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Thoughts on the Mormon church.

1. Their achille’s heel is that the top leadership (i.e. the 15 men in the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve) really does believe that they are God’s true representatives on earth. Any doubts on this are viewed as coming from Satan and quickly self-suppressed. As a result they’re constantly striving to be positive, up beat, and believing that all will work out in the long run with the Lord saving the church from whatever troubles come their way.

2. These men are very much groupthinkers and show tremendous deference/respect to those higher in seniority to themselves. From the time they are little children (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcFks_graPQ) they are taught to follow the most senior member of this body of 15 men who is the church president & called the prophet. Whenever the longest serving of these 15 men dies then the next-in-seniority automatically becomes the next prophet. That’s why since 1975 it’s always been a man over 80 years old and half of the time in the past 27 years its been a man over 90 years of age. Change is slow for them and loyalty to the prophet is paramount. The top 8 in seniority right now are all 79+ years old. Important policy decisions are made by these 15 men with the top 3 in the First Presidency expressing their general opinion to the Quorum and then each member of the Quorum from the most senior to the most junior in order expressing their opinion. Then once the prophet makes a decision then the rest rubberstamp it. The amount of influence on the process for anyone involved depends upon their seniority. It is very rare that any disagreements amongst themselves ever see the light of day outside of their quorum meetings and they present a united front always to the world.

3. Any problems with church history/doctrine are brushed under the rug and officially ignored. Consider the analogy of comparing the church as being the Windows operating system from Microsoft. In the early days of Windows there were tons of bugs that resulted in lots of crashes. Over time these bugs get fixed to provide a better end user experience. Some key components get re-written to work better for users. However these changes get implemented very slowly in order to not scare the end users away by having too much change at a time. Now imagine if Bill Gates had said around 20 years ago that Windows is a perfect operating system that will never change and never has any bugs in it. Anyone who complains about bugs gets berated as lacking faith. Anyone who publishes anything about bugs gets blocked from using Windows and gets denounced in the local community for being a heretic as everyone knows that Windows is a perfect operating system. The only acceptable way of resolving bugs is for a person to quietly go in for a 1:1 meeting with their local Microsoft representative for counseling on their weaknesses. And the level of credibility that a person has depends on how well they know and declare their belief by the Spirit of the Lord that Windows is perfect. Suppose that Windows just freezes up on you one day unexpectedly. The reason this happens is because you were a bad dumb user and its all your fault.

4. Good luck getting any concrete answer on any official church teaching on just about anything anymore. Let’s return to the analogy I provided above with Microsoft Windows. Suppose that some evil anti-Microsoft people had published books exposing bugs, experiences users had where the operating system crashed/froze or just didn’t work how they thought it should, or they heard some Microsoft manager or sales person tell them about some functionality which just didn’t work flawlessly. Or even worse someone got out a copy of Microsoft’s official Windows 2.0 manual and compared it to Windows 7.0 manuals and pointed out all the contradictions even though Bill Gates had promised that Windows would be unchanging forever. As a result the public communications staff at Microsoft decided to take a new approach of not publishing any features list anymore. How can a user complain that things have changed or that the functionality doesn’t work right if there is no official list of features anymore? If someone doesn’t understand a feature then they should go in 1:1 to meet with their local Microsoft rep (who themselves hasn’t been given any documentation) for answers. If a person doesn’t agree with a feature then they have a personal problem which could require disciplinary action if they ever share their concerns with other people. In the meantime Bill Gates and the top brass of Microsoft keep hush-hush in never answering any serious questions on product features. In addition everyone within Microsoft has taken an oath to be 100% loyal to Gates and to never question him on anything and to accept that anything Gates says is the truth and that nobody else on earth is authorized to officially declare what the functionality of Windows is. Sure they’ll still publish some fluffy advertisements showing a smiling person in front of their computer having another flawless day at the office running Windows. But there won’t be any technical details or any official guidance on anything substantive. With Mormon teachings/doctrines its like nailing jello to a wall to figure out exactly what the church believes on something.

My apologies to Microsoft on using them for comparison. I just picked on them instead of other alternatives because they are so well-known and their changes (and history of dealing with stupid end users + bugs) over the years are obvious to many people. If Microsoft had stayed small/insignificant then I would’ve used someone else ;)