The land in Florida is being used to raise cattle and crops used for welfare projects.
Okay, so the development at Deseret Ranch, FL. will exist entirely to stock Mormon Bishop's storehouses, then?
Here are a few problems I have with this idea:
(1) According to the CBS link, it already is a place where cattle and alligators are raised, and while that apparently will not entirely be going away, it
mostly will, to be replaced by housing units for over half a million people. If the point was to raise cattle and crops, then they're giving themselves far less space to do so than they would've had if they didn't plan to turn the area into some kind of weird Mormon metropolis.
(2) Related to (1), there is also this:
Deseret already is in six-year a legal battle with state regulators over whether it can charge public utilities in central Florida to use the water from a reservoir on its property.
"Deseret has had a vision for a long time of being a producer of potable water to sell to others," Lee said.
This, combined with their attempt to get the rights to a second reservoir on the property in order to secure water rights, says more about what they're about than any claims of purely humanitarian aid: They want to essentially run a water privatization scheme which would then allow them not only the access to the water needed for their vastly reduced crop and grazing land (and parks and whatnot which will be found on the 19,000 acres they've set aside for that purpose, which got Audubon Florida off their backs), but would allow them to charge others for the use of water that is now 'theirs'. That's the kind of thing that gets corporations like Nestle rightly protested around the world, because it's pretty supervillain-y to go into a place, buy up most of the land (remember, this is the largest single available piece of land in Florida, larger than Manhattan), secure 'water rights' with it, then charge people who are not connected to your corporate operations money to access their own water, since its yours now.
And you say that the moves made by the LDS Church/corporations are not about making a dependency, but making people independent? Is that why they've tried for six years (six years as of 2015...now I guess 9 years) to get the okay from the state to sell people their own water at a profit?
I don't know about you, but in every place I've ever lived (including the middle of the desert, where you can't mess around with such things), I've paid the city for water. I would be
very uncomfortable in a situation where the church (any church -- your church, my Church, somebody else's church) essentially
becomes the city and I have to rely it for such a basic life needs as water!
You are free to think that this is all benign and holy if you'd like, but to me this smacks of a kind of medieval relation of Church and State that the United States of America was
specifically founded to get away from, except corporatized in a way that distinguishes it very little from a purely secular, entirely profit-driven entity. So it rides a sort of line that makes it inherently untrustworthy to me, in the manner by which we can say that our fathers and mothers went into the desert following after St. Antony and St. Paul the Hermit because they did not want their religion to be contaminated with worldly goals. I suppose it's no mystery why Mormonism has never had and never will have monastics, but it's really a question of what kind of world you want to live in: I don't want to go to the Corporate Church of Mormon, and have my tithing used to strengthen it's Church-State-Corporation symbiosis, and then come home and pay my bills to the LDS Corporation, and go to my LDS job, or my LDS school, etc.
Again, when everything is dependent upon a person's relation to a 'church' which acts in a manner indistinguishable from a for-profit corporation, how can the resulting spirituality or place within a community be in any way healthy? That's true on the individual level, and when you expand things to the level of controlling a large swath of Florida, it is bound to become true on an even wider scale. That's not good. The LDS Borg is a
bad thing. Church-sponsored, corporately-run totalitarianism is the feature of fascist states, not democracies like the United States is supposed to be.
The Deseret Industries hire people who might otherwise have a hard tome finding work. It is a place where they can learn skills to find better paying jobs. The emphasis is not to create dependency, but independency.
See above. I don't buy it. If they were really so benevolent, why would they be trying to privatize everything so as to sell people their own water, vastly reduce grazing and crop land, and essentially turn the entire area into an LDS-run colony? They want their own rules, to be given to them because they'll be developing underdeveloped land starting 20 years from now into the 2080s. That's not independence for anyone but the Mormon Corporate Church.
The fact that they can do all this while also creating jobs for people shows that they are not entirely horrible, yes, but I would guess that if Goodwill Industries or another organization rooted in religion that does similarly were also buying up huge tracts of land, for-profit corporations, and so on as the LDS Church is, they would quickly find themselves in hot water as to the actual 'non-profit' status of their group. My view is merely that the LDS Church should not be exempt from the same heat when they act so very much like a monopolistically-minded profit-driven corporation merely because you personally happen to think that they are the true church of Jesus Christ on the earth. I am not a Mormon, so I don't believe that, and shady business dealings and goals don't get a pass from me just because true believers such as yourself fall back on making faulty religious claims when faced with opposition to your corporate church's plans to literally take over large swaths of the United States and set itself up as a parallel quasi-governmental entity in those places.
That being said I will not leave Christ's true church because I know it is the true church of Jesus Christ.
Right on cue!
Again, it's not about what
you believe -- it's about how
your church conducts itself.
Hardcore Scientologists believe that
they're in the only right organization in the world, too; does that then mean that their organization should be given a wide berth when it comes to operating their own quasi-governmental organizations, including
those which break the law? I would guess that your answer to that is "no", and that is quite a reasonable answer.
Again, I would only suggest that the LDS Church be held to the same standard, such that when it does underhanded stuff like using the donations that it receives for literally anything it wants to without having to tell donors about it, or tries to privatize Floridians' rights to their own water, or any of this other stuff that is in the grey area between illegal and just plain old hideously unethical (gee, kind of like a corporation!), it is no defense to say "But it's the one true Church of Jesus Christ on the earth!"
No it isn't. No it very much isn't. You're free to think that as a Mormon anyway, but that's not an actual answer to any of the criticism it rightly receives for its shadier activities.
