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United States: A while back we reported on the Mormons fixation with changing history by baptising the dead, the practice got up the noses of more than a few people and the LDS got a rap over the knuckles and promised not to do it again.
As we all know we promise not to do it again
and we promise not to get caught doing it again
are two entirely different animals.
In 1995, the Mormon church acceded to demands by Jewish leaders that the denomination stop posthumously baptizing Jews. But Helen Radkey, a Salt Lake City researcher, said on Friday that the process still hasn't ended.
She said she has found posthumous baptism records for 268 Dutch Jews killed in Polish concentration camps, which she described as asmall sampling. All the death camp victims, incorrectly listed in the Mormon database as dying inAuschwitz, Germany, were posthumously baptized well after the 1995 agreement.
Mormon leaders reaffirmed the 1995 pact in December 2002, after Radkey found at least 20,000 Jews in the church's International Genealogical Index. The church says proxy baptisms have been performed for nearly every one of the 400 million names in the database.
The Jews have to either accept what the Mormons are doing or take legal action,Radkey said.
Michel's group asked Sen. Hillary Clinton to intervene in the matter and the New York Democrat met last month with Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican and LDS member, though neither side would comment on the session.
The church directed its members after the 1995 agreement to not include the names of unrelated persons, celebrities and non-approved groups, such as Jewish Holocaust victims, for the baptisms, according to documentation the Mormon church provided Friday to The Associated Press.
The church also assumes that the closest living relative of the deceased being offered for proxy baptism has consented.
The pact, however,did not guarantee that no future vicarious baptisms for deceased Jews would occur, according to church documents.
In a Nov. 14, 2003, letter, church elder D. Todd Christofferson wrote Michel that the church did not agree to find and remove the names of all deceased Jews in its database of 400 million names.That would be an impossible undertaking,Christofferson wrote.
Jewish group: Mormons still baptize dead - AP, 9th April 2004.
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Comments
1: Posted by: Jon H | April 18, 2004 4:43 AM
There's a very simple solution.
People in religions the Mormons might find objectionable should start baptising, or inducting, or whatever, deceased Mormons and publicizing this.
The Church of Satan would be an ideal candidate. One wonders what the Mormons would do if it were announced that Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and assorted other big-name dead Mormons had been baptised into the Church of Satan, and new announcements with more people kept being issued every month or so.
Evangelism, witnessing and similar activitites go by one name here—, and is no different from spam for viagra, penis enlargement products and pornography. We do not take advertising. If you want to advertise your imaginary friend, please spend your own money on your own web space to do so. Any attempts to use the comments section for advertisements will be deleted, and the perpetrator barred, unless they are particularly stupid, in which case I reserve the right to pinch an idea from Teresa Nielsen Hayden and delete all the vowels.
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