The Church
That Could Save The World
But
Chooses Not To
This
is the same church that could bring in the millennium but chooses not to. It
has the means, or could get the means, but it does not have the will. Just
to be clear, I
am speaking of the LDS Church.
And
why do the central church leaders choose not to change the world when they
could do so? It is hard to know their thoughts, but, presumably, it is because
it would be inconvenient to the leaders to do so. Obviously, the basic concepts
of the gospel are in conflict with much of what is taught and done in the
world, so, if the church leaders were more vigorous in their support of gospel
principles, they would be in almost constant conflict with the world in some
way and on some level. Is that really enough reason for their constant timidity
and lack of significant change? Apparently they believe it is.
But
their choices are in serious conflict with the actions of almost every other
prophet or set of prophets that have ever lived on the Earth. We could begin
with the vigorous lives of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, but at every other
time in the recorded history of the earth, the lives of the prophets were
filled with conflict and activity. Certainly, Moses had a tumultuous time as
the head of the church in his era. Even though he lived to be 100 years of age,
he had no time for being part of a retirement community.
Perhaps
the church today could be called "the church of convenience." We now
have vast powers of transportation and communication which were unthinkable in
other centuries, but it appears that these vast technological powers have
actually been used to allow the church headquarters to accomplish less than it
ever has before, rather than more. Perhaps these vast powers are also very
useful in promoting Satan's concepts and resisting the church of Christ.
Although they offer a way to get out the gospel message more easily and more
quickly, they also provide for quicker and stronger negative reactions and more
resistance. Perhaps these new powers and possibilities have the church leaders
in a state of shock, overwhelmed by their potential negative consequences.
Whatever
the answer might be about church leader reasoning, it appears that we can say
that unless something very basic and radical changes with the church and its
administration, it has already done everything it is ever going to do in this
earthly realm. Hundreds of years from now there is little or no measurable
change to be expected. Although there is a very minimal level of current incremental
growth, the church is actually shrinking relative to the growth of the rest of
the world. This makes the whole prophesied gospel project seem like it is
effectively over. The two other church
restorations accomplished personally by Christ himself disintegrated after
about 200 years, and as we are on the cusp of the 200 year mark ourselves, it
appears that we will suffer the same fate.
As
a church member, I find this very depressing, and I suspect that many others do
too, although I don't know how many would express themselves that way. As the church
criticism levels seem to be going up, and the member activity levels seem to be
going down, these negative trends could easily be tied to the performance of
the church headquarters itself.
We
might notice that today the all-in centralized cost of finding and integrating
a new long-term member of the church is about $400,000. The all-in centralized cost
of a new long-term member at the beginning of the last three restorations of the
church, including ours, was zero. The church was growing rapidly in those other
three periods, while it is shrinking today, at least relatively if not
absolutely. If we can't explain and greatly modify these extreme differences in
costs and results, we have to assume that there is no hope for any improvements
in the future.
Over
the past few years, I have written at least 50 different articles as part of my
personal effort to analyze and describe the situation of the church today and
what can be done to make it better. None of these articles were actually
published, but were simply a means of recording the results of my various
research steps. Even at the end of that process I still did not feel like I had
a complete grasp of today's situation. However, I believe I have developed a
working set of theories about where we are, and how we got here, and what we
can do about it, to allow the church to fulfill its prophetic mission. It seems
inconceivable at this point that I will ever have the time and the wit to
rewrite all of these articles from a different viewpoint or to integrate them
into some single descriptive volume.
What
I offer then is an introduction to a few of the articles, plus those few
articles themselves as they appeared in their original form. It is quite likely
that the reader will find them somewhat incomplete and inconsistent and perhaps
even contradictory at times. Hopefully, however, the reader will gradually come
to understand the main points which I have discovered and wish to pass on.
Perhaps there are others who can use this information as a starting point to more
completely research and write that desperately needed fully integrated treatise
on this major problem of the church and its current and future place in the
world.
Perhaps
the reader can think of this publication as a book within a book. These first
few pages are intended to set the tone and some goals and to be a guide for the
serious student of today's church, while the much larger (and still slightly
rough) embedded book entitled Restoring
the Restoration: Repairing 200 Years of LDS Doctrinal Drift and Reaping the
Benefits fills in most of the details.
With
any luck, making this body of information available will start a lot of people
down a fruitful path of research and introspection and writing which can then
gradually create an entire community body of work on a new kind of "Mormon
studies" which are focused on how to get the church back on the right
doctrinal and administrative paths to make it be as successful as was the
church which Christ himself restored, at least for the first 200 years of that
early restoration.
A few items not found
in the attached book
A new take on the
original apostasy
Much
of early church history appears to have been lost, or at least kept out of
sight as inconvenient. The widely accepted version of history that deals with
the question of how the church after the time of Christ went into apostasy
seems to put forth and rely upon claims about the deaths of all the apostles as
the reason for the church going astray. However, there is no particularly
obvious reason to think that might be the actual story. The first vacancy in
the 12 apostles was easily refilled after the death of Judas. A vote and an
ordination was all that was required by the remaining apostles, the work of a day
or two. Unless all 12 apostles were simultaneously killed on the same day, it
seems likely that there were many opportunities to keep the quorum filled over
the next 250 years.
However
unpleasant and inconvenient it might be today to be able to more closely
examine early church history, the apparent extreme likelihood is that the
church ceased to teach and live by correct principles simply because the living
apostles were intimidated or corrupted or co-opted. How can the Roman Catholic
Church, stemming from the events of about 300 AD, even claim to be continuous
back to the beginning if there were no apostles to make a credible transfer of
authority to popes under the influence of Constantine? The Catholic Church
claims that Peter was the first bishop of Rome who then immediately became the
first pope of Rome. They would say that his papacy began in A.D. 30. Again
according to Christian traditions, Peter was crucified in Rome under Emperor
Nero Augustus Caesar between AD 64 and 68 (with Peter's age between 62 and 67).
In other words, according to tradition, Peter was an apostle and head of the
church for up to 38 years before his death. It has been estimated that the
Christian church had reached the 500,000 membership mark by AD 100 (at an
implied growth rate of 7.5% for 70 years). (The population of the Roman Empire
was somewhere around 4 million to 5 million people by the end of the first
century AD)
At
that 7.5% growth rate for the 38 years to A.D. 68, the membership size could
easily have been 50,000 members. Obviously, the church did grow quickly or it
could never have eventually displaced paganism in the Roman nation. It is
estimated to have reached a 5 million membership by AD 300. The main point here
is that with 50,000 members at the time of Peter's death, there could easily
have been as many apostles available as might be needed to continue the church
properly. At that point, the death of one man, even a very important man like
Peter, should not have destroyed the whole movement, or left it so adrift and
leaderless that it could be easily and profitably co-opted 250 years later by
religious allies of Constantine. The very fact that it continued to grow at
such a rapid pace for its first 270 years seems to indicate that there was
continuous leadership, but that that leadership was eventually corrupted and
co-opted by Roman politics.
We
might note that although the LDS church today claims to have about 15 million
members, the actual number of active members is apparently only in the range of
about 3 million, based on the number of chapels and other meeting houses needed
to provide meeting space for the active membership. And that is after about 200
years of growth. If the Christians in the Roman civilization reached about 5
million by about 300 AD, after 270 years of growth, that obviously makes the
two situations quite similar. This argues strongly for the possibility that the
process of drift within the Roman church was very much like the apparent
process of drift that has happened to our own church, and that the final
outcome will be the same.
In
summary, blaming the loss of purity of the original church on the death of
Peter and other of the original apostles seems like a very poor and incomplete
explanation of how the original church grew to a 5 million membership before
being corrupted by politics. One might more reasonably expect that the church
would have been snuffed out completely by the loss of those earliest leaders,
if no more leaders emerged to take their place. But, to repeat, the church continued
to rapidly grow to be about 5 million in size before it was drawn off the
narrow path, implying the continual availability of active leadership.
Using
the kind of logic commonly heard today about the early apostasy should mean
that after the death of Joseph Smith the church was hopelessly and
irretrievably corrupted simply because of that loss, just as it is argued that
the death of Peter meant the hopeless corruption of the original church. But
that is not what happened in our time, as evidenced by the string of apostles
who followed in the footsteps of Joseph Smith after his death, so perhaps that
is not what happened after the time of Peter either.
The
main question then seems to be whether the corruption of the apostles happened
in one step, possibly including the direct corruption or loss of Peter, as the
Catholics seem to be claiming, or if more steps and generations were required.
Perhaps there are records which go back that far which actually describe the
deterioration process in some detail, but, if so, they have been kept out of
sight. If I were an avid conspiracy theorist, I might accuse the LDS church
today of having a hand in making sure those records are not available for fear
they might demonstrate that the church today is following in the footsteps of
its predecessors in seeking to build a worldly political empire using incorrect
principles rather than focusing all its efforts on spreading the gospel in its
original purity, including using the original administrative methods.
The traditions of the fathers -- an irony
What is so very
strange about all my studies on this question of the current state of the
church is that even though we are told to read the Book of Mormon every day of
our lives, and we receive all these ideological preparations including many
warnings, we are nonetheless reenacting the greatest ideological and
sociological errors of the Book of Mormon "as we speak," as they say.
The great lie in the Book of Mormon, initiated by Laman and Lemuel, and then
perpetuated by all of their descendants, was that a great political and
religious wrong had been done to Laman and Lemuel, justifying their rebellion
and attacks on their "tormentors." Those lies that were repeated again and again by
their descendants for more than a thousand years, were that somehow Nephi had
stolen the birthright from his elder brothers, and that the Lamanites had
suffered horribly ever since under subjugation, even though the two societies
of the Lamanites and the Nephites mostly lived completely separately, and there
was no practical possibility of the Nephites continually exploiting the
Lamanites. In fact, the truth was, that
the Nephites were often in bondage to the Lamanites, being taxed and exploited
when they weren't being exterminated by the Lamanites. It never, or only
rarely, happened the other way around, with the Nephites exploiting the
Lamanites, but that simple truth never seemed to get in the way of the
convenient and self-serving Lamanite political narrative.
All of this bizarre
and endless hatred and sociological insanity was perpetuated for more than a
thousand years until the "eternal victims", the Lamanites, finally
destroyed their "oppressors" through a series of genocidal wars which
were finally successful in exterminating the "exploiting" group. At that point, the only
"exploiters" of the "victim group" was that victim group
itself, and they continued in a degenerate and even further deteriorating
sociological situation ever after, endlessly exploiting and murdering each
other as they had the Nephites, presumably continually adjusting the
"traditions of the fathers" to justify any cruelties they might
decide to carry out.
The ability of a few
lies and the sustaining traditions of the fathers to make white into black and
black into white, and to maintain that confused "alternate reality"
mental state for thousands of years, is truly remarkable. We apparently imagine today that we are so
wise and so advanced and so intelligent that we would never make the kinds of
mistakes which the Lamanites and all their allies made in charging the Nephites
with grievous ancient lies and errors and then prosecuting their case to the
point of exterminating their supposed enemies.
Even though this "traditions of the fathers" process was interrupted
for 200 years by the coming of Christ and the enjoyment of the full Gospel for
that time period, nonetheless, the ancient traditions of the fathers were
somehow resurrected, and the task of the wrong side killing off the right side
was finally accomplished. But then, of
course, in good tribal warfare fashion, new "enemies" and
"exploiters" were found acting against the "victims," so
that the victims felt justified in destroying the "exploiters" and
the "enemies."
This is all so ugly
and brutal that it seems incomprehensible that humans could descend so low, but
this was all made possible over and over again, for thousands of years, because
of the traditions of the fathers. And
the traditions of the fathers could come and go in cycles, some of those cycles
being no more than a year or two, even though there were longer cycles, overlaying
the shorter cycles, which may have lasted up to 600 years.
In our own case, our
particular traditions of the fathers only seem to go back a little more than a
hundred years to the time when LDS church leaders discovered the benefits of
the "new" concept of a paid ministry as they found a way to receive
reliable flows of funds from the church members to maintain their own desired
lifestyle.
At this point, these
and other total inversions of original Gospel principles have been maintained
so long and so vigorously and so successfully, that today's church members
believe the exact opposite of what the Scriptures teach. Even in our own case, black has become white,
and white has become black, on many important doctoral and practical issues.
What this means in
practice is that today's church members are so saturated by our own set of "traditions
of the fathers," that long-term mind control technique, that it is nearly
impossible for them to understand the truth even when it is presented to them
clearly. They have become so certain
that black is white and white is black that they are essentially impervious to
the actual truth. We say that we are great seekers of the truth, looking for it
wherever it can be found, while, at the same time, carrying with us such great
errors of understanding, that, in many cases, we would not recognize the truth
if we saw it.
As another level of
irony upon irony, we now see among us the "new Lamanite" groups of
dissenters who go out of their way to invent new lies of exploitation, and then
gradually, through a large amount of propaganda effort, turn them into a new "traditions
of the fathers" which can affect millions of people.
Perhaps we can say
that we are at the same point the Book of Mormon society had reached after the
time of the coming of Christ when the Lamanites "remembered" the
"vast wrongs" supposedly done against them nearly a thousand years
before, and began to justify killing their ideological competitors, the
Nephites.
This all becomes much
harder and more confusing because today's "Nephites" have themselves
absorbed a large number of perfectly wrong and backwards traditions of the
fathers, which, unfortunately, give some real basis to the new
"Lamanites" to invent and propagate their new version of the old
traditions of the fathers that ended up with all the Nephites being
exterminated.
This is a very sad
and twisted situation, being repeated for the umpteenth time, and hardly anyone
seems to know what is going on right before their eyes. It is these kinds of considerations, and this
kind of blindness all around, that make it seem highly likely that, after 200
years, the church will destroy itself in our own time, just as it managed to
destroy itself from within about 200 years after the coming of Christ to the
Old World and 200 years after the coming of Christ to the New World.
In the political
world these days, there is much said about "global warming" or
"climate change," which seems to consist of a hysterical set of
pro-taxing pro-government atheistic ideological totalitarians trying to
convince everyone else that the normal climate cycles of our earth, which have
been going on from the beginning of time, were actually recently caused by man,
and somehow threaten all life on the planet, and that only these enlightened
few visionaries can save us from a certain end.
Of course, these hysterical groups are atheists who completely discount
the fact that God may have something to say about what happens to the earth he
created and his children living on it, but if their propaganda is strong enough
and persistent enough, perhaps this is a way for the reflexively totalitarian
atheist groups to enslave all others through this constant propaganda which
they hope will turn into a new traditions of the fathers which will numb the
thinking of the masses which then will allow themselves to be exploited, as the
atheists are excitedly hoping to accomplish.
These are a few of
the examples of the weak and limited thinking skills of most people on the
planet, and, apparently, the Mormons are at least as vulnerable to this kind of
manipulation as anyone else.
All of these kinds of
musings seem to tell me that it is essentially impossible to stop the
deterioration of the gospel once it has reached its 200 year mark (evidencing another
kind of religious algorithmic inefficiency -- see below), and that the "truth,"
wherever it may be found, will be so unrecognizable and preemptively rejected
that it is simply impossible to stop this slide into ideological oblivion. Anyone who tries to act against this
avalanche of foolishness will simply be pushed aside or even crushed out, and
those doing the crushing will see themselves as heroes, just as the Lamanites probably
saw themselves as heroes, perhaps as "saving humanity," as they
slaughtered the Nephites, or as any other society in the history of the world
might have considered themselves heroes as they destroyed any prophets that
might have come among them to disturb their settled and comfortable mindset.
However, even though
the Mormons may have a few mental health issues related to the "traditions
of the fathers" mechanism, they may still be the sanest people that can
actually be found. So as long as there
is the slightest chance that this rush into oblivion can be stopped, there
remains an impulse to try to stop it.
Algorithmic efficiency
I first began my
studies of the state of the church in our time by looking at the algorithmic
efficiencies of the extremely large church programs concerning genealogy and
family history. These programs consume
at least $2 billion in church member resources each year, with about $0.5
billion in cash and about $1.5 billion in volunteer time. When I finally discovered and verified that
it was perfectly feasible to carry on the same process with at least 100 times
more efficiency, that meant that costs could be lowered to 1% of current costs.
In some cases 1000 times more efficiency could be achieved, meaning the costs
could be reduced to 0.1% of current costs.
I naturally became quite alarmed at this extreme ineffectiveness which
leaders are very determined to continue.
The procedures and algorithms
used in those genealogy and family history projects are so ineffective that it
becomes completely impossible to ever finish the genealogy even for the United
States, let alone for the world. To
illustrate, using current methods it would cost more than $900 trillion just to
finish the United States. That is such a
large number that it might as well be infinity.
This makes the costs of each new unique name submitted to the temples something
in the range of $2000, when a cost of $2 should be closer to the average cost.
Moving on to look at
the missionary program, it appears that we are currently spending about
$400,000 in church resources for each new long-term convert. That seems like an
absurd amount and serves to indicate how self-centered and inward looking we
have become. A family of five new
converts would thus represent the church members spending $2 million in
total. This should be enough for a
family to buy a new home and have the parents retire for the rest of their
lives. Obviously, with this kind of extreme
inefficiency, there's no chance at all for the church to have significant
growth.
I think most people
assume that governments and charitable organizations are not typically known
for their efficiencies, but the track record of the LDS Church in the areas of
genealogy work and missionary work is so bad as to be almost
incomprehensible.
Another
even more fundamental algorithmic inefficiency is demonstrated by the fact that
the church now, even with all its modern technology, including information
storage and processing technology, has no mechanism to maintain its own purity
beyond the 200 year mark, just as the last two versions of the church started
by Christ himself also contained no mechanism to maintain their purity beyond
the 200 year mark. Apparently, the natural human tendency to become victims of
the long-term mind control phenomenon known as "the traditions of the
fathers" is a basic human characteristic which is inevitably and always
successfully exploited by Satan's minions. Only an extraordinarily vigorous process,
never seen before among men, could hold the church to the straight and narrow
path for centuries on end.
Age of leaders vs. wickedness
of world
There
could be some advantage to having men long past retirement age managing the
church because of their breadth of experience and long memories. But, at the
same time, they are also likely to be extremely restrained and cautious. It is
hard to imagine a 90-year-old man who is also an ideological and sociological
firebrand, something like Joseph Smith at age 25, willing and able to put forth
the level of effort and commitment it would take to actually change the world
for the better. Most men of that advanced age are weak and timid and just want the
peace and quiet of typical retirement. They are not inclined to take on giant
worldwide problems at that stage of their life.
So
we truly do have a geriatric viewpoint concerning the mission of the church on
all levels. Just as most of these men have finished their life's work and are
happy to have enough savings to see them through retirement, possibly with
their new church calling being a nice supplement to their pension, they
similarly seem to think that the church has already done its life's work by merely
establishing itself, and all it needs at this point is to have a quiet
retirement which only requires a few steady and unexcitable caretakers to make
sure that it doesn't completely disappear.
All
these leaders need to do now is to keep the younger and more aggressive church
members calmed down to keep them from somehow generating ideological or
practical conflicts with the world which might complicate the lives of the
church leaders and destroy their serenity. Maintaining that calming effect now
becomes job number one. It seems that the concept of changing the world fell into
the church memory hole about 100 years ago, as the focus turned to merging with
the world and being fully accepted by it and avoiding any conflict with it on any
level.
Perhaps
the first 70 years of extreme and nearly unabated conflict with the world left
many of the remaining leaders burned out and anxious to end that phase of the
church's history. However, the pendulum has obviously swung far too much the
other way now, with the church embracing almost every ideological and practical
aspect of the world, only managing to delay by a few years its members'
acceptance of nearly every bad aspect of worldly culture that comes along. At
this point, overcoming that well-established and well-entrenched inertia would
both require and cause a great stir indeed. It is hard to even imagine where
such a vigorous positive influence could come from that would not be quickly
squelched by a very comfortable central headquarters.
To
justify the leaders lack of vigorous action and their lack of world-changing success,
it appears that the world is blamed for being too wicked to heed the gospel
message, with that message weakly presented or simply made available, and the
members are blamed for being too lazy and stingy to overcome all opposition,
all the while that the central headquarters is absorbing and
"managing" perhaps $12 billion in resources each year, which implies the
ability to compete head-on with such successful opinion makers as Hollywood and
the mainstream media. This impulse to blame others and to fail to accept these
large responsibilities is not consistent with the historical gospel as it
appears in the Scriptures. Many of the prophets of old accepted impossible odds
and yet were often successful. The prophet Jonah is one good example. Christ
himself, a single man in a hostile world, is of course another good example.
Their
current answer is to send out the young people to handle all the conflict with
society while they stay in Salt Lake City and hope that everyone in the world
will love them and they will experience no conflict. At times, they seem more
concerned about suppressing conflict between members and the central church,
than they are about the necessary and righteous conflict between the gospel and
those who are outside the church who would resist it. This demonstrates the
strength of their desire to live a peaceful harmonious life without conflict
from any source.
The
leaders seem to be claiming that the church is not growing because the world is
too wicked. But I don't see the evidence to support that claim. It appears to
me that there are still a very large number of good people who are keeping our
society from collapsing, and the bulk of those people are not associated with
us or in league with us in some way. If we were doing and promoting the right
things, it's likely that they would want to join with us. There are many of
these people who cry out for a return of the prophets or wonder why the prophets
we have are so silent and timid.
Since the
LDS church is itself indulging in some of the administrative errors and
inefficiencies that these politically conservative non-members disapprove of concerning
our state and federal governments, that observation would naturally make these
outsiders less anxious to join up with us. If we could fix that, I believe more
of them would join with us in the grand Christian freedom project which began
hundreds of year ago and resulted in the rise of the United States.
