High priests are Melchizedek correct?
Are they not responsible for temple and family history work within a ward?
Do they not run the temples?
I may be wrong on this, who is it that prepares the names for temple work if they are not submitted directly by a family member?
WTF? The issue is whether a purely symbolic act, performed out of sight (but publicly known), can by its nature be offensive or not.
If you just handwave examples away because you cannot answer them, you aren’t being serious about supporting your point.
My point, in case you did not understand it, is that symbolic gestures one person finds laughable or trivial, another person may find seriously irritating. In short, the fact that you don’t find some purely symbolic gesture offensive doesn’t mean that, objectively speaking, it cannot be offensive.
Since when would it be acceptable in polite society to use voodoo dolls? Mitt Romney personally has been a proxy for a posthumous baptism, yet has a reasonable shot at the presidency. If Obama admitted to practicing voodoo (dolls, chickens, talismans, whatever), his chances of being accepted as a serious person by voters is zero. ZERO!
Western culture has long struggled with this idea of whose nonsense is acceptable vs. unacceptable for intelligent, reasonable people to practice. And a lot of those lines have been drawn arbitrarily and even with active discrimination.
You seem to want to try to move this posthumous baptism into the realm of acceptable, but I will stand firm on this. It is unacceptable for a religious institution to practice this if it wants to be taken seriously by the wider secular culture. By continuing to do it, they are demonstrating that they will not moderate their nonsense. That’s fine, that’s their choice, but the downside of this practice is that they will feel shame for it. They will be embarrassed by it. They will be asked about it when they run for public office. They will be made fun of by other people (including believers in equally nonsensical gibberish).
This isn’t about the actual act, as far as I’m concerned. It’s how that act colors the opinions of other people. Voodoo dolls are the perfect analogy for this. They are unacceptable behavior for serious people in this country. Belief in it damages the common perception of that person’s judgement and intelligence. Same goes for snake handling. Same goes for young Earth creationism (for a slim majority of people). Same goes for this garbage.
(Transubstantiation, you’re next.)
Nice rant. But this isn’t the Romney for president thread.
Subpar deflection. My point is that it is “acceptable” to be a Mormon (mostly) in this country. It is not nearly that acceptable to be practice voodoo. Romney is evidence for that in the political realm. Now why don’t you explain why we should treat Mormons more seriously than we treat practitioners of voodoo.
Also note how they will force legislation on non-Mormons because they are offended by actions that do not impact them nor their religion at all.
But that is true of most groups, they want their rights just as long as they don’t have to let you have yours.
Binding a person who was tortured and killed for their mono-theist beliefs and or lineage to a new arguably polytheist religion that is an offshoot of a religion who had been doing the same via force for 2000 years…No problem in their mind.
But if two consenting adults want to enter a legal contract and are the same gender!!! Now to them that is attacking their freedom of religion!!
Cite:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700257603/LDS-Church-issues-statement-on-same-sex-marriage.html
The whole kerfuffle seems based on a misunderstanding that posthumous baptism entails posthumous conversion. It doesn’t. Mormon doctrine is explicit that posthumous conversion depends entirely on the free will of the convert. The baptism only makes it possible for that conversion to lead to salvation. The baptism is not supposed to have any effect leading to conversion.
So I don’t see the problem, even if I take the symbolism seriously.
This disappoints me, though. The church should stand by its beliefs, or else I can’t see what justification it can make for its own existence.
Of course churches sometimes change their beliefs. But this seems to be a case of simply being inconsistent with one’s beliefs. It’s always disappointing to see this.
Any member can submit any name to have proxy work performed for that person. Back when I was still a member I submitted my first names shortly after my baptism at the ripe old age of 8. My mom thought it would an uplifting experience for me (It wasn’t really).
Historically there was absolutely no fact checking. I can’t speak for the current system, but I understand little has changed in the past decade or so since I last did any work. But the individual who submits a name is the only person who verifies that the basic information is correct, that the work has not already been done for them before, that the individual is a relative, and all the rest.
That is the reason the leadership is having such a hard time with this. They made an agreement they had no ability to enforce. They are now trying to implement some sort of verification process. But the current system strongly works against any solution. When any one of 10 million yahoos can do whatever the hell they want, it is hard to prevent them from doing precisely that.
According to the agreement signed in 1995 by the Quorums of the Seventy the church was going to review names, they have the technical ability and even lacking that they could refuse to record the baptism in the rolls.
This is all temple level work, if they can keep track of recommends they can track this.
I find it highly disingenuous to say that they can not, seeing as they seem to be quite capable of maintaining family search.
It is an issue of character and credibility, they made an oath to stop doing this several times, there are billions of names they could used besides these names and stick by their word but the church is not willing to do so.
Obviously even the Aryan Nations has a right to their beliefs but that does not mean the should be respected.
I would be quite miffed if they inducted my dead Dad, his beliefs were antithetical to theirs.
If they said they would remove them per my request and then didn’t I would be double miffed.
Personally I was not disappointed when the LDS church dropped “doctrine of Cain” in 1978, I was quite impressed. I remember saying “thanks” in school when we talked about it, like the Mormon kids in my class had anything to do with the revelation.
I was also hopeful when they said they wouldn’t baptize people who have very bad experience with it for a couple thousand years, obviously they were under no legal obligation to but they offered to be nice.
Mormons, like most people try to be good people who try to do the right thing but in this case their church has let them down.
Hey, I don’t disagree. I am on this thread earlier as saying that the implementation of the agreement was less than it could have been and should have been. There is not reason they couldn’t do this. The technology does exist. But the current system is not compatible. The church is in the wrong here.
And they don’t really keep track of recommends. That is handled on the local level and sent up with no real fact checking either. 10 years ago I could have made myself a fake recommend on my PC and walked into any temple in the world. Now I would need to send a copy of the record electronically somehow, as well as have the forged paper. But there isn’t any verification that the Stake President has sent valid recommends to the church. If I could send that electronic copy, the church system would simply accept it.
In case I wasn’t clear the “problems” the church is having implementing the agreement are social and cultural, not technical. The problem is the people they have trusted to do the reviews are the exact same people who are doing the original submitting. This is a church run by the members. There are no professionally trained clergy. The inmates run the asylum. And leadership still doesn’t seem to get that they can’t trust the membership to keep the leadership’s agreements. After all if you can’t trust an 8 year old to review their own work who can you trust? (If my mom hadn’t been checking my work someone would have definitely been baptized on behalf of a distant uncle of mine, “Ipee Freely” when I was 8) Hopefully the leadership is starting to understand that, and the promised upgrade will fix the issue. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised either way.
My point to rat avatar was not that the system is correct… just that this isn’t being done with a wink and a nod by the High Priests. It is being done by the loonies, while everyone else tries to keep their blinders on and pretends it isn’t happening, and only takes action when it gets complaints.
Running the names though new family search would work, it would be simple to blacklist Holocaust victims without a direct connection to the submitter.
Heck they could just flag entries with the place of death listed Auschwitz and get rid of most peoples problem with it.
They made a DB of the names from Israel too, they could match against that before printing the “this is who you are today” sheets at the temple.
I think saying that and not making the commitment to change things would have been better, or allowing families access to check, I know they tried that and just pulled access to non-members a short time ago, which is frustrating.
And yes I do understand how hard it can be with church with a lay ministry.
I actually felt really bad for one ward when I heard a schoolmate had been called as bishop.
I agree. All of those would be fairly easy to implement and reasonable. But those might block legitimate names as well as the ones they are supposed to be avoiding. Better to accidentally baptize a few thousand they are supposed to avoid, and latter remove them, then to miss a valid individual who may be anxiously awaiting that baptism in the afterlife (not my argument just playing devils advocate).
Besides the leadership would say, that is what the members are supposed to be doing. Those 8 year olds and octogenarians are supposed to be verifying that the person in the database is a valid person for baptism. Otherwise, they could just print out the contents of everything they have ever digitized and go to town. The whole system is set up on the assumption that the members are and should be the final say on who is a legitimate candidate for baptism (etc.).
And sorry to say that there isn’t one well known practitioner of Voodoo who is intelligent and successful by Western standards, whereas there are many such Mormons. So Romney standing in for a baptism and being affiliated with LDS doesn’t taint him like an affiliation with Voodoo would damage Obama.
They had a revelation that they should drop the doctrine of Cain–which is of course a bunch of hooey but it’s not a case of inconsistency. Change of doctrine through revelation is an established part of their religion.
When they baptise people posthumously, this is not supposed to have any effect on the person in their posthumous state. Their conversion after death (if they have one) is, according to Mormon doctrine, entirely initiated and consumated through the convert’s own free will. The baptism has nothing to do with that. So I really don’t see why anyone would have a problem with it even taking the symbolism seriously.
I can’t think of any justification, within Mormon doctrine, for not baptising Wiesenthal or any other non-mormon posthumously. I almost guarantee you, in fact, that what “they” are thinking (whoever “they” is here…) is that they’ll be able to get around to them eventually anyway so there’s no reason to press the issue now.
Why should being a Mormon be less acceptable than being Christian, Jewish or Muslim.
For the record, since we’re talking about religion and several people have shared their beliefs, I’m a Muslim.
Because they are trying to mainline, if they don’t care about that then it doesn’t matter.
Seeing how much money they have dumped into advertising this year I think they very much care about that.
However it would be unlikely they could dump the vicarious baptism bit, they have more and more members who want to go do their temple work and there is no way you could convince them that making shoes for ZCMI is part of that these days.
BTW:
The 1978 Revelation on Priesthood was after lots of external and internal pressure from civil rights advocates but you are correct that it was simpler to remove without causing a wide spread crisis of faith.
Wilford Woodruff only had a revelation on polygamy after the US revoked the churches corp charter and seized all its assets.
I would be hand in hand with the Mormons marching on Washington if they tried to do that today, but just interesting to put it in context.
You can make that case, and it is compelling one. Hopefully without derailing the thread too much, what’s the verdict on Scientology? Similarly secretive religious order with beliefs seen as kooky by the majority of people in the country, and there are plenty of successful Scientologists. Would they be “tainted”?
Incidentally, I could go page after page of successful intelligent atheists who would have no chance to be elected. I understand why, but I won’t lie: it stings a bit.
As I said, the “acceptability” of religions is extremely arbitrary already. It’s my hope that we can relegate the misfits (fundamentalists, literalists, dominionists, etc.) out of what is generally considered to be polite society and into the “punchline” category where just their mention elicits a chuckle from a crowd. The more delusional, disruptive, or dangerous, the more deserving these religious affiliations are to becoming punchlines.
There’s not much that sets Mormonism apart as particularly more dangerous than mainline Protestantism, but I think it’s arguably less rational. To be honest, there’s a lot of common religions (you mentioned them plus more) that I would like to see become too far out for people to grant respectability to, but Mormonism is already there so I think it should stay there (unless it proves itself somehow less dangerous than alternatives).
And I want to be clear, I am not suggesting anyone be disqualified from office or barred from their religion, or anything like that. It’s just a big social engineering project and one of my own hobby horses of how to steer humanity toward evidence-based reason. I’ll try not to further bore you with details, but I hope you’ll read my poorly Xeroxed newsletters.