I was thinking about this subject today when it hit me.

If you give a 19 or 21 year old a good income to compensate them for their labor, you give them...OPTIONS, SELF RESPECT, IDENTITY, CHOICE. If they learn at that age that working so hard gives you tangible benefit, then that would lead them to open their eyes and look at the world and ask themselves what would be more fulfilling to spend their time in and they would most likely walk away from the church.

You see, the church has to get people to want to donate their time for free and to make them think that that is normal and that they will have some sort of spiritual fulfillment in simply knowing they are getting Jesus brownie points for endlessly serving and serving and serving.

I think the scariest thing for the church...especially for the women is when they (the women) acutally get the guts to go out into the world and get a job and an actual paycheck and realize how great it feels to have OPTIONS and that maybe she doesn't want to prepare that primary lesson. Maybe she would rather do any number of things other than submit to old men in SLC.

Once you have money...you are a threat. That is why the church gives high positions of "authority" to the more wealthy members. You must make them feel important and ever so special, or they will be more likely to take their dollars elsewhere. When you have the masses fawning over you it makes it harder to leave.

So, bottom line, not only do you not pay the missionaries, but you CHARGE them so they have no idea how it feels to get compensated fairly and also so that when they come home they are stressed and at risk and vulnerable...easy pickings for the church to push them into marriage, children......anything the church wants. It's all planned out. It is disgusting.

Gabriella

and then these missionaries come home and pay tithing...and part of this tithing goes to support those GA's that are placed on the payroll on the church. this seems bassackwards...

for years, i was under the impression that all leaders of the church were donating their time for the "cause". i had no idea that the upper tier were given an allowance, salary, filthy lucre, etc...

shouldn't the church pay missionaries and require the GA's to live off their own savings? i am not 100% sure of their church allowance, but they appear to be taken care of fairly well. Ghandi, Mother Theresa and the like, they all seemed to have a greater influence on the world without relying on a steady income.

look at all those places in the third world where women are getting micro loans and controlling the size of their families.

are patriarchal structures feeling threatened? Damn right, and thank Raptor.

RS pres, Sunday school teachers, everyone who has a calling! Then where would they get the money for all those temples?

Other churches pay their clergy and they don't get nearly as much money as LDS, Inc.

RIDUNKULOUS if you ask me.

No wonder my nephew would rather get an edumacation than go on a mission! ^_^

So true. An old neighbor got home from his mission not too long ago. I asked him how life was at home. His response: "It sucks so bad. Everything seems so pointless and mundane now. I want the mantle back."

I tried so hard to keep a straight face.

When you are PAID for fibbing to people, you assume that you got paid for it so that compensates you for fibbing. But if you fib to people without getting paid, then you have cognitive dissonance. You think, "I'm, a decent person but I just fibbed to someone." This is a contradiction. This causes "cognitive dissonance"--a difference between what you think about yourself and what you know you did.

When there is a conflict between what you believe and what you are doing cognitive-dissonance theory says that you tend to take the easiest way out: you change your belief rather than your actions.

This was tested in an experiment. Volunteers were given a tedious and boring task. They assumed that their performance on the task was the point of the experiment. It wasn't. They were told that it was important for them to tell a prospective volunteer that the task was kinda fun and interesting.

The volunteers were separated into two groups. One group was paid $20 for lying to the prospective volunteer. The other group was paid $1.

Afterward the volunteers were asked how the task was. Was it tedious and boring or was it kinda fun and interesting. The result was that the volunteers who were paid $20 to lie about it tended to say it was tedious and boring. But the volunteers who were paid $1 tended to say that, yes, it was kinda fun and interesting.

If you are out on a mission being paid to give discussions then you can easily justify it as something you are doing to get paid. But if you are paying for the "honor" yourself then the only way to justify that you are not a total schmuck, is to tell yourself you are doing something important, something significant, something TRUE.

That's the reason missionaries are treated like dirt by the leaders and asked to pay their own way. It makes them into believers.