RayAgostini wrote:Darth J wrote:However, since the Church won't tell its donors where the money goes, neither you nor the people who performed this study have any way of knowing whether that additional $,1800 per year does in fact go to charitable causes undertaken by the Church, since the form you fill out when you donate to the Church indicates that all funds will be used however the Church decides.
I suppose I should be skeptical of newspaper reports too, but in any case we know where this money went:
Water from the mountain ranges behind the city overflowed creeks and raced through the city, moving boulders the size of cars and knocking houses from their foundations. More than 3,000 houses were damaged and 1,500 families were left homeless.
Damage was estimated to exceed $100 million. The city infrastructure alone received more than $50 million in damage.
Elder Vaughn J Featherstone of the Seventy and president of the Church's Australia/New Zealand Area presented the $100,000 check to New South Wales Premier Bob Carr and...Mayor David Campbell Oct. 29.
Mr. Carr said some families and businesses in the area lost everything. "The courage and the community spirit shown in Wollongong is heartening but we must all do whatever we can to assist them to recover."
The Church's donation will go a long way to do just that, he explained.
This says nothing about how much money came in versus how much went out. You have no way of knowing what proportion of donations made by LDS Church members intended for charity (above and beyond tithing) are in fact being used for charity.
No, you don't, and neither does whoever wrote this entry in a self-appointed wiki. You would have to know how much money the Church brings in and how much it pays out to determine how "most" of it is spent. You do not have that information, so you have no basis to assert what "most" is spent on.
Darth J wrote:Neither I nor the person whom your article quoted said that Mormons don't give anything to charities outside of themselves. What he said, and I said, is that the vast majority of Mormons' interest in charity concerns themselves. E.g.,
A poor man can't help a poor man. Of course people, and organisations, look after themselves first. You do it. I do it. And all organisations do it. It's just common sense.
That's not common sense. The United Way does not look after its own members (whatever that would mean) first. The Salvation Army does not. Private food banks and soup kitchens do not. Goodwill does not. You don't have to belong to any of these organizations for them to help you. And you and I as individuals are not analogous to a religious organization that spends a far greater amount of money on a high-end retail mall than a decade's worth of humanitarian aid.
Darth J wrote:And guess what, Ray? That $1,800 that Mormons give to actual charity,* as opposed to levies to support their favorite religious organization? That's less than the U.S. average of charitable donations.
Well, of course, because there are more "average" Americans than there are Mormons, including millionaires and multimillionaires, so the average will work out more.
There are also Mormon millionaires and multimillionaires skewing the average among their cohorts. If you are touting the median amount of non-tithing donations (which are still primarily to the Church, to be used at the Church's sole discretion) by Mormons as some kind of proof that Mormons are more generous than the average American, the statistics do not bear that out.
Among religious organisations, I'll borrow a page from Chris Smith's blog:
Mormons Give More, Says Christianity Today.
For God's sake Ray, do you ever read your links before you post them? Chris' blog post is consistent with what I am saying.
The Mormons I know have a fairly high degree of trust in their church's use of funds, Mormonism has very in-your-face accountability structures in place to encourage tithing (without which you can't go to the temple and attain exaltation), and Mormon theology is more a theology of structured obedience than of spontaneous worship.
Antoher interesting finding of this study is that Mormons give almost entirely to religious organizations.
..........
I think that comparative studies like this one are interesting, but I am highly skeptical when people try to use them to prove that their religion is truer or better than the others (which is not what the CT article was doing, by the way-- I'm just editorializing and generalizing now). For one thing, the difference between the various faiths is not that great. It appears to be the result of organizational and theological differences rather than of baptismal regeneration or the workings of the Holy Ghost. As a matter of fact, the more I study the religions the more I find myself convinced that no religion's adherents are demonstrably better or more regenerate than the others. Some religions have developed more effective structures for the channeling of human energies into constructive activities (just as Western-style capitalist democracies are more effective in this regard than communist regimes). But clearly no one religion has a monopoly on transformative power.