Author: KimberlyAnn
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints isn't a joy to it's members, it's a leech sucking the life-blood out of hard-working families financially, spiritually, and emotionally. One of the more insidious ways the cult oppresses it's victims is by making tithing mandatory for a temple recommend. No tithing, no temple recommend. No temple recommend, no celestial kingdom. No celestial kingdom, no eternal family. It's a sick religion that CHARGES families to be together in heaven.
Many members suffer terribly in order to pay tithing. We've read the horror stories of hungry people scraping together the last of their money to pay tithing instead of buying food. I lived a life like that many years ago.
When I was first married my husband was in the service and stationed in Coronado, California, a little piece of heaven on earth. He was a pitiful Lance Corporal and our paycheck totaled about $1,000 a month, and that included a housing allowance because no military housing was available for us. If you've ever lived in southern California, you know how expensive apartments are. We paid $475. a month for a flea-infested dump in a gang infested neighborhood of San Diego where drive-by shootings were par for the course and I was literally afraid for my life. We had $525 a month left for groceries, gas, car insurance, utilities and tithing. We didn't have a dime to spare.
When we went in for our first tithing settlement together, the Bishop didn't think we'd payed enough tithing - we were paying ten percent of his gross check, but the Bishop felt we needed to calculate the free meals DH ate every day on base and the cost of our health insurance. He said we needed to pay about $150. a month, or 15% of our gross check. My husband, being a convert, said to me after we left the Bish's office that the Bishop was "full of shit". I chastised him and said we'd make the necessary sacrifices to pay our tithing as we should.
I was often hungry after we began paying that extra money in tithing. DH ate on base, so I stopped buying very many groceries. My father came to visit and thought I had anorexia. We were so broke that I took some silver dollars that had been given to me by an uncle and placed in my baby book the day I was born and used them to pay the toll it took to cross the Coronado bridge to pick up my husband from work. We were BROKE! But we paid our tithing. And I feel sick about it now. What an asshole of a Bishop we had - he knew how bad off we were, but he didn't care.
Things eventually got much better for us financially, and I shudder to think of the thousands and thousands of dollars we paid into that cult. Since we've left the church, I've found several of those little yellow tithing slips tucked away written for large sums of money and I feel a surge of anger every time it happens. Hopefully, they're all cleared out by now because I don't want to discover another one.
So, if you have high blood pressure, make sure you've taken your medicine and share your outrage at having been duped out of your hard earned money and how it affected your life.
Not being coerced into paying tithing - another benefit of leaving Joe's cult.
No comments:
Post a Comment