APART from wearing “magic” underwear, the Mormons are associated will all sorts of other bizarre and comical practices, not the least being the baptism of dead people. Of course, the dead need not accept such posthumous baptisms – dearly departed souls can apparently accept or reject the Church of Latter-Day Saint’s baptismal rites. It’s anyone’s guess how they can do so.
This fact, however, cuts no ice with the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has expressed outrage over the revelation that some moronic Mormon decided to baptise the parents of Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. This happened despite an agreement reached in 1995 which was designed to ban the practice of baptising Holocaust victims by proxy after it was discovered the names of hundreds of thousands of those who died had been entered into Mormon records.
- The late Simon Wiesenthal
Simon Wiesenthal’s parents are long since deceased, with his father dying in World War I and his mother perishing in the Holocaust.
The Church, according to the BBC, has apologised for posthumously baptising Asher and Rosa Rapp Wiesenthal at proxy ceremonies in the US states of Arizona and Utah in January.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spokesman Michael Purdy said the Church’ s leaders:
Sincerely regret the actions of an individual member.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, a spokesman at the Wiesenthal Centre said:
We are outraged that such insensitive actions continue in the Mormon temples.
Cooper said any further discussion of the problem was useless.
The only way such insensitive practices would finally stop is if church leaders finally decided to change their practices and policies on posthumous baptisms, a move which this latest outrage proves that they are unwilling to do.
The Catholic Church has also objected to posthumous baptisms of its members.
Wiesenthal himself died in 2005 after surviving the Holocaust and dedicating his life to documenting Nazi crimes and hunting down perpetrators.
Purdy told the Associated Press news agency that the church considered the act “a serious breach of our protocol”.
According to Purdy, the names of the Wiesenthal family were simply entered into a genealogical database by one person.
We have suspended indefinitely this person’s ability to access our genealogy records.
Evidence that Wiesenthal’s parents had been baptised was found by Helen Radkey, a researcher and former Mormon.
Recently, an English woman living in the US decided to create a video showing just how ridiculous – not to mention sexist and racist – Mormonism is. Enjoy:
Yeah, but I just unbaptised him in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Problem solved.
I’m going to get a cup of water and baptise Jesus and Mohammed in the name of atheism.
Baptising anyone posthumously is both absurd and outrageous, it just shows how fucked-up Mormons are. Imagine one of these nuts become something like the president of the US of A. I don’t understand what’s in it for Mormonry, but it’s a bit like some people who claim to have thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook, pathetic!!
This really is fantasy time. Nothing is happening, nor can happen, to anyone as a result of this.
They should do the pope! Imagine when he turns up at the pearly gates and St.Peter informs him that his name is not on the list. It just goes to show how ridiculous the whole thing is.
Remember: with God all things are possible! (Matt.19:26)
This insanely pathetic and utterly futile practice makes not one single jot of difference to the deceased, but it can mean a whole load of anguish for their family and friends. So how, I wonder, would Mormons like it if the The Westboro Baptists started picketing all the funerals of their loved ones? Because let’s face it, it’s precisely the same thing – deranged strangers passing themselves off as god’s true representatives and publicly imposing their own brand of judgement on that recently dead father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, baby, whatever.
Quite frankly, after all the religious tosh I have had to endure reading about Wasri et al over the course of the past 48 hours, I am inclined to move on from thinking of myself as a ‘militant atheist’ and start calling myself a ‘fanatical atheist’. Whatever that means. (Just as long as it really, really upsets religiots and especially Daily Hate Mail readers.)
Agent Cormac,
I agree this is totally ridiculous, insane, foolish, and just plain old stupid. One cannot fix stupid. Religion is either stupid or right close to stupid, kissing cousins if you will.
The video is excellent.
This site has been a great source for me and I felt it was time to stop just reading and join the conversation.
*sigh* It’s too late now, though. They’re hopelessly saved.
What I cannot grasp – or perhaps I can – is that if the ‘offended’ religion thinks that all others are wrong and they alone are right, why would the be concerned. Clearly it can make no difference to a ‘true believer’.
I suspect the only reason they don’t simply say that, in this case, the Mormons are crazy and of the devil (because they aren’t the one true way) is because they fear that someone will say the same about them.
(Overload of pronouns I know, sorry.)
Mormons are batshit crazy to use a PZMyers phrase, but so are all religions. It doesn’t matter if they are 2000yrs old (christianity), 4000yrs old (judaism) or even older like hinduism or zoroastrianism, they’re all batshit crazy.
Blimey! People believe this tripe?
Shame on me for plucking this low-hanging fruit, but…
Mr. Wiesenthal’s parents can enjoy meeting other people in Mormon heaven. Other people who have been baptised by the Mormons after death. People like… oh, I don’t know… maybe Hitler? (No, not Hitler!) Yeah, Hitler.
I mock the idea of baptism and heaven, not the suffering of real people on this Earth.
Not only the Mormons in the news recently:
http://youtu.be/78XZEPOhptA
No danger of Muslims posthumously baptising people. They claim all human beings born from Abraham’s time – and including Abraham – to have been Muslims at birth. Anybody not a Muslim in their adult life is an apostate and anybody daft enough to convert to Islam is “reverted”. (Surely shome mishtake, they must mean “retarded”) I suppose, by interpolation, that they regard Jesus as having at least started out as a Muslim. I wonder what Ratty the Vatican Vole has to say about that?
Baptising dead folk is not as futile as you might think, if it swells the number of Mormons they can claim. These numbers affect the allocation of real resources – such as handouts and planning procedures – here and now.
So, I have just enrolled everyone who ever lived in my new church.