Welcome to FR, Mr. Waterman.

As you stated in your article, "I wanted to include the following information in the essay above, but the piece was already so long I didn't have the heart to put you readers through a longer stretch."......the excerpt I DID post is quite long, thus the emphasis on certain points. As I explained, a lot of readers are inclined to see a long post and rather than wade through it, will move on. I feel that the information you have made available is of interest to the readers of the mormon threads.

As to the "meat" of the article, I pull this quote from you...You can’t claim Christ as the head of your church if you have to first petition the State for permission to exist.

I'm sure I am speaking for many when I change it just a little.."You can’t claim Christ as the head of your church if you have to ~~first petition the State for permission to exist~~ answer to a leadership consisting of businessmen and attorneys and a "prophet" who requires a "sustaining vote".

Council on the Disposition of the Tithes

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Council on the Disposition of the Tithes (also known as the Council on the Disposition of Tithing) is a leadership body in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, composed of the First Presidency, the Presiding Bishopric, and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The Council determines how the tithing funds of the church will be spent. The Council oversees revenue, investments and expenditures valued at billions of dollars per year.

While the Church employs an independent auditing department which provides an annual report to the Church^[1], it has not published full financial reports since 1959.

The Council was established by church founder Joseph Smith, Jr. on 8 July 1838.^[2] As of April 2009, the members of the Council are:

Thomas S. Monson, President of the Church University of Utah. BA Business management
Henry B. Eyring, First Counselor in the First Presidency Doctorate in Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Second Counselor in the First Presidency started studying engineering at 18 but later continued in Business Administration in Cologne, Germany, graduated from the International Institute for Management Development,Lausanne, Switzerland.
H. David Burton, Presiding Bishop University of Utah, BA economics, MA Business Administration from the University of Michigan
Richard C. Edgley, First Counselor in the Presiding Bishopric BS, political science from Brigham Young University, MA business administration from Indiana University
Keith B. McMullin, Second Counselor in the Presiding Bishopric ??
Boyd K. Packer, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles Doctorate in educational administration from BYU, 1962
L. Tom Perry, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles Graduated from Utah State University in 1949 with a B.S. in business.
Russell M. Nelson, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles Medical Doctor with specialty as Cardiac Surgeon.
Dallin H. Oaks, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles Brigham Young University in accountingin 1954, and the University of Chicago Law School in 1957.
M. Russell Ballard, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles Prior to his call as a full-time Church leader, Elder Ballard had interests in the automotive, real estate, and investment businesses.
Richard G. Scott, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles George Washington University, BS in Mechanical Engineering.
Robert D. Hales, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles received degrees from the University of Utah and Harvard Business School.
Jeffrey R. Holland, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles MA in Religious Education from BYU. Yale University, Ph.D in American Studies
David A. Bednar, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles BA in communication, MA BYU in organizational communication, Doctorate in organizational behavior from Purdue University
Quentin L. Cook, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles Utah State University , BA in political science, Stanford Law School
D. Todd Christofferson, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles BA from Brigham Young University, J.D. Duke University School of Law
Neil L. Andersen, Member, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles MBA degree, Harvard Business School.

I invite you to stick around and join in the discussion here. We welcome new voices to the debate.

Oh, I don’t fault you at all for not excerpting more of my piece, Greyfox. It is most certainly very long, and as you mention, even the part you excerpted is looooong. Conciseness is not one of my better traits.

I hope nothing I said led you to think I was critical of your offering the excerpt, and I do understand your motivation for highlighting certain lines. But when I saw Elsie’s recommendation that it be put into a word processor and straightend out, I felt a mention of where it could be found would be helpful. I’m very grateful to you for plugging it.

(That piece, by the way, has had an astonishing run, getting more than 11,000 hits in its first twelve days and thousands more since, so I do believe Daymon Smith’s research has hit a chord with a lot of people.)

Thanks for the welcome. I was an early reader of FR, but parted ways during the Bush administration because I’m a traditional conservative (constitutionalist)and FR seemed to have skewed heavily toward a Neocon philosophy in those days.

I concur completely with your reworking of my quote above. And MrReaganaut, I’m not at all upset with you, either. Happy to have stumbled onto this forum and happy to be aboard with you, mates.