It is always sad for me to see otherwise intelligent human beings outsource their thinking to somebody or something else -- a church, a political party, etc.
Yes, the Church wants you to be 100% dependent on them for how you live your life and how you think. In order to achieve this objective, they regularly use "fear" and "guilt" in order to make you toe the line.
listen to their counsel. What a shock when after my story came out that my TBM SIL told me she never would have taken their counsel, that I should have been thinking for myself. Other members told me that, too. Well, for one, I was suicidally depressed because of the whole situation. I had gone to them for answers and all they had was a bunch of bullshit. I was such a total mess. I've never been the same since.
So if you take their advice, then you are stupid, but then they tell you that you are supposed to do it. Even my dad picked up on that in terms of he knew I was more intelligent than that and then he heard what the leaders had told me and he knew immediately why I had married who I did.
My over the top TBM aunt, whose e-mail I posted after my daughter got married, at least didn't let me down in this area. She said that I did what I was supposed to do, that I had listened to my leaders and so I had done what God wanted me to do. One of the one and only mormons who has told me that.
When your own mind is screaming to you that this is so wrong and you go tell them that and they keep telling you you are wrong, it is extreme crazy making. I finally did marry him to get out from under them. I never went to them again and refused to allow my husband to.
most Everyone has some rational (or not!) way of making decisions, I understand that mormons torture lots of our vocabulary, but I think we all use thoughts for making decisions...
" Correlation" in the morg is a copy of the 1935 Nazi idea of Gleichschaltung ( co-ordination ) which was used to instill Nazism into every aspect of human life.
Its always amazing to see how many tactics in Mormonism mirror those employed by the Nazis.
Based on experiences/reports that I've read, the church make-over of Sunday School has been a humongous flop. You know, the one where everyone sits in a circle and then shares their "personal revelations" about the ward.
It's not that the church doesn't have intelligent members, but that the church has grossly conditioned them not to think. Members have been trained to be told what to do.
They want to shift away from autonomy and towards submission to the organization.
Many of you may remember the idea of "free agency." Well, leaders started to get annoyed with bratty young people "exercising their free agency" to get out of Mormon rules. Sometime in the 1990's I remember Seminary teachers and general authorities pushing back on this notion in favor of "moral agency," which was more like: "do what we say or suffer the consequences."
Same thing would be true with personal revelation that doesn't comport with LDS, Inc. orthodoxy. Personal revelation always needs to support the party line, or they tell you to pray again until you get it "right."