By their nature, religious documents and documents pertaining
to the practice of a religion can never be subject to
exclusive use. Freedom of religion, i.e. the freedom to
practice one's religion without interference and without the
obligation to belong to and/or pay any particular church, is
protected by the constitutions of most countries and takes
precedence over copyright. This is particularly true in cases
where copyright is not used to promote the spreading of the
religious scriptures in question, but to suppress it
instead.
Furthermore, the religious and other practices of any church
are a public matter; they are everybody's business and
everybody has the right to know and debate them. This is
not only the natural consequence of the respect that religion
enjoys in our Western democracies, but also a pre-requisite
to it. Only if a church is open to public scrutiny can it
claim the right to practise its faith undisturbed and - yet
more - to proselityse. The freedom to operate that churches
are granted in our democracies is not God-given, and it is
rather disturbing to see that one church after another try
to have it their way both ways. That's called "eating the
pie and having it" and works very seldom.
These considerations, together with the fact that the LDS
church is trying to suppress the publication of the
following documents, is the reason that they are published
here. Complaints (and compliments) can be directed to
For more information about this book and the controversy around it, see
Mirele's
and David's pages.
The book in HTML format, divided in chapters.
Download and peruse as you may need. Also, if you have the
possibility to mirror this site, do so by downloading the ZIP
file and unzipping it in any one single directory on your own
server. The more mirrors there are around, the more difficult
it will be for anyone to suppress this publication.
It seems that the LDS church has just picked a fight about the
circulation of the documents on this site. Taking the example
of the so-called "church" of scientology, the LDS church is
claiming the exclusive rights to the documents, based on
copyright.
Zenon Panoussis
2e van Swindenstraat 188
1093 XA Amsterdam
The Netherlands
The book in HTML format, all in one file.
Index in HTML format, but not linking back to the text.
The book in Folio Infobase format, all in one file.
This entire site, including this page, in ZIP format.