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The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

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

#351

Post by darksaints »

alanwreath wrote: post #327
jacurtis wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One part that was left out of the WSJ article but was released by the whistleblower was the source of these funds. When members asked to donate money to charity, the church said they would happily donate it on behalf of the members. It was then taken from the members and funneled into this investment fund instead of redirected to charity (as they promised). The church claims that since they are a non-profit that they…

If you want your assistance to go straight to those who need it - then walk right to that person and give it to them. If you want someone who is experienced in making said assistance stretch further than just to that one family, ask someone experienced. Complaining seems like you don't trust the person to whom you just put in charge of using your donation wisely. So why was the donation made again? Obviously one woul…

> Probably the best remedy of those who do not wish to trust the Lds charities, would be to stop donating to them.

And the best recourse for people who spent significant sums of money donating to a charity that misrepresented their charitable actions and has acted more like a for profit business would be to initiate a class action suit for fraud and to remove the fake charity's tax exempt status.

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

#352

Post by whatthesmack »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #305
x1oqw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always surprises me that wealthy churches pretend to take Christ seriously, when Jesus was not very fond of amassing money. I get why the churches do it (of course they don't believe in Christ), but why do the exploited masses believe them?

Christians in general all denounce socialism --even it seems democratic socialism. Christ taught: Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, give all you have to those in need then come follow me, else there's no path to heaven if you're a shallow rich person. I'm no expert on Marxism, but I think there's quite a bit of crossover in ideologies. But the point of my argument is most church's don't practice what…

I think the issue that many folks take with this perspective is that you’re prescribing one particular implementation (socialism) of what Jesus taught. We can debate what he taught, but you must acknowledge that you’re advocating for your favored implementation. There are plenty of ways to “Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, give all you have to those in need then come follow me, else there's no path to heaven” that don’t involve or require your particular implementation at all.

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

mrosett wrote: post #128
snuxoll wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at least that's what they tell me. Assuming the countless anecdotes on /r/exmormon are to be believed, nobody really gets a choice. Your local leaders will browbeat you and try to look over your financials if they don’t feel you are tithing appropriately.

/r/exmormon has a very particular perspective, largely driven by the people who are active there are usually the ones who genuinely had the worst experience.

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by telmo »

rayiner wrote: post #324
telmo wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Families aren’t just federations of sovereign individuals. Kids are community property. Kids are nobody's property, and parent absolutely have the right to ignore the rest of the family as long as they observe the laws of the land.

It’s a very liberal western viewpoint. The vast majority of humanity would disagree.

Sure, and that is besides the point. Liberal western democracies are not perfect, but they get a few things right and this is one of them.

I believe that children are not cattle, and I would keep believing that even if 100% of everyone else thought otherwise.

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

#355

Post by dang »

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…

This comment crosses into flamewar territory, especially the personal part ("people like you constantly come along and want to categorize me"). Please move in the opposite direction when commenting here. I know it's hard on topics like this where emotions are understandably high, but that's why the site guidelines include:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#356

Post by dang »

darksaints wrote: post #228
sturgill wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know enough about the legal structure of [1] to have an informed opinion. Contacts and contracts are always the gift to children of connected parents. I hope to give the same to my kids... ;) I’m sure it happens as it does in any family (hello Biden!) but I’m not convinced it’s more prevalent in the Church than any other organization of people. It’s an interesting thought, but I’m not sure how prevalent it is…

> I’d like to see less of it (and fully expect to as the Church continues to grow globally) Luckily this plague of a religion has stopped growing.

Religious flamewar isn't ok here, so please don't post like this, regardless of which religions you're for or against. You may not owe Mormonism better, but you owe this community better if you're commenting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#357

Post by curiousgeorgio »

godelski wrote: post #337
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…

> you would have to have been baptized in the church, professed to believe in the church's doctrines, voluntarily consented to being a member, provided personal data, etc, so a retraction of all that is a relatively serious decision). *at 8 Remember, you get baptized __at 8__. If you're a male, you get the priesthood at __12__. You're talking about consent and volunteering that information. There's a reason we legall…

> No means no.

Local leaders don't have direct control over the removal of someone's membership record, and that's a reasonable safeguard against local leaders/members (deliberately or accidentally) performing such a significant action on behalf of potentially hundreds of other members. Most companies operate under similar safeguards when it comes to data security and deletion requests (requiring some kind of procedure rather than hearing you just say the magic words "delete my account" and not even verifying your identity). I imagine the church is legally required to keep some of that data for tax and reporting purposes, so it's not quite as straightforward as it might sound.

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

#358

Post by [deleted] »

tomrod wrote: post #26
x1oqw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always surprises me that wealthy churches pretend to take Christ seriously, when Jesus was not very fond of amassing money. I get why the churches do it (of course they don't believe in Christ), but why do the exploited masses believe them?

I can't speak for more faiths, just what I saw in the Mormon faith. Basically, they literally believe they are the only church that has authority to act for God on earth, it was given to them, and they will be the world wide government during the millennium (a time period kicked off when Jesus Christ returns, in their view).

[deleted]

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

#359

Post by btown »

starskublue wrote: post #79

It's important to note the historical context around this. The LDS church used to be constantly in extreme debt and close to having their religious buildings taken away due to it. Then in the early 1900s they instituted a simple financial policy that could also be an example for members. 1. Spend less than you take in. 2. Save/invest a portion of what you bring in for a rainy day. Thus over a hundred years that build…

> available to the Church for times of need

Or, perhaps, to finance a massive interstellar spaceship a few hundred years from now... [0]

(In my ideal reality this should be the goal of _all_ investment funds. Also, everyone who enjoys the higher levels of the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness [1] should watch The Expanse.)

[0] https://observer.com/2015/12/the-expanse-recap-1x04-mormon-s...

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...

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

#360

Post by dehrmann »

walrus01 wrote: post #157
x1oqw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always surprises me that wealthy churches pretend to take Christ seriously, when Jesus was not very fond of amassing money. I get why the churches do it (of course they don't believe in Christ), but why do the exploited masses believe them?

If anybody asks you "what would Jesus do?", remind them that turning over tables and whipping money lenders is within the realm of possibility.

That was in the context of people cashing in on religion, selling their wares in front of the temple. It'd be like him going to a religious bookstore and trashing the place. It was not an indictment on lending money.
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