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For some time I have wanted to be able to communicate on a rational basis with other church members about an important set of topics concerning today's LDS Church. The current-day church is about to reach the 200-year mark since its restoration. The two churches which Christ restored in the Old World and in the New World both imploded at about the 200-year mark, and one might reasonably wonder how we could possibly be so wise and fortunate as to avoid a similar fate. Are we really going to claim that we are far superior to Peter, James, and John, the Three Nephites, etc., and that we will succeed where they eventually failed? That is certainly not something which should be taken for granted, but needs to be thoroughly verified.
Because of the often highly emotional content presented here, finding the right people to speak with has proved to be quite a challenge. It appears that there are several groups who have simply started new churches when they ran across disturbing aspects of the LDS Church. That certainly seems like a last resort, after every other reasonable option has been tried. I decided to try some social media options as my "reasonable options" before thinking about doing something more drastic. Hopefully there will be some thoughtful responses which will verify my general faith in humanity.
If you found your way to this site because you randomly saw a very brief ad during a Google search, or you saw a billboard ad, or a Facebook ad, I hope you will have a little patience with what I have presented here. I have been working on this "Mormon Audit" project for 20 years, and have created numerous articles during those years to express my findings. It would be nice if I could now start over and completely reorganize and reedit that mass of material, as a professional editor might do for a large and important book to be published, but that will probably take me another year or two to accomplish. In the meantime, I would be missing the opportunity to hear from other people so that I can take their reactions into account as I clarify my writings. One advantage of having an editor or a board of editors or a set of reviewers is to get various viewpoints so that the final printed product can be of the highest possible quality.
I encourage you to make a quick tour through all of the posts on this website, and, at the end of the oldest post, continue on to examine the book-length compilation which is stored separately online. That will give you a chance to see the many topics I have attempted to cover. I hope you will not stop with the first topic you run across, since each article may only make sense in a broader context.
I encourage you to examine these materials quickly first, and more carefully later, and to respond when you have a well-thought-out observation or comment, especially if you have new information to add to this compilation.
A Short Preface on Church
Inefficiencies
It was a
long process to create these 50+ articles, but the underlying impulse was quite
simple. I started by looking at the church's genealogy and temple work programs
as a professional computer systems engineer, and when I found out the
astonishing levels of inefficiency which the church technical employees were
fanatically defending and pursuing, apparently without the slightest management
complaint about their many procedural boondoggles, I decided that any
organization which was that badly messed up, from top to bottom, in one area, was
probably just as badly messed up in many other important areas.
I then assigned myself the task to look for those other seriously distorted areas which almost certainly must exist. If a few minor procedural changes could improve the efficiency of genealogy research by 1000 times, then the church's policies and methods for doing missionary work and welfare work and member education work would likely be just as bad, presumably for all the same bureaucratic reasons. My research hunch proved to be very close to the truth, although trying to answer the question of "why" in all these areas is quite a challenge.
I then assigned myself the task to look for those other seriously distorted areas which almost certainly must exist. If a few minor procedural changes could improve the efficiency of genealogy research by 1000 times, then the church's policies and methods for doing missionary work and welfare work and member education work would likely be just as bad, presumably for all the same bureaucratic reasons. My research hunch proved to be very close to the truth, although trying to answer the question of "why" in all these areas is quite a challenge.
As a
simple effort to roughly quantify the scale of inefficiency in all these areas,
we find that:
●The church resources expended that can be
associated with each new long-term member is about $400,000, totaling about $2
million for a family of five. Such outrageous costs obviously slow down the
missionary process. Missionary work should be at least 100 times more
efficient.
●Each new unique name which is submitted for
temple work costs in the range of $2000 in total resources, when combining cash
and volunteer labor, resulting in a process that is so outrageously expensive
that even in hundreds of years it can never finish even the United States, let
alone the world. With proper procedures, $2 should be enough for each new
unique name.
●The central church's hundred-year failure to
look to the temporal welfare of its members now costs each working member of
the church at least $2 million in retirement benefits, with a cumulative price
tag of about $10 trillion (yes, Trillion) for all church members. If each church member who had
spent a lifetime in the workforce had an extra $2 million after retirement, one
might guess that a truly amazing amount of valuable church work would be
accomplished by the ordinary members.
I imagine that most people who become aware
of these mind-boggling inefficiencies would like to know how and why we got to
this point, and what it might take to fix it. That is what this website is all
about.
Table of Contents for
blog
Topic -- location
●Social Media Ads -- August 8, 2017 post
●How Stands the Dispensation? 50 Variations
On A Theme -- July 30, 2017 post. Read post.
●The LDS Church Is Responsible For the
Collapsing of Western Civilization --
July 30, 2017 post. Read post.
●Freedom, God, and Man -- June 27, 2017 post. Read post.
●Can we avoid reliving the original apostasy? -- June 27, 2017 post. Read post.
●Mormon Studies Issues -- June 9, 2017 post. Read post.
●Two Essays on Living Prophets -- June 9, 2017 post. Read post.
●It's Time to Start Over -- May 30, 2017 post. Read post.
●The Church That Could Save The World, But
Chooses Not To -- May 2, 2017 post. Read post.
Book Summary -- March 7, 2017 post:
Restoring the
Restoration:
Repairing 200 Years
of LDS Doctrinal Drift
●Introduction – Our
duty as members today
●Is a restoration of
the restoration possible?
Summary List
A few of the problems with today's church
Lessons
and hints from the Book of Revelation
●Premillennialism versus post-millennialism
●The Gathering and
Building up of Zion
●The very nature of Christ and his teachings
●The 144,000,
priesthood keys, and a distributed church
Issues that are more observable and measurable
●Paid Ministry -- page 101
●God as creator
●Freedom -- Individual freedom as the "ground of being" for LDS
theology
●Education
●Organization and Constitution
●Secularization by incorporation
●Administrative inefficiencies -- genealogy work -- page 181
●Administrative inefficiencies -- missionary work
●Administrative inefficiencies -- representing a
people and their welfare
