Semantics. The point is the same.

@Sgt_Spanky I’ll explain further: we cannot prove what cannot be proven.

Are you a fruit farmer by any chance ?, Picking cherries seems to be your favourite pastime.

Religion is about selling bullshit and lies for profit. Widows and orphans don't enter into it unless they too can be monetized.

@Sgt_Spanky that's capitalism not religion. Unless you want to call the government of the United States of America a religion.

@Word Are you unaware that religion is a business?

@Sgt_Spanky so that they could not BUY or SELL unless they had [government issued identification] Revelations 13:17

Yes, It has been written for 2000 years that Identification for taxation and government control will be required.

There certainly are, billions of them, in fact.

A guy named Henry from Ohio can start a religion just like Joe Smith from Upstate New York did so long as he doesn't place himself at the center of it. He can make himself peripheral to it as Joe Smith did but Smith still put GOD at its center. You have to have the magic guy so ppl can feel comfortable subjugating themselves to a higher being.

The LDS does not have 16 million members, as they claim, because many of those are inactive, non practicing and are in many cases dead. (Being dead does not stop the Mormons from baptising you, Adolf Hitler for instance appears on the membership rolls three times)
Extrapolating from tithing figures in countries where the LDS are required to file tax returns to maintain charitable status and tax exception (unlike the US where they are not) the LDS at a generous estimate have approximately 5 million active tithe paying members as of 2015.
However after revelation of the LDS church secret holding of approximately $100Billion dollars in tax haven banks all over the world and another $15 billion in stock market investments under various holding companies, their interests in the Bonneville media empire which they own outright and other business empires in south America, Scandinavia, the UK, and the Cayman Islands, the church no longer has to worry too much about members and tithing, so long as they still have enough to claim to be a church and continue to avoid taxes.

@Sgt_Spanky I understand the distinction you're making, but whether the name is Joseph Smith, Ellen G. White, Mohammed, Jesus Christ or Moses, self-anointed prophets make claims regarding their 'special' abilities to communicate with a 'higher power' who imparts (according to the prophet) knowledge and guidance that become religious teaching and doctrine. And while followers rally around the so-called prophet during their lifetime, it takes their death to allow for them to be elevated, if not deified, through the fabrication of wonders and miracles.

These self-serving narcissists I have mentioned, and others, may have claimed that God was at the center, but it was always all about them. Remove the prophet from the equation, and the religion would not have existed.

It's the thought that counts.