LDS Humanitarian Services

I received a comment this evening from YouTube user JAMaddict on my video Inside the LDS (Mormon) Twin Falls Temple.  This is what she said:

It makes me physically ill to think about the “hand selected” granite flooring. What a waste, when so many millions of people need various types of aid.

Before you start going on and on about LDS’s humanitarian efforts, don’t bother! Since LDS refuses to release their financial records, no one knows for sure, but the best guess is that they give 2% of their total income to aid. That’s sickening.

This was my reply message back to her:

The LDS Church has given over $1.1158 billion dollars in humanitarian aid in 167 countries worldwide since 1985. You can see the breakdown per year here:
http://www.providentliving.org/content/display/0,11666,4606-1-2329-1,00.html

If you want to get more specific, you can see the 2008 Welfare Services Fact Sheet here:
http://www.providentliving.org/welfare/pdf/WelfareFactSheet.pdf

$282.2 million in cash donations
$833.6 million in material assistance

That includes:

• 61,308 tons of Food
• 12,829 tons of Medical supplies
• 84,681 tons of Clothing
• 5,965 tons of Educational supplies
• 8.6 million of Hygiene, newborn, and school kits
• 1,100,059 days of labor donated to welfare facilities

What is sick about that?

I might have also mentioned that anciently only the very finest materials were used to construct the House of the Lord, including gold, silver, iron, copper, timber, and stone (see this description of Solomon’s temple), and the Lord has revealed that they are to be built to the same standards today.  It is God’s House, not ours, and He will have it built the way He reveals to His prophets.

If we had spent the humanitarian aid money we have since 1985 instead on temple construction, we could easily have over 100-200+ more temples throughout the world than we have now, essentially doubling the number we have taken 179 years to build, and providing the blessings of temple worship to many more of our members.  But our goal is not to just build temples, but to do what the Lord has commanded, “to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to provide for the widow, to dry up the tear of the orphan, to comfort the afflicted, whether in this church, or in any other, or in no church at all”.

Temple Construction Costs vs. Humanitarian Aid?