Bouncing off of a recent thread that ventured into Mormon territory, I was wondering if there is a “Do not baptize” list that I can get on that will tell the LDS church in no uncertain terms that after I die, they must not perform any LDS sacraments for my soul? I personally object strongly to the doctrine of that church and consider some of its teachings to be evil.
I am not a lawyer, nor Mormon, opinion only follows:
It seems to me that anyone can pray in private whenever and about whatever they like. If I pray for your soul right now, how are you going to know, and stop it?
Any attempt to legislate the prevention of such a prayer runs afoul of the first amendment, IMO. They only things I can think of is it’s legal for you to prevent me from praying on your property, etc, essentially, by invoking the trespassing laws.
You might change your mind if you ended up in some weird undoubtedly real Mormon hell and the only way out was for one of your progeny to get you baptized. Based on that logic, I doubt that such a thing would be recognized.
IANAL, but I’m pretty sure that legal decisions about restrictions on religious practice are not founded on logical inferences about the plaintiff’s possible change of heart in a hypothetical afterlife.
Rather, I think such restrictions would be invalid on the civil-liberties grounds of freedom of speech and religion that other posters have already invoked. Just as you can’t prevent a religious body from performing some rite (e.g., excommunication) that excludes you from their membership if they consider it appropriate, you can’t prevent them from performing a rite that includes you among their membership if they so choose.
“It doesn’t hurt me and it may amuse you” about sums up my reaction to any organization’s claims to manipulate or regulate my putative soul without my consent.
I think the OP was asking more about whether the Mormon church had some mechanism for preventing future baptisms rather then if there was a law against it. Sort of like how Popes excommunicate people, the Mormons could add your name to the “do not baptize” list, to keep future Mormons from baptizing someone particularly unsavory.
Well, according to the beliefs of some other Christian churches, Catholics among them, it’s only possible to be baptized once. If you’re already baptized, someone might go through the motions of another baptism, but it wouldn’t actually be a baptism, it’d just look like it.
And really, in general, either you believe what the Latter-Day Saints believe, or you don’t. If you do believe, then presumably you would welcome the baptism, and if you don’t, then presumably you wouldn’t recognize that the baptism was in any sense “real”, and either way, I’m not sure I see the problem. Ultimately, it looks to me like what you’re asking is “Is there any way I can prevent the LDS from thinking they’ve baptized me”, to which the answer is “No, you can’t prevent anyone from thinking anything”.
I assume the Mormons are sincere in their belief that they are correct in their views of the afterlife.
I also assume that they sincerely believe that people who don’t get baptised while living will desire to do so once they are dead, once they are face to face with “the Truth”.
Why would they then set up a “do not baptise” list? Wouldn’t that contradict what they profess to believe in? In other words, isn’t that a logical contridiction?
Just to clarify - excommunication does not remove a person from the Catholic Church. It is a pretty straightforward matter making a person ineligible for certain sacraments until they have confessed their sin and have received absolution.
This is correct. I think it is fair to state that freedom of religion is going to prevent me from being able to use the courts to somehow prevent it (which would be weird because I believe they only do proxy baptisms of people who are dead - if you are alive you have to consent to it and go through it yourself, and if they tried to force me I could probably make a case for Kidnapping, False Imprisonment, Assault, and perhaps a few more things.) Dead people can’t easily file court cases, and I would probably need some bizarre trust scheme that could use my life savings to hire an attorney to monitor the LDS church and initiate a lawsuit as soon as they found my name in LDS ritual files.
My question was whether or not there is any procedure (in the church) by which I can give the LDS Church my personal details so that:
I am on record with them as stating my opposition to their teachings (hey, ya gotta feel good about sticking it to stuck-up people!).
They would honor my request and refuse any attempts by members to perform any proxy rituals on my behalf. E.g.:
robert_columbia’s great great grandson: “I’d like to baptize my ancestor robert_columbia, who died in 2070. Here is his bio information.” <hands over sheet>.
Mormon Temple Official: <tap tap tap> “Umm, it seems that robert_columbia is on the ‘Do Not Baptize’ list. You will not be permitted to go through with this as his express wishes in his life were to be excluded from the LDS church for eternity due to his sincerely held beliefs. Did you have another ancestor you wanted to try?”
I am a lapsed Morman, but I think I am pretty sure that there is no such list. The main reason being that the whole point is to give you a second chance at conversion after you die. Baptism for the dead is not intended to automatically convert your unwilling soul. The idea is that to be saved you need to meet certain requirements, some of which you cannot do on your own after death. Think of it as an effort to fill out the paper work you need. You are under no obligation to submit the paper work, but it is there if you want it.
One of the main tenants of the LDS church is that you are not judged at death, but at some future Judgment Day and until then you can still change your mind.
Personally, I think that it is silly that if the LDS concept of the afterlife is true, you could be sent to their equivelent of hell because of a bureaucratic oversight.
However, some posthumously-baptized people such as Jewish Holocaust victims have been removed from the Mormon genealogical records due to complaints. But I think the LDS justification for the removal is not the fact that these people themselves didn’t want to be baptized, but rather that the people who performed proxy baptisms for them were not their own descendants.
So if a verifiable descendant of your own did request a posthumous proxy baptism for you, I don’t think there’s any LDS rule that would invalidate it. However, as I said, the LDS maintains that your spirit in the afterlife would still be free to reject the baptism if you so choose.
Do the publish the names of those they baptize? Is there any way for me to learn that they chose Granny after she died?
I’m thinking you could by off the Mormons before you die. “I will donate X dollars on the condition that the church never baptize me”.
But there is no means of enforcement. I think I’m on relatively sold footing when I claim there is no Federal Anti-Baptism Police, nor a similar state organization in Utah.
So, this is the only thing I can think of to assure no baptism… You make a major donation, with the no baptism ever condition. You also create a trust, the purpose of which is to keep an eye on the Mormon church and sue their asses off if they ever break the agreement and baptize you. Since this trust would need to operate, well, basically forever, it would need some kind of endowment of millions or tens or hundreds of millions to capitalize it.
The good news is, you can share these costs with other anti-Mormon paranoiacs! Find each other on the internet and found the Freedom from Baptism Foundation to protect you all.
In retrospect, I should not have suggested you are anti-Mormon. You May be anti-baptism, or anti-baptism-after-death, or anti-baptism-by-any-other-church-than-your-own without being against Mormons per se. Apologies,
The LDS church maintains a fairly extensive genealogical database with access to the general public. It exists because their goal is to baptize as much of humanity as they can and so offer as many deceased humans as possible the opportunity to reach heaven. Mormon theology supposes a sort of limbo-esque hell where the souls of humans who have not been baptized in the LDS church spend eternity. The thought is that anyone stuck there would gladly accept the baptism. At any rate, if you were to go to one of the centers the LDS church maintains, and find your granny’s name in their database, then it’s likely she’s been baptized by proxy. It’s my understanding, though that they generally restrict baptisms by proxy to descendants.
In my opinion, their genealogical database is a boon and baptism by proxy is a waste of their time so what do I care.
There’s been an ongoing series of rants on a Jewish genealogy site I frequent on this very issue. Needless to say, some Jews find it highly offensive that their ancestors, some of whom died specifically because they were Jewish, would be posthumously baptised into another faith. Here’s one summary of the debate, including the text of a 1995 LDS/Jewish agreement on the subject, and some examples of Jews who were posthumously baptised after that agreement was signed.
