The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sort of. Maybe these posthumous conversions are seen as a service, to prevent the heretics from perishing in hell. They get to pick an choose over the dead, and these tend to be both for genetic reinforcement and earnings potential in the afterlife in equal measure. A bizarre form, a moral inversion of eugenics mixed with an almost delightful anticipation of a particular vision of the Apocalypse, one of many versions in participatory culture, but they’re working on it. Second sittings for the last supper. reserve your spot! All major credit cards accepted. Automatic withdrawal even after death! In this muscular vision of the the four Horseman are working as a team, but they’re really the good guys; married folk with young children and home-bound wives.
Jerusalem is reduced to rubble, something like Warsaw with the Nazis and its imagine the “false jews” will also be dust covered and inert as well. And the Third Temple will be built by the true, the strong and brave with an enthusiasm described simply as messianic. And divine. And cosmic. After all, the temple was so central to the relationship between the individual and god that its destruction, to the jews is regarded as the most significant and greatest tragedy in their history, but in the Mormon version, it appears,their rebuilding will mark the ultimate redemption and the restoration of harmony within and between god and his creation, and who more qualified than the mormons to manage this massive and complex undertaking. But they’re working on it and maybe the dead baptized can refresh their Egyptian memory and getting cracking on the construction project renewing contact with their skills of old…
For the Mormons baptizing Jews, it’s really using their their beliefs in an ironic way, insulting to some, but these activities did not arise in a vacuum. Jews for the most part, don’t believe in Jesus so don’t care for the Baptism. But Mormons understand their activity as an act of kindness and Mormon compassion towards “gentiles” to which jews have been put in the same dirty laundry hamper. Its a favor and everyone owes them one. But if you look back, Maimonides, in a similar manner did not overly praying at grave sites and waiting for miracles; but Jewish mystics seem to feel like they are doing him a favor by praying at grave , despite thinking he was off-base or badly interpreted on the whole, about not praying at grave sites and creating death cults and fetishes.
Anne Frank at Berlin Tussaud. — This past weekend they baptized Anne Frank, WWII diarist and victim of the Holocaust. That’s strange enough, but it turns out this is at least the tenth time they’ve baptized her. She’s probably covered by now, people. Maybe it’s time to let up.
Posthumous baptism was intended to be done to bring people’s non-Mormon ancestors into the fold, but it’s since become acceptable to baptize all kinds of random people. In 1994, it was discovered that the church had taken it upon themselves to baptize Jewish people who’d been killed in the Holocaust. As you might imagine, this unauthorized action upset Jewish religious leaders tremendously, and they eventually got the Mormons to agree to stop performing posthumous baptisms on all Jews, not just Holocaust survivors.
Anne Frank’s latest baptism is a clear violation of that agreement. (All of her previous baptisms occurred between 1989 to 1999.) It seems it took place at a Mormon church in the Dominican Republic, and the fact that it was allowed to go through casts doubts on the security of the procedure for keeping Jewish people out of the baptism database. Michael Purdy, a church spokesman, told The Huffington Post that the church was committed to keeping its word, and this appeared to be an isolated incident. Frank’s record will probably be scrubbed—who knew it was possible to undo a baptism?—but maybe they ought to stick a little note in there so they can avoid attempted Anne Frank baptisms numbers 11, 12, etc.—Read More:http://jezebel.com/5887546/why-cant-the-mormon-church-stop-baptizing-anne-frank
( see link at end)….Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate, whose name was entered into a database so that he could be baptized in a Mormon ritual after his death, said yesterday he wants Mitt Romney to speak out against the Mormon practice of posthumously baptizing Jews.
“He is a Mormon, and since he’s running for president – the highest office in the world, not only in America – he should know what is happening, and he should have said simply, ‘It is wrong,’ ’’ Wiesel, a professor at Boston University, said in an interview….The church acknowledged earlier this week that Wiesel’s name and the names of his late father and grandfather had been entered into a genealogical database as candidates ready for posthumous rites.
—The baptisms occur in baptismal fonts constructed in Mormon temples, the group’s most sacred buildings. Millions of Mormons conduct genealogical research to identify ancestors who were not Mormon or lived before the time church founder Joseph Smith is believed to have restored Christianity. Billions of names have gone into databases, and individual Mormons in temples around the globe gather daily to conduct posthumous baptisms.
In the baptism ceremony, one volunteer reads aloud the name of a deceased soul while another, a proxy for the deceased, is immersed in a hot-tub-size pool of water. A third volunteer utters the words, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”—Read More:http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/02/15/146950146/elie-wiesel-shines-spotlight-on-romney-over-controversial-mormon-practice
“None of the three names were submitted for baptism, and they would not have been under the church’s guidelines and procedures,’’ Michael Purdy, a church spokesman, said in a statement. “The names were simply entered into a genealogical database. Submission for proxy baptism is a separate process.’’
The church acknowledged that the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s father and mother were recently baptized, in violation of the church’s policy of not baptizing victims of the Holocaust….Read More:http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-18/metro/31071937_1_genealogical-database-mormon-theology-mormon-church
—I didn’t always recognize the early, gnostic brand of Mormonism Bloom celebrated, but I knew it was important that finally a cultural critic of national standing saw nothing especially shameful or r
ting in my religion’s astonishing nineteenth-century rise. Rather, according to Bloom, its imaginativeness made Mormonism a work of “authentic American genius,” an American original. Like jazz, perhaps.—Read More:http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/joannabrooks/5384/romney_betrays_harold_bloom’s_fantasy_mormonism/
ADDENDUM:
Harold Bloom:The Salt Lake City empire of corporate greed has little enough in common with the visions of Joseph Smith. The oligarchs of Salt Lake City, who sponsor Mr. Romney, betray what ought to have been their own religious heritage. Though I read Christopher Hitchens with pleasure, his characterization of Joseph Smith as “a fraud and conjuror” is inadequate. A superb trickster and protean personality, Smith was a religious genius, uniquely able to craft a story capable of turning a self-invented faith into a people now as numerous as the Jews, in America and abroad. According to the church, about six million American citizens are Mormons, and there are more than eight million converts in Asia, Africa and elsewhere.
Persuasively redefining Christianity has been a pastime through the ages, yet the American difference is brazen. What I call the American Religion, and by that I mean nearly all religions in this country, socially manifests itself as the Emancipation of Selfishness. Our Great Emancipator of Selfishness, President Ronald Reagan, refreshingly evaded the rhetoric of religion, but has been appropriated anyway as the archangel of American spiritualized greed.
Marxist slogans rarely ring true in our clime, where religion is the poetry (bad and good) of the people and not its opiate. Poetry is a defense against dying. The American Religion centers upon the denial of death, literalizing an ancient Christian metaphor.
Obsessed by a freedom we identify with money, we tolerate plutocracy as if it could someday be our own ecstatic solitude. A first principle of the American Religion is that each of us rarely feels free unless he or she is entirely alone, particularly when in the company of the American Jesus. Walking and talking with him is akin to receiving his love in a personal and individual relationship.
A dark truth of American politics in what is still the era of Reagan and the Bushes is that so many do not vote their own economic interests. Rather than living in reality they yield to what oddly are termed “cultural” considerations: moral and spiritual, or so their leaders urge them to believe. Under the banners of flag, cross, fetus, exclusive marriage between men and women, they march onward to their own deepening impoverishment. Much of the Tea Party fervor merely repeats this gladsome frolic….Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/will-this-election-be-the-mormon-breakthrough.html?pagewanted=all
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Mormons are fond of expressing their “affinity” for the Jewish people, but there is good reason to be suspicious of their motives. According to [now late] Bruce R. McConkie, chief theologian and apostle in the Mormon Church:
“The Jews were cursed and smitten and cursed anew because they rejected the gospel, cast out their Messiah, and crucified their King…the Jewish denial and rejection of the Holy One…made them a hiss and a byword in all nations…(and) so shall it be until they repent and come unto Him whom their fathers slew and hanged on a tree…and only when they believe the Book of Mormon and turn to Joseph Smith.”
In this apocalyptic vision, Jerusalem and its inhabitants will be destroyed—”just retribution” for not becoming Mormons—and the “true Jews” (the Mormons) will “build the promised Temple whose functions and uses will be patterned after the house of the Lord in Salt Lake City.”5 …Jacob Neusner, the distinguished professor and scholar, wrote of his personal experiences at BYU in a letter to the Intermountain Jewish News (Denver, CO.) in Jan., 1985.
“Nothing they do is selfless. Everything they do has the single goal of converting every one they can. Pure and simple. The proposed BYU Center will provide access, not only to Israeli Jewry, but also (and especially) to large numbers of foreign, including American Jewish youth who study in Jerusalem. Until the Mormon Church recognizes the legitimacy of Judaism for Israel, the Jewish people, the can want nothing other than to convert as many of us as they can get their hands on.”
Neusner’s concerns are not unfounded. According to the “Missionary Training Manual for use in the Jewish Proselytizing Program,” published by the Mormon Church, “The greatest success will be among the Reform Jews and among the religiously inactive…”
The introduction by the late president of the Mormon Church, Spencer W. Kimball, says, “As a people, the Jews have lost their way. As a missionary, you have been called…to help find it again.” According to Mormon doctrine, missionary work is a divine obligation. The Church printed the Book of Mormon in 1981 and missionary tracts in Hebrew in 1982….Read More:http://saintsalive.com/resourcelibrary/mormonism/the-mormon-church-israel-and-the-arabs
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