Pulling back the veil... a little

Reader Ram recently directed me to Wikileaks, the site where stuff gets leaked. I knew it was something special when I saw a story about the Wikimedia Foundation board censoring Wikinews. Now that's hard-hitting.

What Ram thought I would really be interested in is the posting of Book 1 of the Church Handbook of Instructions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Link to the story (with its own download link) is here.

This book is generally unavailable to church members without the need-to-know (tends to be reserved to bishops, stake presidents, and the like) and is definitely not available to gentiles at large. The Mormons are unleashing some lawyers on Wikileaks, claiming copyright infringement. Wikileaks' answer: you are talking to Wikileaks.

So, what's all the hubbub about? What's in this "secret" book? Let's pull back the veil (at least a little) on the legendary secrecy of the Mormon leadership!

Actually, I've hyped it up way too much. This is 198 pages of boring. Really, it's an administrative handbook. The page on Wikileaks that I linked to lists some interesting passages, but are you terribly surprised that Mormons wouldn't give temple recommends to post-op transsexuals? I'm more surprised that they will, in fact, agree to baptize them. That's more liberal than I thought the LDS church would be.

Here's another scandalous item: if a baby is born in a family where one parent is a member of the church and one isn't, the bishop will obtain verbal permission from both parents before the child is blessed. When the child turns 8, the bishop will visit with the parents to propose that the child be baptized.

Again, it seems to be more polite than anything. Compare that with Catholics - not that I know much, but from what I understand, when you have a Catholic and a non-Catholic who are having kids, the Catholics consider themselves to have dibs on the kids, no questions asked. You baptize it quick, no muss, no fuss.

Try this: 'Members who have mental disabilities... need not be baptized, regardless of their age. They are "saved in the celestial kingdom of heaven"'. Not to rag on the Catholics again, and at the risk of exposing my vast ignorance yet again, but based on the South Park episode where the kids were concerned that Timmy couldn't get into heaven because he couldn't understand Confession... well, I'll leave the comparison to you.

There are interesting bits here and there, but, again, mostly it's administrative stuff. What paperwork to fill out and when, what you should do in a given situation, etc.

Looks like Wikileaks also has some Scientology documents. Now that should be interesting.

Thanks for visiting Mormania!