9 ms·

‘MormonWikileaks’ website launched, seeking transparency in LDS Church

72 points by gscott 10y ago

rokosbasilisk 10y ago
Wow cool. I hope the future is more wikileaks sites forcing transparency.
- riebschlager 10y ago
  Hmm. You sure? Leaks are a funny thing. Someone could "leak" your last year of emails and forge a few incriminating messages about your coke and hookers habit. The damage would be done before you get a chance to prove the forgery.
  - rokosbasilisk 10y ago
    That is a good point. I didnt think about bad actors.
  - douche 10y ago
    trolltrace.com
- grillvogel 10y ago
  should all information be made public?
  - bediger4000 10y ago
    Most of it, especially churches, which get special tax and other governmental treatment, at least in the USA. The flip side is that we all need to be more forgiving and tolerant. Government stuff should almost all be out in the open, way more than is currently. Remember: there's very few real state secrets, but there's a ton of nepotism, self-dealing, dunderheaded blunders, money laundering, fraud and corruption. My guess is that we'd be better off erring on the side of disclosing state secrets, than erring on the side of protecting all the other crimes that probably go on under the guise of state secrecy.
fintler 10y ago
Why not just use wikileaks.org? Is there something here that the regular wikileaks.org won't cover for some reason?
- brink 10y ago
  It sends a stronger message.
- endgame 10y ago
  A single WikiLeaks is a single point of failure.
- treebog 10y ago
  wikileaks.org is now a propaganda arm of the Russian government
  - rudolf0 10y ago
    They definitely had an agenda in the last election, but that's a huge stretch.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  WikiLeaks won't publish the kind of leaks we're seeing because they're insignificant to the public interest. They are standard internal documents like those you'd expect to see in any organization.
zeroer 10y ago
The beliefs are batshit crazy, but in my personal experience, Mormons are consistently the nicest most welcoming people you'd ever meet. It makes me sad that the church leadership doesn't reflect that. :(
- somethingsimple 10y ago
  Indeed. There's a Mormon guy in my (fairly large) team and he is by far the nicest person around. Really wish I had more co-workers like him.
  - grillvogel 10y ago
    my old team was largely mormon and my boss was their bishop. it was kinda weird.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  "Meekness" is encouraged among the faithful corpus. I would agree that I have met many kind and decent members of the LDS church, but I have also seen how the Church urges families to threaten or enact shunning of their relatives who choose to leave the Church, and their forays into political activism are inhumane.
  - willismichael 10y ago
    Citation? As a member the LDS church, I have never been urged to shun those who have left, and find the idea extremely deplorable.
    - wavefunction 10y ago
      Many Jack and Jill Mormons in Utah where I lived for a while, and folks there as well whom had gotten themselves stricken from the records. I also learned from native Utahns that they had been ostracized in high school for not being part of the LDS community. It happens, we're all human. All we can try to do is do better. I did meet many fine folks there as well, among the best the world has to offer.
torgoguys 10y ago
They've released 4 rather minor documents so far. It's a fine start. However, they don't seem to even link to the documents from their website! You have to go to Facebook / Twitter and scroll until you find links...and the documents those links go to aren't self-hosted, making it easier for them to be removed by LDS complaints... Maybe not such a good start. I wish them well in their goal of more transparency for the LDS church.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
henrikschroder 10y ago
Of course they are nice, every salesman is nice to future prospects. They want you to join their cult. In reality, the people of Utah consume the most anti-depressants in the US, teen suicide rates are among the highest in the country, and if you're not a straight, white, male, mormonism is a terrible environment.
- mholt 10y ago
  Mormon from Iowa here. I see those behaviors much more among my non-religious friends than I do within the LDS Church, and some of my best LDS friends have been female, Asian, Brazilian, or African-American.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 10y ago
  You've posted more than one religious flamewar comment in this thread. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do this on HN. Literal religious flamewars are the last thing this site needs. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13224646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13224646 and marked it off-topic.
innocentoldguy 10y ago
As a Mormon, I have a hard time imagining this site being very interesting. Between fairmormon.org, lds.org, all the anti-Mormon sites, and the missionary duos, just waiting to knock on a door near you, I think the world already has a pretty clear view into the workings of the Mormon church, their history, and their beliefs. Sure, the Mormon church "hides" things, but most of that stuff has to do with disciplinary councils, excommunications, when people were baptized, etc. I can't imagine knowing that Edgar Jones was baptized in 1953, or Deloris Canflap cheated on her husband, is going to make for a compelling web experience; but who knows?
- goda90 10y ago
  I've often seen people get worked up over the for-profit businesses linked to the Church. Carefully structured leaks can make such businesses look shady, and inspire knee jerk reactions of people claiming tithing is used to build malls, and that somehow tax exempt status is magically extending to the businesses.
  - innocentoldguy 10y ago
    Yeah, that happens. People like to have their boogiemen to blame for everything in life that doesn't suit them. I do it too. Personally, I blame everything on Orrin Hatch.
- tomcam 10y ago
  > Deloris Canflap Not sure if authentic history or minor Harry Potter character
- 36bydesign 10y ago
  Part of the goal is to show the church is fundamentally a business.
  - innocentoldguy 10y ago
    To what end?
innocentoldguy 10y ago
@henrikschroder - Would you mind giving a citation that links Utah's issue of depression with Mormonism? After all, there are a lot of non-Mormons living there too. The last I read, scientists believed that the mountain states suffered from depression due to altitude and thin air (http://www.livescience.com/50813-low-oxygen-increase-depression.html http://www.livescience.com/50813-low-oxygen-increase-depress...) Also, I couldn't find any statistics on just teen suicides, but according to CBSNews, Utah ranks 15th in suicide rates in the U.S. Alaska is #1 (http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/suicide-20-states-with-highest-rates/ http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/suicide-20-states-with-highe...). If you have better citations, could you please provide them? Finally, I have several extended family members who are gay, and two of my best friends are gay (and active Mormons). My wife is Japanese. Several of my cousins are black, and I have two cousins who were adopted from India. I also have other relatives who are hispanic. In spite of all this non-white, non-straight, and non-male stuff going on in my life, I've never witnessed this "terrible environment" that you're talking about. Could you offer citations for that as well?
- henrikschroder 10y ago
  Ask the fine people here: https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/ You'll get a lot of answers.
  - joshontheweb 10y ago
    Be cautious in that subreddit. There are a lot of people with chips on their shoulders who are more interested in anti-mormon rhetoric than truth. I'd recommend r/mormon instead. It has a better mix of active and ex-mormons and the dialogue is more civil.
  - innocentoldguy 10y ago
    Perhaps you could help me understand how a bunch of anonymous rancor on Reddit acts as a citation that proves your previous commentary. I'm looking for a scholarly citation. Not opinion and blither.
Flammy 10y ago
There were a significant number of leaks recently posted to the "ex mormon" subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/545v5n/leaks_megathread/?ref=search_posts https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/545v5n/leaks_mega... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/552yzo/update_on_the_leak/ https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/552yzo/update_on_...
36bydesign 10y ago
Are you a Mormon? I'm going to bet yes.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't comment like this here. It's uncivil to invoke intimate personal details as ammunition in an argument. Maybe you didn't mean it that way, but if you're going to raise something like this, the burden is on you to show that you don't. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226171 and marked it off-topic.

72 points by gscott 10y ago

rokosbasilisk 10y ago

Wow cool. I hope the future is more wikileaks sites forcing transparency.

riebschlager 10y ago
Hmm. You sure? Leaks are a funny thing. Someone could "leak" your last year of emails and forge a few incriminating messages about your coke and hookers habit. The damage would be done before you get a chance to prove the forgery.
- rokosbasilisk 10y ago
  That is a good point. I didnt think about bad actors.
- douche 10y ago
  trolltrace.com
grillvogel 10y ago
should all information be made public?
- bediger4000 10y ago
  Most of it, especially churches, which get special tax and other governmental treatment, at least in the USA. The flip side is that we all need to be more forgiving and tolerant. Government stuff should almost all be out in the open, way more than is currently. Remember: there's very few real state secrets, but there's a ton of nepotism, self-dealing, dunderheaded blunders, money laundering, fraud and corruption. My guess is that we'd be better off erring on the side of disclosing state secrets, than erring on the side of protecting all the other crimes that probably go on under the guise of state secrecy.

fintler 10y ago

Why not just use wikileaks.org? Is there something here that the regular wikileaks.org won't cover for some reason?

brink 10y ago
It sends a stronger message.
endgame 10y ago
A single WikiLeaks is a single point of failure.
treebog 10y ago
wikileaks.org is now a propaganda arm of the Russian government
- rudolf0 10y ago
  They definitely had an agenda in the last election, but that's a huge stretch.
cookiecaper 10y ago
WikiLeaks won't publish the kind of leaks we're seeing because they're insignificant to the public interest. They are standard internal documents like those you'd expect to see in any organization.

zeroer 10y ago

The beliefs are batshit crazy, but in my personal experience, Mormons are consistently the nicest most welcoming people you'd ever meet. It makes me sad that the church leadership doesn't reflect that. :(

somethingsimple 10y ago
Indeed. There's a Mormon guy in my (fairly large) team and he is by far the nicest person around. Really wish I had more co-workers like him.
- grillvogel 10y ago
  my old team was largely mormon and my boss was their bishop. it was kinda weird.
wavefunction 10y ago
"Meekness" is encouraged among the faithful corpus. I would agree that I have met many kind and decent members of the LDS church, but I have also seen how the Church urges families to threaten or enact shunning of their relatives who choose to leave the Church, and their forays into political activism are inhumane.
- willismichael 10y ago
  Citation? As a member the LDS church, I have never been urged to shun those who have left, and find the idea extremely deplorable.
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    Many Jack and Jill Mormons in Utah where I lived for a while, and folks there as well whom had gotten themselves stricken from the records. I also learned from native Utahns that they had been ostracized in high school for not being part of the LDS community. It happens, we're all human. All we can try to do is do better. I did meet many fine folks there as well, among the best the world has to offer.

torgoguys 10y ago

They've released 4 rather minor documents so far. It's a fine start. However, they don't seem to even link to the documents from their website! You have to go to Facebook / Twitter and scroll until you find links...and the documents those links go to aren't self-hosted, making it easier for them to be removed by LDS complaints... Maybe not such a good start. I wish them well in their goal of more transparency for the LDS church.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

henrikschroder 10y ago

Of course they are nice, every salesman is nice to future prospects. They want you to join their cult. In reality, the people of Utah consume the most anti-depressants in the US, teen suicide rates are among the highest in the country, and if you're not a straight, white, male, mormonism is a terrible environment.

mholt 10y ago
Mormon from Iowa here. I see those behaviors much more among my non-religious friends than I do within the LDS Church, and some of my best LDS friends have been female, Asian, Brazilian, or African-American.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dang 10y ago
You've posted more than one religious flamewar comment in this thread. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do this on HN. Literal religious flamewars are the last thing this site needs. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13224646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13224646 and marked it off-topic.

innocentoldguy 10y ago

As a Mormon, I have a hard time imagining this site being very interesting. Between fairmormon.org, lds.org, all the anti-Mormon sites, and the missionary duos, just waiting to knock on a door near you, I think the world already has a pretty clear view into the workings of the Mormon church, their history, and their beliefs. Sure, the Mormon church "hides" things, but most of that stuff has to do with disciplinary councils, excommunications, when people were baptized, etc. I can't imagine knowing that Edgar Jones was baptized in 1953, or Deloris Canflap cheated on her husband, is going to make for a compelling web experience; but who knows?

goda90 10y ago
I've often seen people get worked up over the for-profit businesses linked to the Church. Carefully structured leaks can make such businesses look shady, and inspire knee jerk reactions of people claiming tithing is used to build malls, and that somehow tax exempt status is magically extending to the businesses.
- innocentoldguy 10y ago
  Yeah, that happens. People like to have their boogiemen to blame for everything in life that doesn't suit them. I do it too. Personally, I blame everything on Orrin Hatch.
tomcam 10y ago
> Deloris Canflap Not sure if authentic history or minor Harry Potter character
36bydesign 10y ago
Part of the goal is to show the church is fundamentally a business.
- innocentoldguy 10y ago
  To what end?

innocentoldguy 10y ago

@henrikschroder - Would you mind giving a citation that links Utah's issue of depression with Mormonism? After all, there are a lot of non-Mormons living there too. The last I read, scientists believed that the mountain states suffered from depression due to altitude and thin air (http://www.livescience.com/50813-low-oxygen-increase-depression.html http://www.livescience.com/50813-low-oxygen-increase-depress...) Also, I couldn't find any statistics on just teen suicides, but according to CBSNews, Utah ranks 15th in suicide rates in the U.S. Alaska is #1 (http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/suicide-20-states-with-highest-rates/ http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/suicide-20-states-with-highe...). If you have better citations, could you please provide them? Finally, I have several extended family members who are gay, and two of my best friends are gay (and active Mormons). My wife is Japanese. Several of my cousins are black, and I have two cousins who were adopted from India. I also have other relatives who are hispanic. In spite of all this non-white, non-straight, and non-male stuff going on in my life, I've never witnessed this "terrible environment" that you're talking about. Could you offer citations for that as well?

henrikschroder 10y ago
Ask the fine people here: https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/ You'll get a lot of answers.
- joshontheweb 10y ago
  Be cautious in that subreddit. There are a lot of people with chips on their shoulders who are more interested in anti-mormon rhetoric than truth. I'd recommend r/mormon instead. It has a better mix of active and ex-mormons and the dialogue is more civil.
- innocentoldguy 10y ago
  Perhaps you could help me understand how a bunch of anonymous rancor on Reddit acts as a citation that proves your previous commentary. I'm looking for a scholarly citation. Not opinion and blither.

Flammy 10y ago

There were a significant number of leaks recently posted to the "ex mormon" subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/545v5n/leaks_megathread/?ref=search_posts https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/545v5n/leaks_mega... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/552yzo/update_on_the_leak/ https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/552yzo/update_on_...

36bydesign 10y ago

Are you a Mormon? I'm going to bet yes.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dang 10y ago
Please don't comment like this here. It's uncivil to invoke intimate personal details as ammunition in an argument. Maybe you didn't mean it that way, but if you're going to raise something like this, the burden is on you to show that you don't. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226171 and marked it off-topic.