The church exists because it has the assets to afford its mistakes as a religious organization. It’s financial management who are professionals the church hires out of the corporate world are good at what the do.

The religious leadership that run like a monarchy have much to be desired. The oldest becomes the leader and you get people who are past their mental prime and out of touch with the real world the church members live in.

Only an out of touch leader would say using the word Mormon was a victory for Satin. Only out of touch leaders spend billions on temples nobody wants or needs. The focus is on converting migrants in the western world and people in the third world. Nobody who’s educated in an industrialized country wants the church.

The church is coasting on its money and the dregs that exist from Brigham Young’s colonization efforts. It points to third world baptisms and temple construction as success. It uses its schools as bait. You can get an education through the church.

The church expects a lot from you but offers very little. In fact by destroying the social/fun aspects of the church and becoming a boring gathering Israel machine people are going to leave. What will be left are a bunch of fanatics and that seems to be what the leaders want because they are delusional fanatics themselves.

It's understandable that individuals born into the church may never reach a point where they feel ready to choose something different, but I'm hopeful that fewer and fewer BICs feel such a restraint.

As for converts, it boggles the mind that human beings chose to be mormon.  But then, with a bit of awareness, one can comprehend that there are people in situations that make joining the church appear to be a step up.  One can only hope that further progress, or better opportunities, allow them to step away.

The church has a certain $$$ momentum, and it may be enough to keep it going for the foreseeable future, unless there really is a Second Coming, because such an event is not going to be kind to the church of salt lake city of latter-day saints.

How can there be a second coming when there was never a first coming ?

  
  
  

Does the immaculate conception count?

  
  

>> As for converts, it boggles the mind that human beings chose to be mormon.

One huge problem is trying to make other Christians convert. Christians do expect their churches to do a certain amount of charitable work, and in some cases, substantial charitable work. The Mormon church's feeble attempts at charity will not fool them for long.

Ha! Ha! The church is toast at the second coming. We know what Jesus thought of religious hypocrites and money changers.

The notion that the church is storing up money for the Second Combing (so as to look neat) is so silly!

"Money" is stored on computers.  Who gives a rat's butt how much gold is in Fort Knox, and who cares who carts it away after the breakdown of society occasioned by Jesus' helicopter landing on top of the Tabernacle and having selfies taken with the temple missionaries?

Food and water are what will be of primary interest, and warm clothing if he comes in the Winter.  Stocks, bonds, CDs, Go-Funk-Me accounts, crypto-currency, etc., won't exist without the Internet, which is fine, because you can't eat or drink the Internet.

Jesus, guns, & ammo ... until it's down to bows and arrows!  Oh, fletch!!

it's worse than lost. It is corrupt. And yes, it all starts at the top. That's why the worst crime in Mormonism is to challenge the top people. They don't even know what the word "doctrine" means. All they care about is constantly increasing their power.

Organizations with top-down authority are frequent. Monarchies, dictatorships...

Germany under Hitler operated on the "Fuehrerprinzip" ('the principle of the Leader'): that is, everyone is subject and must obey the leader over them, and that leader must in turn obey his leader, in an authority pyramid with the single "supreme" leader at the top.

IIRC, the Nazis admired Mormonism as an organization.

I don't believe the Nazis ever paid the Mormons any attention at all. Is that incorrect?

The good folks at Wikipedia inform us that. . .

"As of 1939, 13,402 Mormons lived in the West German (including Austria as of November 1938) and East German Missions.[15]" Assuming that some of those Mormons were inactive, furthermore, the total must have been well less than 10,000.

Nor was the church growing significantly: between 1930 and 1940 total official membership rose by 14%, implying an annual growth rate of less than 1.5%. So church growth was insufficient to garner much Nazi attention.

"Under the Nazi Government of 1933 - 1945, no Mormon congregation was stopped from worshipping and few individual Mormons were persecuted (and only for transgressions that any German of the time would have been punished for).[16]"

All of that makes me think Hitler and his minions probably did not waste time thinking about Mormons positively or negatively.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
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> The good folks at Wikipedia

Not sure they're that "good". I've been one of them in the past. Wikipedia is so full of inaccuracies, it's laughable but they are often subtle ones. I've found a series of mistakes on various articles but they won't allow cellphone editing.

...of Hitler's Germany involving itself with Mormonism, there is some evidence (see thread at

https://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon483.htm

that LDS leaders, particularly Thomas Monson, were involved with East Germany's top-down Communist leader Eric Honecker after World War II. That said, whether or not Adolf Hitler paid attention to the small U.S.-based religious group, both he and LDS leadership were playing out of the same top-down playbook. So is the Roman Catholic Church, my former affiliation, where links with Nazi leaders and beliefs are much more apparent.

The lds church even excommunicated Helmut Huebener.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/helmuth-hubener?lang=eng

When I found out as a TBM that the lds church had excommunicated Helmuth Huebener it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Yes, the RCC had a compelling need for accommodation with the Hitler movement. So unseemly compromises were made.

But the point remains, it's highly unlikely that several thousand Mormons worried the Nazis enough to justify any surveillance beyond that to which the general public was subject.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
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> I don't believe the Nazis ever paid the Mormons
> any attention at all. Is that incorrect?

Mormons were low profile at the time. The main two points of interest were:
* It was an American church and that made it suspect to an ultranationalist group.
* They were good at keeping genealogical records, which was of use to the National Socialist party's attacks on Jews and Gypsies.

Like most of Europe, the German "saints" had a tendency to emigrate to the USA until the 1950s, so they never built up a big membership there.

So true... we see the same tendency throughout society... power passed upward as far as possible. The local schools near me now boast they work according to UNESCO guidelines, a globalist organization. It would be better if they were run according to local needs and conditions, with input from people on the ground.

We keep seeing this in LDS chapels where everything is homogenised. Units can't even have their own webpages (like other churches). Boundaries for units are set by outsiders, meaning half a ward goes inactive because no one's bothered to check whether the locals want it or find it convenient.

> The local schools near me now boast they work
> according to UNESCO guidelines, a globalist
> organization.

Can you document that? I sincerely don't think you can.

I don't think it is true.

It might be this:

https://en.ccunesco.ca/networks/unesco-schools-network

"The UNESCO Schools Network includes students and teachers from over 11,500 schools in more than 182 countries. The network acts as a laboratory of ideas by experimenting with innovative teaching and learning approaches to address global challenges."

Having global standards is not necessarily a bad thing, i.e. the International Baccalaureate program or Montessori schools. If you are talking about a broad swath of public schools, then I suppose it depends on what kind of standards you are talking about. The USN has among its guiding principals gender equality, preservation of cultural heritage, advocacy for children's health, etc., which all seem rather innocuous to me. But if it's one thing that I've learned in my long years in education, there is no one magic answer to everything when it comes to schools. Variety in educational offerings is a good thing.

Rubicon Wrote:
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> The religious leadership that run like a monarchy
> have much to be desired. The oldest becomes the
> leader and you get people who are past their
> mental prime and out of touch with the real world
> the church members live in.

I thought you were talking about another malfunctioning organization for a moment.

Q: What would any person in charge of a Pile of Poo do?

A: Spread it around.

any other Questions??

Eventually the middle managers of the church won't be able to deal with the daily complaints and problems of the church. They provide tremendous insulation of the difficulties from the policies and edicts that get shouted from the top. At some point, the shield won't be able to deflect and silence the unhappiness that arrives daily from worn out members.