Why do we lie?

The church teaches the following in the Gospel Principles manual. Gospel Principles: chapter 31: Honesty

"There are many other forms of lying. When we speak untruths, we are guilty of lying. We can also intentionally deceive others by a gesture or a look, by silence, or by telling only part of the truth"

Why do people lie? why do you lie? why do any of us lie? In every example I can think of, when a lie is told there is something to be gained by the liar. There is something that gets avoided, perhaps a punishment is avoided, there is a consequence that is avoided. The result of a lie is something positive for the one that told the lie. 

As my shelf broke and I read the CES Letter and investigated its sources and dug in and learned disturbing fact after disturbing fact I started to ask myself. "The church says teaches that anti-mormon material is made up of lies and that ex-mormons are bitter angry people, so if these people are lying, what are they getting from the lie? what reason do they have to lie?" It seems to me that the only party that gains something here is the church. if they are able to make their members believe that all anti-mormon material is just lies or that ex-mormons are angry bitter people they keep their members from finding the truth. 

The typcial ex-mormon experience is this. 1. you find out some disturbing truth about the church. 2. you go and corroborate from church resources that it is in actuality true. 3. you share it with your family and friends. 4. you get told that you are a liar or that you're being deceived by Satan and that you need to forget the fact and just believe the church is true. 5. You are either persuaded for a time to "stay in the boat" or you have the courage to stand up and say "enough is enough".

There are people who have left the church or don't believe and have lied to get stuff out of the church, a name that comes to mind is Mark Hoffman, I'm not saying that there aren't bad people out there. what i am saying is that Jeremy Runnells doesn't seem like he is lying, he does allow his emotions and frustration leak into the CES Letter but you can corroborate everything that he points out.  

I ask myself, why did I have to go outside the church to learn the churches history? The church teaches a whitewashed version of its history. The only reason I can think of as to why they would teach a whitewashed version is because the church fears something in their history. Something that they want to hide because they know that if members learned about it they would leave. Which is exactly what is happening. people are leaving the church in droves and its pretty consistently because they grew up believing one thing and then discovered that its actually not the truth. For me I grew up believing the church was a certain way and then I woke up from the stupor that they had lulled me into and I walked away.

For me, it was a particular struggle, to discover that the leaders of the church had lied, probably because I felt like the church had turned me into a liar, because I defended their lies on my mission or in conversations with people. 

Here is just one example: Holland lied in a BBC interview about the penalties that used to be part of the temple covenants. Jeffrey R Holland Lying On Camera I have saved the timestamp in the link so you don't have to watch the whole thing. He very clearly tries to get away with "telling only part of the truth".

Why would he lie? because he knows that the church is weird and he's trying to protect some public image of the church. one of the biggest tells of a cult is that it has secret teachings that you don't learn about until you're already in the cult. the temples serve that purpose. its a "sacred" place that you're told you have to go if you want to gain salvation and you can't go there unless you get your "worthiness" permit. You can't learn about it in detail before going because what you learn there you promise never to talk about with anyone. all hallmarks of a cult.

 

To sum up, the church stands to gain a lot by painting anything negative or not faith promoting as a lie or as untrustworthy.

Kill, don't kill, who knows?

In 1 Nephi 3:7 it says "And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them."  

In Exodus 20:13 it says "Thou shalt not kill" which is pretty straightforward. There are no conditions placed on it. If you interpret the bible literally then you shouldn't even fight in a war. But even if you interpret that loosely to mean you shouldn't kill someone unless they are trying to kill you or someone you are protecting that's still pretty clear that killing should be avoided. 

In 1 Nephi 4:10-11 it says "And it came to pass that I was constrained by the Spirit that I should kill Laban; but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him. And the Spirit said unto me again: Behold the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Yea, and I also knew that he had sought to take away mine own life; yea, and he would not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord; and he also had taken away our property." 

Once again we have a changing, inconsistent, confusing Mormon God. First Nephi says that God always provides a way to keep his commandments. A few hundred years earlier, God said don't kill and didn't give any conditions. Then God changes his mind and says "go ahead and chop that guy's head off, he tried and failed to kill you and stole your stuff, and who cares it's only one guy, it's better that he dies than your kids dwindle in unbelief." 

Just think about that logically for a second. God could have provided all kinds of other ways to preserve the scriptures for the Nephites. He could have had Laban stay passed out drunk for a day or two while Nephi got the plates and left. He could have provided copies of the plates, certainly some scribe somewhere was copying the plates if they were important. Nephi already knew how to write. Lehi knew how to write. God could have made it possible for them to copy the plates as a scribe or something. Heck, God doesn't have a problem sending angels down with flaming swords to make people keep commandments, why couldn't he send an angel to make Laban give Nephi the plates? Why was his only option breaking one of his own commandments?  

Get out of the Boat!

Matthew 14:22

Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” “Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” “Come,” he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?” And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” 

Jesus wasn't afraid of getting out of the boat. He charted his own course and only got back in the boat if it was convenient for him. When Peter wanted to get out of the boat, Jesus said "come." He didn't care that Peter was in or out of the boat, only that he was learning and growing. When Peter started to sink into the depths, Jesus didn't say "I warned you it was dangerous out here; you should have stayed in the boat." Instead, Jesus took him by the hand and helped him navigate the rough seas. If anything, he reprimanded him for not having the faith to navigate life outside the boat on his own. They only got back into the boat when it was convenient. Peter left the boat and learned how to rely on the Lord in ways his companions never did because they stayed in the boat.  

The Jesus of the bible wanted us to love God and love our neighbors. He encourages us to leave what is comfortable, when we are ready, and try something new, so we can grow. If we sit in the boat our whole lives, then we miss out on things that could bring us greater joy, deeper connections and a more authentic relationship with God. Some might think that staying in the boat is what God commanded, or that things people do outside of the boat are going against God's will. Jesus said that the great commandments are to love God with all your heart, might and mind and love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:30-31). 

If you really love someone, and if they really love you, is that relationship based on conditions? Do you really feel love for someone that gives you a list of things you have to do or things you can't do? Do you have real relationships with someone like that, or is that just a relationship that causes constant fear? Fear of not being good enough or doing enough or fear of doing the wrong things? A relationship like that stunts your growth because you don't try new things because you are afraid. 

You develop your strongest relationships with the people who love you unconditionally and who encourage you to be your best self. God loves us unconditionally, he wants us to be our best selves, and we can only find out who we really are and become our best selves by getting out of the boat and walking through the rough seas while reaching for Jesus' hand only when our faith starts to fail us. 

Compare those thoughts with this, "Brothers and sisters, stay in the boat, use your life jackets, and hold on with both hands. Avoid distractions! And if any one of you have fallen out of the boat, we will seek you, find you, minister to you, and pull you safely back onto the Old Ship Zion" - Russel Ballard

Pay your tithing!

The few times I helped count tithing we counted somewhere between $5,000 and $8,000 in donations on average each week. If you do some googling you can find other financial secretaries who report similar numbers in average wards and much more in rich wards.[1]

The church reports there are 30,940 wards and branches in the world, 15,276 of those are in Canada, the UK and the USA. The wards in those areas are going to typically be able to average $5,000 a week. Wards in places like central Africa or South America probably much less. If we assumed that just those richer wards were doing $5,000 per week in tithing then that's still at least 4 billion a year in tithing, just from half of all the wards in the world. This is all just to set the stage for the next paragraph so that you can see the numbers below are reasonable.

The best estimates for how much tithing the church brings in each year, since the church isn't transparent, range from $7 billion a year [2] to $30 billion a year [3]. If we run some numbers that's either an average of $225,000 per ward or $969,000 per ward. According to church officials, the church spends about $5 billion per year running the church[4], so that includes things like maintenance, utilities, salaries for church employees, salaries for the prophet, apostles and seventy [5], costs for maintaining temples, paying mission presidents, paying for missions, printing materials, broadcasting stuff. All the things. $5 billion divided by the number of wards means each ward needs to supply at least $162,000 per year to keep running the church. That still should leave $50,000-$75,000 per ward for a budget, every ward in the world could have the same budget of $50,000-$75,000. That would cover all kinds of amazing activities for adults, youth, everyone, people would want to be a part of the church just because it was fun with budgets like that. So why do most wards get more like $8,000-$12,000? [1] Why do most wards have to do fund raisers so that kids can go to camp or a group movie or something?

Maybe this is why, instead of supporting members and making the church somewhere people want to spend their free time, the church takes all that extra money and buys land, hotels, and cattle:

$148 million beach front hotel in Maui (2021)

$210 million Washington Cattle Ranch (2021)

$50 million Texas Ranch (2020)

$76 million California industrial buildings (2019)

$129 million London Office building (2019)

$120 million Atlanta Apartments (2018)

 

Chicago apartment building (2018)

$100 million Dallas Raytheon campus (2017)

  
$120 million Apartments in Philly (2014)

$562 million Florida cattle ranch (2014)

 

Now, I wouldn't argue anything if the church was using all this land to grow crops and end world hunger, but they aren't doing that. The church already owns 2% of Florida [6], but we don't hear about how the church is solving hunger problems with that land. What are they doing? Why would God want land in downtown Chicago or beach front property in Maui?

So we pay our tithing, clean the buildings, donate to fund raisers, and our wards get minimal budgets with barely enough for a few youth activities and maybe a ward party around Christmas time while the church keeps the rest to buy up land, hotels, and apartment buildings. Is this really how God is building up his kingdom on earth?

[1] https://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon565.htm

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/mormon-church-earns-7-billion-year-tithing-analysis-indicates-flna939844

[3] https://www.sltrib.com/religion/local/2017/10/14/historian-digs-into-the-hidden-world-of-mormon-finances-shows-how-church-went-from-losing-money-to-making-money-lots-of-it/

[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mormon-church-amassed-100-billion-it-was-the-best-kept-secret-in-the-investment-world-11581138011#:~:text=Clarke%20declined%20to%20disclose%20the,collectively%2C%20total%20about%20%245%20billion

[5] https://kutv.com/news/local/mormonleaks-web-page-posts-information-about-living-allowance-of-lds-general-authorities#:~:text=In%20accordance%20with%20approved%20procedures,increased%20from%20%24116%2C400%20to%20%24120%2C000

[6] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2014-03-06-os-mormon-florida-land-deal-sealed-20140306-story.html#:~:text=The%20Mormon%20church%20through%20its,was%20announced%20in%20November

If you really want to dive into all this take a look through this http://www.mormonthink.com/tithing.htm much more detail and much more analysis.