There is just a few things I find hypocritical:
-I think its great for SLC and I really enjoy going there but I think City Creek is over the top. I also find it hypocritical they are profiting off of the sale of tea, coffee and alcohol.
-There are reports that based on estimates of what the church makes through tithing money that the church themselves is not paying out 10% to relief efforts or charitable items. The churches finances are all secret so there is no way to verify this.
-I don't mind GA's given a salary but I hear stories of "insider trading". Where GA's or their family member start purchasing land around where temples are going to be built before they are announced to the public. Temples usually drive up property values.
So some of this stuff to be honest it pure speculation. Which is why I think the church should just open up the financial documents and be clear about everything.
As for City Creek, I've never been there. . . . but I would guess it fits in with the general trend in America towards a third-world class system involving an ever-more-prospering elite "governing civil management/corporate management" class, and a declining leige class. Clearly, City Creek is a necessary high-end hangout/island with utility for isolating the privileged from the ruled, and we need more of these in every city in America.
I am in this issue with both feet on the side of Beantown's recommendation for accountability to the people from LDS "authorities".
Once upon a time. . . . and this is an absolutely true story. . . . someone wrote to me about a local. . . . which is to say a "national" level, the Philippines to be exact. . . . Presiding Bishop's misdeeds with the Church funds, expecting me to be able to do something about it. I personally knew the people involved, the complainer and the "Presiding Bishop".
I was a nobody. If I went walking in any "Somebody"'s office to present the complaint and ask for someone to "look into it", I knew nothing would be done. I wrote my own. . . . anonymous. . . letter, trying my best to mimic someone who was in possession of facts and capable of making them public, and sent it to the one person I knew who could not afford to ignore it, personally. . . meaning who could really be held responsible in the public eye. I felt like a blackmailer, maybe I was.
I knew the offending Philippine "Presiding Bishop", had been to his house a number of times because he lived in my tracting area, and he was just that willing to come out on the street and invite us in. I knew the culture that prevailed, and I knew how he fit into that culture. In the Philippines you'd be hard-pressed to find someone "qualified" for the job that wouldn't just do stuff like that expecting the Church to work like the government does, and like corporations do, over there.
I knew the complainer was a simple soul who just thought somehow the Church would be different. I might not be such a simple soul, but I think the Church should be different, too.
I was kinda impressed that shortly after my blackmail letter was sent, the problem was "resolved", at least to the extent of installing a new Presiding Bishop over there. Can't say if they found someone who was "different".
