Plenty of people tell racist and sexist jokes which they don’t mean to be offensive, but which are anyway. The whole point about respect is that you don’t determine if your action is offensive or respectful to another person - that person does.
Well it is a bit more nuanced than solely blaming either the leadership or the membership. It is the individual members who choose to perform posthumous baptisms. They also do the research and choose who to do it for. Historically the church really had no policy on who could do what work on whom. And there used to be absolutely no verification at all. There were those members who love to get baptized on behalf of famous people. So you had (and still have) some folks who would look up every name they could think of and add them to their “collection” so to speak. No doubt that’s how Obama’s mom got baptized.
Around the 1990s when various organizations started to pay attention to who was getting baptized, and when the church started to get complaints about it, they changed the policy. But it wasn’t widely advertized within the church. And business went about largely as at always had. It is only very recently that they have started to initiate fact checking for submitted names. And it isn’t a very solid system yet. The upcoming upgrade to the database is supposed to resolve the issues. We’ll see.
But I think it is fair to say that the church still isn’t completely blameless. They still, in my opinion, haven’t told the members in strong enough terms to stop it. All they would need to do is take away the offending members’ temple recommends for a year. And the membership would get with the program right quick. Nor have they implemented the software solutions to prevent it. A simple name check on all newly submitted names would prevent 99% of the offending behavior.
So yes the church leadership is making a good faith effort to resolve the concerns. But it is the minimum of what could have been done. I think it is perfectly reasonable to still be angry at the leadership, about both the ineffectualness and the speed of their solutions.
They are not just doing some hinky funky ritual that many find to be just… odd. They are adding names to an online database that my ancestors 100 years from now may find, stating great grandma was a Mormon.
I have spent a lot of my life tracking down remnants of my partially slaughtered family, and I would Hate for my Great great great grandkids to question if they are really Ashkanazi Jews.
It is about pride, heritage, genetics and myob.
I will happily give the Mormons credit for adding a lot of info to genealogy com, but my Nan died for being a genetic Jew, not for any other reason.
They are stealing the legacy of others, and padding their numbers.
Sorry if that is terse, but I am very proud of my tough heritage.
It’s G-d damn insulting to Jews, including me.
Regards,
Carnivorousplant.
That’s not quite how it works. When any posthumous work is done, it is clearly marked as such. And the individual is never added to the rolls of the church. They don’t do it to “pad their numbers.” Your great grandma (if baptized) would not be marked as Mormon (or LDS) in any database that I am aware of. She might have a entry added that would state when the various temple ceremonies (baptism, endowment, & sealing) were done on her behalf… but even that would only go into the LDS database. And those make it pretty clear that they are posthumous. For example your Nan’s record may look something like this:
Nan SubaRhubarb
birth 1909
married 1929 (Grampa SubaRhubarb)
death 1944
baptized 1973
endowment 1973
sealed 1973
And I don’t think that genealogy.com or any other group that uses the LDS research imports those fields. So there is no reason to think that your descendants 100 years from now would have any cause to think that your grandma was anything other than an Ashkanazi Jew.
Now that said, I do share your outrage. I was pretty upset to find out a cousin had my grandma sealed to my grandpa after she died. Best thing that ever happened to her was when the bastard died. She was LDS and could have easily been sealed if she wanted… she didn’t want to. And it is offensive that someone presumed to tell us that she should be married to to him for all of eternity. So I do understand where you are coming from. But it isn’t an attempt to pad numbers, or otherwise obfuscate the past.
Well, I disagree with your first point. In my experience, people who tell racist and sexist jokes are racist and sexist. And your second point is nonsensical. By your logic I could decide that people disagreeing with me are disrespecting me and you’d have to agree with me that that’s offensive.
How is that nonsensical? If that’s your threshold for being disrespected, then anyone who disagrees with you is, indeed, disrespecting you. Of course, with a threshold that low, it won’t be long before most people stop caring if they’re disrespecting you or not, but that’s really a separate matter.
It doesn’t matter if you care or not. Disagreeing with my posts is disrespecting me and we’ve already established that disrespecting someone’s wishes like that is dickish behavior.
Have we established that? I don’t think we have.
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I just don’t see how what the Mormons did affects anything. Are the history books now going to start saying “Simon Wiesenthal, former Jew and current Mormon…”? Of course not.
What do you think?
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I think, like others here, that the conversion attempts are disrespectful to Jewish people both living and dead. Also, something like this could snowball into wider efforts to ‘convert’ Jews, which of course has been a severe problem at times and places through history. Mormons can be so blindly unrealistic about their own faith and how others perceive it that they may not know the offensive nature of these so-called-conversions unless Jews voice their concerns.
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The LDS faith simply doesn’t make sense and is full of shenanigans. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were perverts who deserve to be kicked in the rear and told to move along. There is no other mainstream faith that is so obviously false.
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All religions don’t make sense and are full of shenanigans. And they’re all obviously false. Some of them are just old enough that the falsehoods are more comfortable.
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And some of them are just onerous enough to knock on your door to recruit at 7:15am on a Saturday. I have no issues with others’ non-sensical beliefs as long as I am unaffected by them. LDS Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses are serially guilty in this regard.
No, they are not. No Mormon is saying or even pretending that the ritual in question says the deceased person was Mormon.
So, simply start retrobaptizing mormons going down the list from Patriarch Smith and all of his family into some agreeable christian church. I figure you might be able to get one of the little independent charismatic groups. Shaking snakes, glossolalia, dancing in the aisles and all. See how they like it.
How do you know it is succulent?
But, nevertheless, I find your ideas intriguing and wish to be subscribed to your newsletter.
The offensiveness of the gesture isn’t established merely by the intent of the person making the gesture, but also by the effect on those on the receiving end, in context.
For example: I tell a tasteless joke; it isn’t per se offensive, because my intent is to be funny, not offensive. Someone suggests that the joke isn’t appropriate for the company. So far, no harm, no foul. I’m not being offensive deliberately. In some contexts, with some folks, telling that sort of joke isn’t offensive (well, depending on the joke).
However, I then ignore the person who raises objections, and tell another tasteless joke of the same sort in that company. At this point, I’m acting with deliberate intent - intent to ignore the objections of the person raising objections. Maybe I’m right and maybe I’m wrong - maybe the person raising objections is overly sensitive, a real fainting flower. But I can no longer pretend I’m not acting with deliberate intent to offend.
Baptising dead Jews is a gesture of this sort. I can understand how some Mormons would do it not knowing that it is offensive. How can they possibly have that excuse now? If they are doing it now, they are doing it in spite of knowing others find it offensive.
Sorry if this was already mentioned, but the story I’m seeing is that Wiesenthal’s parents were posthumously baptised (at a Mormon temple ceremony, no less).
Still offensive, and the linked story notes that the practice is offensive to other religions as well (Catholics included). I especially liked the part about how Mitt Romney’s atheist father-in-law and Elie Wiesel (a prominent Holocaust survivor and writer) were posthumously baptised.
I agree with an earlier poster who said the Mormon Church could easily put a stop to what it claims are unapproved actions by a few “overzealous” church members, by doing more than a slap on the wrist (in a case described in the article, “suspending” the offender’s access to genealogy records). Disfellowship them (or whatever the Mormons do when they want to put someone on ignore). Anything less is an official nudge-nudge-wink-wink by the hierarchy to let the baptismal bullshit continue.
I dunno – what can any church do to a member short of excommunication, to borrow a Catholic term? That seems kind of like execution as a punishment for a traffic violation.
I may have missed it, but is there a cite for this or anything similar?
There are punishments for Mormons short of excommunication.
“As a lesser penalty, Latter-day Saints may be disfellowshipped, which does not include a loss of church membership. Once disfellowshipped, persons may not take the sacrament or enter LDS temples, nor may they give prayers or sermons in church meetings, though disfellowshipped persons may attend most LDS functions and are permitted to wear temple garments, pay tithes and offerings, and participate in church classes if their conduct is orderly. For lesser sins, or in cases where the sinner appears truly repentant, individuals may be put on probation for a time, during which further sin will result in disfellowshipment or excommunication.”
In the news story I linked to, a Mormon who broke the church rule on posthumous baptism was not allowed to access genealogy files, which seems like a pitiful wrist slap to me.
That’s basically it. People are upset because it’s disrespectful. Personally, I find posthumous baptism stupefying and hilarious and pitiful, but I don’t get upset because I believe nothing you do can hurt a dead person. There is something to be said about being respectful to surviving family members and other living admirers of the deceased, but I’m pretty liberal about standards of speech.
It also reflects a fundamental conflict between a pluralistic secular society and broadly traditional religious ideas. There is an expectation that people believe what they believe, and no one else really talks about it, and everyone just respects it. Religions don’t believe that. They believe one is right and others are wrong.
Sure they are racist and sexist - and from that perspective, honestly think the jokes are funny, and can’t imagine why anyone would be offended.
Disagreement itself is not offensive - though the Catholic Bishops’ line seems to be that support of SSM is anti-Catholic - but disagreement that leads to action is. I’m fine with a Christian believing I’m going to go to hell, but not so fine with him baptizing me forcibly or posthumously. Actions count.