Omnibus Religious Fucks in the NEWS

[TokyoBayer]

@Sylvanz

Well, my mother in law died some 24 years ago. Most of what I know about it I knew from her and her mother. In those days women were not allowed to, “Go on [a] mission.”

My correction.

Factually incorrect.

When I came on my mission to Japan in the early 80s, about 10% were sister missionaries.

At the time, boys had to be 19 or older and served for 24 months, while the sisters were 21 or older (their primary purpose was to get married early and if they failed that, they could go on a mission).

Now the age has been lowered to 18 for the boys and 19 for the sisters.

@Sylvanz

Although, some women will visit local Mormons and talk about different aspects of the religion and sometimes about local members who need some sort of assistance or have died and help the families.

The men who do this are called “home teachers” and the women who do this are called “visiting teachers”.

@Sylvanz

She had to get the Bishop from 30 miles away to give her a, “Blessing” not exactly sure what that was.

Mormons believe that all males 12 and older are elegible for the priesthood (not just the clergy) and those 18 and older are elegible for the higher pristhood. The higher priesthood allows the person to give people “blessings” which invokes God’s power to heal people. Most priesthood holders don’t come right out and say “You are healed in the name of the Lord” although there isn’t anything stopping them.

@Sylvanz

I don’t know if this still holds true, but they alwas dress in black pants, white shirts, and black ties, and they ride bycycles.

Conservative colors for suits, pants and ties, but no requirement for them to be all in black.

@Chronos

They don’t really even do that. The purpose of sending the missionaries out isn’t to get converts (though of course they’d be happy if that happened), but to reinforce the faith of the missionaries themselves.

LDS missionaries do generally try to do good works on their missionary outings, though.

Not true. It’s both, to convert and to reinforce the faith of the missionary.

People who have served missions, are “returned missionaries” are many more times likely to remain “active” than those men who choose not to go. However, even then many do not remain in the faith.

Like other religions in the West, Mormonism is also suffering stagnating numbers, something which would be worse if not for the missionaries. Many of the converts come from Africa, the Philippines and some countries in South America.

Recently a high percentage of missionaries are choosing to come home early, somthing which almost never happened 40 years ago.

In various missions or regions of missions around the world, there have been times when the leaders have gotten overly zealous and pushed baptism too much.

One of the most famous cases was what became known as “baseball baptisms”

The controversial “baseball baptism” program was Moyle’s idea to increase baptisms in order to fill the church meetinghouses. Missionaries would encourage young men to join sports leagues and used baptism as a prerequisite. Under this approach, large numbers of young men were baptized but very few were ever active in the church.[5] The rush to baptize was accompanied with the establishment of baptism quotas for missionaries and memorized missionary discussions which were to be delivered verbatim to potential converts.

It happened while I was in Japan, something I wrote about in this post.

@TokyoBayer

Basically, Elder Kikuchi was called as the area supervisor and decided to take the Tokyo South mission from baptizing less than 100 per month to over 2,000 per month. That would be 20 converts per companionship each month.

That’s a long post, but it goes through all of the problems that happened. The ends with:

@TokyoBayer

Halfway through my mission, Elder Kikuchi was fired, “reassigned” as they put it, and a replacement came from Salt Lake. He admitted that more than 90% of the people baptized in the previous five years were completely inactive. Our new assignment was to track them down and see if they wanted to simply pretend it never happened.

I had undergone a faith crisis and the used-car salesman approach appalled me. Even before I went home, all the people we had dunked were inactive. I had not wanted to push them so quickly but was overruled by my senior companions.

The idea of righting past wrongs invigorated me; I threw my heart into it, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I was much better at this task. I’m probably one of the few missionaries with a net negative number of baptisms.