Section 7.

Therefore, how could Joseph Smith claim the priesthood was lost from the earth and how did a living being link up with his two dead fellow apostles to "restore the priesthood to the earth"? Why didn't John (who knew Christ and clearly was a personal witness of him) simply become head of the new so-called "only true church of god"? After all, they could not have assassinated him and we would have been saved from Brigham Young.

Mormonism is loaded with cognitive disconnects since Smith was making it all up as he went along.

We had a 70, Elder Choules, come to our mission and he offered to answer questions via slips of paper. I asked him that specific question: If the LDS Church is God's true path to heaven, why is it so small?

He scoffed and said, "I don't think it's that small," and then moved on. I felt like an idiot, but I also smarted that he didn't answer my question. It hung in my mind that a GA could not address something that seemed so basic an obvious to me:

In a world of (now) 7 billion people, why does LDS, Inc think that 15 million is something to brag about? Of course we know that generously they have 6 million actually practicing members, and only half the adults have a current temple recommend. So in all this big wide world, there are about 2 million temple worthy LDS adults. That's about the size of Houston, not counting 'burbs. Even if the world were just Texas, that's only a small slice of the state, let only the US or China. In India, that would be 0.2% of the population.

There's a GA Choules? Aha, my cousin thinks she married up, lol!

I think of the mormon church size in relation to the world the same way I think of the effect of peeing in the ocean.

Templar Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think of the mormon church size in relation to
> the world in the same way that I think of the effect of
> peeing in the ocean.

...... well, except that human urine is far less foul MORmON Church doctUrine.....

No, because we thought we were the elect few who recognize the truth. "Few there be that find it." It was actually testimony-strengthening, at the time.

When I was TBM I was concerned about how the Church was not growning at least as fast as the population of the earth was. I asked my bishop was anyone concerned about the membership as a percentage of the world getting smaller instead of larger. How would Jesus be able to come if we (the church) is small. Boy was I surprised at his answer. I was basically told not to worry about and not to mention it to anyone else.

Not keeping up with world growth is a sure sign of the nail being hammered into the casket of the Mormon Church.

themaster Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Boy was I surprised at his
> answer. I was basically told not to worry about
> and not to mention it to anyone else.

So much for the "if you have a question about Mormonism ask a
Mormon."

You asked your Bishop--the number-one Mormon in your ward to ask
about Mormonism. He basically told you he wasn't going to
answer your question AND he told you not to ask any other
Mormons.

Of course not. I blamed myself for not sharing the gospel with others more.

Yes, it's a win-win: The Restored Gospel will roll out upon the whole Earth, the church is true!...if the church is small then it is the Very Elect who will be saved--the church is true!.

Just like dead missionaries....a close call means that God saved a missionary--the church is true!

A dead missionary means that God needed the missionary in Heaven--the church is true!

It never bothered me in the slightest personally. I was always aware that 13 million or whatever was a miniscule proportion of the world's population. Any mormon with a basic knowledge of maths will know it, and evidently they're fine with it.

I live in Europe though, so from day 1 I was always aware mormons were a small minority. Maybe it's different for those who live in Utah where mormonism is actually somewhat relevant.

Mormon God is mathematically challenged.

Doesn't ever seem to give a crap about the subtle difference between a comma and a decimal point.

That's why the earth is only 6,000.000 years old ya see.

When I was ten years old, we lived in Manhattan (which I loved and Dad hated). There were only two wards out of eight million people. We had to take a bus from our 121st street apartment to an old synagogue downtown. The church rented the building. One of the two wards was Spanish-speaking and met at a different time.

I remember stepping around sleeping drunks on the sidewalk outside the church and trying to look in the windows of underlit saloons. There was dogshit everywhere back then, and you had to watch where you walked. The local Mormons were almost like Lutherans. I had a teacher who didn't know what the 24th of July was when she saw it in the class manual. She said that maybe it was a misprint. We were a long way from Utah.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/11/2015 01:19PM by donbagley.

Sort of. I guess I had great faith that the church would grow in the next few years.

I was very disappointed in the sales techniques and manipulation of feelings to try and convert investigators. I was also surprised and let down by how hard it was to get people to be receptive to "hearing the message" and "to feel the spirit."

I didn't feel like God was helping us. I felt like we were just using human skill and manipulation to get people to join.

I thought I'd see miracles and God overshadowing GOOD people, which were many, to WANT to hear us. Instead, 99% of the people were completely indifferent to us.

Ex-CultMember Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> I didn't feel like God was helping us. I felt
> like we were just using human skill and
> manipulation to get people to join.

Well that couldn't possibly be it, could it? :)

This was my epiphany moment in the church and now I'm a complete goner.

Knowing that the missionaries were mostly mucking about at our Bishop's house made wonder just what sort of God would leave the fate of humanity to those immature kids. The more I thought about it, the more I realised something was just very wrong and very inefficient about the plan of salvation.

The rest as they say is history.....

I also added up (as best anybody can) the numbers of humans that have lived on earth, and then compared it with the numbers of members during JS's time, and the time of Christ. It made NO sense to me, for example, that after Jesus went to all the trouble he did, that the church immediately went astray and only a MINISCULE number of people joined. From then on they only got 'bits and pieces' of the truth according to tscc. So what sort of God set up SO HUGE a number of his people to fail their biggest test on earth (according to tscc)? I thought it was downright mean!!!!

Cog dis was one thing, but the numbers just didn't add up to a caring God AT ALL!!!!

Well, isn't that the whole point of doing genealogy and temple work? For all those poor souls that didn't get it in this life, we will make sure they get it in the next, thereby ensuring that everyone will be mormon sooner or later?

The Devil's work is NEVER done....... and neither is a MORmON'S

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsakhmRzow8