Suppose that you want to raise a little hell with the Mormon church. You choose a prominent LDS family, who could be located anywhere. All you need is the their name and city where they reside.

Next you go to one of the Internet people-search websites, pay a few dollars for a membership, and now you can look up information on your target TBM. You can look up his/her date of birth. You can add eight years to that to calculate the date of his/her baptism. You know his full street address.

And then you forge a resignation letter and send it in to CoJCoLDS Membership Records.

If people start doing this malicious trick, how is Membership Records supposed to deal with it? If a target person instantly becomes an ex-member upon receipt of the letter, that could cause a lot of grief and embarrassment for the target person.

Wouldn't you suppose that it might be reasonable for the CoJCoLDS to want to verify the authenticity of the resignation letter? What better way than to have the Bishop contact you?

People on RFM jump all over the CoJCoLDS about resignation issues, without ever giving any thought to the scenario that I am discussing.

I would never do this, but I can think of some people that the church would be better off without.

That is exactly why they want to contact you upon receipt of the letter.

I know people get all upset when they get contacted but it really is a good why to weed out any bogus letter they recieve

Yes, that membership is soo very important...you must protect it and certainly the church does ^^. Point made

nuff said

The only local contact I had was a form letter from a bishop that I ignored. LDS Inc processed my resignation without verifying it.

Potential victims of the forgery you're describing would get two letters from SLC that would alert them to what was being perpetuated.

There is no need for local contact.

Forging a resignation letter is a tremendous DISSERVICE to everybody who wants to resign legitimately. For every single letter that is found to be forged, the membership office will be all that more finicky for a hundred legitimate resignations.

DON'T DO IT!!

Oh, that's messed up...
I love it!!!!
But seriously, don't do it.
some times the daydream is much, much better than the reality.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/01/2012 03:40PM by ambivalent exmo.

I am pretty sure it would also be illegal.

For those that are resigning I suggest they snail mail COB and have it notarized. That way there is no question that you are who you say you are.

Snail Mail worked for us.

copy to COB Members Records
copy to Bishop (actually a nice guy)
copy to Steak President (self-righteous phony corp guy)

Within 4 weeks we received our Dodge letter letting us know we are no longer members.

There is something to be said to exiting the cult on our own terms.

Clean break, still think about the church I grew up in but now more laughter and less anger.

tofino

And this effort to "raise a little hell" would clearly demonstrate you're a better person than the people you'd be screwing with?

No need to be judgmental. If you will carefully re-read my original post, it is 100% clear that I was speaking about a hypothetical situation. The point of the post is to say that the CoJCoLDS needs to verify the authenticity of incoming resignation letters so that the hypothetical scenario, if it ever occurs, will be detected.

Yeah, nothing like mail or wire fraud to "raise a little hell."

My best guess is that out there in the real world there is no shortage of people who are capable of doing the illegal deed that I described in the hypothetical scenario.

Our "former" bishop called us on the phone 4 days after SLC got our resignation letter by email. He indeed wanted to confirm it was us and we had asked for our names to be removed. Didnt really want to talk to him, but did confirm we had indeed written that email.

The problem with this idea is that it will make it even more of a pain to leave the church then it is now. Mormons like to pretend this is a problem, so they can try to hold onto you just a little longer, and make you jump through just one more hoop. Imagine what they would be like if they had proof that it was actually going on?

If they do it to me, I could press charges.

Everyone else has the same options as me.

Crimes others commit are not *my* responsibility.

All exmos need not be held accountable for possible misdeeds not yet done by unnamed persons.

Face it. There's NO WAY for any of us to control what mormons or other exmos do.

heck, I had to show my Drivers License yesterday just to get some medical records.

I don't mind verifying it is me in this day and time. Mormons will see the last contact as thier last way to save me

and the beat goes on...the beat goes on

They show up and try to badger exmos to reup and do NOT verify who they are addressing on the phone or at the door.

I don't understand what you do to attract them, but my experience has been the total opposite of yours.

I became totally inactive in TSCC in 1959 when I was age 17. There was no such thing as "resigning membership" back then, so I remained a full member. I finally decided to resign 35 years later, in 1994.

During those 35 years I had exactly ONE unwanted contact from a church member. That was a phone call from the ward clerk in a ward where I had never set foot in the church. He told me that the Bishop wanted me to come meet with him at 2:00 p.m. on that Sunday. I replied that there was absolutely nothing that I wanted to discuss with the Bishop, and that if I ever changed my mind then I knew how to contact him. I said that they should lose my phone number and never contact me again. And that was exactly what happened.

So in the 53 years since I became inactive, I have had just one contact from the Mormons. I don't understand why some inactive members or exmos are hounded by the Mormons.

For 28 years I lived on a culdesac with Mormon neighbors. We were good friends with them. They never mentioned religion and they totally respected my right to be a non-church-goer.

Maybe attitude has something to do with it. I was always a friendly helpful neighbor. In winter I used my power snow blower to clear the snow off their sidewalks on a regular basis. They appreciated that, and they were friendly to me.

Agree with you on this one.
I've never understood what made Cheryl important enough to continue to draw endless visits & harassment.

The corporation has never hounded me, in SLC or anywhere else in the world.
More JW doorknockers than corp missionaries.
I live about three houses down from the local bishop, half a block from the nearest church.
For the first ten years in this little town we had devout Mormons living on both sides.
Zero pressure to join anything. Zero condescension. Nice people.

Only contact from the local ward was the old bishop dropping by to confirm we were the ones who actually sent in the resignations in 2006.

The corporation leaves us alone (aside from a couple years of taping craft night notices on every mailbox on the the street), we leave the corporation alone.

Important??? So that's it? You're jealous and wanting attention from the likes of mormons.

How dare both of you for making up lies about me. Horsefeathers actually wrote and posted a totally false account the other day claiming to "know" more than I do about an incident on my front porch.

Good grief!

Who in heck would claim to be important to such a sleezy piss-ant no-account fanatical little cult??

Certainly, not me.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/03/2012 05:54AM by Cheryl.

bad bad mormons

Every time I moved they were two weeks behind. I am sure it was some idget family member sending them my info. That was one reason I was happy to see there was a way to get off their list. Didn't work out quite that way for me, took an ugly confrontation at the door (even with a notarized letter) but that was the end of it. Oh, except for the random door knockers.

No jealousy whatever.

Horsefeathers posted an eroneous memory of where you were, inside or outside, when your infamous hose incident began, and Horsefeathers apologized when you posted a correction.
Horsefeathers did not claim to know more about the incident than you.

And Horsefeathers is still wondering why you were so important to those people that they just had to keep coming back. :)