Mormons are heavily involved.im pyramid schemes and outright ponzis.
Please keep religious flamebait (not to mention slurs) off this site. Even if the OP is related and activating, that's an additional reason not to go there.
The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church
441–450 of 537 posts
Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is fine. Families have the right to criticize each other for how they raise their children and to enforce common norms, where they genuinely believe decisions to be harmful. If my brother was raising my nephews/nieces in a way that I felt was harmful you bet he’d get an earful. Families aren’t just federations of sovereign individuals. Kids are community property.
And if the earful consists of a bunch of toxic nonsense about how I’m not raising my kid according to your dogmatic interpretations of some fairy tale from the Bronze Age, you can fuck right off. Being related doesn’t give you some inviolable right to my time or attention, despite what you may think. You can spout off all you want about “western views” and what your rights are because we share parents, but at the end…
Please don't react to flamebait by going into flamewar. We're trying to cultivate the exact opposite reaction here.
Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's an organization which does not allow you to leave with your dignity intact. This is definitely not true. It may have been the case for you, but my dad and brother/wife all left years ago without any problems at all. We are still on great terms.
“ dad and brother/wife” Is this a reference that your dad and another man were married to the same person. I’ve heard sister/wife used before but never brother/wife. It is it your dad, your dad’s brother, and your dad’s brother’s wife?
Please don't do this here.
Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes—the last paragraph, for example, which talks about an entire class of people in a belittling and ultimately ("used car dealer") pejorative way. I'm sure that wasn't your intent, but these effects are always much less obvious to the person making the comment than they are to many outside readers.
I don't see how the metaphor was pejorative, and I don't see how that could be worse than "a distillation of disgruntled exmembers", which has been the constant categorization of people who have left the church. That being said, I don't think either the comment I responded to or my own comment was out of bounds, insulting, or crossed into "flamewar territory". Rather, the impression I'm getting is that any disagreeme…
"Used car dealer" is a pejorative metaphor; it connotes self-interested deception of others.
I didn't mean to read anger into your comment. What I'm concerned about is how such comments land with other people who happen to be reading the thread. When there are well-known patterns of provocation in a comment which are likely to trigger others and lead to a predictable flamewar, that's flamebait, and it needs to be avoided for fire safety reasons.
There are ways to express your views and to disagree without being gratuitously provocative, so it's not the case that any disagreement would get moderated in this way. But to reach that requires being willing to hear where the gratuitous provocations are, learn from that information and adapt.
Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church
#445That is just what is uncovered in the investment market with one subsidiary. They also own 2% of Florida[0], huge land tracts in Argentina, Oklahoma and elsewhere, and attractive urban real estate in most major metropolises including apartment complexes in PA. They centralize donation collection of tithes and good will offerings such that about 8% stays back at congregations (based on personal observation as the fina…
I don't fully agree with this characterization. My girlfriend and her brother have left the church and there seems to be zero love lost in the family or their friend group that they grew up with. I know that this does happen to many people but it is not a uniform experience.
> zero love lost
That phrase means there was no love in the first place so nothing was lost. Is that what you meant?
Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church
#446That is just what is uncovered in the investment market with one subsidiary. They also own 2% of Florida[0], huge land tracts in Argentina, Oklahoma and elsewhere, and attractive urban real estate in most major metropolises including apartment complexes in PA. They centralize donation collection of tithes and good will offerings such that about 8% stays back at congregations (based on personal observation as the fina…
It's really crummy that you had to go through that. My wife joined at I think 32 and left at 36 without grief. Granted, she only kept up consistent contact with one friend from the church, so there isn't as much pressure compared to having family still in the church.
Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church
#447Is 100 billion really that much? The church has 16 million members. That is about $6,000 per member. The church has had 200 years of tithing and compound interest to get to this point. If used as an endowment to support 16 million people in 170+ countries that doesn't seem too crazy. A single human (not mentioning any names) having 100 billion seems crazy.
$100 billion in one fund. $32 billion accounted for in other funds [0]. Not to mention 2% of the land in Florida, several billion dollars in commercial and residential real estate. Who knows what else they're hiding. And 16 million members is fools' accounting. It doesn't account for the millions of people like me who don't go to church and yet are still members because I don't want to pay money to hire a lawyer to f…
> I don't want to pay money to hire a lawyer to force the church to take my name off the records.
You literally just have to ask in writing. Send a letter to church headquarters in Salt Lake.
But you already knew that didn't you? I swear ex-mormons are more devoted to getting people converted to their way of thinking than believing mormons are.
Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church
#448So the Mormon Church has created an endowment instead of corruptly spending the tithes on trifles and graft for their leaders, in preparation to help their members when needed and continue their operations in times of scarcity. I see this as a very smart thing, not nefarious. Not any more “scandalous” or hidden than the Harvard endowment. Mormons are well aware the Church uses its tithes to invest. Much of this threa…
> Much of this thread’s comments are little more than ignorant and bigoted attacks on Mormons and Christians. Please call out such. I'm sure dang and the mods would prefer to keep bigotry out of HN. Especially if you are referring to my comments, I would like to be told where my expressions and observations are being perceived as bigotry. I love my currently Mormon family deeply and work hard to not push them away, d…
Not you, I’m thinking specifically of certain comments that are using this thread as a thinly veiled excuse to attack Mormonism and even Christians in general.
I’m not Mormon myself but I have Mormon family members and the openly upvoted bigotry disturbs me.
Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a note on leaving the church: when you leave you leave all the people you have known all your life. Since you spend so much time in church activities fellow members become your extended family. When you leave you understand that the only reason you had contact with your extended family is because of the church. You become the lone man out. It's extremely hard to rebuild relationships outside the church. I don't…
Organized religion is a great way to sell people their own family and community back to them.
There's a real point in that statement, but it's overstated, like saying a University sells you your own brain and community back to you. Sure, you can be an autodidact and get quite an education at the library, you might even be able to find one way or another to rub elbows with the members of a community if it didn't host a university, but a good University will facilitate both at a level
Of course, there's for-profit colleges which provide terrible value at an outrageous cost, and even among "legit" universities or courses of study have more value than others. And back at the topic there's real questions about a church that's acquired assets on the scale the LDS church has. What transparency obligations does it have to the membership that contributed those funds? Should there be dues/tithing, or show the assets function as an endowment to support the activities of the institution while mitigating what members are asked to contribute? If an institution claims divine authority and also reaches the point where it no longer requires contributions in order to sustain it, does that mean it can be more careless with the confidence of those members (and if not, what would prevent that)?
Re: The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's an organization which does not allow you to leave with your dignity intact. This is definitely not true. It may have been the case for you, but my dad and brother/wife all left years ago without any problems at all. We are still on great terms.
I dunno. One has to deal with the random crying, the questions of "Why haven't you baptized your children? I want to spend eternity with my grandbabies!", "They need primary!", etc. Then there's the endless gossip at family activities when you're absent about how you're leading your family to hell.
> I dunno. One has to deal with the random crying, the questions of "Why haven't you baptized your children? I want to spend eternity with my grandbabies!", "They need primary!", etc. Then there's the endless gossip at family activities when you're absent about how you're leading your family to hell.
This is every family, with slight variation.