Most people understand that if you want the best deal possible for an item you have to go to the source. For example, If I want to save money on a mattress, I should go directly to the factory. If I go to the mattress store in the mall I am going to have to pay more. Why? Because now the middle men have to get their cut. The mattress broker. The truck driver. The salesmen. The owner of the store. I am sure I am leaving out someone in the mattress hierarchy, but you get the picture.
Now I understand that if a person is working 2 jobs and/or raising 3 kids, they do not have time to drive to the mattress factory. A factory that could be hundreds of miles away. The gas for the drive and the possible cost of having to rent a vehicle large enough to get the mattress home are definite issues. Those issues are the reason hard working people opt to pay more for the convenience of having the mattress delivered to their home. Less time and hassle, but more money.
Religious people want the middle man to tell them what to do. Mormons want the president of their corporate empire to dictate things. Catholics want the Pope to lead the way. Cults rely on charismatic egomaniacs to charm their followers out of time and money. Spiritual people bypass the middle men.
Whether it is a cult or a church, there are middle men who still get their cut of your money. You pay for the privileging of getting their best guess about salvation. Usually the less the middle man tells us we have to do, the more we have to pay him for the false sense of security. The middle man knows that if he requires too much time, money, and pharisaical behavior, the less people there will be to keep supporting his pyramid scheme. Mormon Incorporated, is a perfect example of this concept with the recent change from 3 hours of time wasting per Sunday, to now just 2. We humans are mentally flawed, but there is a limit to how much foolishness we will put up with before finding something else.
If you want information from GOD, then go directly to Him and cut out all the self-professed pastors, preachers, popes, presidents, and prophets. That is what Joseph Smith did. Joseph is important not because he led a church but because he got his information directly from GOD. He did it before there even was a Mormon church. Joseph spent his life trying to get others to do what he did, but they were too lax spiritually to do it. They were hard working people on the American frontier, but they could not be bothered to fast and pray until they rent the veil.
There is always a price to be paid for allowing middle men to get between you and the product you want, or you and the information you need. Everyone needs to weigh the costs. With your potential eternal life (the greatest blessing of all), you are definitely going to want to go directly to the source of that gift and make sure you qualify.