Can we go after Mormons next?

They are just as annoying and more pervasive

Truth.

More pervasive? I've never seen a Mormon and you don't have to pay $500 just to read the first few pages of the book of Mormon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_7qTaGejuY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_%28LDS_Church%29

Members are expected to donate their time, money, and talents to the church, and those who have participated in the Endowment ceremony make an oath to donate all that they have, if required of them, to the Lord. To be in good standing and to enter the church's temples, church members are required to tithe their income to the church, which is usually interpreted as 10% of income.

Members are encouraged to fast once a month on Fast Sunday and to give the money they save by not eating two meals to the church; those who can afford to be more generous are encouraged to give more than simply the money saved as a fast offering.

All male members are expected to serve a two-year mission at the age of 19, though there are high standards of worthiness and physical and mental health that prohibit many men from serving. Women may optionally serve a mission if they are over the age of 21 and not married, as may older married couples.

Missionaries are expected to pay their own expenses while on the mission, often with assistance from family and friends. In the past, each missionary paid his or her actual living expenses, but this approach created a disproportionate burden on missionaries who were assigned to more expensive areas of the world. In 1990, a new program was introduced to equalize the financial responsibility for each missionary and his or her family. Now, all young missionaries pay a flat monthly rate which is then redistributed according to regional costs of living. The cost of a mission as of January 2006 is $400 per month, which covers food, lodging, transportation, and personal items. As families now contribute to a general fund for missionary expenses, the sum is deductible under many nations' tax policies regarding charitable gifts.

Young people in the church are encouraged to save money throughout their childhood and teenage years to pay for as much of their mission as they can, although nearly all receive assistance from parents, family, or friends. Missionaries who cannot save the required funds may obtain assistance from their home congregation or from a general missionary fund operated by the church and contributed to by Latter-day Saints around the world. Married couple missionaries are expected to pay their own costs. In many areas, church members often invite locally-assigned missionaries over for meals to help reduce the overall expenditures of the missionary program.

Is it surprising that the same mind that would justify Mormonism would also:

spend time paying for a MutiLevel Marketing "business" (Amway, for example) when the statistics regarding it show that 99+ percent of those who get involved lose money, not to mention creating painful false expectations and wasting years of time in many cases

get married at age 21 right after returning from his mission because “the Lord revealed to him on his first date with X that she was to be his wife”

encourage his wife to quit her job and start having babies “because that is the Lord’s will” even though he does not have a reliable means of supporting their family and she has a great job

move from one city to another because he feels like the Lord has something for him to do there, even though job prospects there are inferior to those where he already lives, the cost of living is higher there, commuting distances are worse there

start taking anti-depressants instead of seeing a counselor who would help him to understand that his day to day pattern of living is virtually guaranteed to cause depression,

marrying young, starting a family too young, having too many kids, insisting on a single-income but living a double income life-style, etc.

The LDS Church will invest close to $1 billion when it remakes downtown Salt Lake City's two malls.

In Jan. 2006, Deseret News said, “since 1984, the LDS Church has donated nearly $750 million in cash and goods to people in need in more than 150 countries.”   That averages to $37.5 million per year or about $3-$4 per Mormon member went to the poor.   The total of $750 million in 22 years spent in cash in goods to people in need is only HALF what the church is spending on these malls. The Mormon church is spending less than 1% of its income to help the poor.  Is the Mormon church really a charitable organization?

An organization that spends 15-20 times more on real estate to develop malls than on helping the poor is, by any definition, a corporation, not a religion.  An average American Mormon gives thousands of dollars in tithing, yet only a few dollars of that donation is for the poor.

It seems to me that an argument can be made that the church is operating under cover of tax exempt laws which favour it over other business institutions in the project of money making. In addition, its members are not privileged to see any financial statements, as are those participating in other companies as shareholders or interested parties. I don't see how that is fair. Whether you have the words "Jesus Christ" in your organization's name or not, if you're in business, I don't see why you shouldn't have to play by the rules of business.

From whom did "the church" originally get the capital and wealth it has used to build up its business enterprises? From the members, paying their tithing. Whether those tithes were paid fifty years ago or five days ago, they have still facilitated the construction of the church's portfolio of business holdings.

Does refurbishing a shopping mall for Salt Lake City, for $1,000,000,000, really make sense in light of the church's claims for itself?

I cannot understand why members keep paying tithing. I thought Hinckley showed his true colors by spending $300,000,000+ on the new conference center. If there are 12 million Mormons does it really make a difference if a hundred get to see conference live as opposed to a thousand? Today I find out that the church is spending $1,000,000,000+ on the malls across the street from temple square.  Now I am not just confused - I am angry.

In just a few days it will be ten years since the start of my mission. I went to Mongolia and what Tal wrote about tithing and poverty rang true for me. There are gangs of street kids that roam around the city. There were no real charities there to help them out and the Mongolians were always shooing them away like flies. We were natural targets for them because not only were we Americans, we were also pretty much the only people in the entire country that wore suits! We must all be filthy rich, right? They used to follow us around sometimes and beg. Our oh so Christ like MP told us over and over that we were not to so much as talk to the street kids because they were distracting us from our real mission: to save souls. If we felt guilty about it then we were to donate any left-over money to the branch fast offering fund so that it could be administered in "the Lord's way." That was supposed to make us feel better.

Mongolia is a high desert, and so it is cold in the winter. I'm not talking about Utah cold either. I grew up in Alaska and I'll be damned if I wasn't freezing all winter long! During the winter these kids would live under the streets because that was where the hot water pipes were. All of the buildings were steam-heated from central boilers spread throughout town and so there were hot pipes in the sewers. One spring there was a flashflood and hundreds of these kids drowned. Did anyone care? Did Christ's true servants even so much as say a prayer for them?

It was common for these kids to sleep in the entrances of the apartment buildings. If they kept their mouths shut nobody would kick them out. Because they would beg from us our entrances seemed to have more of these kids in them than others. So here I am, a servant of Jesus Christ, with a pocket full of money and a kitchen full of food and starving homeless kids on the other side of my door. I CAUGHT HELL FOR LETTING ONE IN JUST ONE TIME!

Like so many missionaries I spent my 2 years feeling guilty. Guilty that my numbers weren't good enough, and all the normal missionary guilt. But on top of that I was made to feel guilty about these kids. If I helped them then I was "encouraging their homelessness." I was told that "if they get cold enough or hungry enough they will just go back home." If I let them be then I felt guilt because doing nothing offended my own human decency. Damned if you do and damned if you don't, you know?

So here are these kids sleeping, starving, and even shitting in my entryway and sure enough, one morning we find one of them dead. Mormonism is responsible for fucking each of us up in our own special ways, and for me this was it. I was really messed-up over this dead kid that we had just ignored on our way into our apartment the night before. I went to the MP and bawled my eyes out to him. He gave me a blessing and it kinda made things better - thats how brainwashed I was. I let a kid starve/freeze to death but it was ok because he was fast-tracked to the Celestial Kingdom.

President Spencer W Kimball said "it is an act of extreme selfishness for a married couple to refuse to have children when they are able to do so? When married couples postpone child bearing until after they have satisfied their material goals, the mere passage of time assures that they seriously reduce their potential to participate in furthering our Heavenly Father's plan for all his spirit children. Faithful latter day Saints cannot afford to look upon children as an interference with what the world calls, self-fulfillment. Our Covenant with God and the ultimate purpose of life are tied up in these little ones who reach for our time, our love and our sacrifices".

"How many children should a couple have?? All they can care for!!Of course, to care for children means more than simply giving then life. Children must be loved, nurtured, taught, fed, clothed, housed and well started in their capacities to be good parents themselves" (Dallin H Oaks).

"The pattern for family life instituted from before the foundation of the world, provided for children to be born to and nurtured by a father and mother who are husband and wife, lawfully married. Parenthood is a sacred obligation and privilege, with children welcomed as a heritage of the Lord (Howard W Hunter).

A mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a geographical administrative area to which church missionaries are assigned. Almost all areas of the world are within the boundaries of an LDS Church mission, whether or not Mormon missionaries live or proselytize in the area.

Geographically, a mission may be a city, a city and surrounding areas, a state or province, or perhaps an entire country or even multiple countries. Typically, the name of the mission is the name of the country (or state in the United States), and then the name of the city where the mission headquarters office is located.

All missionaries serve in a mission under the direction of a mission president, who, like individual missionaries, is assigned by the President of the Church. The mission president must be a married high priest in the Melchizedek Priesthood; his wife is asked to serve alongside him. Mission presidents are typically in their forties or older, and usually have the financial means to devote themselves full-time to the responsibility for three consecutive years. The church provides mission presidents with a minimal living allowance but it normally requires them to supplement it with their own funds. Often, the mission president must learn the local language spoken in the mission, as the missionaries do(although mission presidents today have either previously served a mission in the mission language or speak the mission language as their native language).

Each missionary companionship has a geographical area which may include part of a ward or branch, one ward or branch, or several wards or branches. The missionaries are responsible for preaching to the people in their own area. In a mission, the ecclesiastical line of authority is from the mission president down to the missionaries. The missionaries answer to the mission president directly, as opposed to the local branch president, bishop, or stake president.  Another type of mission exists where there are no organized stakes of the church in an area due to a relatively small number of Latter-day Saints living in the area. This may be the result of the church being relatively new in an area or may be the inescapable result of the church being established in a sparsely populated area of the world.

An area is an administrative unit of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which typically is composed of multiple stakes and missions. The areas outside the United States and Canada continue to be governed by area presidencies that are typically composed of general authorities and area seventies. Rather than living in Salt Lake City, the area presidency members in these areas reside in a headquarters city that is located within the geographic boundaries of the area. Each area presidency employs an executive secretary to assist in the administration of the area.

A district of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a geographical administrative unit composed of a number of congregations called branches. A district is a subdivision of a mission of the church and in many ways is analogous to a stake of the church. The leader of a district is the mission president, who selects a local district president as his agent. The district president may choose two men to assist him; the three together form the district presidency.

Districts are usually established where the church is new or where there are insufficient numbers of Latter-day Saints to organize a stake.

A stake is an administrative unit composed of multiple congregations in denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement. A stake is approximately comparable to a diocese in the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations. The name "stake" derives from the verse "enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitation: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes" (Isaiah 54:2). A stake is sometimes referred to as a stake of Zion.

The geographical area encompassed by a stake varies between countries and regions based on membership density. In Utah, a stake might encompass a few square miles in area. In contrast, a stake in another part of the world might require thousands of square miles to comprise a sufficient number of members.

At the end of 2006, there were 2,745 stakes in the LDS Church.

The stake is an intermediate level in the organizational hierarchy of the LDS Church. The lowest level, consisting of a single congregation, is known as a ward or branch. Stakes are organized from a group of contiguous wards or branches. A stake must be composed of at least three wards, and up to a total of sixteen congregations. Most stakes are composed of five to eight wards.

Each stake will hold a stake conference twice a year under the direction of the President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The stake president is usually instructed to preside in the absence of a general authority or to organize the conference under the direction of the general authority that will preside. The conferences are used to conduct stake business (primarily the appointment and sustaining of stake officers) and to disseminate counsel and guidance from the stake presidency. Speakers at stake conferences generally include the three members of the stake presidency and other stake members, called upon by the stake presidency, to speak on assigned topics. When a general authority of the church presides, he is the featured speaker.

tl;dr: We will continue expanding until every last person on Earth is a follower of our religion.

One at a time. And also, much more politically hazardous. It will work only if they know who we are (i. e. massive breaking of rules 1 and 2) because if not, then they will assume we're crazy christian fundamentalists.