[EDIT: 9/4/2015 2:01 p.m. MST] Update, within 24 hours of this blog reporting on the LDS Philanthropies video (and the author posting to Reddit), it was taken down by the user:
We did it! A little attention and a really bad philosophy has been removed. Of course, rather than let it simply vanish we have re-uploaded their video and relinked so that one could still understand the context that was once posted.
LDS people who gave your inheritance to the church rather than to your children, know that the church WILL NOT support this action (As it is questionably legal) [/Edit]
Original Post follows:
Our story tonight opens with a historical tale of one Rachel Ivins. Rachel was the daughter of a wealthy family of Quakers, but like many people who actually ‘got music in their souls’ she was too rambunctious for her family and, in a move they would blame on her sinful needing to sing hymns, she left the religion to join another. Like a caged canary flying out of its cage into a slightly bigger cage and tweeting its freedom to followers everywhere, Rachel joined the Mormon church.
A move, the would cause her family to disinherit her. She left her home with almost nothing and was taken in to the Mormon church a pauper. There she befriended Sally Kimball, one of Joseph Smith’s multiple wives and when she found out the leader of the religion was thinking of adding her to his harem, she left the faith and returned home.
Ten years would go by, and then she once again returned to the church, this time all the way in Utah. There she married the missionary who taught her, Jedediah “Jeddy” Grant, who would die 9 days after she gave birth to a son, Heber. Heber would later become the prophet who would remove “Beer” from the Mormon menu.
Mormon church manuals have several stories talking about the hard work ethic of this woman, as she, a single mother, would sew until her feet were too tired to work the sewing machine night after night so that she would not have to become a polygamous wife again, or return to her family leaving the faith she loved.
She is heralded as a righteous woman who sacrificed everything for what she believed. And she’s not alone. The stories of families disinheriting people who joined the Mormon Church in the 1800’s are many, and Mormon leaders share them often.
When Hanna and Mary Joined the Mormon Church, their Father disinherited them
And I don’t care what faith you are, if you can’t handle your children believing something different than you so that you try to manipulate them with money, that is a “dick move”.
Which is why it is a bit surprising to find the Mormon Church, today, encourages members to do exactly that:
If they are worthy of their priesthood, they can then handle the inheritance and continue to do good. If they exercise their agency contrary to my beliefs then the option is that the entire inheritance will go to the church.”
Now we all agreed that it was a “Dick move” to try and manipulate kids with money, I mean, Rachel Ivins could have been living well, not deciding between becoming a 7th wife and wearing her fingers out on curtains for the 6th wife of a wealthy Mormon if her family had not disinherited her; but to then have the Church, itself, say “Give that money to us” is even worse.
Because even though this company encouraging this is called “LDS Philanthropies” it’s actually part of the Mormon Corporate Empire using the same logo, letterhead, and being part of the corporate structure.
And while they claim “One hundred percent of all donations are used to help the needy; overhead for administering aid is paid from the general funds of the LDS Church”, if you look for “LDS Philanthropies Statistics” all you find is a donation box for Statistics majors at BYU. It’s true, Google it. Google it.
You see the church has hidden all of its cash donations since 2010 when it was widely reported by a website, “Mormonthink” that they had only giving about $9 of aide per member per year to actual humanitarian aide; so now only total hours contributed are mentioned. And hours of service are good, but they aren’t a metric that would get you a grade on CharityWatch.org, a company that actually investigates claims about how much money goes to administration and other costs.
Further, as we stated before, donations to BYU are processed through LDS Philanthropies, so it’s very hard to believe that your check you made out thinking you were giving water to children dying of thirst in Africa, isn’t actually subsidizing a general authority of the church’s kid’s failing Econ 101 for the 4th time.
“I know Kearl is hard Tommy, but you have to actually go to the labs. That’s the secret, Tommy, the labs!”
Because, you see, families of church leaders get 100% paid tuition scholarships and that money would end up in the same giant cash-bucked as life-preserving water donations in the corporate structure.
Further, though, encouraging individuals to give their inheritance to your religion over their own family, is actually illegal in several areas under the term “undue influence”. It’s a law that was written to prevent con-men or psychics, or mistresses from stealing a families wealthy by slipping in at the end of someone’s life and making off with the family fortune through a few well placed hand jobs. Or, mind —-ery, that too. Whichever
In fact, one lawyer said on the subject when they learned about this video
I’ve drafted hundreds of wills and I’ve only once agreed to draft an estate that disinherited a child and the reasons were not punishment, but protection of the disinherited. In all other instances I’ve declined to assist in any kind of contingencies based on religious, marital, mission, criminal record tests/criteria. People rarely realize how disinheriting someone can create bad blood for generations. It is usually ruinous to a family. I have low regard for lawyers who assist with this ugly behavior, including the whores at LDS philanthropies.
So here is the thing, Mormon Church; you can either teach in your manuals that people who disinherit family members over belief are dicks who should be mocked mercilessly through the generations in classrooms of your church members, or you pilfer the dollars of dying believers from family members through advertising campaigns like this one; but you can’t have it both ways.
That would make you hypocritical. And we are all hypocritical at times. That’s true. We understand that. But there is someone who had something to say about that:
You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”
That’s right, Christ the Lord had a lot to say about Hypocrites, and I love the way that man reads it, so calm and soothing. I picture it more like “YE HYPOCRITES! ALL of you. ALL. So far from me, that I can look behind me to find you. Isaiah, man, he was right. You’re so out there!” Only in Arabic.
Mormon Church, I understand that you’ve a hard time being accepted as Christian; and Lord knows, people abuse that term for money all the time, by the way, have I mentioned I have a church too? You can donate to “Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption”, praise Jesus, and if you want to give us your inheritance, “sucks for your kids, don’t it”?
Mormon church, if you are rejecting the words you claim that Jesus said to Joseph Smith in the First Vision, meanwhile embracing Hypocrisy like this, I think it’s right to call you “not Christian”. You can’t reject the stone the foundation was meant to be built with by decrying individuals who disinherited their families, and then say give us your money; leave those little shits without a dime, oh and also:
Our family can be together forever, by the choices each family member makes (Song: Families can be together forever, sung by a child)
Instead, the slogan should be “Families can be together forever, unless you don’t do exactly what we tell you, then we’ll be Dicks, causing ruinous family relations for generations”.