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.
Not just the BOM, but the Bible as well. What grieves my spirit in regards to Mormonism is documented at the end of my freeper profile:
This link is a prime example of why Christians have so many issues with Mormonism (LDS). The text of the link follows:
To: Grig
And the LDS position is that prior to the time that those manuscripts were made, that the content was altered (mostly though deletions), sometimes to force it conform to the acceptable views of the time, sometimes human error, perhaps even sometimes due to malice against God. Because of what was lost, a prophet was needed to restore it.
Not even Metzger can perform textual criticism on something like that! There's little I can say if someone wants to believe biblical text was deleted but has no physical evidence to support that it existed in the first place.
Some of my best freeper friends are Mormons but I just can't agree with their theology and their reasons behind the need for restoration.
Last time I looked, there was a mosque on the Temple Mount. When did the Mormons get around to building a temple there?
Does John D. Lee count?
Lee was spooked and over reacted he thought it was the missouri extermination mobocrats!
He was hung for his deed!
When you make statements like that you should also include your source!
Because of our acceptance of Torah, Jews have a special status in the eyes of G-d, but we lose that special status when we abandon Torah. Furthermore, the blessings that we received from G-d by accepting the Torah come with a high price: Jews have a greater responsibility than non-Jews. While non-Jews are only obligated to obey the seven commandments given to Noah, Jews are responsible for fulfilling the 613 mitzvot in the Torah, thus G-d will punish Jews for doing things that would not be a sin for non-Jews. The Seven Laws of NoahAccording to traditional Judaism, G-d gave Noah and his family seven commandments to observe when he saved them from the flood. These commandments, referred to as the Noahic or Noahide commandments, are inferred from Genesis Ch. 9, and are as follows: 1) to establish courts of justice; 2) not to commit blasphemy; 3) not to commit idolatry; 4) not to commit incest and adultery; 5) not to commit bloodshed; 6) not to commit robbery; and 7) not to eat flesh cut from a living animal. These commandments are fairly simple and straightforward, and most of them are recognized by most of the world as sound moral principles. Any non-Jew who follows these laws has a place in the world to come. The Noahic commandments are binding on all people, because all people are descended from Noah and his family. The 613 mitzvot of the Torah, on the other hand, are only binding on the descendants of those who accepted the commandments at Sinai and upon those who take on the yoke of the commandments voluntarily (by conversion). In addition, the Noahic commandments are applied more leniently to non-Jews than the corresponding commandments are to Jews, because non-Jews do not have the benefit of Oral Torah to guide them in interpreting the laws. For example, worshipping G-d in the form of a man would constitute idolatry for a Jew; however, according to some sources, the Christian worship of Jesus does not constitute idolatry for non-Jews. |
Inferred indeed!
1) to establish courts of justice;2) not to commit blasphemy;3) not to commit idolatry;4) not to commit incest and adultery;5) not to commit bloodshed;6) not to commit robbery; and7) not to eat flesh cut from a living animal.
For example, worshipping G-d in the form of a man would constitute idolatry for a Jew; however, according to some sources, the Christian worship of Jesus does not constitute idolatry for non-Jews.
He was hung for his deed! .
.
When you make statements like that you should also include your source!
To: Gamecock
I could have sworn John Lee was Shot (that blood atonement thing again).
532 posted on 12/23/2003 12:18:10 AM CST by CARepubGal (I do not sell my tokens for money)
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Darn good idea!
Hebrews 7:18-19
18. The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless
19. (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.Hebrews 8:6-13
6. But the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, and it is founded on better promises.
7. For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another.
8. But God found fault with the people and said : "The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.
9. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them, declares the Lord.
10. This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.
11. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, `Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.
12. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more."
13. By calling this covenant "new," he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear.
Dang!
How many witnesses do we need?
Then why do you frequent FR?
You could be a POSTER BOY!!
It's not on Har HaBayit. It's either on Har HaTzofim or Har HaZeitim (I think). At any rate, it should not have been built.
When you make statements like that you should also include your source!
Well, OK, but only because you asked. I don't want to be accused of bashing our mormon friends!
A Utah Massacre and Mormon Memory
New York Times/May 24, 2003
By Sally Denton
Santa Fe, N.M. -- As families tramp all over the country this summer, visiting historic sites, there's one spot - Mountain Meadows in southwestern Utah - that won't be on many itineraries.
Mountain Meadows, a two-hour drive from one of the state's popular tourist destinations, Zion National Park, is the site of what the historian Geoffrey Ward has called "the most hideous example of the human cost exacted by religious fanaticism in American history until 9/11." And while it might not be a major tourist destination, for a century and a half the massacre at Mountain Meadows has been the focus of passionate debate among Mormons and the people of Utah. It is a debate that cuts to the core of the basic tenets of Mormonism. This, the darkest stain on the history of the religion, is a bitter reality and challenging predicament for a modern Mormon Church struggling to shed its extremist history.
On Sept. 11, 1857, in a meadow in southwestern Utah, a militia of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, attacked a wagon train of Arkansas families bound for California. After a five-day siege, the militia persuaded the families to surrender under a flag of truce and a pledge of safe passage. Then, in the worst butchery of white pioneers by other white pioneers in the entire colonization of America, approximately 140 men, women and children were slaughtered. Only 17 children under the age of 8 - the age of innocence in the Mormon faith - were spared.
After the massacre, the church first claimed that local Paiute Indians were responsible, but as evidence of Mormon involvement mounted, it placed the sole blame for the killings on John D. Lee, a militia member and a Mormon zealot who was also the adopted son of the prophet Brigham Young. After nearly two decades, as part of a deal for statehood, Lee was executed by a firing squad in 1877. The church has been reluctant to assume responsibility - labeling Lee a renegade - but several historians, including some who are Mormon, believe that church leaders, though never prosecuted, ordered the massacre.
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