Thursday, February 16, 2012

Mormons apologise for baptising Simon Wiesenthal's Jewish parents

Mormons apologise for baptising Simon Wiesenthal's Jewish parents | World news | guardian.co.uk:




The Mormon Church has apologised after its members performed posthumous baptisms into Mormonism of the long-dead Jewish parents of famed Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal.
First, you said you'd stop doing it in 1995. You didn't.

Second, you promised again to stop doing it in 2010. Again, you lied.

Third, the whole idea ... WTF?

Y'know, it's no skin off my back and, at first, it's hard to see why anybody would care. It's not like the dead care; they're dead. If you're not LDS, you probably think they're just weird fools for doing this anyways; but, I can see how you might also feel like they're deliberately disrespecting you by disrespecting your wishes and what the wishes would be, we presume, of your ancestors if they knew what was being done with their names. I wonder, too, in the back of my mind, if a member of my extended family converted to LDS, and started making my ancestors LDS posthumously, and they start breeding like rabbits, filling up the family tree going forward with indoctrinated church members if, a generation or two down the line, does it look like all my family is/was LDS? Will some historian using the LDS genealogical record somehow get the idea that I was a Mormon? (Ewww.) Google, again, please don't let Blogger disappear from the web. Ever.

As a personal aside, the first time I ever heard about this practice was when my wife and I were dating and she told me how, as a young girl growing up in Salt Lake City, she had been a proxy in these ceremonies. I'm extremely glad she recognized how bizarre the practice was, refused to go along with church's definition of femininity, and left it all behind.


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