The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church • Hacker News Board

Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

#341

Post by alanwreath » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

darksaints wrote: post #287

sturgill wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad comparison when you’re skeptical of an entity investing money in businesses who employ lots of people...

I see you're admitting the church is a business. Too bad that's not how they tell it to their members. I'd be perfectly fine with the church's actions if they would just admit that they're a profit seeking enterprise and charity is only of value for the PR it brings. At least then I wouldn't have felt swindled when I found out that all that money I spent on tithing while working 80 hours a week as a truck driver to p…

    I see you're admitting the church is a business.

Your argument might be more serious if you didn't weave comments like this into it. It's quite clear that statement hasn't been made or insinuated.

Also, as far as the church spending time teaching its members all the different ways it invests would be quite tangential to a Sunday class. People don't go to church to understand how the church operates but rather why. As far as the church employing individuals who have studied finance and know how to make the church financially sound is logical and right. The church itself encourages higher studies. Employing those who have studied to further the work is being a wise steward.

Now if they are only using the money to make individuals rich, that would go counter to teachings. What handful of people are you referring to?

Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

#342

Post by godelski » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

jacurtis wrote: post #302

godelski wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can second this. I left over a decade ago. I've moved through four states, and probably a dozen addresses in that time. This is the first year where missionaries have not shown up at my door. I always had the same conversation with them: "Elders, I left the church for a reason and have no desire to come back. If you ever need water or to use the restroom, you are welcome to come by. I understand that what you are d…

I can third this. I left about 7 years ago. I have moved from Wisconsin, to North Carolina, to Virginia, to Texas, and then to Washington. The Mormon church managed to find me each time. (I briefly moved to Pennsylvania for work for about 6 months between living in NC and VA, and that was the one time they never found me). I have always rejected all attempts to "re-activate" me. I have never provided notice of my lea…

Thank you for sharing. And this is part of why I shared. Because I feel that I myself harassed and enabled this abusive behavior. It is weird, of all the places to actually feel welcome talking about this, it is Hacker News. When I talk about this with friends I'm often met with "Mormons are the nicest people I know." I'm sure others experience this too.

> The mormon church has even taught terrorists and hitler will be able to seek forgiveness in the next life and go to [the Telestial Kingdom [0]], but not as low as outer darkness.

For those that think this is hyperbole (though I heard you only went to outer darkness [Hell] if you had active proof of god and rejected him), I have heard the exact same teachings and have never lived in any of the states jacurtis mentioned. This belief is also why when you're a Mormon, you feel the need to save those that left.

[0] (this says that those that leave are on the __same__ level as mass murders) https://www.mormonwiki.com/Celestial,_Terrestrial,_and_Teles...

Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

#343

Post by umvi » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

sofal wrote: post #236

umvi wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/exmormon is a distillation of disgruntled exmembers. It's extremely biased and not representative at all of nearly anything. Not all exmembers are disgruntled. The ones that aren't disgruntled don't hang out in /r/exmormon. It's like distilling all of the people in the world who had a bad experience with the police to /r/fthecops and then using anecdotes in there to make assumptions about all police. Or using anec…

It's always the term "disgruntled" that is used when attempting to discount the experiences related by people who left an organization. What exactly does "disgruntled" mean to you? Take me, for example. I've spent decades of my life as a true believing member of the organization, willingly giving an incredibly significant amount of income, time, and work toward it. And then I discover on my own decades later that I h…

> Online communities like /r/exmormon have a very large portion of people like me who have not had bad experiences in the church or leaving the church, but yet still have plenty to talk about for what should be obvious reasons.

Well, the problem is that reasonable people like you get drowned out and dominated by the people on there that just want to vent or otherwise have an axe to grind. Sometimes I'll pop by just so see what's on the front page and I'll be disappointed to see memes dancing on the graves of dead people (anytime a general authority dies).

It would be like a moderate liberal claiming that there are a "large portion" of other moderate liberals on /r/politics. Probably true, yet, /r/politics is dominated by the hard left, and you'll rarely see balanced viewpoints there; it's an anti-right echo chamber with zero nuance.

Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

#344

Post by alanwreath » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #166

wincy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! As I said, I’m officially a member and live in a fairly affluent area. When I was unemployed and going through some tough times, even though I’ve never tithed they extended food aid to me. It was a very humbling experience, and if I didn’t have to believe all the stuff Joseph Smith made up I’d probably be an active Mormon. The ingroup exhortations of beliefs that, charitably, are very unlikely, is somethi…

You bring up something that bothers me too. The manipulation of local congregations in order to fund the central corporation is disappointing to say the least. Mormons are often the nicest people you'll find. It's a shame they are expected to express belief in racist, sexist, or other bigoted beliefs in order to be fully acceptable to their in-group. I point out in another comment that, charitably, congregations rece…

     It's a shame they are expected to express belief in     
     racist, sexist, or other bigoted beliefs in order to be 
     fully acceptable to their in-group.

It's a shame you feel that way. I've been to churches in Massachusetts, Utah, Missouri, Texas, Yucatan, and Guatemala. I'm not sure where you're getting that.

Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

#345

Post by darksaints » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

sturgill wrote: post #331

darksaints wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you're admitting the church is a business. Too bad that's not how they tell it to their members. I'd be perfectly fine with the church's actions if they would just admit that they're a profit seeking enterprise and charity is only of value for the PR it brings. At least then I wouldn't have felt swindled when I found out that all that money I spent on tithing while working 80 hours a week as a truck driver to p…

I called it an entity that invests in businesses. It very clearly has an investment arm (which I have known about for decades). The Church owns physical assets and I’m okay with that. I’d rather it have liquid assets than struggle to pay its bills like in the 1800s - early 1900s. I’m a fan of financial prudence. At the end of the day, and as unpopular as it is, I believe Joseph Smith saw the Father and the Son. Other…

The modern church teaches that you should pay tithing irregardless of living condition, income level, destitution or poverty conditions. I taught this principle to people who were literally starving to death in Honduras. It was extremely hard for me to tell people who didn't even have a cup of rice in their 4x4 corrugated steel shack that they needed to donate 10% to the church before they could buy food for their three kids.

Later I learned that it hasn't always been this way. The church has deliberately misrepresented its own doctrine to extract everything they can from these people.

In 1899 the Church was almost bankrupt. President Lorenzo Snow and the GAs went around Utah shaking the members down. The 1899 General Conference was "the tithing conference" and where Lorenzo gave pivotal instruction about tithing - which defined the church in relation to tithing going forward.

Lorenzo Snow said in the 1899 Conference Address

"...I plead with you in the name of the Lord, and I pray that every man, woman and child WHO HAS MEANS shall pay one tenth of their income as a tithing..."

Conference Report Oct 1899 page 28 (3/5th way down column 2 on page 28) [http://archive.org/stream/conferencereport1899sa/conferencer...

However, in the 2011 Lesson Manual, in Lesson 12- Tithing, the Church quote this talk as:

"....I plead with you in the name of the Lord, and I pray that every man, woman and child ... shall pay one tenth of their income as a tithing...."

Teachings of Lorenzo Snow manual, page 160 [https://www.lds.org/manual/teachings-of-presidents-of-the-ch...]

THE HISTORICAL IDEA THAT YOU ONLY TITHED IF YOU HAD MEANS HAS BEEN REDUCED TO AN ELIPSES.

So yeah...the broke church from the past only asked for tithing from those who had means, but the "prudent" multibillion dollar corporation of the present expects it from people whose children will only grow to 5 feet tall as an adult because their diet consists of rice and yucca and parasite-infected water.

The church is a wealthy corporation today. Sure they manage their finances well. But their coercive tithing policies that are misrepresented by their own modern literature are extremely burdensome to a huge portion of their membership. They don't need their money, and they should stop asking for it and pretending like their salvation depends on it. And if it really is the case that their financial secrecy is hiding their personal enrichment off the backs of those experiencing poverty, I really hope that a hell exists that is as bad as they deserve.

Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

#346

Post by sofal » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #314

sofal wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you think the genuineness of a belief is relevant when it comes to scrutinizing harmful actions based on those beliefs. Lots of people genuinely believe in a lot of harmful things. Some people genuinely believe they need to kick their gay kid out on the street in order for them to learn what's good for them. Some people with great political power genuinely believe that starting an apocalyptic war in…

> I'm not sure why you think the genuineness of a belief is relevant when it comes to scrutinizing harmful actions based on those beliefs. Because the substantive truth of the theology isn’t dispositive of whether family members have a right (in the social, not legal, sense) to criticize each other from departing from certain norms and practices. For example, there is a lot of evidence showing that the supposed harms…

> Because the substantive truth of the theology isn’t dispositive of whether family members have a right to criticize each other from departing from certain practices.

So are we talking about what rights people have now? We have all sorts of rights to engage in all kinds of harmful activity. You’re not going to find in me any opposition to the idea that people should have a right to criticize others. Let's not muddy the issue by talking in terms of "rights", because that is just as irrelevant as the idea that the genuineness of beliefs justifies harmful actions.

And let’s also not lose sight of the fact that we’re not talking about people “encouraging” their family members to conform to generic values of family duty and hard work. We’re talking about people telling their friends and family that they are damning their families to an actual real hell, and that they are going to be eternally cut off from an omnipotent loving deity that has massive hangups about coffee and masturbation. We’re talking about people who genuinely believe that their gay kids can and need to be “fixed”. These are concrete claims that have no rational justification, and the actions that result are harmful.

Your study link also doesn’t support what you think it does. If you looked at these numbers and compared them with people who are active in anything else, you’d find a statistically insignificant difference. You could be active in your local book club, your monthly astronomy meetup, or your local atheist group and be just as happy. This is just the difference between socially active people and people who aren’t socially active. But since the idea that people who are socially active are happier is too obvious to publish, let’s instead pretend that somehow it’s religiosity that matters.

Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

#347

Post by darksaints » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

alanwreath wrote: post #341

darksaints wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you're admitting the church is a business. Too bad that's not how they tell it to their members. I'd be perfectly fine with the church's actions if they would just admit that they're a profit seeking enterprise and charity is only of value for the PR it brings. At least then I wouldn't have felt swindled when I found out that all that money I spent on tithing while working 80 hours a week as a truck driver to p…

I see you're admitting the church is a business. Your argument might be more serious if you didn't weave comments like this into it. It's quite clear that statement hasn't been made or insinuated. Also, as far as the church spending time teaching its members all the different ways it invests would be quite tangential to a Sunday class. People don't go to church to understand how the church operates but rather why. As…

A membership report is tangential to the topics in general conference, but that was never left out of conference (at least until the church stopped growing).

You don't have to spend time talking about it in church. Publish an audited yearly financial report, and send it to members in the mail.

And yes it does matter. The church operates like a business. Members literally think of tithing as a form of giving to charity. They should have some expectations and understanding of how that money is spent. Would tithing receipts be the same as they currently are if everybody knew the church had hundreds of billions of assets, 15 years of tithing on reserve, and spent less than a percent of it actually helping those that are in need of charity?

Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

#348

Post by curiousgeorgio » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #325

curiousgeorgio wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're welcome to your own opinions, but I actually work with church records at a local level, and this is the truth. I have siblings and neighbors who have left, and there's absolutely no remaining evidence (that I or my local leaders can see) of their info or that they were ever members of the church. It comes down to what you're specifically asking. If you ask a local leader to remove you from a list, they may rem…

> On the other hand, if you want to remove your record from the church as a whole (the entire organization), you'd need to be clear about that with your bishop (local leader), and they are instructed to give you details about how to go about removing your record from church headquarters. This is exactly how my friend was treated at every step of the way. They pretended that she hadn't actually asked for the right thi…

I'm sorry about your friend. If it's a case of abuse (as it sounds like), I'm truly sorry, and I don't know anyone - inside or outside the church - who would think that's okay. If she wants her name removed (and it hasn't already been done), that can definitely be done - she just needs to talk to the bishop or stake president and formally request it to be removed (it's really not a complicated process).

Those stories should be heard, and there absolutely needs to be transparency. It does come with the side effect of making those cases sound disproportionately "typical", when they really aren't. I've never experienced or known a victim of abuse in the church (that I know of), but it does break my heart to hear about it happening, and I would encourage people to speak up when it does happen (especially to higher-up leaders who can do something about it).

Bad people slip through the cracks (as they do in any organization). It's unfortunate, but the church is doing a lot to help prevent those wrongs and mistakes. I absolutely still stand with my assertion that "mistakes are rare and local leaders will help however they can".

Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

#349

Post by sofal » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #343

sofal wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always the term "disgruntled" that is used when attempting to discount the experiences related by people who left an organization. What exactly does "disgruntled" mean to you? Take me, for example. I've spent decades of my life as a true believing member of the organization, willingly giving an incredibly significant amount of income, time, and work toward it. And then I discover on my own decades later that I h…

> Online communities like /r/exmormon have a very large portion of people like me who have not had bad experiences in the church or leaving the church, but yet still have plenty to talk about for what should be obvious reasons. Well, the problem is that reasonable people like you get drowned out and dominated by the people on there that just want to vent or otherwise have an axe to grind. Sometimes I'll pop by just s…

I see the problem of /r/exmormon differently. Since I'm no longer at a point where I feel personally attacked when Mormonism is criticized, I can appreciate some of the more harsh stories that people have to tell, and can understand the anger that results, even though I did not experience nearly as much of the abuse as others have. I think the ultimate problem with /r/exmormon now is that a lot of the good content (personal stories, community support/advice, discussions and debates) is drowned out and dominated by people that just want to lolvote at memes all day. It's the natural result of all undermoderated large Reddit communities that the content eventually serves the lowest common denominator and so the front page is largely a bunch of lazy memes lazily upvoted and zero discussion.

Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

#350

Post by darksaints » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

alanwreath wrote: post #317

darksaints wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We only agree that the church is tight with its money with respect to how that money is used to benefit members and the unfortunate that should probably be the beneficiaries of good old christian charity. But tight with its money amongst those that control it? Neither of us know...because it is a secret. A secrecy that has no benefit but to protect those who control it from scrutiny. I don't know how you could view e…

I think you've just described FUD. Asking for more transparency isn't bad though - this would require a change in US law or wherever they operate. Start there. Then all religions might meet the standard you're describing. There are abusers in every organization and transparency would be good.

If they're as benevolent of an institution as they pretend, we wouldn't need such a law. They already can publish financial reports without any law compelling them to do so.

But they aren't a benevolent institution.