Lds church is wrongly attacked for giving too little to charity....

[Res Ipsa]

Peterson is playing silly word games. The LDS church's investment account is roughly the same size as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's endowment (the second largest in the world.) Yet the Gates Foundation spends about 1000 times the amount the church does on humanitarian causes every year. The issue isn't whether the church qualifies as a "charity." It's how much it spends on humanitarian causes.

[Moksha]

Peterson is playing silly word games. The issue isn't whether the church qualifies as a "charity." It's how much it spends on humanitarian causes.

What if Dr. Peterson were to ask why the Church should be concerned about humanitarian causes? What has humanity got to do with Mormonism?

[Gadianton]

In the way Dan is thinking about it, it doesn't qualify as a charity.

Dan is thinking that spreading the gospel and teaching the wondrous principles of clean Mormon living is charity. Therefore, Mormonism is a charity.

He's wrong, dead wrong.

In that regard, Mormonism is a consumer good and the Mormon church exercises monopolistic power over it -- price discrimination where it charges a different amount (different interpretations of 10%) to those who wish to consume this life-extending power.

The Church makes tremendous profits for which there is no use case in reality or even hypothetically. It's a profit maximizing monopoly in every way conceptually, except within narrow interpretations of tax rules.