Religions tend to become the opposite of what they preach.
The church of Jesus became an actual state for centuries. Buddhist monasteries founded on non-violence became fortresses populated by warrior monks. Hindu religion perpetuated the caste system. And so on. No major world religion is exempt.
The LDS church is a curious speedrun of religion’s possibilities. Should we be esoteric? A state? A hedge fund? A polygamous matchmaker? A business networking opportunity? They seem to have tried everything in less than two centuries.
I am not Mormon, but I am mystified why a Mormon would not understand why their church hoards money rather than giving it away. It makes complete sense to anyone who understands their peculiar doctrine.
One of those peculiarities as a religion born in America is the prophecy that when the US Constitution is hanging by a thread, the Mormon Elders will be asked to step in and save it. Saving up a ton of money for that day is in complete alignment of what they (quietly) preach. There is a prepper mindset fairly deeply attached to Mormonism.
Having been a seminary class president, scout, priesthood holder, just not a missionary or really active member, born and raised in Utah, I will tell you one interesting contradiction about Mormons is the extent to which they disown their past and at the same time still have many ideas from that time circulating around in a particular way. I would think it's similar to say how some Catholics may be down with the whole thing right now and yet still aren't "up-to-date" with the Catholic church's official position on things, for instance post Vatican II. Some not all.
I would doubt that this sort of prophesy is a genuine front-of-mind-concern today by the people running this operation at the church. Preparing for the second coming could be a more sincere answer coming from them, but if such an event were to occur I think it would make money worthless, so that doesn't make sense to me.
> I would doubt that this sort of prophesy is a genuine front-of-mind-concern today by the people running this operation at the church.
The concern is keeping the tribe going, and doing whatever it takes to optimize the tribe’s performance. Holding contradictory thoughts is just an inconvenience that can easily be tolerated, or even serve a purpose to weed out those less committed to the tribe. Note that even within the tribe, there can be multiple tribes, for example those of the leaders and those of the followers, who might have different goals.
> I will tell you one interesting contradiction about Mormons is the extent to which they disown their past and at the same time still have many ideas from that time circulating around in a particular way. I would think it's similar to say how some Catholics may be down with the whole thing right now and yet still aren't "up-to-date" with the Catholic church's official position on things, for instance post Vatican II.
As I don't know what you mean about the LDS in your first sentence, I don't know what you mean here. Where the Catholic Church is concerned, no change in doctrine can occur; it would invalidate the Church's claim of religious and moral authority. Doctrine can develop, of course. Analogically, I like to characterize this as something like an increase in clarity and depth of prior teachings, or deductions that follows from them, but never anything that innovates or contradicts prior comprehension. We could say that development is monotonic. However, doctrine is one thing, but things like liturgical practice and canon law are another (and still another are the private opinions of prelates, which less educated people may confuse with magisterial Church teaching). These can be adapted in changing circumstances, though obviously not with infinite flexibility.
In the case of Vatican II, it was a valid council and nothing taught in that council contracted what came before the council. Rather, historical circumstances, the cultural turmoil of that period, the resulting confusion, disorientation, corruption, etc. led to all sorts of secondary effects that seized on the fact of the Second Vatican Council. This left many people thinking the Church had changed in some essential way when it had not. Opportunists both inside and outside the Church happily used the appearance of change to promote fashionable nonsense and notions among the ignorant that were never taught by Vatican II. But from a historical perspective, one of many crises in Church history. No historically aware Catholic is freaking out, as dismayed as he may be.
I don't disagree. It's not a perfect analogy. The Mormon's I describe are a lot like Sedevacantists except that they aren't openly out "against" the official church.
I grew up Mormon. No Mormon I’ve talked to has any problem with the church holding onto this money. They’ll say “well of course, it’s for when the temple is built in Independence, Missouri and we’re all called to live in the Promised Land under the Law of Consecration.”
I fell on tough times a few years back and my local Bishop insisted I take some aid, they gave me food for a few months from “The Bishop’s Storehouse”, basically a food bank for members. This is despite me being an inactive Mormon for twenty years or so. They care a lot about their members, even the ones who aren’t going to church.
Mormons are very clear about how they think things are going. What’s funny is the concern people outside the church have with all this.
This religion was formed when a person in the 1820's discovered golden plates with ancient Egyptian inscriptions (from ~ 2000 years ago) about 300 miles inland from the Atlantic in NY State. Absolutely no evidence that anyone from Egypt or the middle east was ever roaming around what is now upstate NY.
Mystified isn't a strong enough wording to describe how people aren't rationalizing many aspects of the world's religions with all we know today.
My family is amused when I criticize the physics in a movie when a bridge collapses in an unrealistic way. Apparently I don't have any issue with the talking dog that flies across the river and uses mental telepathy to form a giant wave that catches all the pieces of the fallen bridge and pushes them back into place to restore the bridge. No, my beef is with the poor grasp of physics because of how the bridge fell down.
Joseph Smith didn't discover gold plates. He was led to them by an angel sent by God. The question of whether a decendant of inhabitants of Jerusalem could have buried some modified Egyption writings in North America 1000+ years before Joseph was born... that question is kind of small when considering if there is a God and if any such God takes a direct interest in individual people.
FWIW, I happen to believe that there is a God and that God cares very much about you.
You speak about physics and how unrealistic a bridge collapse in a movie is yet want to hand wave about the physics of golden plates showing up from a civilization 5000 miles and 1500+ years away with zero evidence that the plates ever existed other than "trust me, bro".
As you go back through history, its understandable that earlier civilizations attribute things happening around them, or things they observe, to some higher power or having completely false notions of the world, like the earth is flat for example. And then humans come to a more accurate understanding via science. How many hundreds or thousands of deities/gods have humans attributed things to during our thousands of years of existence?
God or a higher being isn't the discussion point, the discussion point is how silly it is to think that something like being led to/discovering golden plates happened at that period of time.
Please read the book. One guy follows a funky compass provided by...God(?) from Jerusalem to some coast. On the coast God shows him where to mine ore to make tools. God shows him how to build a ship that can weather a long sea voyage all the way to the Americas.
The whole book has all sorts of interventions from God. Like every page is about God. If you're hung up on Egyptian writing you missed the whole point. That's the least incredulous part.
And some 18-year-old kid in the 1820s says an angel led him to these gold plates with all this modified Egyptian writing and God showed him how to translate it into English.
So this book is going to be a bunch of crazy nonsense, right? Read it. Seriously, read it. It is a better read than anything you did in your high school or college lit class. We can't have a decent critical discussion about the physics of it until you've read it.
I wish people would apply critical thinking to whether or not it is appropriate to permanently punish two and all of their progeny for an action they took prior to having knowledge of good and evil. Or why an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent being would need to torture a distant descendant of theirs to death before considering forgiveness for that action.
The church in question regularly teaches that people should build up their savings against any reversal of fortune. It also teaches to be generous to those in need. It strives to set an example in both things.
Your wikipedia link is about some rumor started a half century after the founder was murdered. It's a bit like George Washington's cherry tree. It may be a well-known story, but it isn't part of the constitution or a motivation for any governing action.
I think it is entirely appropriate for the government of Sweden to build some security for a rainy day. I think it is appropriate for my neighbor to do the same. I don't see any reason why the local community church should not. So why should a multinational church be different?
I'm reading other headlines about whether US politicians will extend the debt limit in time. Wouldn't it be a relief if instead we criticized them for building too large a reserve?
It was widely discussed when I was a Mormon for the first three decades of life, primarily by the more conservative contingent of the LDS church.
Mormons have this notion of "deep doctrine" because their hierarchical governance seeks to instill reliance and trust on its leaders, whom rarely commit to stating things as doctrine because the memory of the unwashed masses is longer than they'd expect. So folks on the front line take notions spoken decades and centuries ago and try to fit it to a modern framework, even when things are obviously wrong.
There are, in fact, no Quakers living on the moon (Brigham Young), which we did arrive to in 1969 (Joseph Fielding Smith). This is why the White Horse prophecy remains relevant -- gets spoken about by Mormon leaders to young men over campfires and Sunday talks, in addition to a whole lot of other nonsensical mysticism and, worse, principles that are harmful to marginalized communities.
Two statements made by early "prophets" of the religion, statements that most members would like to forget. Actually it was Joseph Smith (the religion's founder) that said the moon is populated by people resembling Quakers. Joseph Fielding Smith, the church's "prophet" in the mid-1900's, said we would never make it to the moon.
> So folks on the front line take notions spoken decades and centuries ago and try to fit it to a modern framework, even when things are obviously wrong.
Yep, and barely at that. Mormon history allegedly starts no earlier than 1820, though there are several versions of what they consider the "First Vision" that may have taken place over several years in 1820. Definitely by 1830 it started to take shape.
I can’t speak to other religions, but Jesus did not speak against the state, or against statehood as such.
Meanwhile the Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization in the world, despite all of its problems due to consisting of deeply flawed humans.
Jesus didn’t speak against the state, but saw it as something different that didn’t interest him. He spoke more against religious authorities, and against the strict enforcement of harsh religious laws. I say this because lots of people seem to be claiming the opposite and pushing for more christian influence in governance
True but he was martyred by the state. This is the core of Christian faith. God was put to death by an unjust government. It was Christ’s threat to state power that earned the execution. And tax collectors, even the disciple Matthew, were widely considered sinners during his day. The orientation people have to government power is much different before and after Christ. Political liberalism, individual freedom and many other things we take for granted are the direct result Christianity. But yes, “render unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s”
The Roman Governor famously found nothing wrong with Jesus, that is to say nothing threatening to Rome, and washed his hands symbolically to say Jesus is dying because of the demand of the crowd and the religious authorities. He was dangerous to religious order, not secular order.
> True but he was martyred by the state. This is the core of Christian faith. God was put to death by an unjust government. It was Christ’s threat to state power that earned the execution.
Actually, the Gospels make clear that Pilate found Jesus not guilty, and it was only the threat of a riot by the priests if he didn't crucify Jesus that he crucified him. It's still ultimately the religious authorities who order his death, and in this case, the state is at best acting as a tool of the religious authorities rather than in its own secular authority.
It kinda depends on how you define "charitable" though.
Historically, churches treat money spent on themselves as "charity." There was an interesting discussion in Christianity Today a long while back about how, on the surface, it looks like Red state residents are more charitable than folks in Blue states -- but the difference was tithing to churches, which overwhelmingly consume those funds on operating their Sunday morning social club & related programming.
If you factored out that aspect, the comparison flipped dramatically.
The paradox being resolved that religious people aren't highly charitable in general, but people in a social club are pressured into paying dues, and mentally ill people are easily duped into giving up their money.
That's not really the cause. It is more like grease to ease the egress when someone already looking for the exit for other reasons needs an easy excuse. Ireland's Catholicism was already weakened by various ideological currents and social engineering that swept across the country, many facilitated by powerful, shall we say, American corporate interest and investment. Living the Catholic faith is demanding and utterly unappealing to those who've been made slaves to their deranged passions. Not so coincidentally, those who are slaves to their passions are easier to control. I leave the inference to be made here as an exercise for the reader.
The British colonization of Ireland was brutal, but it was corporeal. The spiritual colonization today, materially prosperous and comfortable, destroys the soul.
I think it's probably got something to do with it. Plenty of non-Catholic denominations and other faiths have had similar abuse scandals, and in the public consciousness the crimes of Catholic priests get filed under "why religion is bad" as much as "why Catholicism is bad".
Well, it's certainly not helping with the recruiting of younger people into that particular religion... Today's 80 year olds in the church probably joined 60-75 years ago.
Synagogues are giving the Catholics a run for their money. Ask yourself why the shorim are allowed to completely cover up all the abuse inside the orthodox community?
What? Comparing the size and scale of the Catholic church, and the centralized system of protecting known sex abusers, to a small fraction of a tiny religious group is absurd.
Yes, but it also is besides the point. People gladly attack the Catholic Church and they do so with a kind of seething hatred or blind ignorance that allows them to assign to the Church a unique status in this regard. But the fact is that child abuse[0] is or was present in all institutions that deal with children, both religious and secular. In fact, the rate of abusive priests in the Church (estimated to be about 4%) is average or below the rates elsewhere, especially public schools where it is something like 10% among staff, last I checked.
And I wonder if the parent above knows how protective these Jewish communities are of their own. They do not like to involve the state in their affairs.
So none of this is unique or even extraordinarily present in the Catholic Church.
[0] And by "child abuse", certainly in the Church, it is best described as a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. That is, 80% of abuse victims were post-pubescent teenage males.
The Catholic Church is also responsible for more violence, "holy" wars, death and harm then Hitler, Mao Zedong, Stalin and whoever else you want to add to the list combined.
I searched and found this pristine answer.
It’s around 100k
Still it was for many people a horrible time and institutions that did that once should be abolished. That’s nothing anyone can come back from in a humanitarian society.
Edit:
It’s not the goal of life to argue with bad institutions until they become slightly less bad . If an institution has a history of abuse of power or trying to get power trough violence it should be abolishe
The article is written by someone on the left, whose point is served by magnifying the crimes of the Catholics (and minimizing those of the Muslims). Therefore, it's likely to have a generously large estimate of the death toll due to the Catholic Church. And it says:
The Crusaders themselves suffered; historians estimate that only one in 20 survived to even reach the Holy Land. It is estimated that 1.7 million people died in total.
Historians estimate that 150,000 people were put on trial by the Inquisition, with 3,000 executed.
I'm afraid that is a lot less than the usually estimated 6 million from Hitler alone, and far less than the tens of millions from Stalin and Mao.
Edit: OP originally claimed that the inquisition killed 50 million people and then edited their response instead of providing evidence. That's better than nothing, but I think still illustrates that OP might have extreme biases when discussing the Catholic church.
Do you also need some evidence that the earth is in fact not flat or the center of the universe as your beloved church claim for so long and also killed people for saying otherwise?
Just google "inquisition" or the million other atrocious acts for the church. I don't wast my time doing the work for people who defend the most criminal organization in the world
As a general rule of thumb, "popular common knowledge" of the Medieval and Early Modern periods tends to be the complete opposite of the truth often enough that anyone who cites to popular knowledge for this period is very suspect in their use of sources.
It really doesn't help when you start your citation to this by comparing it to flat earth--no educated person in the Middle Ages would believe it to be flat; even the standard textbooks of the day (e.g., Ptolemy, Aristotle) would give you several proofs of its spherical nature. It's even mentioned on Wikipedia's List of Common Misconceptions, which is a clear sign you should purge it from your list of comebacks.
High estimates for the number of deaths due to the Inquisition is somewhere in the thousands. Communism in its various forms is in the tens of millions.
I would rephrase this as: an institution most important goal is self-preservation. It is a bit the same as how a specific implementation can have security bugs, while an algorithm in abstract does not.
There is a big difference: once a bug is found in an algorithm, it is removed. But in religions, once a problem is found, they will just threaten the people who found the problem and protect the perpetrators.
To me, the this is just a corollary of the fact that any human system is susceptible of becoming corrupt. Therefore, human systems should be created with a built-in self-destruct function, so that once they have lived past their initial purpose they collapse in the least harmful way possible so that then another newer and better system can take its place.
It's funny because I'm basing my statement on history, all sort of human-made institutions become corrupted, endure for longer than they should, collapse when the situation becomes unsustainable, then a new system necessarily takes over. Meanwhile, people who have to go through this process reap the suffering that comes with it.
What I'm advocating is an understanding of this process, and ensuring that systems get replaced before they collapse because our unwillingness to let them go. What I'm advocating is the opposite of chaos, it's controlled renewal.
Incremental reform is rationally a much better alternative, but in practice it doesn't always work, again, systems want to perpetuate themselves over time, so the only way in which they change is by collapsing. Also, sometimes what you need is not incremental changes but paradigm shifts. Another aspect, is that this assumes that we can always design systems on a top-down fashion, I think sometimes it's better to have an evolutionary trial-and-error process.
This feels like a pretty modern view of the role of religion in society. For the majority of history I think it would barely be fair to consider a religion's de jure or ab initio "intent" from its de facto actions. Since it is the line to God (in the theistic traditions at least), it is always the most accurate source of its own intents, especially pre-Luther (and really, pre mass literacy).
I guess what I mean to say is I'm not sure any of those you listed had strong philosophical or textual convictions against the counterpoints you provide. And even if they did at given points, that's not enough to judge the overall shape into some particular direction of "corruption"
If anything, I assert that religion is as much reflective of the society it serves, as it is causal. It is one of the primary engines of "True Things" for people, but it also needs to react to new "True Things" from other sources, and integrates them, to provide a more powerful explanatory framework. With some consideration for its own foundational priors and axioms, but even those become malleable given enough social pressure.
So in that light how can we be surprised that modern American incarnations of "Christianity" embrace capitalism as the yardstick for Goodness?
> Religions tend to become the opposite of what they preach.
I'm not a fan of such generalizations, not least of all because the term "religion" is itself commonly thoughtlessly applied and vague. Every human being has a religion according to a technical reading of the term because every human being takes something as the highest good to which all others goods are subordinate and to which he offers some kind of worship. So the question isn't whether someone is religious, but what they are religious about, and then, how good and true their religion is, whether their religion is the best, whether it is the true religion, etc. (Shocking perhaps to the adherents of the blandness that is moralistic therapeutic deism.)
> The church of Jesus became an actual state for centuries.
The Church never became a state (though I'm not sure what this is insinuating about the alleged teachings of Jesus). Those with authority in the Church have historically had both ecclesiastical authority and secular authority, yes, and this continues to this day (the pope is the prime example as he is both the supreme pontiff and monarch of the Holy See, and historically, has been the monarch of, e.g., the Papal States). But so what? There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus that contradicts the notion of secular authority or that those in the Church might also have such authority. Indeed, it is in the teachings of Christ that we find the very distinction between and recognition of religious and secular authority and institutions in the first place (e.g., Matthew 22:21). The liberal notion of the separation of Church and State is just an exaggeration of this distinction (which is why liberalism is, quite literally, a Christian heresy). You cannot make sense of this distinction outside of the broader Christian tradition. This is probably one reason why American attempts to spread the Gospel of Liberal Democracy have generally been hamfisted failures in other civilizational contexts. In any case, the state is a natural institution according to the natural law and a necessary institution.
Here's an interesting explanation of the significance of the Holy Roman Empire that you and others might find interesting[0].
The church of Jesus became an actual state for centuries. Buddhist monasteries founded on non-violence became fortresses populated by warrior monks. Hindu religion perpetuated the caste system. And so on. No major world religion is exempt.
The LDS church is a curious speedrun of religion’s possibilities. Should we be esoteric? A state? A hedge fund? A polygamous matchmaker? A business networking opportunity? They seem to have tried everything in less than two centuries.