Chapters 26 & 27  Zion, Priestcraft issues 

Chapter 26

No time to relax. No "all is well in Zion"

I have often said that the LDS church leaders appear to have no idea what Zion would look like, and therefore most certainly have no idea of how to get there. They appear to be so embedded in today's statist systems at every level (more or less Satan-inspired) that thinking outside of that very constraining box is out of the question. I can hardly expect to remedy that lack of information and understanding in just a few pages, but even a brief outline might be helpful.

Getting to Zion, a gospel-based civilization, is really very simple. The U.S. Constitution, which is incorporated by reference into modern LDS Scriptures, sets the world standard for a government and a set of laws that define a free society. It is hard to imagine that anyone would argue that Zion could be Zion without incorporating complete political, economic, and religious freedom. Basically, just defining Zion as an aggressively free society would be enough.

There are thousands of attacks on US freedom every day, coming from inside and outside the United States. Simply organizing the thousands of activities necessary to counteract these constant attacks on freedom would be an excellent use of the church's resources. It needn't be initiated or managed by the central church at all. If church members were encouraged to use their own resources to resist these debilitating attacks, that would be good enough. In fact, it would probably have a much stronger and better effect than trying to coordinate these activities through the central church.

However, the church leaders, whether they know it or not (since the church staff lawyers seem to make all the most important policy decisions for the church) seem to have chosen to do as little as possible to defend freedom and the Constitution, and to care for the poor, which would result in positively changing the society we live in.

Unfortunately, the members are currently very much discouraged from undertaking any active changes to society, presumably on the theory that independent member actions could result in possible embarrassment to church leaders, nationally and internationally, even though that restriction interferes with members' freedom of religion.

The church's refusal to take seriously its duties to care for the poor has left open to atheist secular governments the opportunity to institute enormous, wasteful, and corrupt tax-and-spend welfare systems whose very purpose is to displace and discredit the Christian religion. The church's abandonment of such activities basically to Satan's minions has been an enormous blow to the church and a boost to those minions.

The same is true of the church's abandonment of any meaningful influence on the nation's educational system, abandoning it to the corrupt worldly influences which have nearly taken over our entire nation, largely exactly because of corrupt atheistic influences on our children over generations.

The church leaders seem to have concluded that they will be most successful when they are almost invisible -- that the best way to promote the gospel is to not actively and openly promote it at all, however strange that plan may seem. The only way they are willing to join into public activity is to pretend to be just another example of a private business franchise system which is such a common feature of our business-oriented culture, something like McDonald's or Jiffy Lube, which provide a commonly needed service, but the church carefully avoids any statement or activity that might seem to indicate that they wish to change anyone's political or religious belief system or value system..

Nonpolitical

The church has made much of its claims to be nonpolitical, but it is a little difficult to understand why. The U.S. Constitution does not require American churches to be nonpolitical at all. From the very beginning, on issues related to the Revolutionary War, and later the Civil War, the churches had a major influence on society's opinions and actions.

I found it fascinating that in the lead-up to the Civil War, when proslavery and anti-slavery forces were skirmishing in Kansas (which included many of the proslavery forces from Missouri which was just next door, those proslavery forces being exactly the same ones who had previously run the LDS members out of Missouri), churches in New England sent wagon loads of "Beecher's Bibles" to the anti-slavery forces in Kansas to help make sure that the anti-slavery forces won the voting referendum there on the slavery issue. Some history on the topic:

He (Henry W. Beecher) believed that the Sharps Rifle was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles. You might just as well. ... read the Bible to Buffaloes as to those fellows who follow Atchison and Stringfellow; but they have a supreme respect for the logic that is embodied in Sharp's rifle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beecher's_Bibles

Beecher Bibles The Sharps rifle was a big innovation in firearms during the 1850s. It was highly sought after by men looking to gain political advantage in territorial Kansas. The unique weapon with its patented breech-loading and self-priming features offered quick loading, speed in firing, and accuracy in distance.

https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/beecher-bibles/11977

The total number of Sharps that reached Kansas between 1854 and 1858 will probably never be known. Fragmentary records indicate somewhere around 900 to 1,000 Sharps were purchased for the border conflict. Https://civilwartalk.com/threads/beecher-bible-and-rifle-church-in-wabaunsee-kansas.152398/

The Sharp's rifle was legendary in its innovations. There was at least one Hollywood movie made about it, "Quigley Down Under" starring Tom Selleck. The rifle was somewhat akin to today's long-range sniper rifles, with a range of up to nearly a mile, with several different cartridges of varying powder loads available for it.

We should note that the U.S. Army which had been intentionally sent to Kansas to help turn Kansas into a slave state, and failed, probably partly because of the presence of Beecher's Bibles there, was the exact same Army which marched out to Utah in 1857 to try to turn Utah and California into slave states.

The Mormons in Utah at that time, including the leaders of the church, were hardly nonpolitical in their behavior. The 20,000 seasoned mountain men who then lived in Utah, about 10 times the number of regular soldiers in the army sent there, were not about to be driven out by this corrupt army, and they were not afraid to say what would happen to the army if it attacked, since it was obviously very isolated and far from any hope of resupply or reinforcement. I assume that army took the Mormons' threatening statements very seriously, and that is what kept things relatively peaceful.

The modern-day almost complete surrender to the concept of the church being "nonpolitical," even though the IRS's trying to require churches to be nonpolitical is unconstitutional (but the IRS has so far avoided press hard enough to get a Supreme Court ruling on that issue) seems mostly aimed at keeping on good terms with the American federal government, specifically the IRS, so that the LDS church could do such things as stockpile $200 billion in unused contributions without any adverse political or economic consequences. Obviously, the federal government does not see the LDS church as any kind of threat. The LDS church today apparently wants to be seen as a completely loyal sub-organization to the federal government, perhaps even going so far as to operate as a virtual state church. This complete peace agreement and armistice may make life easier for the church leaders, but it almost completely torpedoes the actual mission of the church to change the society for the better.

Political

At the same time as it claims to be nonpolitical in one area,, the LDS church has gone beyond its delegated authority from the members to get involved in political matters such as making political compromises at the state level with gay activists, weakening long-standing constitutional guarantees. Naturally, these political matters seem to only move in one direction by being in conformance with the typically constant leftward march of the federal government.

Zion and the Gathering

The doctrinal topic of the Gathering is the other side of the Zion coin. Zion is the gathering of those who desire freedom, and it is the very process of gathering into a major and formidable nation of freedom lovers that would allow them to have freedom.  Their very size and homogeneity of ideology and values would allow them to enjoy and maintain freedom and to continually add to their strength by separating out the good people from Babylon, strengthening Zion and weakening Babylon.

In today's perverse situation, the church leaders REQUIRE that the members stay in one of the many Babylons where their lives are often miserable, and where they are unable to control and improve their own societies.  At the same time, there is not even any place officially designated where they COULD gather to gain the autonomy that would allow them to enjoy freedom. Gathering together in small groups in hundreds of countries is never going to provide the critical mass to make a change in those societies, and the church would discourage it anyway. The church leaders have, in effect, joined with the exploiters of the world to maintain an unnecessarily low standard of freedom, apparently for no other reason than that it is in that condition that the central headquarters of the church can best justify its existence and its constant taking and consuming or wasting or stockpiling of massive sums of money from the members. 

If the Saints were to break out and to spontaneously create their own Zion space, overruling central headquarters policy, and managed to combine all the saints together, the headquarters would quickly shrink in size since there would be no continuing need for expensive travel to and diplomacy with perhaps 200 different countries and governments.  The saints would spontaneously take care of their own needs once gathered, and there would be no justification for an oversize administrative unit in Salt Lake City.

Rather than allow and encourage the gathering, which would make today's headquarters nearly unnecessary, the church prefers to keep hundreds or thousands of different church groups all separate and isolated just so it can spend vast amounts of money on staff and their travel to act as the coordinating body between them all, moving tithing money from some groups to others, etc., when, if left completely to their own devices, they would coalesce into one or a few places and spontaneously meet the needs of each other without any artificial church bureaucracy.

As it is, the central church bureaucracy essentially holds the members in all of these other Third World countries as both trophies and hostages, as ways to extract the maximum amount of contributions from its members in the First World. Freeing up those scattered members to build up Zion, presumably in the United States, would also free the First World members to direct their charitable contributions towards the highest social needs within the new Zion society. 

In other words, the church today is actually as anti-Zion as it is anti-Gathering.  This is a bizarre situation.  One might even call it "antichrist" or anti-Christian, in the sense that Christ would not act to keep the Saints scattered when they all naturally and wisely desire to gather. 

It is clear that the few million saints in the United States cannot control the political climate of the nation, and cannot even control the political climate of the State of Utah, which is far from an ideal Zion. However, if there were 100 million freedom-loving members gathered from around the world, where they probably learned to have a great love for freedom simply because they were systematically deprived of it, that 100 million members could have a profound effect on the culture in the United States and would ensure that righteousness and freedom was well supported there.

It seems remarkable that merely correcting this perverse structural situation -- consciously constructed by church leaders for their own purposes -- would almost automatically establish Zion, as the members around the world were allowed and encouraged to gather to the United States (and perhaps a few other places) and slowly build the society they would prefer.  The central church would stop interfering with the natural good impulses of members to gather and establish and enjoy freedom, and Zion would happen spontaneously.  That is supposed to be the effect of the Gospel on the world, and the leaders just need to stop interfering just for the purpose of rent-seeking, extracting money from the free members who are concerned about their less-free brothers and sisters, when the less-free are kept less-free by active church interference. This is a cynical, perverse behavior by the central church for the very purpose of manipulating members for the monetary gain of headquarters. The church is not growing now, and it is its own counter-gospel, counter-gathering policies and activities that keep the church from growing -- "we have met the enemy, and it is us."

I hear that the church finds it necessary to limit its expansion outside United States simply because, using current policies and practices, the amount of tithing received from the First World countries more than pays for First World costs, allowing the excess to be spent in Third World countries to accomplish the tasks and financial policies preferred by the Salt Lake City bureaucracy. But, obviously, there are limits on the net positive flow of tithing from First World countries, meaning that, to keep a proper financial balance, the church has to limit its growth and its preferred programs in Third World countries. This is a very artificial process which could end simply by encouraging the gathering from these Third World countries. Also, the operation of the church as designed by Christ was intended to allow it to move easily worldwide without these kinds of bureaucratic constraints. But, of course, there would be no profit in those methods, so they are not considered.

One case study of individual effect

One of my daughter's mission companions came to the United States from Poland.  She naturally wanted to stay in the United States after her mission, but the church insisted she return to Poland and not attempt to move here.  The logic was presumably that she should learn about the church here, and then go back to her native land and teach the Gospel there using her new experiences.  However, it surely was clear to everyone involved that her life in Poland would be a poor shadow of what it could have been in the United States.  She certainly had no reasonable expectation to change the corrupt culture of her home country all by yourself or with the help of a handful of members there.

The only practical, nondiscriminatory solution is to gather all those scattered and persecuted members to the US where they could enjoy full freedom and the benefits of living with millions of other saints, and then, sometime, perhaps when they have raised their children, perhaps either they or their children could return as privileged US citizens (like the privileges that church leaders enjoy as US citizens -- but are unwilling to do anything to protect) and influence their home countries to do better (perhaps after being weakened by losing many of their best and brightest to the homing beacon of the Gospel.)  This sort of gathering would put the church actively on the side of freedom, and naturally would cause the church to be considered a negative force by the corrupt leaders of all these countries, and the church would be less able to act with its current policies in those countries.  But I see that as a good thing, not a bad thing.  Pandering to dictators all over the world and using church policy to strengthen the hand of those dictators is actually a way for the church to go against the Gospel and partially commit suicide by stopping its own growth in influence.  The best people would gather themselves to Zion, and the world's societies would be changed by that activity, people voting with their feet for freedom and the Gospel.

The church apparently wishes to avoid offending the corrupt governments of the world by fostering a brain-drain of LDS members, but that is exactly what needs to happen to weaken Satan's grip on those places at this stage of working to change the world's societies toward a wide-spread Gospel civilization.

Some general history

Since 1896, when the practice began of the enforcing and consuming of tithing by church headquarters,

the church leaders have collected about $1 trillion and wasted most of it on relatively frivolous activities.  There might have been some benefits at the beginning of this worldwide expansion of a huge religious bureaucracy, but 100 years later there are nothing but problems. But far worse than the lost $1 trillion, by not allowing the Gospel to spread naturally, they have prevented at least $10 trillion, and probably much more, from being applied to Gospel purposes and the building up of Zion. They imposed an enormous 10% growth tax on church expansion for their own personal benefit, and, after a long decline in church growth rates, have finally completely killed any measurable church growth.

Had they allowed to the Gospel to spread naturally, the membership of the would be much larger now, and the members would have collectively spent trillions of dollars in the United States and elsewhere to advance the Gospel and to advance the societies in which they live, all moving the nations towards a Zion or a millennial condition. At least an extra $20 trillion in all would have been available to advance church work, including the $10 trillion that would have been available to retired church members if the church had encouraged the setting up of an alternate Social Security system which would have been many times more efficient than the corrupt wasteful tax-and-spend federal government version. Apparently, the church leaders planned a virtual ideological merger with the US government to minimize all conflict between organizations and make the lives of the church leaders more convenient.

The long and tortured trek toward Zion
Date	Event	Consequences
1830	The LDS church is organized	This begins the trek toward Zion in earnest. Things go as planned for the first 66 years, during the presidencies of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor, and the church is free and grows quickly. 90,000 converts come from Europe to bolster the process.
1896	Wilford Woodruff declares leadership salaries from church contributions	The church takes a terrible wrong turn and begins to suffer all the bad consequences of having a professional priesthood. Doctrines and practices are changed to maximize church income, not gospel influence for good on the world for the benefit of all members. The church consciously chooses to mimic the Roman Catholic Church. This creates the first financial class system in the church.
1923	The church creates a corporate structure which specifically separates the central offices from any control by the members	This makes it impossible for the church members to have any control over the money they contribute to the church, or even any knowledge of where it goes, and the church quickly begins to waste and hide the money it receives. According to plan, Christian charity gradually dies out and is replaced with law of Moses tithing and personal purity logic. $1 trillion is wasted and $10 trillion are kept from being applied to Zion projects, and the church ends up with $200 billion in sequestered assets.
1945 about	Church ends Relief Society independence	I believe Joseph Smith's vision was that the women should be spending on charitable projects nearly all the money which is now spent by church central offices for other things. (Women often managed charity in the New Testament.) That would ensure that we continued Christian charity as intended and not create a full-blown and wasteful law of Moses priestcraft system. The women were competing for church income, and that was "duplication," even though they were doing what they should.
1960 about	The church makes mandatory the payment of tithing before attending temples.	The successful monetizing of all higher ordinances sounds wonderful to church leaders who collect all the money, but the growth of the church takes a permanent downturn, heading towards zero, as we see today, because the members naturally do not agree with the leadership choices, and they shouldn't. In the United States, this means the average member must pay about $500,000 to maintain a lifetime membership in the church. Extra charity payments are strongly discouraged, as well as impractical. Charity can change society, and all such social change is discouraged. That individual tithing money is enough for a single person to build local meeting facilities for everyone if desired, with all the other money, the other 99%, going to Salt Lake to be consumed.
1977	The church officially ends the doctrinal policy of the Gathering	This step justifies central church leadership's keeping an enormous bureaucracy in Salt Lake City to travel to and coordinate among all the scattered members of the church, but it naturally further greatly slows the doctrinally required gathering and is the last nail in the coffin for any hope of establishing Zion in the United States or anywhere else. This makes permanent the international class system where the wealthier members in the United States pay for expensive (but unnecessary) architecture desired by leaders in foreign countries.
1978	The church allows priesthood ordinations for blacks	This was a necessary fairness development, and might have slightly assisted in the growth trajectory of the church. But this was probably not a profitable change for the church leaders, since most Third World countries consume more than they give in church contributions, so the leaders presumably tried to resist or contain that growth.

Chapter 27

Other Priestcraft Issues,

Including

Promoting One-World Government On Satan's Terms

Rather Than Resisting It

Chapter topics:

1. The Correlation Function Of The LDS Church: The Ghost in the Machine? The Heart of Darkness?

2. How standard economic and legal trickery was used to turn a religion, with only unprofitable charitable volunteer activity, into a highly profitable business.

3. The Last Straw -- Unchristian Visions Of Worldly Grandeur

When I was first outlining this book, there were certain areas of study that I thought were just too unpleasant to even talk about. They present a "heart of darkness" that is probably more than most members are willing to believe of their church leaders. But now I fear that many readers will just gloss over the more general complaints mentioned here in this book until they realize what a priestcraft church is capable of doing to the gospel. The past gives us many clues about the future, but we are still left to speculate about where it all leads.

Obviously, we have 2000 years of history for the Roman Catholic Church to learn from as far as priestcraft is concerned, but we somehow imagine that we are fundamentally different from that ancient organization and the many misdeeds it has engaged in.  However, basic human nature has not changed in 6000 years of history, so we should not assume that we are immune from many similar misdeeds of our own.

I see the church as taking conscious action to keep the effect of the gospel at about 2% of what it ought to be. That blocking function they are performing, all for the purpose of maximizing short-term church income, naturally upsets me. The current ideological corruption is very deep, although it is not obvious on the surface. The leaders must see every day the consequences of past policies, so that it is hard to imagine that they are not aware of these consequences and the policies behind them. They would naturally regularly have to review all past policies and all consequences before they could choose any new directions.

People always want to put off any potential bad consequences as long as they can. I think it's called "kicking the can down the road." The LDS church has been kicking that can down the road for 120 years, and it's time to straighten things out.

The Correlation Function Of The LDS Church:

The Ghost in the Machine? The Heart of Darkness?

The LDS correlation committee is usually presented as a purely educational function of the church where all instructional materials that are sent out to the members are first examined by this coorelation committee to make sure that it is in conformity with the Scriptures and with all current church teachings and policies.  Presumably that is indeed one of its functions.

However, it appears to me that the correlation committee would be better described as the puppet master for the entire church bureaucracy, setting and enforcing thousands of rules about interpretations of Scriptures and rules for the behavior of all the public faces of the LDS Church. The reason I say this is that the church, over the last 120 years, has deviated an enormous amount from the Gospel which Christ taught and which Joseph Smith taught.  It has adopted many of the teachings and practices of men and has taken the church backward a giant step to enforce most of the concepts of the old law of Moses as though the church were deciding that it really didn't have the Christian answers anymore, and the best it can do is to revert to the original "schoolmaster." The church's current efforts concerning its new programs for children and youth, supposedly to get rid of the old checklist culture, the church program culture, actually highlights that it is at least partially aware of this "law of Moses" mindset and is trying to change it. That is laudable, but it must make a really major overhaul, including ending tithing, to really make a major and lasting change.

This law of Moses mindset that has been in place for nearly the last 100 years means that the teachings and behavior of the church today are far different from Christ's church.  This presents a major problem since it probably happens all the time that the distinctions between the Scriptures plus the original Church of Christ, as compared to the current church, come up in many different settings, and someone must either try to justify those many differences or try to hide them.  Part of that defense of the status quo includes telling lies about what the original Church of Christ was so that the new policies will be accepted as normal.  This gets very complicated.  As anyone knows who wants to put up an entire false front, riddled with untruths (something like the constant efforts of the current mainstream media to promote projects of the political left), it takes an enormous amount of thought and energy to keep this false story alive and plausible.

This means that we cannot have any general authorities speaking out of line, especially if they are advocating for parameters of the original Church of Christ and, as a result, speaking against current policy.  (This makes me think of the many hilarious comments of J. Golden Kimball, the "swearing elder," who was definitely "uncorrelated" most of the time. In his day, there were presumably no recordings and probably very few written transcripts, so strict central discipline was essentially impossible, and probably considered less necessary.) https://ldsblogs.com/11344/j-golden-kimball

One fairly recent example occurred when one lower-level general authority thought that there might be an easier way to solve the problem of getting church members around the world to be able to visit temples for their living ordinances without excessive travel expenses.  As we know, it takes many years to get a temple authorized in a new country, and the costs for actually building the temple are also very large.  This person suggested that an "endowment house" solution be used as a low-cost, quick-reaction way of providing access to saving ordinances around the world. (A similar earlier suggestion, which also died quickly, was to equip an airplane as a temple and send the airplane around the world periodically. That still seems like a genius idea.)  After all, the members in Salt Lake City used the endowment house for essentially all of their ordinance work for 40 years while the Salt Lake Temple was being completed, so why would not that same solution work somewhere else? Obviously that solution would be catastrophic to the current church financing strategy and system which depends on strict control of recommends to keep people out of the temples (they helped fund) unless they have paid their tithing to the central offices. The other half of that monetizing proposition is that it is has been declared that it is only elegant temples in which these ordinances can take place.  Naturally, that church leader did not get to make that endowment house suggestion more than once, and it was quickly scrubbed from any written records.

Another interesting example is provided by Elder Thomas S. Monson, who had much to do with the building and use of the East German temple in Frieberg, Germany.  After the wall went down between East Germany and West Germany, he expressed his gratitude that the East Germans were now free.  However, the church policy is to never say anything in support of political freedom and to treat every government ideology as equal.  In their minds it is perfectly rational to expect to be a good Mormon and a good communist at the same time, so talking about freedom being a good thing is considered a very bad thing for a general authority to say.  He happened to make this comment at the very beginning of a general conference talk he was presenting.  As fast as was humanly possible, his unscripted spontaneous comments as he began his talk were quickly erased and do not appear in any videos or on any written versions of the talk he gave. 

These are two examples out of presumably the tens of thousands which have occurred in the past where general authorities or public speakers might find themselves "off the ranch" as far as the current approved policies and attitudes about everything in the world.

As another example, one of the church attorneys made sure that the church conferences were not broadcast to any Arab countries lest some Arab governments be offended and some Arab members get imprisoned or killed.  I see this as part of central church administrative paranoia.  The truth is, that the church is much more worried about its own progress and freedom of action than it is about the lives of any members that may be impacted.  Incidentally, we do have some Arab members, as in Lebanon.

There are many indicators that this single central church brain, this almost-alien force that has the LDS church in a powerful grip, enforcing thousands of tiny rules, is the real controlling force of the church.  The top church leaders do have a fair amount of information and long-term continuity, but I believe it is simply impossible for any one of those men or all of them together to ever be able to examine every action and every potential misstep over a period of 120 years to make sure that the "cover story," and the "narrative," for the earliest church is not breached, and the sham is not exposed.

A movie starring Tom Cruise entitled "Edge of Tomorrow" was very interesting to me.  In that movie there was a single giant controlling alien intelligence which controlled millions of individual aliens and was even able to control time, allowing it to rerun any particular day so that any mistakes could be rectified so it could never lose a battle.  The extreme level of control on every level, high and low, that it takes to keep the church on an even keel with a completely consistent internal and external message is certainly something that requires a superhuman effort.  One small slip could expose the long-term fraud for what it is. This level of control is so great and so detailed that I find it frightening.  That is why I say it is superhuman and therefore frightening.

We have had government administrators such as the Italian Machiavelli who were able to manipulate governments and propaganda to reach certain results.  But the difficulty of thinking of those strategies and then applying them on such a massive scale as to keep millions of people in the dark about what is really happening is truly impressive as well as disturbing.  The level of secrecy maintained by the current church in its headquarters is remarkable, and that has to be part of this whole complex of information control and message control.  Perhaps that is why the Church has felt so threatened by so-called "intellectuals" who dare to challenge any of the many assumptions on which the current church operates.

This whole system seems extremely fragile and therefore vulnerable, so it is very hard to see how we even got this far without a major gaffe and the revelation of the semi-sinister powers behind the throne.  Perhaps we have finally reached the point where the evidence is overwhelming, and it is no longer possible for lies and manipulation to cover up the truth.  If it is correct that the church has about $124 billion in reserve assets in one known collection, and many people think it is twice that amount if all sources are considered, then it is going to take some very serious long-term spinning to get rid of that obvious breach of fiduciary duty and put that question to bed.

How standard economic and legal trickery

was used to turn a religion, with only unprofitable charitable volunteer activity, into a highly profitable business.

We start with the fact that Christ gave away for free all of his miracles and all of his ordinances. If the church leaders today followed that same example, as they did for at least the first 66 years after the church was organized by Joseph Smith, then it would be very hard to make a lot of money giving away religiously valuable goods and services. The obvious and time-honored way to move from a charitable service organization to a rent-seeking business is you have to find a way to charge a lot of money for something which should be free. One can do that by creating a legal monopoly so that the law demands that you pay a certain amount, regardless of the cost to produce, or you tell a big religious lie and then hammer it home over a generation until people finally accept the lie. The church has followed both courses of action to get to its highly lucrative business where the basic costs of its main product -- salvation, or, rather, peoples' subjective feeling that they are worthy of salvation -- has a near-zero cost to the dispensing organization. This is very much like today's consumer software business where having made one working copy of a program at great expense, the distribution of all other copies is nearly free.

The church has gone through several steps on its way to monetizing its ordinances. It went the government route of setting up a system within the state of Utah to authorize the formation of corporations of a certain sort, and then taking advantage of that corporation law to insulate the central church from the members. In essence, it used the fiction of the sovereign immunity of a state government to create a kind of sovereign immunity for the church organization itself. That was clearly inappropriate for a church to do, but was done anyway. "Secularization through incorporation" is one way to describe the process of partially corrupting a church. Really, it is only government organizations that can legitimately play the sovereign immunity game, but churches have found ways to trick people into believing the same thing about churches. A state church obviously fits that description where the two are formally merged. So, in Utah, the LDS church is more or less a state church. The Roman Catholic Church went through that process, and the Mormon church did the same, for the same reasons. Since the leaders of the church and of the state were basically the same people in Utah, they created the corporation sole as a feature of the Utah government and then adopted that for the church, making the leader of the church an absolute dictator on everything that has anything to do with the church. There is no group of people managing the church, where differing opinions can and need to be considered. There is only one man and he alone has absolute control.

Before that, the church was an unincorporated association which at least yearly needed to authorize a trustee to act on its behalf concerning property holdings. The great business weakness with that arrangement, for a church that wants to monetize its most valuable product, its ordinances, is that if the church members become irritated by the church leaders' misbehavior, they can vote for a different trustee. There is no particular reason for the yearly trustee to be the current head of the LDS church, otherwise typically known as the president and prophet. Someone else can fill that role. Or we might have the unseemly situation of people campaigning and competing to be the next trustee promising to operate with a different set of principles.

Going to the corporation sole format essentially squelched all member control options. Of course, what that means is that the trustee at the time, who allowed this process to go on to create a Corporation sole to control what had in the past been an unincorporated association, did indeed breach his fiduciary duty to the members of the church. But, this turncoat person, unauthorized do what he did unless he held a special member vote on that issue, would naturally be celebrated by those who were conspiring to take over the church and cut out all member influence on the management of the church and its resources. This was a "lawyers' coup." Apparently, after a few years of getting by successfully with this fraudulent move, then this strategic change became a fate accompli and everyone gave up and forgot.

On the "big lie" side of the takeover equation, people were told, at least by implication, that now that the central church owned all the resources, and the members owned nothing, and had no management control over anything, then the new owners of the church and its property and its copyrighted materials could have absolute control and they could therefore say who could attend the temples and who could not, since now all ownership of everything had been vested in this one autonomous and self-perpetuating totalitarian organization. That would have been a good time for a church revolution to stop this unprincipled takeover, but apparently it didn't happen, or it didn't happen with enough force to be effective.

So, then, gradually, members of the church were convinced that they were not worthy to go to the temple unless they did exactly what the new church leaders said which mostly amounted to paying 10% of their income to the central offices, and giving up all control over that money. The church says that when some money passes into its hands, members have no control whatsoever over it. That means the leaders can spend it as they wish: they can waste it, they can hold it in reserve for pensions or perquisites, or whatever they want.

The really terrible part of this is that now essentially none of that money goes for the charitable purposes for which it had been used before and which the church members would reasonably expect the church leaders to continue. But since there were now no legal or practical or economic constraints on that member money anymore, the church simply kept all the money and spent it as it saw fit, almost exclusively on itself.

If there were new questions that came up they could keep gradually tightening up the regulations so that there was no way out of paying the full tithe if one wanted to get access to saving ordinances which meant attending the temples.

The bad effects are many. All of the good intentions of members that their contributions be used to do good in the society are completely ignored and the church wastes or expends these resources any way it wishes with abandon and without responsibility.

One of the really worst parts of all this is that most societies are incapable of avoiding deterioration unless someone is willing to put in some idealistic effort and resources to keep the society from deteriorating. The true church is uniquely qualified and responsible to perform this task. It has certainly done so in the past, but at this point the church is part of the problem. If everyone is left completely to their own narrow self-interests, then it is not long until there are many people who lose out in the race of life, and there is no one to take care of their needs. One of the very important things to do is to maintain freedom in the society, and that will not be done by a rent-seeking church which avoids any kind of conflict with the world in efforts to maximize its short-term profits. Some conflict with the world is necessary to maintain the freedom of the people. Otherwise, the greedy totalitarians will gradually take over and crush out everyone, perhaps reaching the point where we have active slavery going again. Slavery is Satan's plan, and it can be achieved through many step-by-step processes. It is only the church, an active positive good, that can stop these constant deteriorating steps.

The church should be at the center for defending freedom, just as the Christian churches were the center for overcoming slavery during the Civil War. But here we have the church joining the forces of darkness to add their own form of economic bondage to the church members to extract money from them which the church is not entitled to get. When people who are supposed to be uplifting society become part of those groups that are destroying society, then the end is near. Alma 1:12 has an amazing statement which governs all societies. It is speaking of priestcraft, and we need to be wise enough to realize that priestcraft covers a multitude of sins concerning bondage, and the church is involved in many of those sins itself.

Alma 1:12 ... and were priestcraft to be enforced among this people it would prove their entire destruction.

This is why there is no such thing as having priestcraft being a little bit okay. It is always the route to destruction of every society that adopts it. Since we have adopted it, our end is certain unless we can change direction, and we certainly cannot count on the LDS church to help the society change direction. The church will simply keep up their rent-seeking strategies until the whole societal structure goes up in smoke.

The Last Straw -- Unchristian Visions Of Worldly Grandeur

Once the heresy and temptation of priestcraft are accepted, the illusions and delusions of fame, money, and power seem to grow without limit, until the leaders imagine themselves as the rightful rulers of the world, God's viceroys overriding and including all other systems of human government, however absurd and wrong that result may seem in relationship to basic gospel principles.  In fact, they may use gospel principles and opportunities to effectively become the Antichrist and accomplish the exact opposite of what was intended, persecuting the Saints using the gospel. Seeing these kinds of psychotic delusions being accepted and relished by the Church leaders should send shivers down the spines of all good members -- this is the heart of darkness, the mystery of iniquity.

In first creating a draft of this book, I tried to leave out this most sinister part of the consequences of the church deciding it's going to be the new one-world government, or at least part of it.  But serious Christians need to know where all of this impulse to religious empire-building actually leads to in the fevered minds of ambitious church leaders. 

The leaders seem to be unconstrained in what they can dream of and hope to do, all on the backs of their faithful Mormon tribalists, those tribalists having been prepared and conditioned by history to be willing to undertake very difficult activities if they are said to be necessary for the cause of Zion. But that willingness to sacrifice can be abused easily, as I believe it has already. However, "things which can't go on, don't," and the church leaders have definitely pushed things way too far in their search for power and prestige and glory.  It is all a very prideful thing they do. 

We might think of Ezra Taft Benson and his famous talk about pride.  I have often wondered who he was talking about, and now I believe he was talking about the church leaders themselves, other than himself, who were hell-bent on world domination, Roman Catholic Church-style. This is psychotic, but still seems to drive at least a majority of church leaders. This is "Gadianton Robber" thinking, not the thinking of Christ.  Christ would look to the needs of the one, not be willing to sacrifice individuals to the questionable plans for the greater glory of an illegitimate religious bureaucracy.  When the church leaders think of themselves as the generals of a religious army, we are in deep trouble. Generals usually don't suffer the consequences of their errors, so they are often only too willing to sacrifice others.

There was a time within the church when it was considered a compliment for the church to be said to be "organized like the German army." The generals of the Third Reich, along with Hitler, probably imagined that they would be the rulers of the world and that they were so wise that they deserved such adulation and power.  They were willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of people to reach the glories of a Third Reich.  Luckily for everyone else in the world, they completely failed, but at a devastating cost in wholesale slaughter, something which Satan would have delighted in, regardless of whether his minions attained world domination.

The LDS church has not yet advocated for the sacrifice of individuals on the same scale, but they have come far too close, accepting in principle results that could be just as bad.

I know of about three instances when the church leaders have grossly stepped over the line, repudiating almost every aspect of the Gospel in their search for worldly power.  They have not only failed and succumbed to the three temptations of Christ, but have done it with great gusto, imagining that the world owes them a living, a living which involves adulation and power.  They wish to become the masters and haven't the slightest interest in being the servants of anyone.  That puts them at war with the Church of God, even though they are supposedly the leaders of the Church of God.

The things I'm going to describe relate to times before, during, and after the active fighting in World War II, that being the great international convulsion of most recent memory.  One would have to assume that there were many other instances where choices were made that were antithetical to the cause of the Gospel, with the leaders opting for the tantalizing route to temporal power, but most of those instances we would likely not know anything about.  Only the largest and most outrageous events have made it to the point where they can be known publicly, slipping out of the darker recesses of church leadership strategy sessions and actions.  Perhaps we need some more "wikileaks" on this important point, some filmed discussions of these highly damaging topics to get a better understanding of the values of our leadership class.

Before World War II actually began, the LDS Church declared itself to be neutral and pacifist.  That seemed to be a very strange position to take.  Did that tend to put ALL obedient church members in the position of a "fifth column" internal anti-freedom, antiwar movement, or did it only apply to the church headquarters itself? How did the members at the time resolve the issue? Did they support the church or did they support the nation? Captain Moroni would have figured out who the enemies of freedom were and would have focused all his energies on keeping them at bay or defeating them if they crossed a certain line.  One might think that it would be important for the church leaders to want the church members to be politically free, at least in the United States, but, apparently, they have no concern about that issue. 

If someone is going to be free, then someone has to pay the cost to maintain that freedom, and the church was declaring that it would not pay that cost, and, presumably, would not encourage its members to defend their own freedom.  The church headquarters (perhaps accompanied by the members) became a free rider, depending on someone else, other people who were better Christians than we are, to maintain our freedom for us.  Perhaps that's the way the church leaders felt -- that they were entitled to experience the benefits of freedom at no cost to themselves or to anyone they knew.  But that is not the way it works in real life, as every adult understands.

It is a major problem already if anyone, the church included, is undecided about whether freedom is important or not.  It is even worse to actively decide that one will never help the cause of freedom, that defense of freedom being inconsistent with the "will to power" of church leaders, where, for one person or group to gain power, someone else must give up power and freedom. (Many of the German leaders of the time admired the "will to power" concept. Perhaps the church leaders of the time admired those German leaders and some of their philosophies.)

The church's pacifism was specifically helping the enemies of freedom, and, as we will see, the church often helped the enemies of freedom in more active ways. Today we have the twisted situation where the political left admires Islam for the very reason that it demands and maintains the obedience of the masses, as Islam repudiates nearly all the traditional principles of Western civilization.

In politics, often "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," meaning that for a civil government which wishes to take totalitarian control over its own citizens, those citizens become the enemy of this would-be dictatorial government, putting totalitarian Islam in the role of the government's friend while the citizens are the enemy. Islam helps the central government increase control over its people, without necessarily getting all the blame for doing so.

It seems that we have a similar situation with the LDS church. The central headquarters sees the membership as "enemies" to be conquered and exploited. Any totalitarian government such as socialism or communism can thus be viewed as an assistant to the central church reaching its goals. This is very twisted thinking, but it seems to happen at church headquarters. There is a war going on between central headquarters and the members, but the goal is to keep the members from being aware that the central headquarters has declared war on them in its search for its own version of illegitimate world power. 

This kind of deception and trickery may seem suicidal for a church headquarters, but that is only because we have not yet considered how the church central headquarters, as an entity, psychotically imagined that it could profit from World War II, no matter what the outcome might be.  If the church leaders pridefully decided that their message and their political organization could and should survive no matter what the underlying ideology of any future government might be, only then would they make the foolish choice to try to stay above the fray, hoping to rule religiously over whatever was left after a military conflagration.  As a practical matter, this would require the church headquarters to create an alliance with the expected future government, in this case the German Third Reich. A stable alliance between good and evil seems absurd, but the church leaders seemed to imagine that they could do the impossible.

Perhaps the church leaders were looking at the Roman Catholic Church as their model which manages to have church members in almost every kind of country where government ideologies of every sort are in power.  We have the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia.  We have the Catholic churches in South America which have adopted and incorporated local saints and miracles and beliefs into the basic religion.  But what this means, of course, is that there are perhaps a hundred different versions of the Catholic Church in a hundred different countries, some more idolatrous than others, but none of them adopting the full Gospel of Christ.  Perhaps the LDS leaders decided that if the Catholics could do it, then the Mormons could do it too, adjusting the Gospel parameters as needed at every different set of borders it crossed.  But this is not the Gospel, this is nothing but opportunism.  If every version of the Gospel is different and none of them match the original Gospel of Christ, then you have nothing but a big mess, with each country group being in its own varying stages of apostasy and deviation.

Save missionaries but not members

If the church felt that it needed to save the American missionaries who were sent to Germany, why would it not just as much try to save the German members in Germany? What exact kind of class system is the church trying to enforce here? Are the missionaries to be considered the diplomatic and military agents of the church central headquarters bureaucracy and so they deserve special treatment over the regular members in Germany? Isn't every member a missionary? That seems like very bureaucratic thinking, not Christian thinking, especially if the church imagines that it operates above all worldly rules.

In those early times near the beginning of World War II, when everyone could see that there was going to be a great conflict, the LDS church at least took the action to remove its missionaries from Germany and other places in Europe.  One might think that if the church were actually interested in doing the best thing for its church members no matter where they were, temporary missionaries or not, it would also have invited as many church members as possible to leave their soon-to-be war-torn countries, and sponsored their trips to the United States or to some other place where they would be safe from this coming hellish experience. 

But the LDS Church did not do that.  One might think that the LDS Church would be happy to welcome Jews, as part of the house of Israel to be gathered, especially those who had become church members who wished to leave Germany, seeing the handwriting on the wall that their fate was likely going to be very bad. (There is some historical mention that one of the church first presidency counselors at the time, J. Reuben Clark, had strong anti-Semitic feelings.  That certainly does not well befit a member of the Mormon first presidency.)

One might especially think that Jews who had become Mormons would be especially vulnerable and therefore especially suitable for transporting out of Germany before the great conflicts began.  But none of this happened.  The church only brought its formal representatives home and gave no help whatsoever to any church members or any Jews who wished to leave that quickly-deteriorating place. Apparently, the church even specifically denied support for any requests for visas. As a result, many of the church members died from battle situations, and others, the most pitiful of all, killed their children and themselves rather than experience coming under the control of the invading Russian army or living under the control of the German army.  In other words, the church behavior was responsible for numerous suicides of desperate church members who should have been aided in leaving that terrible place. (There were no romantic Mormon "Sound of Music" last-minute escapes from Germany and Austria that I know of.)

The logic seems to be, as I've hinted at above, that the Church wished to stay on good terms with the leaders of the Third Reich so that it could benefit from being allowed to have members remain after the battles were over. This seems to be assuming that the Third Reich would win. This almost puts the church the situation of rooting for the Western Allies to fail. That meant doing things to individuals, sacrificing their interests, simply because sacrificing those individuals would prove to the Third Reich that the Mormons could be counted on as dependable citizen/slaves after the Third Reich took power.  At this point, such thoughts seem to be total madness, and only in the fevered brains of "power at all costs" church leaders could this make an ounce of sense.  I recall reading that there were a few minor cases where Mormons were given some small preferences by the German leaders based on their protestations of loyalty, even though one cannot reconcile the freedom-loving Gospel with the murderous dictatorship of the Third Reich where millions of people were killed simply because they preferred freedom and were not sufficiently obedient to the rising dictators.

If we move ahead to the time after the battles were over and Europe had been divided up between the Allied powers and the Russian army, and Germany had been divided into eastern and western sectors, then we see a continuation of this "diplomatic" pandering to the ruthless communist dictators which now controlled East Germany.  It seems to me that all the events surrounding the building of the Freiberg Temple are not something to celebrate but should be repented of and atoned for.

To the extent possible, all of those church members in East Germany should have been assisted to get out of that satanic place.  I don't know how much could have been accomplished before the Berlin wall went up, but it seems possible that large numbers of them could have escaped if they were assisted in some way. (Apparently the church leaders thought that it would be a feather in their cap to have some church members trapped in East Germany where they could theoretically act as a nucleus for spreading the church there later on.) But what a terrible cost the church headquarters seemed to expect these members in communist East Germany to pay to add power and prestige to the ambitious bureaucrats in Salt Lake City.

Perhaps when Ezra Taft Benson went to Germany right after the war and distributed aid to church members, that would have been a perfect time to get many of those church members out of that terrible place so that they could have lived normal lives.  I am assuming that many of those people could have escaped before the Berlin wall made that impossible. (Can anyone imagine Captain Moroni making a deal with the Gadiaton Robbers or the Lamanites to put the church members in bondage to them? How could the church leaders consider selling church members into bondage as something they should be proud of?)

Certainly after the Berlin wall was raised it would have been much more difficult to get those people out of that terrible place.  But, the idea that the church could "make a deal" with the East German dictators to allow a temple to be built there to meet some of the religious needs of the members seems like a really terrible solution on many levels. (We might recall that expensive temples are really unnecessary by Gospel standards. Getting one built in this terrible place is really nothing but a prideful act, a tarnished trophy.)

First of all, it was recognizing the Russian dictators as a legitimate constitutional government, even though it was totally antithetical to everything that the Gospel stands for.  The Communists were ruthless murderers and their Stasi secret police most likely harassed the Mormons as much as anyone else, and probably more.

Making that agreement and alliance of convenience with East German dictators and their Kremlin masters could do nothing but sully the Gospel and make any reasonable person wonder what the principles of the Gospel really were.  Were they really to be just another layer of government added on top of whatever secular/atheist government might be operating there?  So we have a supposedly Christian government with its tithing taxes overlaying an atheist communist government with its taxes , widespread property confiscation, and ruthless controls? It is ideologically impossible to be a good communist and a good Mormon at the same time; those principles simply cannot coexist in the same brain or society consistently.

But, worst of all, the church was willing to use its influence in the United States to hurt the freedom impulses and activities of the United States, hoping to curry favor with the corrupt dictators in East Germany and Russia, the church trading its influence over American society to weaken that society and strengthen the Communists.  This seems simply unforgivable.

This all happened surrounding the MX missile issue.  The United States had decided to build a vast series of missile storage facilities and missile silos interconnected by roads and railroad tracks.  The idea being that one could hide hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles in perhaps a two-state area, and if those missiles were constantly on the move, the Russians could never know where all the missiles were.  The idea was that no imaginable number of missiles shot from Russia could ever take out all of the US missiles, leaving a goodly number left for a return strike.  This is the maximum version of the Mutually Assured Destruction strategy that the great powers were pursuing at the time. 

Because these missiles were to be placed in Nevada and Utah, the LDS Church took it upon itself to do everything in its power to stop that missile complex from being built in the first place.  Presumably the LDS Church was also acting as a negotiator with the East German government, promising to try to end or minimize this threat to Russian international power in exchange for being given permission to build a temple in East Germany.  This is a terribly unbalanced bargain from any angle, and can't cannot be considered anything but treasonous to the interests of the United States by the LDS Church which appointed itself a fifth column movement to act on behalf of the Soviet government within the United States.  As far as I know, the church never suffered for this disgusting anti-American activity, in pursuit of its tiny little corrupt interest in East Germany, but it should have.  In the end, the church did stop the building of that giant missile complex, and a much smaller number of missiles were placed in Wyoming, I believe, but they were far more vulnerable to a Soviet first strike than anything would have been in Nevada and Utah.

One of the strangest parts of this transaction is that we had Gordon B. Hinckley arguing that it would be terrible to have all of the construction workers coming into Utah to disrupt the people there. (This is nothing but a big lie as is common in normal politics.) These presumably American construction workers were portrayed as being an evil and satanic influence of low morals who would greatly damage the state and its people.  In fact, the more likely result would be that these were good people who would be coming here to do this complicated work, and many of them would likely become good church members when they came in contact with the church.  That is the strategy today in the days of the expanding "Silicon Slopes" businesses in Utah. However, this foolish (and highly unchristian, even xenophobic) argument about the low quality of the workers was necessary to bolster the foolish argument against building a missile system in the first place.  This scorn for all the outsiders was nothing but a very poor excuse for trying to stop the missile installations for what the church saw as its own long-term political interests in ruling the world -- one of Satan's temptations to Christ which the Savior naturally resisted.

One of the arguments proffered by Hinkley was that the church did not wish to have its headquarters unit anywhere near the potential blast zones for these missile systems.  This "not in my backyard" attitude indicated that the Mormons were not willing to sacrifice anything to support the freedom of the United States.  One might debate whether the missile system was the best solution to defending the United States, but that was not the issue the church raised. (Maybe the church could have allowed the missiles to be installed and then prayed that the heavens would intervene to make sure that the missile system was never needed, but that would not have matched with their long-term plans to merge with all other governments of the world.)   It simply, in typical pacifist fashion, wanted nothing to do with any of these kinds of defensive systems.  The real truth, of course, was that the church was negotiating away American freedom interests for its own selfish interests to remain a religious power in East Germany and presumably in Russia as well.  I find this disgusting.

People may wonder why I am so adamant that any kind of priestcraft is bad, without exception.  The problem is that as soon as anyone gets these foolish ideas in their heads of taking over the world, they start bending every principle of righteousness to achieve that disgusting goal.  They want to do what Christ clearly avoided in every possible way, but was extremely successful, nonetheless.

As a joke in a Beatles movie, there is a scene where two government scientists are saying that they are trying to "get a government grant to take over the world."  This was intended to be funny, of course, but here we have the LDS church doing exactly the same thing, imagining that it can tax its own members enough, that, with clever diplomacy, it can become a world power, operating as just another ideological and practical level on top of all the corrupt secular governments which are already in place, which the church happily recognizes in any form, just so that it can be allowed to operate and extract another level of taxes and obedience out of the exact same people who are being exploited by the secular governments. (This kind of mixing of ideologies is obviously perfectly incoherent and impossible, but the church leaders saw no logical difficulty in carrying out this bizarre plan. Were they so ignorant concerning totalitarian governments that they imagined that they can become the state religion to an atheist communist Russia, replacing the centuries-old Russian Orthodox church which had already been completely subverted by the Russian Communists?). 

There are so many things wrong with this that it's hard to even list them all.  But the church does not seem to have changed its strategy at all from the World War II times.  It would just as quickly forget about building "Zion on this American continent," and the principles of our Constitution, and every other principle of the Gospel if by so doing it could gain some earthly power and wealth.

Why would any informed member want to be part of such a demented plan? This might even explain why some people leave the church, although they may not be able to clearly state their reasons. With this kind of absurd goals and reasoning driving the church, that is just another reason why the church has to keep all of its internal operations very secret, whether it is its long-term plans for "diplomacy" or its long-term plans to extract the maximum amount of money from the members to launch some of these ambitious diplomatic initiatives. A money horde of $200 billion is not enough to take over the world, but it might sound like a good start. This is a far more likely reason for the church's behavior in stockpiling this money. It is truly absurd for the church to be claiming that it is saving money for the second coming. That argument does not pass the laugh test, since all of its land titles and paper assets would probably disappear overnight in that cataclysmic situation.

I might mention that in the MX case the church claimed to be trying to defend its temple and its headquarters in Salt Lake City in its arguments against the missile complex.  But, in truth, it was condemning itself and demonstrating its past corruptions of the Gospel by doing so.  The church needs no central bureaucracy and needs no temples to operate.  The church is intended to be worldwide, not a regional tribal Sanhedrin.  It had already corrupted the Gospel by even setting up a huge bureaucracy and a fixed headquarters and defending a temple in the same way that the law of Moses priests defended the temple of Herod as the symbol of their power, or as any other pagan priests defended their temples and idols. There is nothing but corruption here.

Naturally the church wanted to defend the progress it had made in building its One-World religious government, but that is not something it should have been defending.  It should never have constructed this bureaucracy and worldly government in the first place, so here it was using illegitimate means to protect something which was itself illegitimate.  If people have very bad feelings about the church today, they have plenty of good reasons to have those feelings.  The church has done terrible things and apparently will continue to do terrible things until the whole structure is torn down, just like the law of Moses was obliterated by the coming of Christ.

Notice now that the church leaders have recently decided to go along with the statists/Socialists and help attack the US Second Amendment by forbidding any concealed carry firearms in their facilities. 

The bad people will quickly learn that the LDS churches are now supposed to be gun free zones – and that always attracts murderous criminals. Many members may not care, some will willingly comply, while that may be the last straw for some people, and other people will simply ignore the new rule and continue with their concealed carry habits. 

There will surely be a few far-left church members who will think it is a great idea to ban guns and help the anti-American socialists, but the pacifist, hate-America crowd is not really the group that I hope the church is trying to placate.  I think it's interesting that a third or a half of the young people in the nation think that other countries in the world are better places to live than the United States.  All that really does is show how completely ignorant and foolish they are. They know nothing about the rest of the world.  They know nothing about our country in comparison to the rest of the world.  This demonstrates that our secular civics lessons have been useless or worse. There is no adequate process in place to emphasize the importance of freedom and the place of the United States in maintaining freedom internally and in the world. 

This constant US movement leftward is just another one of the catastrophes that are about to destroy this country, and the church cares nothing about it.  They are simply trying to get along with the powers-that-be and keep collecting their money. This implies that the lawyers running the church don't believe in the gospel but do believe in collecting money through any means necessary, and they really don't care what happens later on.  They will be like the dictators of Latin America as in the case where the president of Mexico simply stole $2 billion from the treasury when he left office as president of Mexico.  It had a terrible effect on their currency, but he certainly did not care about that, and others had done it before.  This one person was going to be rich for life and he didn't care about anything else.  I think the church leaders have about the same attitude, like the "presidents for life" around the world who loot their countries.   We now seem to have pretty good proof that the church has hoarded at least $124 billion, and the real number may be closer to $200 billion.  And this is all in cash, with all the real estate and other types of investments added on top of that for another unknown number of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Where is the church heading?

The epitome of the LDS strategy these days seems to be to become just like the Russian Orthodox Church.  There are many state churches or semi-state Christian churches around the world that the LDS Church might use as examples of how they would like to operate, but the Russian Orthodox Church seems especially appropriate.  The Russian Orthodox Church became a state church under the Czar's and remained a state church under the atheistic Communists after the revolution and the overthrow of the Czars.  Of course, the Communists, especially in the person of Stalin, tried to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church, blowing up hundreds of churches to try to rid the land of the scourge of religion (a competitor to his absolute power).  However, in times of great distress as when the German army attacked Russia, it suddenly seemed convenient to have a church available around which to rally the citizens and the troops, mouthing calls to defend the church and the motherland and other such patriotic slogans.  Asking people to defend the mass murderer Stalin and his atheist beliefs did not seem to stir up much enthusiasm among the populace.

Apparently even the most atheistic and brutal dictatorship such as the Russian government under Stalin finds it convenient sometimes to have a state religion component.  Apparently, the claims of atheism and their promise of their communistic heaven on earth are not really very convincing on such eternal issues as death and the afterlife.  The proletariat seems to still worry about the consequences of death and the nature of the afterlife.  Apparently, having a state church available which provides a way to burn candles for the dead is a very useful social outlet for various kinds of anxieties.

Of course, the Russian Orthodox Church is completely compromised, being mostly staffed by Russian secret police operatives as opposed to actual monks from real monasteries.  The LDS Church could expect to be as thoroughly compromised in any place where it plans to become the titular state church.  Such a church must be thoroughly domesticated and compromised or it cannot coexist with Satan's minions in government.

The fact that the LDS Church is so foolish as to imagine that it could retain any more than a shadow of true Christianity and still function as the recognized state church in an atheist state indicates that the church leaders are extremely uneducated about the world and the workings of Satan.  That alone would be a good enough reason to get rid of these misguided leaders who are trying to make themselves the new kings of the earth, as though they were authorized by Christ to do so. 

Perhaps the LDS Church is thinking that as long as it has many millions or even billions of followers it can claim, then it doesn't really matter if the essence of the Gospel has been thoroughly corrupted and taken over and claimed by Satan's manipulative minions.  Obviously, if the Church were to present this as their world strategy and request a sustaining vote from the members, they would get very few votes, especially in Utah where rugged individualism and freedom are still considered valuable goals and traits.  In the one-worlder fever swamps of such places as Washington, DC or the European Union headquarters in Brussels, Belgium they might get a few votes from the one-worlders gathered together there, some of whom might be DNA or cultural Mormons, but otherwise I think such a vote would only serve to clarify just how absurd our current church leadership has become. 

It is hard to understand what President Nelson might mean by his "hinge point" rhetoric concerning the future of the Church as we commemorate the 200th anniversary of the restoration of the Gospel, but it seems highly likely that his vision is nothing more than to become a replacement and claimed upgrade to the Russian Orthodox Church and all similar pseudo-Christian churches seen around the world.

When the church leaders begin their planning logic for Church administration with the assumption that some kind of communism or communalism is a necessary part of the Gospel, they have already lost their way as they try to drag a few million Mormons along with them on this fool's errand.  At this point, the fact that the church is still small becomes a blessing instead of a curse, since as long as the church is small it cannot do nearly as much damage as if it were larger.  In a larger incarnation, it might provide even more protective coloration for the minions of Satan who wished to control the world, including choosing to rent or buy religious respectability as part of their machinations, and would appreciate being blessed in their evil projects by an organization which calls itself the true Church.

Part of this delusion is the church leaders imagining that their building up a giant international bureaucracy will somehow lead us to the situation where:

"For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem." Isaiah 2:3

President Hinckley imagined that the law would eventually go forth from the new Conference Center in Salt Lake City, that being one of the reasons given to build that structure.  But I believe he was delusional, since the "law" which is now going forth from the conference center, the ancient law of Moses, is a far cry from any message that Christ would like to see go forth.

Summary

Is it the mission of the Church to prepare many people to be good little citizen/slaves in a socialist or communist setting, the kind of world where Satan has almost complete control of everything, as seems to be their goal today. Or should they be preparing generations of Captain Moroni's who will do all in their power to maintain political freedom, if for no other reason than that free men can do more good with their lives than can slaves?