Quote
evergreen
tsuki you still out there?

Evergreen and Meh,

Thanks for asking... I'm still around. Not sure what our local SGI-ers are up to. They don't try to contact me, I don't try to contact them. I'm guessing that the group is shrinking. I've heard rumors of certain former members going off and practicing on their own, joining other religions, and/or moving out of the area.

Hello,

It's been nearly an eternity since I posted on this board. I heard a rumor that the site had been shut down but I noticed that there was a glitch and 2 years of postings ended up deleted including all of mine.

Since my last posting, I have officially been kicked out of the SGI. I was tricked by my sponsor into a home visit and then he hit me out of left field bringing up accusations that even he admitted that he had no proof of. To make a long story short he actually reimbursed the money I paid for the gohonzon, "confiscated" it and went on his merry way.

I've been living SGI-free until I ran into him recently. I just gave him handshake and went on my way. Given the circumstances of my ouster - mainly snitching - There is no incentive to engage any SGI member for they are not be trusted.

Hope all has been well in your world.

That's interesting, KR. If you had handed your sponsor a letter of resignation from the SGI, then from that *moment*, their rules could not be applied to you. If he went ahead and tried to confiscate your gohonzon (and you could document it) and the organization had excommunicated you officially, you could have taken them to court and won some tens of thousands of dollars in damages, maybe more:

[www.mormonnomore.com]

It is your legal right to resign from *ANY* religious organization for *ANY* reason at *ANY* time. You have the right to resign unilaterally, completely at your discretion, and the religious organization may not put any conditions AT ALL on your leaving. None. They can't require you to return your gohonzon. They can't point to that contract you signed when you got it and say that because it says you have to return it, that means you have to return it. At the moment you resign, their rules and bylaws cease to have *ANY* hold on you. You are no longer obligated from a legal standpoint to "play ball," much as they would like to order you to jump through hoops. Throw your gohonzon away - that's what the SGI is going to do with it anyhow, you know. You DO realize that, right?? It's worthless - the only way they were able to get money out of you for it was to manipulate you into BELIEVING that it was worth something. It's just a piece of paper and some crap wood dowels (or plastic!) with a little scrap of yarn. Take out the trash.

For anyone who is interested, this is a site providing instructions on how to officially resign from the Mormon church, but just change "LDS" and "Mormon" to "SGI." They have several templates you can use as a jumping-off point - just personalize them as you wish:

[www.exmormon.org]

Remember, unless you officially resign, the SGI will continue to claim you as a member, pass your personal information around, and use YOU to inflate their membership numbers in order to claim more power and influence than they really have. Granted, you have no way of confirming they actually did as required, but if you catch them passing around your info, you can sue the pants off them. And I hope you will.

Those letters are great, but you still have to check. I followed up with sgi maybe six weeks after tendering my resignation since they still had me subscribed to Weird Tribune and Living BS-ism. I threatened them with claiming misuse of private information (under PA statute) and they snapped to it quickly enough, even refunding the "unused" portion of my subscription payment. Few things have felt better, maybe other than returning my gohonzons on my terms.

Yeah, I sent off my official letter of resignation in March, I think, and I haven't yet received the letter of confirmation I asked for. So I need to follow up.

You know, this is interesting. The Japanese ex-pat I had considered my best friend while her deadbeat junkie criminal husband (Thank you GOHONZON!!) was in prison on his 2nd of what would turn out to be 4 strikes, who dropped all contact with me once Loverboy was released (except for that one time she came over to beg money from me - didn't Prez Makiguchi say that was a no-no?), got back in touch with me last Halloween (after Hubby Dearest had been sent back to prison for the rest of his life). We got together 2 or 3 times - no more than that - and the last time, I mentioned that I'd officially resigned, and she said that there was a "REMOVE" on my membership card, which she apparently still had. This was back in April; I haven't heard from her since.

I now suspect that the only reason she got back in touch with me was "doing her duty" as the keeper of my membership information and the only contact with me as an estranged member. And I wonder if the reason I have heard *nothing* from her since April is that the word got out that I was not to be contacted by any SGI people for SGI purposes (as I stipulated in my resignation letter to the SGI HQ in LA). Which means that during our "friendship," she was just using me for the child care and financial/material support I was providing (as so many people suggested) and her only interest in re-connecting with me was to try and keep a line of communication going in order that I might return to the SGI. Since I've officially resigned, there is no longer that "line of communication" incentive to contact me, you see, and apparently, that was her only interest in me. I mean, if she'd considered that we had a genuine friendship, she'd realize that the no-SGI-contact directive didn't apply to her - if she could, in any meaningful sense, be friends with someone who had resigned from the SGI, of course. You know how these intolerant religions typically insinuate that the members can only be really friends with each other - "outsiders" can only be targets for conversion, in effect, and are thus only superficially connected with (if at all).

When I last met with her in April, I told her that I wanted to give her copies of pictures from our 2006 trip to Japan for her and her parents. But now I think I'll wait until she contacts me again before I put any effort into that project.

STAP, I went online and looked at PA legislation on use and possession of personal information; to paraphrase, it said that that maintaining personal information, obtained in ANY manner (which I interpreted as meaning even if you handed it over to them) without authorization (which I further interpreted as "once I've told you not to use it any more") is illegal. Even if your card is sitting in the sacred member box with the word "remove" on it, they are still maintaining possession of it; PA isn't the most up-to-date state as far as law-making is concerned, so I'm betting there's something similar on the books there.

California, which is where I am, is pretty progressive, so I'd guess they're at least as forward as PA on that. But *how* do I find out if they're still keeping my stuff?? I have no access!

I remember once there was a minor brouhaha at the San Diego Community Center in Kearny Mesa when a member found a copy of some membership list that had names listed and whether or not they were subscribed to the publications and how much they'd contributed (or not) - it was only a page or two, but a couple of members I knew personally were on it, and they were pretty honked!

The moral of the story is that if they have your personal information, they're routinely passing it around the leadership ranks, whether you like it or not. I just wish I could get ahold of *SOMETHING* with my name on it - or my children's names! - and I'd sue the living pants off them.

STAP, if you know for a fact that they are keeping your membership card then that's a place to start. I don't know if you ever set up an account on their website, but if you did see if it will let you on; if it does, then they still have personal info on you.

I don't know if they still have my card; I suppose the best way to find out is to simply contact a leader (I always go the passive/aggressive route of email because I don't want to talk with them) and tell them that you want it returned to you. They may claim that it's their property, but your personal information on there over-rides that.

These dorks always seem to harbor the idea that we'll come to our senses and return to the fold - that's why I like the finality of making sure that everything is cleaned up and one of the basic reasons I returned my gohonzons. No, not coming back, my friends . . . I actually pitched my butsudan yesterday. I was thinking about turning it into a spice cabinet, but that was far more work than I was interested in trying to carry out. I didn't want to give it to another member, either - I don't want to contribute to someone else's participation in that lunacy in any way; the same reason I threw all the books away.

I know that they published a list of who subscribed to what and when those subscriptions ran out - I don't remember donation info being available, but I'm sure that at some level it is tracked. I was only on the subscription committee, so I may not have been "important" enough to be privy to that. They do need to keep those records for tax-exempt purposes and to send contributors that info so that they can take the charitable deduction on their taxes; that shouldn't be public info though. They're morons.

Here's the thing - that woman I used to be friends with? She's the one who apparently had my card (as of April), and I'm reluctant to pressure her to give it to me, because then she'll probably get in trouble with her leaders, and her life's already such a pile of shit that I really don't want to add to it. Ugh. What to do? I think I'll send the follow up letter asking where my letter of confirmation is that states that all my personal information has been removed.

STAP, just a suggestion, but maybe contact one of the leaders and say that you never got your membership card back despite your request to HQ to recover all of your personal information? Of course, HQ would've never let them know, but you don't need to acknowledge that you know that. That would avoid implicating your friend. You probably should send the follow up to your original request though.

I never have heard back from my leader in Las Cruces, either regarding my resignation or any cute-kitty-type emails. I did have occasion to be reminded of how round-the-back-door this group is though. I received a chipper email from my friend X whom I've mentioned several times (who lives in WA state); the WD leader of the district in ABQ (whom I'll call D) where I began practicing contacted her via facebook to get my phone number. X complied, not ever having heard anything negative about the leader from me. X also didn't realize that I was still fb friends with D who, to my mind, if she had non-sgi stuff to talk to me about (unlikely because we were never friends outside of sgi), she could get my number directly from me. I haven't heard from D, but have had a number of calls over the past week from "Personal Name/Personal Number" appear on my caller ID - I just don't answer those calls anyway, and no messages have been left. I strongly suspect that a frantic call went between Las Cruces and ABQ about my departure from the group. I also had a call from one of the local members, which I was tempted to return until she said "we miss you!" Really? If you haven't missed me enough over the past five months to call and find out whether I was alive or dead, then I seriously don't think the interest is a personal one. Hypocrites. I guess I can't complain too much, though - by and large, they really have avoided contact with me; if I hear from anybody else, though, I'll raise some sand.