Posted on 12/21/2003 4:41:40 AM PST by Pharmboy
Jewish group says it is considering legal action in an effort to stop the Mormon Church from posthumously baptizing many Jews, especially Holocaust victims.
Under the practice, known by Mormons as vicarious baptism — a significant rite of the church — the dead are baptized by living church members who stand in as proxies.
But in 1995, after evidence emerged that at least 380,000 names of Jewish Holocaust victims were on baptismal lists in the church's extensive archives in Salt Lake City, the church agreed to end vicarious baptism without consent from the descendants of the dead. Church officials also said the church would remove the names of Holocaust victims placed on the lists before 1995.
"For the last seven years, we've had entirely cordial relations with the Mormons," said Ernest Michel, who negotiated the agreement on behalf of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which is based in New York and claims 180,000 members. "But the agreement is clear and they have not held up their end."
Last year, Helen Radkey, an independent researcher in Salt Lake City, gave Mr. Michel evidence that the Mormon lists still included the names of at least 20,000 Jews, many of them Holocaust victims and prominent figures like the philosopher Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. Ms. Radkey also provided Mr. Michel with evidence that many of these Jews had been baptized after the 1995 agreement.
But Mormon officials say they remain in full compliance with the 1995 agreement.
"We have actually gone above and beyond," said D. Todd Christofferson, a church official involved with the negotiations. The church removed the names of Holocaust victims listed before 1995 and continues to instruct its members to avoid baptizing Jews who are not directly related to living Mormons or whose immediate family has not given written consent, Mr. Christofferson said.
But he said it was not the church's responsibility to monitor the archives to ensure that no new Jewish names appear. "We never had in mind that we would, on a continual basis, go in and ferret out the Jewish names," Mr. Christofferson said, adding that the labor involved in constantly sifting through an ever-expanding archive, which contains more than 400 million names, would represent an "intolerable burden."
"When the church is made aware of documented concerns, action is taken in compliance with the agreement," he said.
Some Jewish genealogists agree with the Mormon interpretation of the agreement. "I have a copy of the agreement," said Gary Mokotoff, the publisher of Avotaynu, the International Review of Jewish Genealogy. "The wording is vague in some places, but it definitely does not obligate the Mormons to scour their own archives on an ongoing basis."
But Mr. Michel, who said he became involved in the issue after reading about posthumous baptisms in the Jewish newspaper The Forward, contends that the agreement obliges the Mormon Church to monitor the post-1995 lists and remove the names of Jews that appear.
"They put the names in there, they should have to take them out, and the agreement says as much," he said. "Why should we have to do their job for them?" He said the group was considering legal action but would not provide details.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom Mr. Michel contacted, said she planned to take up the matter with Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, a Republican and a Mormon. "Senator Hatch was immensely helpful in brokering the 1995 agreement, so we're hoping he can get involved again now," she said in a telephone interview.
With approximately 11 million members worldwide, the Mormon Church, known formally as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is one of the fastest-growing in the world, partly because of a strong missionary effort. The importance of the family structure is central to church doctrine and is a reason for the extensive archives kept by the International Genealogical Index in Salt Lake City. The archives include detailed biographical information of 400 million people going back centuries. The names of those to be posthumously baptized are drawn from the archives.
According to Mormon theology, all people, living or dead, possess "free agency," and posthumous baptisms provide only an option, not an obligation, to join the religion in the afterlife. Church membership numbers do not include those baptized after death, Mr. Christofferson said.
Originally, the practice was reserved for ancestors of church members, but over the years many other people have been baptized posthumously. "There is no way to prevent overzealous members doing mission work from submitting names that don't belong," Mr. Christofferson said.
Ms. Radkey, an Australian-born Christian, said she began researching the Mormon practice in 1999 after discovering that the teenage diarist Anne Frank had been posthumously baptized.
None. Don't look at this emotionally. Look at it logically. You have your belief in your God and your religion. You presume to be right. So, if you're right, then they're wrong. And if they are wrong, God won't hear their prayers so they are meaningless.
The again, on the odd chance they are right, wouldn't you be glad that you and your loved ones got off from eternal damnation on a technicality?
It's a win-win situation as far as I'm concerned. If the Mormons are wrong, it doesn't affect you because you didn't believe them. If they are right, then they did you a kind favor.
I think you're taking this too personally. This is to be laughed at. Unless, of course, they're right.
They don't "single out Jews". The Mormons collect as much geneological data as they possibly can from all over the world.
Considering that everybody who believes in God will need to stick together in the battle against the secularists, what they are doing is just plain stupid.
As I noted before, I do not believe in Mormonism.
However, let's pretend for a moment that what the Mormons believe is true.
In such a world, the Mormons are trying to save as many immortal souls as possible even if they are total strangers to them. If that is what they truly believe, do you think that they would stop trying to save those immortal souls so that they can win a worldly political battle with secularists that will be of no consequence one million years from now?
The Mormons are doing exactly the same thing that Christian missionaries have been doing for centuries: Trying to save souls according to their own belief system.
If you are a devout Christian, you can see Christian missionaries as selfless individuals who are trying to help total strangers.
If you are not a Christian, you can see those same Christian missionaries as idiots who have wasted their lives away on hocus pocus that only gets a large number of natives angry at them.
There is a time and a place and an occasion to be offended. This is not it. The jews need to pick their battles and their enemies carefully. They should not go out of their way to offend others simply because at some distant intellectual level they can find a reason to be offended by them if they look long and hard.
Jews really have to go out of their way to be offended by this practice. If they are offended by this, then they need to get professional help. And NOT from an Attorney.
I think I do understand how a Jew might get a creepy feeling from a Christian proselitizing. The Jewish person might get the feeling that the Christian was seeking to convert him so that he could brag about converting "his Jew." Kind of like the souls of Jewish people are novelty-items that Christians can collect. The unavoidable association with the Holocaust gives this an even more sinister character -- imagine Nazis collecting Jewish bodies and "Christians" collecting Jewish souls -- as if people are playthings to be destroyed on a whim or trophies to be collected. Now, I don't think the Mormon Church is Christian in any traditional sense, but that is my take on things.
I don't imply that you had any bad intentions with your question. I do think that Christians sometimes underestimate the truly poisonous history that will always cast a shadow on things.
Considering an agreement was made, it is not out of their way to raise the issue.
I think that any religion whose earthly representatives themselves claim domain over others who do not share their beliefs has overstepped the bounds of civility, whether they be Mormons or Wahabbis. This is a case where a symbolic activity has eclipsed the purpose of the service of God and taken on a life of its own.
It is not that I fail to understand the ritual. It is that I do understand the ritual, and it is because of that understanding that I know that there is nothing to be gained by performing the ritual for someone who does not believe in it. I know that they are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, but this is sinful righteousness and not the true service of God.
Given everything that's happening to my people in the world today, I think we have better things to worry about.
Positively ridiculous! Indicates the falseness of their beliefs! Only a LIVING person can be baptized with any meaning. When you're dead, your fate has already been determined by God. Then again, my God is not the same as their god with this kind of practice.
For believers in God, the one in the Bible, this will happen:
2Cor.5:8
[8] We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.
The Mormons know that too. They suspect that if they baptize these people by proxy that they will be given the opportunity to accept the baptism or reject in in their present spiritual state. They also believe that if they do not do this ritual, that those people who are not baptized will not be entitled to whatever blessings accompany that baptism.
So it seems to me that if the LDS Church agreed to take certain people off the lists of those they intended to baptize, that the LDS would then be discriminating against those Jews who were taken off the list and they would be agreeing to deny those people the blessings that all other peoples are entitled to.
this is sinful righteousness and not the true service of God.
I agree that this ritual has no bliblical support and those people on behalf of whom this ritual is performed will not receive any benefit from it. But then nobody made me the President of the LDS Church, did they?
I don't know what religion you are, but be assured that if you are a Christian and you are not offending people by your Christianity, then your Christianity is not effective. The gospel is an offense to those who perish.
If nobody is offended by what I believe, then I don't believe the gospel.
I haven't looked at any commentaries to see what the Biblical experts say about this verse, but Paul definitely seems to be speaking of an ongoing practice of people being baptized on behalf of dead persons.
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