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Mormon Church Goes After WikiLeaks
An anonymous reader writes "The Mormon Church has instructed its lawyers to gag the Internet over WikiLeaks' release of the 1968 and 1999 versions of its confidential handbook for Church leaders. Apart from attacking WikiLeaks, legal demands were sent to Jimmy Wales of the WikiMedia foundation for a WikiNews article merely linking to the material, and scribd.com has also been censored. WikiLeaks has (of course) refused to remove the documents."
You'd think after the Swiss bank debacle it'd be pretty well known that trying to suppress this kind of information (particularly when it's distributed by an international organization), just guarantees that it will be more widely disseminated than it'd otherwise have been.
Someone circulate a memo about the Steisand effect to the lawyers of the US.
When heretics try to disperse reading material that the religious deem unsuitable for the public to read, the only choice that comes to mind is to burn and censor.
If you even have a "confidential handbook", you're a cult, not a religion...or maybe a good old fashioned pyramid scheme.
I'm no fan of the LDS, either as an institution or as a theocracy, but they have as much right to privacy as any other group or individual. Another organization often under attack by the societal, self-elected correctness monitoring crowd is Scouting USA which sponsors an organization known as the Order of the Arrow. OA also has self published, private material that it wishes remain so. There is also an article on Wikipedia about the Order in which editors have come to a consensus about not publishing those private details in accordance with that groups request, which is within their rights. I suggest the same courtesy be extended to the LDS, it's an issue of fundamental importance to anyone who values freedom of expression in all its forms, internet or otherwise.
I concur. The manual seems fairly well thought out, and doesn't have any really good secret stuff I was hoping to read. I don't know why LDS wants it concealed. In fact, I'd argue that manual is strong evidence to the rest of the Christian world that LDS is not an out-there weird cult.
Perhaps LDS wants it publicized? Threatening Wikileaks is the perfect way to do it!
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
As a Mormon, you should know that the materials in these 'secret' manuals are pretty boring. With a lay clergy, you've got to have *something* to help the poor souls who are suddenly responsible for leading congregations. A quick RTFM (haha) shows me this. As a lawyer, I'm disappointed you fail to see the larger issues of copyright and ownership, which is the real issue here. That the owning organization is a religion is an inconsequential detail.
Great Scott! It's almost as if the religious == irrational meme is not 100% accurate.
This is just a normal case of copyright infringement. Somebody holds the copyright and does not want somebody else to publish the book. Whether it is this book or a bestselling novel does not matter.
I wonder how those who talk about "gagging" here would actually want copyright laws to work? Abandon them alltogether and let anyone publish whatever they like? Or just allow the publishing of something when some group decides it is "evil"?
Of course, news media should have the right to publish excerpts from anything that is news or relevant and in most countries this is legal (i do not know about the US). So if you want to report about some weird/dangerous,/ridiculous issues in this book, provide a write-up (your own words of what is in there: legal) and support it with facsimiles of excerpts of the original (small parts: legal).
What would be the problem with that?
In 'The Gallic Wars' by Julius Caesar, book 6 chapter 14, there is a description of Gallic religious practices. The druids would not permit their texts to be written down, they had to be memorized. One reason being that as soon as a text was written it would pass into a sort of 'public domain' where non-druids could read it.
This sounds like something that should be in place today. Make all religious texts public domain, no exceptions. Religions are not for profit (well in theory) and they are tax-exempt, so they have no reason to have copyright. And they use copyright law to harass and bully their detractors. So take that power away from them.
Oh, Your religion wants hide something? Fine, memorize it.
I have three physical copies of the LDS Church's handbooks. One is from the 80s, and two are the most current.
All they contain are instructions for people who are asked to be leaders in their church, so they'll know what to do. Unlike other religions, the LDS Church doesn't have paid clergy, so people don't go to years of school to learn how to be a minister. Instead, they are provided with these manuals and they can reference them when they have questions.
If you're looking for some hidden secret about the LDS Church to make you go all jiggy inside, you're not going to find anything here. If you're up for a dry read though, knock yourself out at WikiLeaks.
Finally, the LDS Church does own the copyrights to these manuals. The law does offer them protection against violators, so I don't see anything wrong with them demanding that protection.
Being a Christian (and pretty well educated about the origin of the LDS) I very much commend them for the work they do, but pity them for the screwed up nature of their beliefs.
Kindof like the pot calling the kettle black, dontcha think?
I mean really. A man chases a bunch of pigs off a cliff and says "they're demons." Today, we lock him up in a psychiatric ward. But you, you call 'im god. Weird, eh.
I'm not trying to flame or troll.
Why is it that about 95% of the time, statements like this are just outright lies?
C//
Jesus would hardly recognize Protestant sects. They're conservative, hypocritical, moneygrubbing, warmongering cults which believe in a crazy greek Gnostic invention called the "Trinity" which has no basis in Judiasm or early Christianity and was used to wipe out competing sects at the Council of Nicea. You're all going to hell.
I think you might think that because you are a Mormon. Hate to tell you... The Church of LDS is weird. Portraying NA as a lost tribe of Israel, the Garden of Eden and the new Jerusalem in Jackson County Missouri, history of polygamy in Western society as a central tenet of faith (followed by denouncing that practice), the tiering of the "Celestial Kingdom" and the structure and demands of the church is weird.
Weird is not inherently good or bad. This isn't an attack on Mormonism. But realistically LDS is a church that formed as what was considered then (and would be now) a cult with frankly bizarre practices and beliefs that retreated from developed areas of America and formed its own isolated community. The fact that some of the stranger pieces of theology have been disavowed or deemphasized and that the membership has increased greatly doesn't change that its a weird church.
There are a great many people out there who think the entire picture of a religion should be visible to the public. Thus when a faith tries to have hidden knowledge it appears as having one face to the public, and another face to the initiates. If the LDS church didn't have these practices Lighthouse and company wouldn't even exist.
It's pretty much the same reason by which people fight Scientology as well. There's simply a drastic difference in magnitude, with Scientology making much scarier threats, and having the vast portion of their entire religion be hidden knowledge.
You don't think magical underwear is weired?
IAAM. I don't think they are weird. I do think it is weird that people so credulously believe any rumor they hear about them. I enjoy learning more about other religions and faith traditions, and I think Stendahl's Rules are a good guide.
(1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
(2) Don't compare your best to their worst.
(3) Leave room for "holy envy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krister_Stendahl
This is a pretty clear violation of rule #1. I don't get the impression you particularly care to know much about Mormonism, but it certainly strikes me as ignorant to combine apathy and ignorance and pass it off as having an opinion.
It never ceases to amaze me how stupid people are.
Stendahl (above) is not a Mormon. Daniel Peterson is. He added a 4th rule to Stendahl's Rules:
So the principle that came to me on this was that if you are looking at a religious tradition that has a large number of adherents...then there must be something in it that appeals to different people.
Mormonism, for example, has clearly lasted long enough and has clearly appealed to a wide enough cross section of people that you don't have to concede that it's true to say there must be something there that appeals to people; bright people, practical people, highly educated people, uneducated people; all sorts of people in all sorts of cultures have found something appealing in this movement. The same is true of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity.
http://www.fairlds.org/Anti-Mormons/Critics_of_the_LDS_Faith.html
Then again, you may be one of those folks that think all religions are stupid. It's not always obvious whether an anti-Mormon is a belligerent atheist or a belligerent evangelical, but most of them break down into one or the other. (With a smaller category for angry ex-Mormons, I suppose.)
Some piece of clothes all of a sudden have magic meaning.
I know. It's so stupid. Like the way we just pretend that all of a sudden patterns of black lines on a white background have meaning and call them letters and numbers. What could be dumber?
It's so absurd it's beyond comprehension.
Which means either:
1. All 11 million Mormons (say 5 or 6 million if you want to just talk about practicing Mormons) are retarded.
or
2. Your perception of their beliefs is not accurate.
I don't think anyone could seriously believe #1, but it makes a nice insult if that's your goal.
If you think religious clothing is a must, you have some serious mental issues.
What if you don't think it's a "must". What if you choose to believe that it's merely a symbol of personal commitment and wear it for that reason?
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
If things taken out of context and lies are a big problem, then releasing the real, complete documents is a great thing. Now people can look up the context of quotes or check if statements are true.
Saying "my religion is just as fucked up as other religions" isn't really that much of a defense. Just because you're as bad as other people, that makes it right and ok?
And re-read your link about the golden plates... all of those have physical evidence of, you know, EXISTING, as well as being much, much shorter in text than Joseph Smith's plates.
The sooner you realize that ALL religions are a sham and a ploy to control their congregation to different extents, the sooner your eyes will open.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
You kind of missed the point of that excerpt. The point is to prevent people from doing the following:
1) Commit some sin that the church disapproves of
2) Request that your name be removed from Church records in order to avoid the consequences
3) Get re-baptized, thus obtaining a "clean slate" according to the records of the Church
By asking leaders to hold off on approving name removals before determining whether there is cause for a disciplinary council is perfectly valid. There would certainly be an uproar if a guy rapes someone, gets his name removed from the church records, moves to another state, gets rebaptized, rapes someone else, and then someone finds out what happened at his last location. It's a protection mechanism for the church. (Disciplinary records are not removed, as far as I know, even if a person's name is removed from the list of members; again this is for the church's protection.)
I do think it's more stupid to believe in miracles that happened 170 years ago If you mean that it's more stupid for people in 1830 to believe in the supernatural then I think you have a valid point. If you think it's more stupid to believe supernatural things happened in 1830 vs. 1030 than I think you don't. So I'm guessing you meant the former, but I'm not sure.
Yes, with a twist: long enough after the supposedly supernatural event, the evidence needed to verify or disprove it has faded. The relevant people have died, the stones have been buried or whatever, and you have only the account of the event. In 30 A.D. it was not reasonable to expect people to subject Jesus's tricks to skeptical scrutiny. In 1830, it was. Believing Joesph Smith today even though he refused to submit to the methods of proof well known and available at the time of his revelations in 1826-30 is much stupider than believing in Jesus today; the methods of disproof available in 1830 were not available in 30 A.D, so it is not a black mark on Jesus that he did not subject himself to those tests.
Your religion teaches that there was an advanced civilization of white people in America before the Native Americans. Actually it teaches no such thing. They were neither "white" in any conventional sense nor were they the first inhabitants in the Americas.
Whatever. The whiteness and firstness parts aren't important; the important part is that they were a non-Native Americans with an advanced civilization that predated the thirteen colonies. Again, archeology demonstrates that this is false.
Joseph Smith, while in jail in violation of double jeopardy, was shot and killed by a mob of over 100 people. So it's also historical fact that people hated the man. The governor of Illinois issued a famous "extermination proclamation" that all Mormons had to leave the state or they would be executed. So it's obvious that this hatred extended to government officials acting in their capacity as such. Given these historical facts, do you really think it's significant that he was found guilty of a crime?
Yes, since the conviction predated all the religious stuff for which he was hated. He didn't publish the Book of Mormon until about four years after his conviction. Or is your theory that the state government figured out that he was the type who might later try to start a hated religion, and therefore they needed to taint him with a fraud conviction before he got his religion off the ground?
Joseph translated 116 pages. He gave the pages to Martin Harrison. Martin Harrison lost the pages. Joseph Smith believed that they had been altered so that if he retranslated them the re translation would not match the original. Thus he did not retranslate them.
This is some seriously weak sauce, and pretty convenient if he was a fraud. If he seriously thought Harrison altered his translations, he could have found a trusted third party and then translated the documents several times with the third party vouching for the similarity or dissimilarity of these subsequent translations.
he enjoyed enormous personal gain when people believed him. This is utter rubbish. Joseph Smith enjoyed nothing but deprivation and persecution as a result of his claims. He lived in poverty virtually his entire life. He may have enjoyed some brief measure of comfort in Nauvoo in the years before he was killed, but the fact is that if he wanted to make a bunch of cash it would have been trivial to do so, given his talents, without going through all the trouble of getting himself driven out of several states and eventually shot to death.
Um, he was the leader of a religion of over ten thousand by the time he was assassinated. He had numerous wives, including one whom he married when she was 14. He had a COMPOUND. If this does not sound like some serious indulgence to you, I don't know what to say. Also, he likely did not anticipate bein