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I tried to get it to show a missionary swimming in a pool of coins like Scrooge McDuck, but it wouldn’t let me produce images that it deemed to be satirical of religious beliefs.<\/em><\/p>\n Once upon a time there was a devout, hard-working, highly efficient religious organization that started stockpiling and investing money for the glory of God. Because of their business acumen and scrupulosity, the pile grew fabulously large until\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n King Phillip (the French King in <\/span>Braveheart<\/span><\/i>) and the Pope collaborated to steal their money and had the leaders arrested, tortured, and executed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Given the title of this post, you can see where I’m going with this. Now, I don’t think the Church leaders will get burned at the stake or arrested, but it’s a truism that the larger the amount of money you have the bigger the target you have on your back for people to just take your money. Because you really can buy (almost) everything in this world with money and money can make people weird and unscrupulous, with the unscrupulousity increasing with the amount of money at stake.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It’s why super rich people have bodyguards and have to deal with a constant stream of lawsuits and bad-faith friends and relatives (and why I\u2019m okay with Church security being more than a guy with a radio outside President Nelson\u2019s apartment). For the Church I don’t know what the actual mechanism might be, maybe some out of control juries and lawsuits, an “excess wealth tax” on religious holdings (which yes, would never happen in today’s jurisprudential environment, but who knows 70 years down the road when a bunch of New Atheists are in charge) or maybe missionary or general authority ransoms, again who knows, but as a general principle that amount of money does make me nervous in terms of incentivizing bad actors.(And as an aside, because of these dynamics I completely understand why the Church tried to keep its funds hush hush, sorry\/not sorry).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Thankfully as of now the Church is headquartered in a nation that has decent rule of law (yes we’re not perfect, but let’s not both-sides this and pretend that the Church\u2019s situation would be the same if it were headquartered in Russia or the Congo). But a Knights Templar-type situation sounds par the course for our own experience as a religion. And if we enter into a socio-political stage where there are fewer scruples about using the state or other institutions to target individuals or organizations the number of possibilities for pilfering the Church\u2019s wealth opens up.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s a kind of fun hashtag that circulated in some circles after the 100 billion (or is it 150 billion now?) number was leaked, #makeitatrillion, and I love the idea. If the Church can turn my 10 dollars of tithing money into 50 dollars through wise investment, more power to them (and people who think the money is just sitting there rotting and not doing any work don’t understand how securities investments and financing works), and I hope they are even more successful and the fund gets bigger. Still, at some point that number becomes large enough that we become a tempting target for the King Phillips of today, even if they are less able to go nuclear on us like he did with the Knights Templar, and that makes me nervous, even if I am in principle fine with the Church managing a trillion dollar portfolio. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I tried to get it to show a missionary swimming in a pool of coins like Scrooge McDuck, but it wouldn’t let me produce images that it deemed to be satirical of religious beliefs. Once upon a time there was a devout, hard-working, highly efficient religious organization that started stockpiling and investing money for the glory of God. Because of their business acumen and scrupulosity, the pile grew fabulously large until\u2026 King Phillip (the French King in Braveheart) and the Pope collaborated to steal their money and had the leaders arrested, tortured, and executed.\u00a0 Given the title of this post, you can see where I’m going with this. Now, I don’t think the Church leaders will get burned at the stake or arrested, but it’s a truism that the larger the amount of money you have the bigger the target you have on your back for people to just take your money. Because you really can buy (almost) everything in this world with money and money can make people weird and unscrupulous, with the unscrupulousity increasing with the amount of money at stake.\u00a0 It’s why super rich people have bodyguards and have to deal with a constant stream of lawsuits […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":46735,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2970],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-leadership-and-policies"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/DALL\u00b7E-2024-03-11-22.19.30-This-depiction-of-Knights-Templar-in-front-of-an-LDS-temple-should-now-be-fully-transformed-into-the-authentic-medieval-art-style.-The-illustration-sh.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46733"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50234,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46733\/revisions\/50234"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}