Tag Archives: religion

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Some notes on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ finances

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Since there are some odd claims about the finances of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints going around, I thought I’d just mention a few things:

1. I honestly like paying tithing and making other donations. It’s chill, I like not worshipping money, it’s lovely how it tempers materialism, and God watches over us better than money does anyway.

2. The monetary reserves the Church holds (about $100 billion), in the highest amounts I’ve seen alleged, are comparable to the combined endowments of Yale (~$40b) and Harvard (~$50b). The 3 BYUs (Church-owned universities) serve about the same number of students as those two universities, but the Church is a much, much bigger org than Yale and Harvard (and even just discussing the BYUs, they’re operated at a massive loss with the lowest nonmilitary tuition in the US, a far cry from Yale and Harvard). The Church’s worldwide operations include welfare programs active basically everywhere the Church is present, humanitarian operations, facilities, budgets for local congregations, even educational services etc. The numbers in modern finance are dazzling, but that’s because the world is crazy. $100b in the modern economy is ~not~ large at all for a global institution.

3. The Church is tax-exempt. Its investment arm (Ensign Peak), however, is a related but distinct entity and is ~not~ tax exempt. It receives extensive IRS oversight, as does any org handling large amounts of money.*

4. Church investments are largely consistent with the Church’s purpose. One of the biggest sectors of investment is agriculture, which is necessary to sustain the Church Welfare system’s food distribution. The oddball projects are usually offshoots or offspring of various community development projects that the Church has contributed to. (Consider how the Church in Utah was in charge of developing almost everything necessary to build a life in the beginning; it has taken on similar projects in other countries as well.)

5. The Church does report what it spends donations on. Building maintenance, humanitarian needs, welfare, missionary funds, temple funds, etc. It doesn’t specify what percentages go to which, but 1) i’m satisfied as to the legitimacy of each fund, 2) detailed reporting is v expensive, and 3) i don’t really care about the details, anyway.**

*I found this kind of funny, it’s an aside about tax law, but I saw a claim that the Church wasn’t following the spirit of the law in its tax operations in some unspecified way. I just wanted to take a brief moment to note that the Tax Code is the most byzantine, absurd, torturous area of law in the US. There is no “spirit of the law” when it comes to our tax system. (It isn’t even fully consistent with the spirit of raising revenue lol.)

**The trend to demand detailed budget reporting in the name of government transparency is a similar and sometimes vexatious issue. The more detail you demand, the more checks you add in, the more expensive it gets (and it gets expensive fast when you apply it across an institution as extensive and varied as the government). It’s really easy to spend so much on “improving” finance reporting that you burn any savings you’d gain from catching errors.

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Re: The AP article on the sexual abuse hotline for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

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The AP article, at least with respect to the legal portion, appears to be flagrant misinfo. This whole situation is distressing, but I write this up because that article actively damages chances of reform and amounts to little more than a distraction.

The AZ law in question states: “A clergyman or priest, without consent of the person making the confession, as to any confession made to the clergyman or priest in his professional character in the course of discipline enjoined by the church to which the clergyman or priest belongs.” A.R.S. § 13-4062(2). The statute even explicitly forbids reporting of sexual abuse admitted in court-ordered/correctional sex offender treatment in A.R.S. § 13-4066, and only makes an exception if, during the course of the treatment, there is a new offense. The statute provides no explicit exceptions for the penitent-clergyman privilege. Now, future or ongoing violent offenses are not covered by these privileges (per judicial interpretation), but that’s why the fact that the article mentions there was no actual knowledge of future or ongoing offenses is legally significant.

Unfortunately, the AP article provides 0 citations for the quotations of law it claims to provide, so I can’t determine why it claims what it does. It just throws phrases in quotation marks out there without explanation or sourcing.

In short, any report made without the permission of the confessor would be illegal. Only the confessor could allow the information to be divulged; the bishop had no discretion and indeed would be under a legal duty to say nothing. This case does not reveal some nefarious pattern in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ conduct; it is a pattern in US law. Every single state and federal law grant some degree of clergy-penitent privilege.

The helpline exists because it is entirely unreasonable to expect bishops or anyone besides lawyers to know how to handle these cases, esp. since law can change at any time. There is genuine legal complexity and significant regional variation. Leaving bishops to handle things by intuition, or or based on a rulebook, or whatever, would produce radically worse outcomes.

Even if the bishop illegally reported, courts would be legally required to ignore any evidence produced by the bishop. And, if the police managed to somehow get enough info anyway to establish probable cause (an uncertain proposition already) to issue a warrant to find admissible evidence, warrants typically don’t produce anything because sexual abuse is hard to get evidence for (this is an ongoing crisis, terribly intelligent people are trying to improve that, prosecutors really want to catch sexual abuse, but it’s a very difficult thing to fix and a quagmire well beyond the scope of this discussion). And forcing a criminal trial without adequate evidence would make things worse; it would almost inevitably grant the defendant immunity under double jeopardy.

That is the state of the law. If we want to prevent this kind of thing from happening/hold victimizers accountable, it doesn’t matter how much you speak to Church members or leaders. They cannot do anything; they are obligated to act within the law. The only people who have the power to change this are the AZ and other state legislatures. This is the takeaway. Hold legislators accountable; only they can change the rules we’re required to live by.

(I would support and I think most would support mandatory reporting for sexual abuse cases within the statute of limitations. I mention the statute of limitations as a threshold because, well, it’s useless to report anything beyond it. But I also note that, if the law were changed, most of these confessions would simply not happen and we’d end up in much the same place as we are now.)

(While this is not the most important issue at hand, I must also confess that the article is unprofessional and reeks of bigotry otherwise. For example, the article violates the AP’s own style guide on referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by massively overusing the pejorative/dismissive term “Mormon.” If you are a Latter-day Saint, you know defamation, bigotry, and attacks are common, but in this case, I comment on it mostly because of the serious legal issues in the reporting.)

Addendum: Mandatory Reporting Statutes

A.R.S. § 13-3620, Arizona’s mandatory reporting law, does not abrogate the penitent’s privilege, nor does it confer the privilege, ability to waive, or actual discretion on the clergy member. If a clergy member does not report, it is based on the penitent’s privilege:

“This section [13-3620] does not create a statutory clergyman’s privilege independent of the penitent’s privilege under § 12-2233; rather, they reinstate in child-related litigation a clergyman’s ability to withhold consent on the penitent’s behalf to examination of the clergyman concerning his penitent’s confidential communication.” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. Superior Court of the State of Arizona, 159 Ariz. 24 (Ariz. Ct. App. 1988).

In that case, testimony was allowed solely because the penitent waived the privilege by telling police about the contents of his confession. AP alleges no facts that suggest a waiver by the confessor. And even should such facts come to light, what does and does not constitute a waiver is highly fact-dependent, and may rely on information neither the bishop nor the hotline would have possessed at the time.

The second section mentioned in that quote, A.R.S. § 12-2233, is another iteration of the clergy-penitent privilege: “In a civil action a clergyman or priest shall not, without the consent of the person making a confession, be examined as to any confession made to him in his character as clergyman or priest in the course of discipline enjoined by the church to which he belongs.”

The court of appeals reinforced the clergy-penitent privilege because, if interpreted as AP suggests, § 13-3620 and § 12-2233 would create contrary legal duties that could not both be observed. Arizona courts have continued to reaffirm this interpretation, the most recent published decision being in 2018.

(And to explain more of the lack of professionalism on AP’s part, I would point to how they brag about obtaining access to this trove of documents, but they do not produce a single quotation or image about their contents. With that much information, if there were a pattern of problematic conduct, one would think they’d be able to report several cases across a Church with millions of members, or at least point to some document or actual policy that is causing the problem. Instead, all they do with all that information is say that, per their reading, again unexplained, the hotline could be used to divert sexual abuse cases from authorities, not that it is used. Here I note that the Church has also been sued for reporting too much in alleged violations of the privilege and that, as a matter of course, even where the privilege applies and a report is not possible, it is universal policy in the Church to push confessors of serious crimes to turn themselves in.)

Addendum 2: Further Details on Court Interpretation, esp. re: Mandatory Reporting, and Operation of Legal Privileges

You may not tell *anyone* privileged information.[1] Not the police, not a judge, not your spouse. Not in court, nor out of court. The clergy-penitent privilege operates very similarly to attorney-client and other privileged relationships.[2] Imagine an attorney telling anyone outside their office about their client’s confessions to them. Imagine if attorneys were allowed to report their clients. The privilege would immediately fail its purpose and the client would not be able to trust their own counsel. If AZ statute doesn’t explicitly spell that out, then it’s derived from common law, the body of law that corresponds to judicial decisions over history. It’s simply how privileges function (that’s why I don’t bother looking it up).

The clergy member has no privilege to not testify: he or she is compelled not to testify by the privilege of the penitent. The penitent is the exclusive possessor of the privilege in AZ law (most states grant the right to the penitent, not the clergy, as well). If the clergy member speaks without permission of the penitent, the penitent has the legal right to force the clergy member’s silence and obtain damages. And, of course, how many accused are not going to enforce such a thing? Even when it is referred to as the clergy member’s right, what it really means is that the clergy member exercises the penitent’s right on their behalf. So no, the clergy member may *not* testify of his or her own volition.

To summarize, the penitent-clergy privilege is a right that the penitent has *against* the clergy member, conditioned on the clergy-member’s respect of the privilege. Not a right of the clergy member.

That was the court’s decision in Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. Superior Court of the State of Arizona, 159 Ariz. 24 (Ariz. Ct. App. 1988). While the statutory language of § 13-3620, read alone, would seem to confer the right on the clergy member, the courts do not interpret it so, because such an interpretation would be incompatible with prior law that § 13-3620 was not intended to replace (per the court’s own examination of legislative history and statutory text). The published decision goes into a discussion of the whys and wherefores if you so wish.

How it works out is that the clergy member may not divulge the privileged information, unless some waiver occurs by the penitent and the penitent alone. If the penitent waives their privilege, then the clergy member would actually fall under the mandatory reporting statute and be required to report (this is problematic because the clergy member doesn’t necessarily know whether the penitent has waived their privilege, esp. in cases of implied waiver).

[1]Unless one of the specific exceptions apply, like the report concerns future violent harm or, say, you’re an attorney discussing the case with co-counsel or a paralegal (and then, cocounsel or the paralegal would be bound by the privilege).

[2] Arizona court decisions have made attorney-client privilege the strongest of the privileges in Arizona, with penitent-clergy being just a tick below attorney-client. Other privileges,

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Pioneer Day 2022 Reflections

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Today’s Pioneer Day in Utah, commemorating the day the first group of Latter-day Saints arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. The move was forced: the murder of Latter-day Saints had been legalized in Missouri and was ignored elsewhere. That we survived as a people was a miracle.

In Missouri, 2 reasons were given to justify our extermination: 1. we were poor 2. race-mixing/impeding the practice of slavery and 3. we were blasphemers. Some Latter-day Saints managed to escape before the onset of winter, while others could not. Many Latter-day Saints lost their properties to arson and vandalism. Many were also victims of assault, theft, rape, and murder.

With little money, they traversed the Midwest and Rockies. Many used shoddy handcarts, pulled by human power, to carry their scanty belonging.

Even after arrival, things were difficult: Utah is mostly desert, famine, illness, poverty, relations with local cultures were complicated (Utes in particular had grown into a powerful slaver culture after centuries of enslaving Shoshone and Paiutes the Spanish Empire).

(small aside: the Ute language is most closely related to the language of the Aztecs in Central Mexico, despite many significant languages and cultures separating them. v fascinating.)

Many people died before the exodus, and many died after. Included several of my ancestors.

While I didn’t grow up with Pioneer Day, I grew up with stories of my ancestors’ struggle to survive. These events still have significant ramifications.

Not the least are the cultural memory of persecution and the generational effects of trauma. Additionally, religious persecution in the US finds its legal precedent in cases against Latter-day Saints from the early Utah period.

Indigenous holy sites, rituals, and religions have been destroyed under reliance on legal principles set forth to harass and control Latter-day Saints. It’s a complex and often tragic history, but people made it work and managed to find their measure of happiness.

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Failure to Prove isn’t Proof of the Alternative, and Thoughts About a World of Belief

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What it says in the title. We like to have things proven, and it’s great when we can do that. But proof is hard (and the more you study the underlying principles of math and science, the more true that becomes). I mean, in the strictest sense, it’s probably most correct to say a true proof is impossible. But that’s not the focus tonight.

If you only accept what can be proven, you will miss out on a lot of good in life, and a lot of truth. So to speak, it’s necessary to anticipate the truth.

For example, you may know how calculus was codiscovered by Leibniz and Newton in the 1600s. What you probably don’t know is that neither of them proved calculus. It took 200 years to prove calculus did what Newton, Leibniz, and basically every mathematician said it did (it was Cauchy and Weierstrass who are responsible for the proof). For those two hundred years, calculus was unproven; the arguments explaining calculus literally divided by zero throughout. But calculus worked just fine for those 200 years. The proof was great to have, it enriched the theory for certain, but the world would in no wise have been benefited if it had waited for the proof before it relied on calculus. Indeed, if calculus had not been used, it’s hard to know whether people would have had much urgency at all when it came to finding the proof (while I doubt it would have happened this way, one can imagine a world where the failures to prove calculus led to its abandonment).[1]

It is troubling to see scientific and mathematical methods applied to things for which they are ill-adapted. It’s worse to see people abandon ideas, or hate their holders, because the proof is not there. We do not live in a world of proof and, after any honest study of epistemology, I struggle to see how you could not be full of trepidation about the whole idea of proof. I’m not even sure that a world of proof is desirable in the first place. Trying to create a world of proof, based on the limitations we face as mortals, seems dangerous and in cases ruinous. Efforts to reduce literature and law to science produce more pseudoscience than anything and cheapen the beauty and brilliance of each field.

It’s hard to explain your beliefs to an argumentative society once you give up on proving everything. But that’s the arguer’s fault, not yours. The modern view of argument is fictitious, abusing science and stretching its claims while failing to acknowledge the essential role of belief in science itself. People like Richard Dawkins are confusing because they hate religion so avidly while their beliefs of choice are often not proven at all. One of Dawkins’ darlings: evolution as a history of all life and speciation, is far from proven–it’s natural selection as a source of speciation that’s been the subject of rigorous experimentation. And for all his criticism of dogma, Nietzsche ultimately felt compelled to acknowledge that he had in fact created a new dogma (zealotry is quite visible in his devotees).[2]

Now, the value of belief in the absence of proof applies heavily to religion. Religion is an important field, but a classic example of knowledge resistant to the scientific method. But religion is not the only reason to value belief: It is incredibly difficult to prove:

  • The falsity of every flavor of fascism;
  • The evil in every form of racism;
  • That being good is worthwhile, even when doing the right thing is not in one’s self-interest.
  • Pretty much every debate like these, whether religious, ethical, ideological, or otherwise.

If you tried to prove every theory of fascism wrong, you’ll be amazed how many subtle variations fascists can come up with, each required different arguments and disproofs. It’s a Sisyphean task (it might be closer to the slaying of the hydra if the hydra could not be burned). It is much easier to convince someone to abandon fascism or racism, if they choose to believe in doing good, than it is to convince them that fascism or racism themselves are not in their rational self-interest, scientifically invalid, etc. An anti-Semite can always find a reason to hate, no matter how often you introduce him to wonderful, kind, and good Jews. The anti-Semite will only abandon their hate by choosing to believe in Jews as a people.

And this is where we end up. Belief is the domain of most knowledge, not proof. Proof is seductive because we believe that we can force people to believe us via proof and, to be certain, this does happen once in a while. But such a proof must be unassailable and, more importantly, the audience must be willing to believe, or they will find some way to reject it. We all understand, for our own beliefs, that there are odd things we haven’t fully figured out. But we trust that the problems will ultimately get sorted out, whether in this life or the next. What I ask, or what I recommend, are two things. First, let other people have their beliefs; let them wait for things to get figured out. Give them, as people, the leniency you give your ideas. Second, let yourself believe and grow. Don’t wait for proof, don’t demand it, and, whenever you discover you were wrong, freely believe something new. And, as always, stay safe and take care.

[1] In many ways, this whole article is a rehash of The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician: Wherein It Is Examined Whether the Object, Principles, and Inferences of the Modern Analysis Are More Distinctly Conceived, or More Evidently Deduced, Than Religious Mysteries and Points of Faith by George Berkeley and the history around it. He correctly criticized mathematics for its lack of rigor, even as scientists and mathematicians demanded a level of rigor from religion that they had not achieved for themselves.

[2] While I’ll take Nietzsche’s stated opposition to the Nazis and anti-Semites at face value, I’ll note that it’s not surprising at all that fascists immediately appropriated his work.

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RE:The term “mormon”

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For when this comes up.

I am what is most commonly known as a mormon, a member of a minority/nonmainline Christian denomination. Mormon is not a correct term (outside of a limited number of historical events and objects). Mormonism is never correct. To refer to people, Latter-day Saint(s) is correct. For the institution, it’s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

See this style guide for more info on how to use the terms exactly. Latter-day Saint and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will always be fine in their respective contexts. I ask you to use these terms rather than “mormon,” “mormonism,” “the mormon church,” or any variation thereof.

It’s easier to remember the name if you understand it’s two parts:

Church of Jesus Christ: Very early in the history of the Church, the entire name was Church of Christ. We follow Christ and base our religion on Him. However, there are plenty of different churches with the same or similar name. Second, we believe in continuing revelation by God and that God requested that the following phrase be added:

of Latter-day Saints: Latter-day Saints is based on two things. Of the periods mentioned in scripture, we live in the latter-days, that is, late in time based on what prophecy covers. Saints is just what we call followers of Christ, because we seek and, by the power of Christ obtain, sanctification (saint and sanctification are related etymologically).

Why “mormon” isn’t great

In the following sections, consider why the term is not accepted. Issues with the term include false association, misinformation/discrimination, and denial of Christianity:

False association: Multiple groups are called “mormons,” of which mine, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, is the vast majority. Most of these groups separated over 100 years ago and have no influence or relation to each other any more. However, because we are all called “mormons,” people think the activity of any one of these groups applies to all. This has been most problematic because fringe “mormon” groups have garnered international attention in recent years, for their involvement in crimes such as polygamy and child abuse.

Those groups are not associated with us, and we really would like not to be wrapped up with them. Because many of these groups are in Utah, which is majority Latter-day Saint, whenever these crimes are discovered, many of the criminal investigators and prosecutors on the case are in fact Latter-day Saints. Because these groups practice isolation, gathering enough information to support a warrant is difficult. We don’t know that all of them engage in criminal behavior either and people don’t deserve criminal investigation merely for isolation or nonstandard cultural practices. But the point is, when these big cases were discovered, Latter-day Saints were just as appalled as everyone else. We are not “protecting” them; they avoid us too.

There are also some radical altright groups that try to use the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to justify their actions. Properly speaking, they are more ideologically aligned with sovereign citizens than us and rely on cherry-picking and stripping statements of context. Their beliefs have been condemned time and time again, whether it’s antiimmigrant sentiment, antigovernment sentiment, or white supremacism. They don’t listen to the Church. They’re on their own stupid path and we’d get them to cut it out if they actually cared about the Gospel and weren’t just using it to justify their power-tripping. We believe in upholding the law and that everyone is a child of God and a recipient of His love.

Misinformation and discrimination: Latter-day Saints have been victims of false information, exoticization, and alternative facts since the beginning. As many early Latter-day Saints were immigrants to the US, they were victims of intense antimigrant sentiment in the US. There’s also the general hatred for non-Protestant religions rampant in the country at the time. Then our opposition to slavery caused a lot of problems, then our opposition to attacks on Native Americans, etc. We’ve never been popular and yellow journalists have always been happy to profit off that. There’s a good chance you have heard misinfo that dates back to the 1800s and was never corrected. We were literally attacked by the US Army on claims of treason and the government didn’t even bother to verify them first (at least that became a scandal for Buchanan).

Just a handful of stuff my family and I have dealt with: claims that we kidnap children, that we have horns, that our leaders are part of a great conspiracy dating involving Nixon and Eisenhower to form a new state called “Mormonia.” My father has been sued and had challenges to his bar membership solely for being a Latter-day Saint (and while the challenges were easily defeated, they still cost us time and money). That’s some of the more ridiculous stuff, but we’ve been the subjects of deliberate exclusion and hostility. My first experience was when I was 10 or so. It’s also the reason why I don’t necessarily bring up the subject often, because I cannot assume that a random person will treat me as a human if I say I am a “mormon.” Or, more commonly, people will treat me immediately as a villain or undesirable, even if we’ve been civil up to that point. When I see the term “mormon” online, I immediately experience anxiety because, 95% of the time, it’s to call us cultists, insist we’re idiots, spread sensational claims about us, and so on. This happens even in fora completely unrelated to us: many people feel completely at liberty to hate us, even in circles that recognize persecution of other religious minorities is inappropriate.

Denial of Christianity: the term’s original function is to claim we are something besides Christian. Now, I am not remotely interested in any argument to the contrary; I have heard many and not a one was compelling. I will leave it at this: I have spent my entire life studying the words and life of Christ. All I really want in life is to be His disciple and changed by Him, based on the power of His Atonement. In the Church, “we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins” (2 Ne 25:26). I would like to think we deserve to call ourselves Christians.

History of the term

The word “mormon” itself is in fact a name: Mormon was an indigenous American historian who lived in the 4th Century. He compiled, wrote, and edited the majority of the Book of Mormon. The remainder was either written by his son after Mormon died to genocide or was part of primary documents included by Mormon in the Book of Mormon.

Latter-day Saints don’t really use the term internally (except as a reflection of pressures discussed in the next paragraph). If I’m with other Latter-day Saints, we use some variation of Latter-day Saints. It came to be a label for Latter-day Saint when hostile groups began to use it as a pejorative. While the term is not as explicitly pejorative as it was in the past, it is certainly not divorced from the pejorative sense (and I have had ample encounters with the term being used pejoratively).

Latter-day Saints are in a position where the term “mormon” is much, much more common, in no small part thanks to the aforementioned yellow journalists. So, when dealing with others, we’re kinda forced to use the term or people will have no clue what we’re talking about. Even with the issues of misinfo. Most people are kinda just in the position where they know the term, have picked up a mix of true and false things, but don’t necessarily hate us. It’s also worth noting some Latter-day Saints don’t particularly mind the term.

There have also been periods where we attempted to reclaim the term “mormon.” We are not doing so now. As mentioned, we believe in continuing revelation from God. He recently said that He did not approve of the term “mormon,” that He had given us a name, and that we were to use that name.

Thus, we’ll often mention that we are called “mormons,” but that the term is improper and ask people to use a different name.

Final Thoughts

As a general rule, not even just with respect to us, please use endonyms, not exonyms. Endonyms are names that groups choose for themselves; exonyms are names given to a group by outsiders. Example: you may have heard the name Anasazi used to describe the indigenous Americans who lived in places like Mesa Verde. Anasazi is an exonym, given by the Navajo, that means ancient enemies. Not really a proper thing to call a group. In this case, we don’t quite know what the right endonym is, so we’ve had to settle with calling them Ancestral Puebloans.

Anyway, endonyms > exonyms. Latter-day Saint > mormon. I’d invite you to follow this principle as much as you can. Even with historical groups, people across the planet, and the dead. It’s not just about using endonyms when someone asks you to do so, or when you’re with someone who’s a part of the group in question. It’s about accuracy and truth in ethnic/religious/historical relations.

Using endonyms is about helping yourself and others understand people on their own terms. When you know a group by an exonym, that should be a red flag that this group doesn’t even get to control their own name. Groups like this tend to be victims of serious, enduring misinformation and often serious prejudice. Whether it’s Latter-day Saints, Romani, Inuit, or any other group, switching from an exonym to an endonym is a valuable chance to learn more about one of the peoples who share(d) this world with you (and expunge false information you may have absorbed).

I’ll end by repeating the request, please just don’t use the term “mormon.” I do not like it. It stresses me out. Even for Latter-day Saints who are ok with the term, many’d prefer Latter-day Saint. In any case, take care and thank you for the consideration.

Originally written on Jun. 26, 2022. Small update on Feb. 20, 2023, mostly to add the discussion on exonyms and endonyms.

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a little piece on being a person who can help

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A comment to someone feeling awful (understandably) about the violence certain religions have perpetrated throughout history. In this comment, I also wanted to address some other comments that were trying to make a general attack on religion in the comment thread. Note that the conversation was nominally tied to discussion of Edelgard’s character in Fire Emblem Three Houses, which is why there are some tangential references to her. Knowledge of the character is not required. The main virtue of this writing, I think, is the last paragraph, which, if you don’t care to read the rest, I’d recommend you read at least that. Take care, stay safe y’all.

I would note Edelgard isn’t really anti-religion, so much as anti-Church of Seiros (and even then, not opposed to the Church per se but the Church as a purveyor of political and social corruption).

And to kindly point to some reasons to appreciate religion in the world, it’s important to understand how diverse religion is (both in terms of ideology and administration). A lot, not all, but a lot of moral learning and revolution and idealism has been religiously motivated, eg, Thoreau followed by MLK and Gandhi, a lot of antipoverty philosophy and advocacy (bringing up MLK again, imo the most important part of his legacy that has been forgotten was his antipoverty advocacy), how many philosophies at least started out as explicitly religious movements (humanism, human rights, for example) or important thinkers who were deeply religious (Locke, Newton, Mr Rogers, Confucius, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and Maria Gaetana Agnesi for some examples; Newton actually wrote more about theology than any other subject). Religious believers and institutions are just as diverse and complicated as everyone else and especially when religion is exploited to justify some evil, the first to decry it are often people within the religion, possibly from a different school of thought, sometimes from the very same school that’s causing the problems.

And to push back at another comment, while it is true that some religions are antiscience, they are hardly the standard (many such religions emerge from impoverished areas where government, medicine, and education have failed the people to such a degree that the ppl are likely to be antiscience whether or not they are religious). My own religion operates 3 universities-at a loss because of how heavily or subsidizes tuition-founded several more that have been integrated into the state education system, and whose leadership includes former educators, judges, doctors, and deans, and is headed by a heart surgeon/medical researcher. Even some of the most famous stories of antiscientific religion are exaggerated. For instance, Galileo’s feud with the Catholic Church is well-known, but people tend to be unaware that the Catholic Church sponsored and approved of Copernicus’ research into heliocentrism a generation earlier (as a non Catholic, my read of the Galilean feud is more that Galileo’s personality as a provocateur was the real issue).

Turning to the overall issue, there are a lot of people fighting to make the world a better place. There are different understandings of what that is, but remember that the reason we have cohesive societies, the reason things function at all, why we haven’t descended into anarchy or general warfare are people fighting to do what’s right. Good people don’t attract or demand attention the way people who cause damage do. A good person will spend hours intimately discussing and healing a wound that was formed by a bad person in seconds. And as fast as bad things happen, i would say less people are actually willing to do bad things; most of it is accidental or driven by stress and duress).

There’s a lot of power in seeking out people who are doing good and aligning yourself with them. In learning in such a fashion that your capacity to help expands the longer you live. Edelgard’s a particular person who was in the right place with the right talents to do a lot of good in her society. But as long as you make yourself a person who can help people, you’ll find yourself in such positions naturally. Not to reform a nation (I assume you’re not secretly in line to some throne haha), but to help people around you to hold on and give them a chance to see the beauty in life. An example of incredibly kind advocacy that hopefully can help a little (it always touches me): https://youtu.be/fKy7ljRr0AA

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The process of religious learning (surprise: it’s basically the same as all learning but heavily otherized)

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Written in response to a discussion about religion, specifically criticism towards committing to religious belief, believing in grand claims, and believing in one religion despite the possibility of being wrong. Alongside typical stuff like evidentiary burdens, proof vs. disproof. I find these lines of thought tend to hold religious concepts to standards we don’t apply to other forms of learning, part of a broad trend to have religious and secular parts of communities otherize each other. So, this comment is principally opposed to the otherization of religion.

Religious learning isn’t really that different from other forms of belief and learning. Like in any science, it’s not so much about having a perfect answer, but getting the best answer available to you, given your capacity to learn, plus the learning communities and resources which you can access, and of course, your own intuition and biases.

An earnest godseeker will usually favor a religious ideology or institution based on how well it connects them to religious growth (and that growth can be in terms of conduct or ideology).

Religion is full of deeply complicated questions. Some questions give rise to serious divides between faith groups, others don’t. But people have their sense of reality, accurate or not, but that’s hardly exclusive to matters of faith. Consider how government leaders don’t have the option of verifying empirically how their every act is going to play out; leaders have to commit to an ideology and courses of action well before they can understand the implications of those decisions. In the sciences, interminable debates rage over interpretations of quantum theory, mathematicians debate over whether and to what extent math is real, Freud is still debated in literature despite his being abandoned by psychology, and so on. Scholars take their position realizing, but never believing, that they could be wrong. We hear all about the rugged scientists who stuck to their positions until they were finally proven right, but for each such story, there are 20 scientists who just turned out to be wrong.

Another illustration: geocentric models of the solar system are only marginally less accurate than heliocentric ones (and much of that difference would not exist if we had refined the geocentric model over the past centuries). Geocentrism wasn’t abandoned because it was inaccurate in a predictive or prescriptive sense. Rather, heliocentrism was simpler mathematically and human intuition grew to favor it.

So in a world where even accuracy, modeling, and empiricism can’t answer all our questions, even when we need answers and must act, and we must rely on intuition and preference, religion is not peculiar. It is not even peculiar in terms of how grand its claims are. When you consider how you and I will never count the stars, nor measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun, nor witness Julius Caesar’s assassination, nor view the functioning of our organs, but we believe what others tell us about these startling, almost incomprehensible things. We can personally verify parts of the great mysteries, but 99% of our abstract knowledge will always be something we’re told to believe and must take on faith.

For myself, I subscribe to my religion based on certain phenomena I have experienced which genuinely aren’t covered by secular psychology, plus an intuition that I am on a productive course of inquiry and learning. I very strongly feel that i am much closer to the truth thanks to my religion than i would be if i relied on my own powers. Also, while not a foundation of my faith, studying advanced mathematics very much impressed upon me how arcane knowledge and reality are: even understanding it, i am tempted to call it magic.

I would also note how there is no dearth of evidence for the existence of some form of divinity. Consider how many people, over history, have claimed to have communicated in some form with a god. Certainly, a good number of them were off in some way. But if even one of these people told the truth, that’s it. Thousands of witness testimony should not be discarded hastily. And I can personally add that I know some very well grounded people who have offered testimony of some kind.