A friend of mine who teaches at the US War College likes to quote Napoleon a lot. One of his most favorite quotes is: "Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake". Sometimes the best thing you can do in war is be patient. If you ever hunted or fished you know patience is a big part of it.

I see a lot of people just biting at the bit hoping the church is going to hit the 100th monkey and suddenly implode. People thought the internet and the church not being able to hide things like it used to would suddenly bring it down. It hasn't happened.

What is happening with the church is it has stalled and is starting to lose its younger members. The church has formed several task forces to assess what's happening. Elder Holland led one such task force which spent several years researching if church activities help retain members. The research showed people enjoy the activities but they do little to keep people in a demanding church. The church doesn't want pew warmers. The church wants committed members who hold a temple recommend. Holland's task force has concluded that you keep this target group of members by giving them more responsibility hence youth temple recommends. Going on missions earlier.

Russell M Nelson has stated the church is about a covenant path. The church is going to hold to its standards of members covenanting to the church and the goal of the church is to have members renew these covenants often. In short, you have promised to do this, this and this. We are going to build as many special club buildings (temples) as we can and you are going to keep your membership card valid and you will go to these clubs often. With $100 billion in liquid assets we can afford a lot of these club houses. We are building as many as our management can handle.

The purpose of the church is to have a valid club membership card. Being active in the clubhouse rituals and promoting the club to people who could be potential members.

This is what the church is. The problem is, more young people are deciding club membership is too expensive and is not providing any real benefits or at least the benefits are not justifying the trouble of belonging.

Also it's leaked out the parent company of the club network has a huge amount of retained earnings and really doesn't need the club dues it's asking. It's also becoming more questionable if the club rewards that were being promised are even obtainable. It seems that the only reason to belong to the club is if it provided a high level of enjoyment and social interaction.

The club's management has decided enjoyable activities and inspiring social interaction is NOT what it's about. If you want that go find that somewhere else. We have this very boring and uninspired not to mention weird elite fraternity you can stay in and join and you will be bored as hell in it but you will be extra special.

So what the church can offer you is elitism. That's it. You can be an elite in a small pond. Is this worth the trouble? I don't think most people think it is.

Is this thing going to stay around for awhile? Yes. Is it going to grow? No. Is is going to shrink? Yes but on a generational scale. The boomers will be the largest group of members but once they die off the church will shrink and probably shrink at an ever increasing rate.

So the church annoys you. It's created emotional pain inside you. You want it gone. You want revenge. All I can say is be patient. The church has peaked and it's doing more damage to itself by being elitist than you can do to it. Also the best revenge is living well.

Live well my friends. Let the church go and invest in your own personal good will whatever that is. Life is too short to waste on the church.

Some of us are hyenas and love running our game into the ground, especially when it's been wounded.

...Visceral is a word that fits the bill...


Of course, I refer to the COB, not the membership.

I was happy being a mormon, and if the pay were good, I could do it again ... except they'd need to let me judge myself, and I want my Sundays free.

When you see a bunch of dipshits at the watering hole with their guard down the inner predator juices defiantly start to flow.

I just had to let my Kolob Playas Club card go. As much as Tele-Elder Savalis promoted it and as cool as the white toga was I just didn't find the benefits matched the promotion.

I agree that patience is the key. The LDS Church is a large corporation, and it cannot turn on a dime. Change, simply based on its size and organization, will come slowly. That includes negative change.

China instituted its one-child policy in 1980, and that cast the die for a shrinking population. There were so many young people in China then that it took up until last year for their population to actually begin to shrink.

They ended the one-child policy in 2015, but it is making very little difference. Now the big cushion of young people that they used to have is gone, so even if the remaining young people start having 3 children per couple, it would take several generations to stop the shrinkage of the population, just like it took 40-plus years to stop the growth. And couples are not having three children now that the policy has changed.

My point, demographic change, like a glacier, is slow but relentless. LDS growth has been slowing for at least 40 years, and I think has finally reached the point, like China, where the LDS population is actually shrinking. I expect the shrinkage will be slow, but nearly impossible to turn around.

I remain curious, regarding the one-child rule, how much the abortion of female fetuses impacted what was then their future and is now their present.  It was instituted in 1979.

From a 1992 study: "The normal sex ratio at birth is 106 male births/100 female births, which was the ratio in China in the 1960s and 1970s.  However, in 1981 it increased to 108.5, then to 110.9 in 1986, to 111.0 in 1987, and to 113.8 in 1989."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12318232/


The study points out that 'underreporting' may also have been a factor, that is, a couple would hide the fact they'd had a baby girl, so that they could 'legally' try again...  But that some pregnancies were terminated upon confirmation that the fetus was female was recognized as a factor, but between the two options, hiding the birth v. abortion, the true figures will never be known.


My point being that there are many Chinese males, up to 13% of the 1989 'harvest', who will never marry through sheer lack of brood stock.  

I grew up in British Hong Kong. Grew up hearing horror stories of the communist Chinese. Saw desperate people sailing into Hong Kong harbor in shitty boats overloaded hoping for a better life but the Hong Kong Government knew if it let those people stay our little island and peninsula would be swamped. We were in a lifeboat and the people in the ocean were not welcome. Hong Kong was a better place but it was brutal. School was private. There was a caste system. Capitalism ruled. If you didn't have money you lived in a shitty apartment and were working class and the government wasn't going to help you climb anything.

In the US we had a public school system that anyone could go to. If you wanted to apply yourself, it didn't matter who your parents were, you could have a better life than they did. That was the 1970's.

When China opened up in 1980 I knew they would play nice, appeal to our greed and infiltrate us and be a wrecking ball on our great system we had. Sure enough that's happened. I see the Chinese model trying to be established using some brutal divide and conquer strategies and who are in with the Chinese is the western oligarchs.

But China has its major problem. It's one child policy. Female babies were aborted so they have more men than women. Also these only male children were spoiled by their parents. I remember having diner in Shanghai with my wife and one of these little emperors was misbehaving badly at the next table. The parents did nothing. My mom would have taken me out and swatted me.

Anyways it is what it is and really who is going to inherit the earth is the group who has children and raises them to be productive. Iran has the best demographics. Young educated people. As soon as that controlling government goes it might go somewhere and that's if someone doesn't start a war and screw everybody.

Control freaks always ruin the good things in life.

I think there are two camps that are critical of the church. One camp wants to see it completely explode and disappear. Another camp wants to see it reform.

It's like the church has built up all this infrastructure and assets so let's be less controlling and put those assets to better use like more humanitarian aid and more affordable education.

For me I'm too old to care. I've been hearing endless talk of making the world a better place my whole life and the same problems that existed in the 1960's when I was a kid still exist now. Nothing changes that much really. Human nature is human nature. Divide and conquer games still being played and people are still getting duped.

I think LDS Inc may well “explode and disappear” in Europe, including Eastern Europe and Russia, China, India and the Middle East. It barely has a presence in those places now. Western Europe is still functioning, but is by all accounts in serious decline.

That’s a rather large slice of the world population.

In the Americas, the Philippines, and maybe the South Pacific and New Zealand, and sub-Saharan Africa, LDS Inc will be around for a long time.

And they can coast for a very long time on their rainy day fund. Perhaps indefinitely.

I think the church is going in the direction of being mainly a fraternal organization with religious elements. But even fraternal organizations have social activities. Ritual alone is not enough to keep people coming through the doors.

I wonder if the loss of membership is greater outside of the Moridor than in. It might be easier to walk away out in the mission field.

I went to B&N the other day and saw a new book called "Bad Mormon" by Heather Gay. Just finished reading it and I must say this is one of the best books I have read in a long time.
She shares what it was like for her to go through "worthiness interviews" like me and my sisters and countless others had to suffer through. She also shares some of her mission experiences when she was in France. I could definitely relate. Brought back some memories of my psychotic missionary companions.
I am so happy for her and how she dealt with her divorce and getting off the Mormon crazy train. Good for her!

Thanks for the tip, I just bought it for my Kindle.