MarginOfError

Maybe I misunderstood. I thought the $7 billion was donations, which would included all tithes and offerings. My understanding of the situation is that the complaint doesn't criticize the destination of expenditures, but that there are no expenditures. It is the lack of expenditures that is the violating condition of the non-profit status. It's a claim I feel would be worthy of some level of investigation, given that the complainant didn't have a full view of the finances, and so may not have seen any other outgoing expenditures. But it's the kind of thing I think is fair to evaluate. My counter to this would be that, for most tithe payers, the day-to-day social fallout is not why they pay their tithing. The longer term consequences, like salvation and exaltation, are also thrown into the mix of consequences. It isn't uncommon for tithing to become an emotionally fraught decision (either for those that struggle financially or those that have concerns about the use of tithing). It may be that we have different models of how trust works. For me, trust requires accountability to those you are asking to trust you. That may not always be direct accountability. It might mean accountability through some disinterested third party. My bar for transparency is much lower than you might think.

Weeeeellllll...there are some sticky issues here. For instance, suppose the Church is building up this massive reserve of value, built on the tithing I pay, and then they never make any expenditures aside from keeping the lights on in the meetinghouses. It was discussed earlier that the Church has $1 Billion left over after paying operational costs, and spends about 4% of that on humanitarian aid. Now I I (hypothetically) take a look at that and say, "it sure doesn't seem like the Church is doing enough good in the world with the money it is collecting. I think I'll quit giving them more money to squander." So I stop paying my tithing now, and next thing I know, I'm getting called in to talk to my bishop and stake president. My temple recommend is revoked. My standing in the Church is put into question. And I'm told to repent, and that my eternal well-being--my opportunity to be with my family forever-- is in jeopardy if I don't repent and obey the Law of Tithing. But if (big if, and hypothetical if) my tithing is being collected and doing nothing more than enriching the Corporation of the First Presidency of the Church--and I'm being spiritually and emotionally manipulated to do it--how is that different from the priestcrafts denounced in the Book of Mormon*. Now, I know those are fighting words. And I'm not accusing the Church of priestcraft. But there is a strong vibe from Church leadership of "just trust us" when it comes to how finances are handled. The total opaqueness leaves a lot of questions. Personally, I'm not really content with that. This is an area where, personally, I don't like how Church leadership has chosen to handle it. I'm a big subscriber to the "trust but verify" model. But I feel like there's no verification path for the membership of the Church**. What's even more frustrating to someone like me is that the bar for justification is pretty low. If there were a statement of "Yes, we retain a fund of more than $100 billion against which we are able to self-insure our $300 billion of real estate assets and supplemental health insurance for youth activities." I'd be good with that. That makes complete sense to me. But that isn't what we get. We get, "we haven't done anything illegal. Trust us. We got this." I don't find that particularly satisfying. * In contrast, when I tell the Red Cross that I won't donate to them anymore because I don't believe that they are spending the money I donate wisely, and that I am donating to the Green Cross instead, they express disappointment and thank me for my time. If I tell the Church that I don't believe they are spending the money wisely and that I am donating to the Episcopal church instead, the calls to repentance start flying. * Are we entitled to it? Legally, no. We surrendered the money. Theologically, we consider that it is the Lord's (TM) money. So religiously speaking, we don't really have a claim to know what happens to it either. But total opaqueness creates the conditions in which abuse and fraud can occur. I'd like some assurances that this isn't occurring.

From the WaPo article (which I have no reason to dispute on this point) "Ensign is registered with authorities as a supporting organization and integrated auxiliary of the Mormon Church. This permits it to operate as a nonprofit and to make money largely free from U.S. taxes."

By Common Consent also has an interesting article up by their resident tax lawyer on the situation. https://bycommonconsent.com/2019/12/17/some-thoughts-about-ensign-peak-advisers-and-the-church/ His highlights: The Church itself has done nothing wrong here. Ensign Peak Advisers may have operated in a weird space, but probably hasn't violated any laws or regulations But unless Ensign Peak Advisers has made qualifying charitable expenditures, it probably shouldn't qualify for tax exempt status*. * If I understand correctly, you are receiving money and not making charitable expenditures, you are really an investment firm, and that doesn't get the same tax-exempt benefits as a charitable organization.

I apologize. I omitted the word "not" in my statement "I am also not ready to question the motives..." I've generally been served better by taking people at their word until there is sufficient evidence to show that they've been deliberately misleading.

This isn't quite true. The only categories that remain in the local units bank account are the Budget, Ward Missionary, and Other. Each batch of tithing, fast offerings, general missionary, or anything else is immediately transferred to Salt Lake. When an fast offering expense is recorded by the unit, the funds for that expense are immediately transferred from Salt Lake to the local account. I believe it's been this way since at least 2000

I likewise find it hard to fault the guy for requesting the reward that is legally available and designed to encourage people to report wrong doing. It really isn't any different that rewards given for tips that lead to arrests. I'm also pretty underwhelmed by the "he's got an axe to grind so he reported the Church." It's just as likely that observing what he perceived to be improper use of tithing funds contributed to his disaffection. At the end of the day, the guy took the risk to file a legal affadavit with his allegations. He isn't just mouthing off whatever he wants on TV...he's believes his allegations enough that he's willing to face serious legal consequences if its determined that he's lying. That being said, my understanding is that the corporate culture of the place he worked at was pretty strong on only giving people access to the information necessary to do their jobs. This is an important information security principle, and so those that aren't managing across multiple groups don't always see the whole picture. That kind of information security can be used to hide wrong doing (I'm not saying that is the case here). But when you're talking about financial portfolios that can turn extra millions based on a few tenths of a percentage point, your trading secrets are very carefully guarded. I'm not convinced that the Church did anything wrong. But I also wouldn't be surprised if some of their investments operated in legally ambiguous spaces. Welcome to reality. But I also am not* ready to question the motives of a whistleblower just because he is making allegations against an organization I hold in high esteem.+ * I accidentally left out the word "not" in my original post. Sorry for the confusion.

Well, first of all, the initial report came out through the Washington Post. I know that probably doesn't a much higher opinion in these parts. But the original story there isn't terribly written. There are a few legitimate concerns in the report. There are a lot of less legitimate concerns as well. For example, The Church takes in $7 billion dollars in donations annually, and spends $40 million dollars annually on humanitarian aid. That comes to 0.5% of its donations revenue is spent on humanitarian aid. That doesn't account for its other sources of revenue. Conversely, about $6 billion of that is spent each year on operating expenses, which increases the percentage to 4% of the remaining billion is spent on humanitarian aid. One of the complaints raised is that 4% seems kind of low. The complaint alleges that $2 billion were spent on bailing out for-profit ventures owned by the church, and that these transfers were in violation of laws governing how tax exempt funds can be used. That seems, to me, to be something worthy of investigation. But I'm also willing to reserve any judgment until such investigation is complete. If any laws or regulations were violated, justice should be served*. Some are up in arms that the Church has holdings that exceed twice the amount in Harvard University's endowment. It's a little eye raising for me, but one should also consider that the Church probably holds a lot more real estate and property than Harvard does. The purpose of these endowments is to offset operating costs when there are drops in revenue so that services can be provided while making adjustments to match costs to revenue streams. So, to me, not a major concern. Some of the ways this gets frustrating to me personally are Every year I have fights with ward members about getting people to the church each week to do the cleaning. Getting the cleaning schedule operating and the cleaning done is easily the most burdensome task I have faced in any of the callings I've served in the Church (and that's saying something). And yet, more and more of the cleaning responsibilities are being dumped on the members to reduce costs. Not a truly valid concern, but when you can't see the big picture, things like this are massively frustrating. The Church has moved to a facilities management system that is "streamlined, integrated, and more efficient at delivering services" or some such buzz word soup. We can't even get paper towels on a regular basis any more. Our fire alarm has been broken for six months. We submit requests to have it fixed, someone looks at it and says "this is what needs to be done to fix it" and then closes the ticket. So we're in this perpetual loop of not getting the stupid thing fixed because there's a higher priority on closing tickets than there is in fixing problems. But clearly the Church has the money to fix the fire alarm. So, at the end of the day, there may or may not be some things amiss in this report. Given that the whistleblower filed the affadavit under oath and penalty of perjury, I think it's appropriate to investigate. I don't know that much will come of it, because religious organizations have a lot of flexibility in this arena. On the more personal level, it irritates some because that is such a large pot of money (in just one set of holdings, by the way. That isn't everything the Church has), but we still feel like we're being bled dry for our time. Those are feelings that can be dealt with, but we should be careful not to be dismissive of them. Lastly, even if there are some mild shenanigans going on here, it's highly likely that the Church isn't the biggest perpetrator of these shenanigans. I imagine there are a lot of "religious organizations" that are using the flexibility given religious non profits to build egregious personal fortunes (ie, televangelists). It may be time to review the books of some of these religious organizations and institute some reforms.

That's a fair criticism of my remarks. But I'd also nuance that with the fact that Smith was pretty prone to believing in fantastic ideas. And many* of the things he taught and described weren't very far outside of the cultural and religious norms of his day. This was a young man who had a stone with "supernatural" powers and a divining rod. Which leads me to wonder if the way that he saw heavenly visitors was an indication of what those visitors tended to wear? Or were they dressed in ways that would be recognizable to him?** I'm not going to say it was one way or the other, or some combination of both. I only claim that there's enough uncertainty to cast doubt on any strong assertions about day-to-day life after death based on the very, very scant evidence in any scripture. * emphasis on many....certainly not all. ** Perhaps because seeing visitors wearing Tony Stark style nano-technology suits would have freaked the poor kid out

Well, obviously it makes a lot more sense for Lehi and company to sail up the Red Sea, pass through the Suez canal, sail out of the Mediterranean through the straight of Gibraltar, and then west and south to Florida. The other option is they sailed east across the Pacific, and went through the Panama canal to reach Florida. Easy peasy

If we take the scriptures at face value, there are prophets and apostles that have described angels in all kinds of dress. Some with wings, and some hybrid with animals. Angels are depicted in various ways throughout history, which would suggest that their dress has changed over the millenia. If we choose not to take scriptural accounts quite so literally, and say that at least some of those visions were figurative, then we have to start classifying which appearances/visions are literal beings and which are not. Those kinds of processes are always subjective and prone to preconceived biases. There's simply insufficient information in the scriptures to describe any aspect of life after death with any certainty.

No.

I'm sorry. I didn't realize you weren't in the U.S. (most participant here are). If you don't have access to mental health care, I don't really know what to tell you. Living with treated mental illness is hard. Living with untreated mental illness is ridiculously hard. In what I've witnessed in life, those who have chosen to stay married to someone with untreated mental illness are miserable. Those how have chosen to divorce someone with untreated mental illness are a few degrees less miserable. Those who remain married to someone with treated mental illness have the best chance at not being miserable (though they sometimes still are if there are other problems).

The cold hard reality that you are facing is some mixture of the two following possibilities 1. Your husband is severely mentally ill 2. Your husband is an idiot. This does not exclude the possibilities of your own short comings with communication or insecurities in relationships, etc. But as far as your husband's behavior goes, my armchair psychology would peg those two issues. And I lean heavily toward the first. The things you describe about your husband sound like depression. He needs treatment. He needs therapy. The first thing I would recommend is a serious discussion with him about whether he is willing to pursue mental health treatment. Mental health treatment should be a condition of your willingness to continue the marriage. I'm serious about that. If he is diagnosed with depression and prescribed medication, consistent use of his medication should be a condition of your marriage. Based on what you've described, you should have yourself checked out too. Your struggles may be created by the stress and frustration of your marriage, or you may have something deeper going on. But it sounds like you need help, too. It sounds like your income is pretty low. Medicaid should be able to cover mental health care (it's a requirement under the ACA). Don't make a decision about the future of your marriage until both of you have had your mental health evaluated. Those are crucial elements to evaluating how you can make the marriage work. One caveat: if at any time there is threat of violence, or ideation of violence, either he must go stay somewhere else, or you must leave. That's usually pretty extreme, but it isn't the kind of thing you wait around for.

Since you rang....See here https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/648/what-was-the-life-expectancy-in-medieval-britain If a person survived into his/her 20's he or she could very well survive into their 40s.

For most people, the use of mathematics is the very definition of dogmatic knowledge. Most people haven't and couldn't prove even some of the most rudimentary theorems of mathematics. Thus, their reliance on it to do anything as simple as balance a checkbook is the very definition of dogmatic knowledge. They can make use of the tool, it works for them, but they can't really explain it. I think you're misunderstanding. There is no distributive property of addition. There are axioms for the commutative property of both addition and multiplication. There is only one distributive property that distributes multiplication over addition. e.g. a * (b + c) = a * b + a * c. https://suchanutter.net/ItCanBeShown/real-number-system.html#the-field-of-real-numbers

We have a couple in our ward for whom we didn't even make this an option. But the children are in a split custody situation, and it made sense to have them always attend the same ward. The adults can suffer.

Um, well, we agree. I know I've said it somewhere before, but I believe doubt is an inherent part of faith. Where one exists, the other must also. I know many here will (and have) argued that with me, but they almost always argue from a different set of assumptions and definitions, which lead them to a different conclusion. But at its core, all of mathematics is what you call dogmatic knowledge and rational faith. The real number system is built on top of 13 axioms that are accepted without proof. Those axioms greatly impact the outcome of theorems. For instance, if you accept the distributive property of multiplication over addition, then a negative times a negative is positive. If you reject the distributive property, them a positive times a positive is positive, a negative times a negative is negative, and a negative times a positive cannot be resolved. In a similar manner, I like to adopt different assumptions about religion sometimes, and see what the conclusions are.

I might need or want to make such generalizations for any number of reasons. Some of them worthwhile, some of them gossipy. Why I am making generalizations is irrelevant to the point. The point is, our youth programs no longer point to any common skill or knowledge set. Again, I'm not saying it's necessarily bad. Just saying that it's a trade we made to get more adaptibilty.

This thread kind of went off on a weird tangent, but I'll try to bring it back some. I have it on good authority* that there will be no General Women'should Session in April 2020. Instead, that session will invite all Young Women, Relief Society, and priesthood holders. * the First Presidency

Of course they don't remember what they learned. Or much of it anyway. They're still teenagers. I've never looked at someone who earned an Eagle Scout rank and thought, "I bet they know their knots." But I do think, "I know they learned those knots once." Additionally, I can reasonably think that if they have an Eagle award, they likely have a basic understanding of knife and gun safety, even if they don't know the specifics of running a safe range. Likewise, I can look at Young Women who have earned the Personal Progress medallion, and I can tell you which scriptures they've studied, and have a reasonable understanding of what kind of time they've put into it and what kind of activities they've performed. They might not be able to quote scriptures or give dissertations about what they've learned, but I understand what foundation I have to build on. With the new program, I won't be able to make generalizations like that about youth who complete the program. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a trade off. But the problem is almost never the checklist. The problem is usually the leaders that permit checklists to be completed without challenging people with real growth.

Also to defend checklists, the whole premise of this new program is for youth to set their goals and then for leaders to help them write their own checklists. The major change is that there is no longer a baseline for how much a person should have accomplished to "complete the program." This has advantages and disadvantages. The primary advantage is that, when applied correctly, youth will learn how to set goal, and break them down to achieve them. And the goals and process to do so are completely customizable to the individual. The primary disadvantage is that there is no way to look at someone who has completed the Church's youth program and have any idea what they know or have experienced. It gives up generalizability for individuality. We've given up more of the former than I would like, but whatever.

<Faith is not believing that God can -- it is knowing that he will> This is utterly preposterous to me. For many of the same reasons JAG brings up. I slap this one down as often as I hear it. I went on a big rant sometime ago when someone said we shouldn't use the words "I believe" and pointed out that all I, personally, can do is believe. I don't know much of anything in the gospel, and still have a lot of doubts. And I don't consider that a sign of weakness. I had to also point out that it's okay if a person says they "know." I don't know what their experiences are. But we should at least give others to room for their doubts. Fortunately, my current status in my ward lets me get away with such rants. One of my favorite lessons I ever taught was about faith and knowledge. I started with the question "How many of you know that, algebraically speaking, x * 0 = 0". Every hand in the room went up. I then asked someone to come up and prove it to me. There was a lot "but it just is! I learned it in school! you can't prove that it isn't!" At some point, I would write the mathematical proof on the board. Very few understood it. And then I would discuss how understanding the concepts and demonstrating how to use them built knowledge. But until I could put all those pieces together, I didn't know that x*0 = 0, I only operated on a strong belief; a belief that persisted because it was so useful. Faith in God often works the same way. We feel like something is true. It makes sense to us. and it is useful to operate as if it is true. At some point, we may extend that belief, go through some exercise that pushes us into knowledge. And that's great. But not everyone progresses from faith to knowledge. And some people that claim knowledge don't actually know (I believe). Anyway, my point is that we do a disservice to faith (and belief) when we try to place it in a position that is inferior to knowledge. Faith is what opens the door to salvation. There's no reason to talk trash about it.

I have seen discrepancies in ward budgeting cut both directions. It's kind of hit-or-miss, and I've heard of enough first hand accounts of young women being given smaller budgets than young men (including from my spouse), that I'm certain the problem was common, but not ubiquitous. The first time I was called as a ward clerk, the ward had three young men and their budget was $700. The ward had seven young women and their budget was $400. Yet, when I looked at the expenditures, the young women were trying to milk every penny out of their budget, and the young men had $575 left at the end of the year. From the other direction, the Relief Society had a budget of $850. The EQ/HP had a combined budget of $100. The mens and womens groups were about equally sized. I decided that couldn't stand. I assigned budgets based on how many active participants there were in each group. The Young Women presidency loved me. The Young Men presidency didn't care (they weren't spending the money anyway). Surprisingly, I got more push back from the men than I did from any one else. The Relief Society president wasn't thrilled, but when she looked at my process for allocating the money she was willing to accept it because it treated everyone fairly. What caught me off guard was the resistance from the men. Their claim was that they didn't need it and weren't likely to spend it. I responded that if they weren't using their budget, they weren't doing enough to build their quorum, and they should start doing a better job of that. In then end, we negotiated $50 less to each EQ and HP, gave it to Relief Society and told the men to suck it up and have some activities. That's when we started holding cookouts before priesthood sessions, and Elders Quorum started to be a bit more fun. Anyway, I am a fan of the directive to allocate funds equally between programs based on participation. Like I said, it wasn't ubiquitous, but it probably does still happen that one group gets more than another for stupid reasons. This gives a clear statement that leaders can use to advocate better funding for their groups when leaders are being jerks about budgets.

My take on this part of the story is that we should not seek vengeance. Additionally, mortal probation is supposed to be the time in which people repent. If God were to allow Cain to be killed, it would terminate his time to change his heart. God was not giving up on Cain, and the mark placed upon him was a reminder to the righteous that they should not give up on him either.