May 2014

The Salt Lake Tribune recently reported that “In the year and a half since the LDS Church lowered the minimum age for full-time missionary service, the Utah-based faith has seen its proselytizing force swell from 58,500 to more than 83,000. That’s a 42 percent leap.” And yet the resulting increase in convert baptisms is a mere 4 percent. Clearly, there is a ‘saturation point’ for Mormon missionary effectiveness – just as there is for double-glazing salespeople. The numbers of missionaries serving will of course drop back over the next year or two. Read the full story here.

Meanwhile, despite the many welfare projects and humanitarian aid the Mormon Church undertakes, it doesn’t appear to care very effectively for its own, as “120,000 LDS children are malnourished.” The Church seems to be getting everything wrong. Read the article here.

Now, the Church wants its members to donate even more money, in order to feed all these malnourished LDS children – ‘Donate Today to Nourish a Child’ – when the Church can already easily afford to feed them all, over and again, from money already donated to the Humanitarian Aid Fund, Welfare Fund, and Fast Offering Fund (much of which sits on deposit doing nothing). While these LDS children effectively starve, the Mormon Church builds shopping malls and apartment blocks. Mormonism is not the ‘true Church’, it is rather a ‘true corporation’ (Corporation of the President); it is a business organisation that does not live up to the standard that Mormons presume. In the UK alone, balance sheet figures carried forward from 2011 to 2012 (2012-13 would not load), were as follows: The Humanitarian Aid balance was £447,000; the Fast Offering Fund balance was £203,000; the Welfare Fund, now renamed ‘Farmland Reserve UK Ltd’, which has separate accounts (2012 did load), carried forward £79,101,000 to 2013. And that is just for the UK, never mind the rest of the world. Yet they can’t afford to use any of that to feed their own – let alone any of the non-Mormon children who die every minute of every day, for the want of fresh water or a bowl of rice.

The amount actually expended by the Mormon Church over the last few years on aid may well be several millions of dollars, but the figure is miniscule when compared with the many billions of overall income and assets that it enjoys. People are more important than secular projects.

On top of all that, according to reports, BYU can’t even get a student ‘gay survey’ question right! They started out with a question that doesn’t even recognise the fact that anyone is actually gay:

What is your sexual orientation?

• I am heterosexual, but I struggle with same-sex attraction.
• I am heterosexual and do not struggle with same-sex attraction.
• Other, please specify:

Then they later changed it to read:

What is your sexual orientation?

• I consider myself heterosexual and I struggle with same-sex attraction.
• I consider myself heterosexual and I do not struggle with same-sex attraction.
• I consider myself homosexual, bisexual, or transgendered.
• Other, please specify:

(“For the record: It’s transgender, not “transgendered.” Furthermore, transgender is a gender identity, not a sexual orientation.”)

Finally, they changed it yet again, to end up with:

Do you experience same-sex attraction?

• Yes
• No
• Other, please specify:

“Now we’ve reverted back to the original problem: Suggesting that gay people, in the minds of the Church leaders, don’t exist. They are merely straight people who “experience” gay feelings.” The Mormon Church is still in the ark – so to speak – which by the way, is another thing they actually still believe in (see note NOAH – April 2014). Read the full article here.