DiscussMormonism.com

Over on the ironically named Mormon Dialogue board, our friend LDST has been banned from a thread for daring to question the Church's claims about having "fixed" the proxy baptism name submission process:

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/570 ... ge__st__60

This is LDST's first key post in the thread:

I'm glad the Church has recognized the wishes of Holocaust survivors and their families. However, I am disturbed that the Church has threatened it's membership with disciplinary action for what amounts to a policy violation. Why not apply better error-proofing so that people can not submit restricted names?

This feels very wrong - using disciplinary action as a punitive threat.

H.

A great, reasonable question, right? Why doesn't the Church do more to address this problem? Why respond by issuing threats?

In response, Calmoriah offers up the following quote (from Mike Otterson, If I recall correctly):

Calmoriah wrote:

It takes a good deal of deception and manipulation to get an improper submission through the safeguards we have put in place.

It is not a casual mistake or a submission based on ignorance that is getting through.

And Toronto's reply:

I'd like to hear more about the deception and manipulation required to make an improper submission. Searching through new.familysearch.org, one can see that at least three people have submitted "Jesus of Nazareth". Doesn't seem all that difficult to make an improper submission to me.

Even so, how does this justify using church discipline as a threat of punishment? This is a policy violation, not a sin, as far as I can tell.


H.

Calmoriah wrote:I believe being honest in your dealings is one of the temple recommend questions. At the very least then, it would seem that one should be able to lose one's temple recommend if one used deception to submit names.

LDST wrote:I am still unclear what is meant by deception in this case. What does the church consider deception? Like I said, it's pretty easy to submit any old name; the responsibility should rest on the church to ensure it's technology is compliant with it's policies.

H.

What, I have to wonder, is so unreasonable about LDSToronto's suggestions? Perhaps even more importantly, what exactly has the Church done (apart from paying a bit of lip service and threatening the membership) to fix the problem?

Ultimately, LDST decided to test this in a more direct way:

LDST wrote:I'm suggesting that the only solution the church has offered is to threaten it's membership. They've left the barn door wide open with it's name submission system and until they can fix it, the thing they've opted for is to threaten members with action.

How do I know? To test this system, I submitted 10 names just this morning that should be restricted. No problem at all. I'll let you know if my account is suspended or if I'm disciplined.

H.

A bold move! Let's see how honest the Church actually is. As you can imagine, the folks at MDD did not like this. Not. One. Bit.

ERayR wrote:As I remember it, it was satin's plan to force compliance. Joseph Smith said "I teach them correct principles and let them govern themselves". If you are deliberatly breaking the rules the fault is not the rules or the governing body but the one breaking the rules.

What do you expect to gain by demonstrating your character faults and then bragging about it?

Actually, I thought that satin's plan involved lovely gowns, or perhaps sheets. Regardless, LDST's reply was spot-on:

It's interesting, the turn of phrasing. I'm simply refuting the claim that one has to be deceptive and manipulative to submit restricted names to familysearch.org. I can vouch, right now, it took no more effort to enter my grandmother's name.

If you feel the Church would be following Satan's plan by implementing technology that restricts certain names from submission to familysearch.org, I can only imagine you feel the same way about installing virus scanners and firewalls that prevent your kids from stumbling upon porn sites.

H.

Eventually, Scotty Dog Lloyd and the rest of the crew show up to do damage control:

S Lloyd wrote:

To test this system, I submitted 10 names just this morning that should be restricted. No problem at all. I'll let you know if my account is suspended or if I'm disciplined.

H.

What are you going to do if that doesn't happen? Are you going to own up to your attempt at deception, or will you just let your mischief run its course?

And:

Scotty Dog wrote:As I've said elsewhere, deliberately violating the policy makes it appear the Church does not live up to its agreement. Thus, it brings the Church of Jesus Christ into disrepute and makes it vulnerable to the barbs of antagonists. This seems very much to warrant discipline.

And Calmoriah's rather over-the-top response:

Calmoriah wrote:So you lied when you agreed to abide by the rules of the submission process in order to gain access to the admission process to test it.

Any reason why we should ever take your word again as truth?

Unsurprisingly, this quickly turns into a kind of inquisition:

Scotty Dog Lloyd wrote:A good question. He may be lying in the first place about submitting the 10 names.

Or, the system could kick out the 10 names and he might choose not to tell us.

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave ..."

LDSToronto wrote:I submitted 10 names this morning, like I said. I am not violating any agreement that I made with the church. They are still there - just checked a few minutes ago. No, I won't give the names because that would reveal my identity and I don't trust any of you.

H.

And with that, Ares swoops in to thread-ban our dear old buddy:

Ares wrote:You don't get to use this board for bragging about fraud or to pretend to do so for the purposes of irritating others. You are excused from this thread.

Since tattling has come up recently, this post is probably worth highlighting:

Scott Lloyd wrote:I asked if you intend to own up to the deception. If not, I feel duty-bound to alert someone at Church headquarters about the existence of your posts on this thread. They may not be able to trace you down, but at least they will be aware that a violation might have occurred of the agreement you made when you registered to use the site -- assuming you were telling the truth in the first instance when you boasted of submitting the bogus names.

It might go better for you if you admit on your own to the deception instead of waiting to be detected.

DCP wrote:Glad to see that others here are reacting the way I did. His little stunt didn't make a very good impression on me, I'm afraid.

I've been saddened to watch his devolution over the past couple of years or whatever it's been.

Of course, all of these comments are appearing after LDST has been banned from responding or defending himself.

Calmoriah wrote:

Stargazer wrote:Oh, cut him some slack. There is a not a fine line, but a great gulf between seeing if something works the way it ought to and being deceptive in order to cause damage. I was about to test the limits myself to see if it were possible, but when LDSToronto said he did it I cooled my jets. Let him have to make the explanation to the Church, if it comes to it.
He could have easily contacted the Church ahead of time to inform them he was going to do this.

Perhaps I have a rigid view of honesty, but if I sign an agreement or give a promise, I try to the best of my ability to abide by it and will not make a promise if I think it is likely something will fall through even though I intend to do it. I also figure if someone is willing to lie over little things that don't matter much...have little impact on their lives, how much more likely are they to lie about things that do matter to them so that they can get what they want.

Which, of course, raises the question: Why is Calmoriah still friends with Juliann in the wake of the "transcript" fiasco?

In any case, as of right now, the last word goes to---can you guess?--Pahoran:

Pahoran wrote:So in the meantime we have a confessedly dishonest person who has either tried to trick the name submission system, thus proving that he does not hold it sacred, on no other motive than to see what happens, or else that person merely told us he abused the system in order to see how we would react.

I think the mods here should offer to give the Church the details of his ISP and Internet address so that they can investigate any possible bogus submissions to FamilySearch.

Regards,
Pahoran

I sometimes wonder why there seems to be such salivation among the MDD TBMs over the prospect of a wavering member getting into trouble. This goes well beyond a simple desire for what's good and right, imho. I think you can sense genuine vindictiveness here.

Regardless, it was somewhat heartening to see some of the posters there calling for levity. And I do hope, along with LDST, that the Church steps up and implements a better filtering system.

Which reminds me: What evidence is there that the Church has actually done anything? (Beyond the lip service and the threats, that is?) Have they actually installed any softward to deal with this? Or are they just opting for the cheapest response possible, or what? I think that I'd like to see some hard, concrete evidence that Church officials have actually done something.

sucks for him...

Dec.18,2012: The Date of Anne Frank's Proxy Baptism

LDST and the Person(s) who orchestrated the Proxy Baptisms are the same caliber of Poop!

I sometimes wonder why there seems to be such salivation among the MDD TBMs over the prospect of a wavering member getting into trouble. This goes well beyond a simple desire for what's good and right, imho. I think you can sense genuine vindictiveness here.

Staunch TBMs would argue that justice should triumph over mercy, schadenfreude is the icing of this cake.

The LDS apology really sucked. Why didn't they say, "We screwed up. Our procedures are not up to snuff."

Why in the hell can't they ever admit any fault? Why? It always has to be this corporate ass covering crap.

Apologists always think that those who point out problems are worse than the problems themselves. They love to attack whistle blowers.

Buffalo wrote:Apologists always think that those who point out problems are worse than the problems themselves. They love to attack whistle blowers.

They are not alone. Which is why there are laws that protect whistleblowers

If I understand, LDST wants to test the church's new procedures by putting in improper submissions and seeing if they get rejected. Seems like a good test to me. In fact, I would assume the LDS church has already performed similar tests to ensure their new procedures are working. After all, an improper name could be submitted accidentally by a well meaning TBM. And now the apologists are up in arms over LDST performing such a test? I'm sure the apologists are satisfied when the church says polices are now in place to prevent improper names from being submitted. If the church said they are fixing it, it's good enough for them. But some of us need to verify stuff for ourselves if we can. It's just in our nature to test things and make sure they work the way they are advertised. After all, the church has failed several times before when they promised to fix the system. Why should anyone take them at their word now?

The whole point here is that there are no safeguards in place, and the only "deception" is putting names in that you know shouldn't be approved. My guess is that LDST does not intend to have the work done on these names but rather is just checking to see if there are safeguards in place. This is analogous to the TSA sending suspicious but not-dangerous items through the airport screeners to see how well they are catching stuff. The idea that LDST is perpetrating fraud or showing low character is ludicrous. Of course, to people like Pahoran and Scott Lloyd, all critics are dishonest and of low character.

I really should stop reading threads about MDD, as they increase my despair for humanity.

I think that is exactly the point, that there is only one "safeguard" in place and that is the hope that each member of the church or person who uses the FamilySearch temple ready system knows that certain names are not allowable.
When you actually do temple ready for a name a little box will pop up to remind you not to submit certain names. I cannot recall the exact wording of this warning.

I'm sure all members know which names are okay and which aren't, just like they all know about polyandry.

I know of people who will slightly alter a name just so they can repeat the ordinances themselves. I have heard of a man who harvests names from the obituaries. There are members who are gonna do what they want to do regardless and there really is nothing to stop them other than discovering the person and booting them off the system (lock out their membership number).

Now, anyone who submits a name has the power to delete the name. Anyone who submits a name to temple ready can unreserve the name, as well. You can also put a name through temple ready and never actually go have the temple cards printed. So, if you are the one who did it you are the one who can undo it. Once other people meddle with the name I am not so sure...it gets more complicated. Once a name is in the FamilySearch database if it is not reserved by someone for temple work anyone can reserve that name.

Wow. Just another reason to add to that long list detailing why I don't waste my time on MDD.