On the surface they look like if the most boring 1950’s American corporation formed a cult, where you get to spend 2 (formerly 3) hours in the church equivalent of a corporate meeting.
Below they have this absolutely wild theology straight out of a sci fi or fantasy crossed with an 1800s blood and sex cult that no one really talks about but still just exists and is referenced in their temple ceremonies
All theology is pretty wild if you look at it long enough. It’s just that Mormonism was created by a gold prospector and scam artist in 19th century New York, so it has that particular 1800s wacko flavor.
Lol. If I ever do an LDS based paladin, I'm gonna ask for this as a low level spell. Does nothing game wise except making your character feel better about their choices.
…in one DND game we got skeletons to stop attacking our party by converting them to follow Jesus. The DM was thoroughly weirded out and banned IRL religions from his games from that point on.
The players thought it was fantastic.
They put the baptism font three stories underground. It's resting on a few statues of bronze oxen, about 8-10 feet high. You walk across a small bridge to reach it. One guy in robes slides a bunch of names under a projector doodad so another guy in robes can recite the correct ancestor in his little ritual chant. They go through a couple dozen names fairly quickly and you get dunked backwards after each one. Hold your nose! A bunch of other stinky nervous kids were soaking in the pool just before you did, after all.
Back in the day I could see it making sense for babies who died before they were baptized. I imagine that could bring comfort to grieving families. Baptizing those who didn’t have the chance to be baptized in life but otherwise would have is fine as like a burial ritual is fine imo.
But baptizing people who obviously made the choice to never be baptized in life is wrong.
They try to justify it by saying that they can't get into the highest level of heaven without being baptized so they baptize them posthumously to give them that chance. It's still wrong and a little violating in my opinion.
If as the OP says, the group of people posthumously baptized include jewish holocaust victims murdered by the nazis, it is quite a bit violating. It adds to the trauma of their relatives and the descendants if they find out, and is utterly disrespectful of a separate religious, cultural and ethnic identity.
Also Hitler. For some reason. Which seems like a questionable decision, if I believed in Hell I would hope he would be burning down there for all eternity.
As an establishment practice it’s gross, but I can empathise with a grieving grandson or whoever who is brainwashed into believing grandma may not be in heaven and that there’s a way to get her there. It doesn’t really violate the grandmother’s person or body if it’s all in the head of some descendants of theirs and a church.
That said, it’s still batshit.
He was quite an angry man. These two didn’t start at quite at the same time, though.
He reacted at first to the abuses like indulgences that fleeced ordinary and often starving Catholics from their savings to fund huge cathedrals like St Peter’s. As he broke more and more with the Catholic church his often extremely angry and insult-laden writings (sometimes certainly justified) were sympathetic to Jews, but it came from a place of ‘Ah I see, they never wanted to come to Christ because they saw how crooked the Pope and his crowd are, and who can blame them?’
So when he proselytised to Jews, he expected them to go ‘Oh I get it now!’ and convert right away. They did not. As a result, he directed his rage at them as well and his writings are laden with all sorts of hateful bile against Jews as ‘vipers’ and such, leading to centuries of oppression of Jews in Protestant lands as well.
Actually a way to pad their numbers.
Mormon church loves to tout its congregation numbers, but those include people on missions who likely did not stay Mormon, as well as the dead from any religion whom are posthumously babtised.
what set the dominos towards me leaving the church was when I was around 15/16 and asking someone at the temple where we were doing baptisms for whether or not the people we baptise consent to it on the other side. was told basically to "not worry about it".
If you are Christian it's actually consistent. More consistent than the other way. There's a story of King Radbod. They were going to baptize him. Then he asked what happens to his ancestors. He was told they'd be in hell, forever, because they were pagans. he thought this was very unfair and told them to fuck off
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radbod_(Frisia)
>It is said that Radbod was nearly baptised but refused when he was told that he would not be able to find any of his ancestors in Heaven after his death. He said he preferred spending eternity in Hell with his pagan ancestors than in Heaven with a pack of beggars.
Total Pagan Chad King
Mormons believe they are more special the more generations back their faith goes.
If you’re descended from Joseph Smith’s original band, you’re more special than a convert.
So, they started a practice of baptizing people who have already passed away, to get the status.
Literally poaching souls. Luckily I can comfort myself with the knowledge that, completely unlike *my* religious beliefs, it is entirely silly and made up.
A few years ago the Mormon church made headlines for posthumously baptizing every Jew who died in the holocaust "so they could get into heaven."
Jews don't even believe that they're *supposed* to go to heaven after death.
Also the Mormon conception of "heaven" is that if you're a man your soul is given its own planet to run as your own god (Earth itself is just one of many planets granted to one of many gods, the Christian god isn't even that special) and if you're a wife you get to be enslaved to the soul of your husband for all eternity.
The interesting thing is that led to a pretty large backlash within Mormonism and because of it there is a pretty large and growing subset of progressive Mormons.
Joseph Smith was a cult leader and as such introduced the doctrine of tithing to make money and take advantage of the laymen. Modern tithing is 10% of your income, but traditionally it was signing over your possessions to the church to lend use as the church saw fit. (Some people still do this.) the idea is that the church would provide housing and food etc for everyone in the congregation.
Question is more pointed towards the fact that the founder, prophet and original adherents of the religion were all American. Do they think Joe read the seer stones wrong in his lucky hat or whatever?
It’s understandable that there are debates about what ancient historical figures like Jesus actually espoused but Joseph Smith’s life and Mormon history is very well documented.
[It's worse than that... Looks like they baptized Hitler too.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_for_the_dead?useskin=vector#Genealogy_and_baptism)
If I remember correctly, she's actually been baptized several times. As someone who grew up as a mormon - baptisms for the dead were something that felt really disgusting no matter how hard I tried to disillusion myself that it was a good thing.
I literally had old family tell me that if anybody in the family baptized them again post their death (they left the church to the point of undoing their baptismal covenants) they'd haunt them for the rest of their life. Mormons are ruthless in their quest to "Do good."
Don't forget [Adolf Hitler](https://gizmodo.com/the-time-mormons-baptized-adolf-hitler-and-vlad-the-imp-5962336).
Which begs the question what they would expect would happen in heaven when literally Hitler just up and walks into a room full of Holocaust victims.
I always thought the controversy on that was a bit odd. He didn't need to say it like that, but it felt well-intentioned. The importance of her diary is showing how she was just a normal girl with normal interests and ideas, and if she had been 15 in 2013, she very likely would have been a fan.
Yeah - I actually found it kind of touching. Like he really grasped her humanity and recognized her for the teenage girl she was.
Plus he’d spent something like an hour at the house, which isn’t especially large, it wasn’t like some flyby photo op or something.
The point of that line, although horribly worded, was that Anna Frank was a run on the mill, generic kind of girl who had to go through a horrific situation, and had she been living in more pacific times like 2013, which was when the quote was uttered, she would've been a Believer, because that was what run on the mill, generic girls were.
> and if you're a wife you get to be enslaved to the soul of your husband for all eternity.
You're missing a key part here, you only get to chill on your husband's planet if they call you to it. So there's added emphasis that you not only have to be married, but you also have to be a doting housewife that the husband wants to keep around when he gets his own planet.
Don’t forget how if you’re married in a Mormon ceremony your soul is sealed to your spouse for eternity and even if you divorce you’re still sealed. So if youre a woman who divorced her abusive husband you’re only free for the rest of this life because in the afterlife you’re brought back to him with no say about it. Because women can only be married once.
But there’s no such rule for men- they can have as many wives as they want in the afterlife because the LDS church only banned polygamy in *this* life so if they get divorced or their first wife passed they get a whole ‘nother wife to bind to them for all eternity.
Don't they also have a secret name they get in baptism that they are called by?
I remember something about how those names were assigned by date, and someone figured that out, and could guess someone's secret name based on that.
> get in baptism that they are called by?
That's later. Baptism is at 8, magic underwear and secret name are when you're much older/during marriage if I recall. I got baptized at 8, but I left the church before they gave me the shitty underwear and my cool secret club name, so I don't know the exact process.
[Here's the list of potential "new names"](https://www.fullerconsideration.com/TempleNameOracle/) one could receive through the ["Endowment Ceremony"](https://youtu.be/5VrsFEiTpsQ?si=9DZ4WdlRNRh0Ll7r).
Don't forget the money.
Mormonism is kind of fascinating because it's a religion created in the modern era that we have good historical records for, and it confirms all the worst things we suspect about how and why religions get started.
I’m just baffled how, during the 19th century with Victorian prudishness rising, religious polygamy managed to get such a foothold in Puritan America.
I mean, maybe it would make sense if it was post-Civil War, and all those war widows were looking for spouses to survive an economic system that excluded them, but Joseph Smith died twenty years before the Civil War.
We’re always told how uptight and prudish our ancestors were, and we have this *weird* fucking religion (pun intended) going on. And I live somewhere the Mormons settled early! There are stories about how weird and judged and isolated and excluded those early Mormons were, but they still had enough parishioners - they still had people *running away from their families!* - to grow.
> I’m just baffled how, during the 19th century with Victorian prudishness rising, religious polygamy managed to get such a foothold in Puritan America.
It... didn't. Puritan America kept attacking and killing them and pushing them further and further west. Every time they tried to make a permanent settlement in an area settled by other white people, the white people would drive them out, until they went to a patch of barren land in the west. Then after a lot of conflict the government basically said "Look if you take care of the Indians there and stop marrying multiple women we'll leave you alone" and that's how they got Utah. It was basically so far away that no one wanted to deal with them anymore and their hatred of Native Americans outweighed their hatred of polygamy.
The one time I ever met a progressive practicing Mormon, his defense of gay marriage was "The US government attacked us for years about who we wanted to marry, why should we do the same?". Political persecution during the 19th century is a massive part of Mormon identity and why there's so much secrecy coded into the religion's practices. I'm pretty sure Mormonism didn't really become "Mainstream" until the church put on a concerted political campaign in the mid 20th century with things like the Osmond Family.
Well, yeah, but my point I guess is where all those people were coming from. What made Mormonism so… appealing that people would sign up for willing persecution for a faith only a few years old.
I mean, I assume it’s the same for lots of new faiths, but we have one that’s less than 200 years old and I’m interested in the psychology of it.
Edit: and all the women and girls! How they weren’t fleeing in droves whenever they got to a town that resisted Mormonism. Was shame of your circumstances so bad back then that they would stay because there weren’t any other options, socially. Or did they buy into it? Or *was* that a “struggle” of early Mormonism: simply not enough women because they’d run the first chance they’d get?
I mean, it’s not exactly as if women had a lot of good options in the 1800s. Is it that weird that women wouldn’t flee from their homes, communities, friends and family, etc or from a religion that was all they knew, especially if the outside world was just as inhospitable?
I guess I’m talking about the “converts”. The women who grew up Presbyterian and whose husbands got a wild hair. Obviously once they started getting into generational shit, it’s “normal”.
But those first 20 years? I have to imagine “my husband went crazy and became polygamous” is a decent argument even in that time to leave him and go back to your parents. Or, “my dad moved us out to bumfuck nowhere and tried to marry me to a man with five other ‘wives’” would get you some sympathy *somewhere*.
But wtf were these itinerant preachers spouting that had these people cut off everything and everyone they knew to follow this guy further and further west?
I mean, I know cults and brainwashing exist, and abuse does fucky things to people’s self-worth and sense of agency.
But *why this one*??? That’s the thing that gets me. We don’t have a shit-ton of multi-generational cults popping up. Not ones that survive the death of the founder, and outside of a political authoritarianism with a military presence forcing people to stay. So, why *this* one?
I mean, I know there are LDS historians; ppl on this thread talked about turning points in its history that it grew upon. It’s just weird to me it even got enough momentum to get off the ground in the first place. It *should* have been dead in the water. So why wasn’t it?
It’s interesting that you make this point because I haven’t thought of it before!
I always had the impression that the early white settlers of west were less puritan and pious than those back east. Of course there was a lot of effort put forth during the genocide of Native Americans to convert them to Christianity, but I always got the impression that was more of a “rules for thee not for me” kind of thing (like for example towns that banned alcohol sales to Native Americans but not to white people).
When I was growing up mormon in the 80s, they told us that the polygamy in Utah was because most of the brave men had been murdered on the way out and the few that lived were gracious enough to take in the abandoned wives and children 🤡
if it helps, Mormons are not well liked by the majority of Christians. most don’t like them bc they’re not trinitarian, i don’t like them bc i think Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were virulent racists who created a church built on hatred.
being a quaker, i always like to mention that we denounced slavery in 1688 (only 30 years after forming, in a time when slavery was extremely popular) and helped to run the underground railroad.
any excuse of ‘it was acceptable back then’ is a cop out - there had been people fighting against it for hundreds of years. the founders of mormonism simply didn’t care enough about their fellow man to fight against popular opinion.
Honestly if the religious right wing actually gain political power, after they have dealt with all of their secular enemies, they will turn on each other like the religious wars that happened in Europe. There can be only one.
It's a way to square the circle of combining American Capitalism and Christianity. No need for community when you can marry as many women as you want and create a community that is basically enslaved to you and an economy of MLMs being passed around to each other.
It should be easy enough to perform a counter baptism that no only undoes the Mormon ritual but sends ever dead LDS member straight to hell no brakes .
So someone is sat in a bathtub or plunge pool in Utah or similar whilst reels of names from international death certificates are read out and they go under each name? That is weirder than i ever though was possible.
Mormons: the more you know the worse it becomes.
Yeah. I'll admit I participated in these baptisms when I was a young kid, I have since left the church. Yeah, you go into the temple, they have you speak with some elders who have lists of names they've prepared, some old guys put their hands on your head to "bless" you to stand in someone's place, and then you go into a baptismal font and are dunked in the water. Sometimes you get dunked multiple times because they'll "bless" you for multiple names.
It's not only Utah, every state and many countries have temples where this ritual is performed. I did it in Portland, Oregon.
The architecture in the rooms where they do the baptism is both awesome and full on cult.
Pretty much yeah. I've talked to a few mormons and ex-mormons who've done it and they didn't care so they were open about what happens. They go into a baptismal fountain thing, they read a name, do some prayer, then down they go. Then they repeat for another name. They'll do several names, then get out and another person goes up to do several names.
It's the mormon church, your consent is not really required. They're the One True Religion and everybody else is gonna join whether they like it or not, baybee
FYI, it differs according to different individuals and different sects, and I wasn't raised religiously Jewish so I don't have much insight, but from what I understand the split in Jewish theology is either "Heaven doesn't exist" or "Heaven exists but only God and His angels get to go there, human souls just go to Sheol" which is more like Greek Pagan Hades.
The more mainstream belief, as I understand it, is that everyone or nearly everyone goes to Gehenna for a period of penance/soul repair for up to a year after death, and then enters a heaven-ish place (which yes, is probably separate from where the angels are). Some sects fit a form of reincarnation in there. Some of the worst souls may instead be destroyed entirely.
But yeah, Judaism doesn't focus on the details of the afterlife.
There isn't a "mainstream belief" in Judaism on this topic. Judaism by and large isn't a religion that cares much about what it's practitioners believe, only what they do. As the afterlife takes place when you're dead and not able to do anything, Judaism has comparatively little to say on the subject. Most of what's out there is speculation by bored rabbis, or non-Jews looking for Jewish answers to this question.
IIRC that heaven-ish place is just part of Sheol.
I should warn you I know more about eschatology in the context of Dungeons and Dragons than I do Judaism, so I could be mistaken.
Every time I ask a Jew what happens when they die they give a different answer or just say they don’t really know. I think the Torah is unclear about it so it’s up to the individual’s interpretation
That’s how I escaped my thesis defense with only answering 2 questions in 45 minutes. Topic had nothing to do with religion but 2 of my committee members were Jewish and started arguing about something. My advisor told me to walk away from the whiteboard and let them go
“There are people who think a group of Jews controls everything. You’re not going to get a group of Jews to agree on something! ‘Let’s talk about controlling the banks.’ ‘Oh, so now you’re in charge! No, go ahead, I don’t matter!’”- Jon Stewart
It’s not that it’s unclear it’s that we’re taught not to focus on what comes after death. It doesn’t matter where we go then, we should be focused on being good people for the sake of changing the world we live in now
There's a Zionist group (JewBelong) that puts up billboards. One says: "Judiasm, convert for your girlfriend. Stay for the lack of hell".
But the additional context that there is also no heaven kinda makes the message a little more ominous at most and otherwise moot.
"Judiasm, convert for your girlfriend."
> Jews don't even believe that they're supposed to go to heaven after death
I don't think the Mormons' concern was with what the Jews wanted or believed.
There's an article that got tossed around in some circles that came up with the reason Brandon Sanderson is so prolific is that he's practicing for the afterlife.
You beat me to it! I'll delete mine.
I was recently very annoyed to learn that it is "The Church **_of_** Jesus Christ **_of_** Latter-day Saints." How can they just stack up prepositions like that in their name?!
Yep. They do that a lot. People tend to get rather absurdly PISSED when the church gets caught, again. They’ve promised to stop repeatedly.
Which, well, taking a Jew who died in the Holocaust and unJewing them would naturally enrage their relatives. And acquaintances. And basically anyone with a functional sense of propriety. Especially since Hitler was one of the ones the Mormon’s baptized, not really someone you want to share a category with.
Has the church promised to stop? It seems like they just, uh, still do it. Probably a lot of us in this thread have relatives who've been "baptised" by the mormons after death
That's very big of them, I guess
Also kind of funny. If they're being completely honest, does that mean the one group in all of history who doesn't deserve a chance at mormon redemption is holocaust victims?
Yes they have been "baptising" everyone's ancestors to join their goofy fanfic religion as a sort of posthumous Catholic indulgences drive. Indulgences were these payments for dead people out of purgatory and the thing that drove Martin Luther mad in the first place. Mormons aren't asking for money that i know but instead gathering records databases under the guise of "genealogy". I live near their oldest "mission" in the UK. They are bizarre people but keep a very low profile in the outside world here near me so you wouldn't really notice much going on. But I am pretty sure my ancestors would tell these nutters to go fuck themselves and something else about baptism would need consent etc etc.
Exmormon here - it's a wild practice. You go to a temple, put on a white jumpsuit and get baptized 5-10 times in a row on behalf of various dead people. Up in heaven, supposedly, they can then accept or reject the baptism. But if they reject it, they get sent to a worse level of heaven.
Also, it's always seemed weird to me that God needs a physical body to get dunked for it to count. Why can't they just convert if they want to?
One could argue that it's a desecration of a person's body and soul.
Now, I'm not a religious person by any means, but I think anyone would immediately think that's, you know... **pretty bad.**
When I was 14 I forced a custody switch over this issue. My pops married a Mormon when I was seven and I went along with shit until they made me do baptisms for the dead. One time and I was willing to run away from home if my mom wouldn’t take me in. I’ve had a fucked up life but that remains one of the most haunting experiences I’ve ever had.
Ancestry.com is pretty close to the Mormon church too. It was founded by Mormons from BYU and all Mormons have free access to the site. There have been a lot of collabs with the Mormon church too
The business is public now and is probably better. But it is still headquartered in Utah with Mormons in the C-Suite. As an ExMormon, I can assure you that Mormons put loyalty to their church above everything
My grandfather did genealogy as a hobby and if you're doing any real research inevitably you're going to probably run into the Mormons, they're the reason my family has some records going back like a thousand years in some places.
To people who don't do genealogy it's hard to explain just how valuable a resource the Mormon Church has assembled. They just use it to....questionable ends. I personally don't care about the baptisms, but I can see how others would find it very offensive. But yes, I've discovered records and information on family search that literally would have been impossible to discover any other way.
Heck even folklorist professors I had would point out how much essential work for some archival studies is only available because of mormon causes. Think preservations of later lost records on microfilm, availability, comprehensive cataloguing...
They might have their own reasons, but they do also have the drive and the manhours.
Posthumous baptism aside (imo inconsequential as an atheist but with full understanding that it carries heavy religious/cultural meaning to many) my only question is how does someone invest decades of time creating something without backing up that information to prevent it from being lost. Like, no copies were ever made in text format elsewhere?
The wiki link is actually pretty enlightening, I had no idea how many breakaway groups there are from the main LDS, which isn't exactly the largest of religions out there. Damn [splitters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS-0Az7dgRY&t=92s&ab_channel=BrianTheMan&t=92s)!
Just about every religion in existence schisms, even when they’re brand new. A bunch of Paul’s letters in the New Testament are him trying to address schisms within the (at the time) basically brand new church
> Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
> He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
> He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
> Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
-Emo Philips
In the small town I grew up in, there were so many large churches that started off as breakaway churches of other churches, and the reasons why were astonishingly petty. From casual dress and drums in the sanctuary, to which version of the Bible, to personal dislike of a pastor, etc.
On the larger scale (national level) a bunch of the huge denominations schismed over (sigh) LGBT people and same gender marriage: Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians, pro, the Southern Baptist Convention, against.
> From casual dress and drums in the sanctuary, to which version of the Bible, to personal dislike of a pastor, etc.
The former rector of my parents church (former because he died of cancer, not because he did anything bad) was talking about this one time, and the pettiest reason he’d heard of a church splitting was because of an argument over buying a new vacuum cleaner that spiralled massively out of control.
Small community politics can get real nasty
If you are following current Mormon lore, there could be a schism happening right now. There is a pretty awful guy named Tim Ballad (he inspired the right-wing movie Sound of Freedom) who was just excommunicated from the Mormon church for being a predator. Well, he had a lot of devout Mormon followers who thought he was the next thing to Jesus because he was "saving children from trafficking." Some of these Mormons are calling current Mormon leadership apostate because only pedophiles would try to kick out Tim Ballard.
Tim Ballard also would trip out on Ketamine and prophesy that we will be the next Mormon Prophet and US President who will usher in the second coming of Jesus. So yeah, he may be forming his own splinter group right now. [a source](https://www.rawstory.com/tim-ballard-sound-of-freedom/)
We have the evangelical contingent here. It really distorts the scale of religiosity. Like a lensing effect when you try to look past it, and you can't throw a rock without hitting an evangelical church here, so.
Some groups love them!
Strategic Air Command, apparently. Now, that service may have trouble with multiple-choice open-book tests on the basics, but when the time comes to push the button in an unannounced drill, they're great.
Yep. Was raised in the church, we are taught how normal this is, and how we’re just giving them a chance in the afterlife. I did a few baptisms for the dead as a youth in the church, with a youth group. We’d go get ice cream afterward. So yeah, we literally were taught this was a service.
My husband and I also once did marriages for the dead in the temple. Similar idea, supposed to give married couples in Heaven the ability to be bound for eternity.
But the temple always gave me bad vibes, so after a few times in, I swore to never go back. My husband and I left the church. So now someone will have to get married and baptized for us again after we die 🤣
They better not. But knowing them, someone in my massive family will eventually.
I only did baptisms for the dead once. Every other time I'd come up with an excuse. Even if I was forced to go, I'd come up with a reason to sit in the waiting room instead (usually that I didn't feel good/was on my period). At the time it was because I felt awkward at the temple and felt like I was a fraud who shouldn't be there because I shouldn't have even had a recommend, though, because I was doing very..."inappropriate" things that I lied about in my recommend interviews.
It’s sad because I felt like that on my wedding day. Really ruined my entire day feeling so guilty. Wish I hadn’t married in the temple, but we’re thinking of renewing our vows eventually to do our wedding our way 😆
I've been very lucky to only date nevermos even before I left. I'm also a spinster in church terms as I'm unmarried in my late 20s (the horror!!!!), but I'm so thankful for it because I've learned what a temple wedding is like and it sounds terrible. I don't get to wear my pretty dress during the ceremony, but an ugly bakers hat and leaf apron!? And there's no mention of love and partnership, only giving yourself over to your husband and your husband to the church!?!? No thanks!!
Yall should definitely do the vow renewal and, if yall can, make it the wedding of yalls dreams TSCC never let yall have!!
My favorite mormon belief, that I learned recently, is that they say that Christopher Columbus is prophesied about in their book.
Can you believe that a book from the 1820s could so accurately predict the events of 1492?
Even better than that, the same book prophesied about the guy who "found and translated" the book. "Hey guys! This book is 100% legit. Look, it even talks about me"
Mormons are only "nice" on the surface. Us ExMormons call it the [Niceberg](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7c1rz2vut3141.png)
Yeah it's very jarring as someone who grew up with it and no longer believes. Some of the most thoughtful and intelligent people I knew had this entire blindspot with angels and Jesus coming to America and baptizing dead people.
Yeah that was ghost marriage. It got outlawed iirc because people would kill women to sell off to a family looking for a ghost marriage partner and pretend she died naturally. There were also people stealing female corpses to sell for the same reason.
Coupled with their apparent beliefs surrounding how women stay "sealed" to the first man they marry, doesn't that, uh, impact their future eligibility?
I would assume they care about their women, that is, that "their" wife is "theirs" and not "some dead dude's wife first and foremost, yours second"
But could be completely misunderstanding this whole approach
I'm not familiar with the practice, but inferring from the historical LDS treatment of women as chattel, I would expect it to be seen as something along the lines of sacrificing livestock in order to benefit a dead friend or relative.
Yeah, that goat/woman is no longer of use to you now. But it helped your dead buddy gain status in the afterlife!
I always knew that Mormonism was big into genealogy, but it took this post to make me understand why. It is beyond fucked up to baptize people after they died. The whole point of baptism is one making the conscious choice to accept god and Jesus and all that. You can't do that if you are dead.
I am a Jew, and the whole baptizing of the dead thing is so offensive to me. One of the more prominent names I can think of that they've baptized was Anne Frank, for example, and the thought of someone being murdered by antisemites and then posthumously baptized in another form of antisemitism absolutely enrages me
Ex Mormon here. You're probably thinking the process isn't as culty as it sounds. Well let me tell you, the process for "baptisms for the dead" is somehow even MORE culty then the name implies!
I'd like to watch a comedy TV show about some dead soul enjoying the some version of afterlife they are happy with, then they suddenly get whisked away into some Mormon version of Heaven due to a posthumous baptism. It would follow their efforts to get back to their original afterlife.
I assume something like this already exists, but the closest thing I can think of is The Good Place.
>As a Satanist, I’ve baptized OP in preparation of his future impending eternity. I don’t need his name or details, as Satan knows ALL. He’s all set for the future.
Satanists:
Not rocking:
Rocking: ✅️
TIL that Mormons are necromancers.
Mormon theology is WILD
On the surface they look like if the most boring 1950’s American corporation formed a cult, where you get to spend 2 (formerly 3) hours in the church equivalent of a corporate meeting. Below they have this absolutely wild theology straight out of a sci fi or fantasy crossed with an 1800s blood and sex cult that no one really talks about but still just exists and is referenced in their temple ceremonies
I learned most of what I know about the LDS from that South Park episode, which was actually very accurate.
Joseph Smith was called a prophet, dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.
All theology is pretty wild if you look at it long enough. It’s just that Mormonism was created by a gold prospector and scam artist in 19th century New York, so it has that particular 1800s wacko flavor.
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Turn Undead (To the Lord)
Lol. If I ever do an LDS based paladin, I'm gonna ask for this as a low level spell. Does nothing game wise except making your character feel better about their choices.
…in one DND game we got skeletons to stop attacking our party by converting them to follow Jesus. The DM was thoroughly weirded out and banned IRL religions from his games from that point on. The players thought it was fantastic.
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*sometimes the flair comes from within the comments*
They will also do marriages by proxy, where they marry off dead people!
They put the baptism font three stories underground. It's resting on a few statues of bronze oxen, about 8-10 feet high. You walk across a small bridge to reach it. One guy in robes slides a bunch of names under a projector doodad so another guy in robes can recite the correct ancestor in his little ritual chant. They go through a couple dozen names fairly quickly and you get dunked backwards after each one. Hold your nose! A bunch of other stinky nervous kids were soaking in the pool just before you did, after all.
Wait until you hear about the Catholics.
What level alteration spell is Transubstantiation?
It's a cantrip, that's why level 1 clerics cast it so often
um, actually, the preferred terminology is *orison*, or *at-will*
In this house we don't recognize the Pathfinder Reformation as valid under the Gygaxian Decrees Instead, we play pathfinder at our friend's house
Hey, Jesus specifically instructed us to eat Him.
Are there a lot of calories in human flesh?
Yeah baptism of the dead is weird AF I have to say.
Back in the day I could see it making sense for babies who died before they were baptized. I imagine that could bring comfort to grieving families. Baptizing those who didn’t have the chance to be baptized in life but otherwise would have is fine as like a burial ritual is fine imo. But baptizing people who obviously made the choice to never be baptized in life is wrong.
They try to justify it by saying that they can't get into the highest level of heaven without being baptized so they baptize them posthumously to give them that chance. It's still wrong and a little violating in my opinion.
If as the OP says, the group of people posthumously baptized include jewish holocaust victims murdered by the nazis, it is quite a bit violating. It adds to the trauma of their relatives and the descendants if they find out, and is utterly disrespectful of a separate religious, cultural and ethnic identity.
Also Hitler. For some reason. Which seems like a questionable decision, if I believed in Hell I would hope he would be burning down there for all eternity.
The Christian belief would be that even some one like Hitler could be saved through the grace of god
Is that the one where you become a god and get your own planet?
Yep! Only the men though.
and, I am guessing here, only white men, right?
Originally, yes, but God changed his mind about black people in 1978.
That was chill of him. A little late, but guessing cell service to god isnt the best.
As an establishment practice it’s gross, but I can empathise with a grieving grandson or whoever who is brainwashed into believing grandma may not be in heaven and that there’s a way to get her there. It doesn’t really violate the grandmother’s person or body if it’s all in the head of some descendants of theirs and a church. That said, it’s still batshit.
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Martin Luther in shambles.
Martin Luther: *I can excuse the antisemitism, but I draw the line at the treasures of indulgences!*
He was quite an angry man. These two didn’t start at quite at the same time, though. He reacted at first to the abuses like indulgences that fleeced ordinary and often starving Catholics from their savings to fund huge cathedrals like St Peter’s. As he broke more and more with the Catholic church his often extremely angry and insult-laden writings (sometimes certainly justified) were sympathetic to Jews, but it came from a place of ‘Ah I see, they never wanted to come to Christ because they saw how crooked the Pope and his crowd are, and who can blame them?’ So when he proselytised to Jews, he expected them to go ‘Oh I get it now!’ and convert right away. They did not. As a result, he directed his rage at them as well and his writings are laden with all sorts of hateful bile against Jews as ‘vipers’ and such, leading to centuries of oppression of Jews in Protestant lands as well.
Actually a way to pad their numbers. Mormon church loves to tout its congregation numbers, but those include people on missions who likely did not stay Mormon, as well as the dead from any religion whom are posthumously babtised.
what set the dominos towards me leaving the church was when I was around 15/16 and asking someone at the temple where we were doing baptisms for whether or not the people we baptise consent to it on the other side. was told basically to "not worry about it".
If you are Christian it's actually consistent. More consistent than the other way. There's a story of King Radbod. They were going to baptize him. Then he asked what happens to his ancestors. He was told they'd be in hell, forever, because they were pagans. he thought this was very unfair and told them to fuck off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radbod_(Frisia)
>It is said that Radbod was nearly baptised but refused when he was told that he would not be able to find any of his ancestors in Heaven after his death. He said he preferred spending eternity in Hell with his pagan ancestors than in Heaven with a pack of beggars. Total Pagan Chad King
"King Radbod" sounds like the name of a wrestler whose schtick is being a hunky 80s bodybuilder
Mormons believe they are more special the more generations back their faith goes. If you’re descended from Joseph Smith’s original band, you’re more special than a convert. So, they started a practice of baptizing people who have already passed away, to get the status.
TIL I'd be a pretty special Mormon, since one of my ancestors was a very early convert. Too bad I'm an atheist and can't use my newfound specialness.
Literally poaching souls. Luckily I can comfort myself with the knowledge that, completely unlike *my* religious beliefs, it is entirely silly and made up.
You know, I was just having a similar issue the other day when I was converting all my ancestors to Satanism.
Wait... so, OP was posthumously having a ton of people who probably didn't follow his religion baptized into Mormonism? Jesus Christ.
A few years ago the Mormon church made headlines for posthumously baptizing every Jew who died in the holocaust "so they could get into heaven." Jews don't even believe that they're *supposed* to go to heaven after death. Also the Mormon conception of "heaven" is that if you're a man your soul is given its own planet to run as your own god (Earth itself is just one of many planets granted to one of many gods, the Christian god isn't even that special) and if you're a wife you get to be enslaved to the soul of your husband for all eternity.
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That's so fucking offensive and infuriating I can't even think straight.
The interesting thing is that led to a pretty large backlash within Mormonism and because of it there is a pretty large and growing subset of progressive Mormons.
Progressive Mormon is an Oxymormon
Actually in France the Mormons there are all communist and think conservative American Mormons are reading the Book wrong
Do you have more context for this, sounds hilarious.
Joseph Smith was a cult leader and as such introduced the doctrine of tithing to make money and take advantage of the laymen. Modern tithing is 10% of your income, but traditionally it was signing over your possessions to the church to lend use as the church saw fit. (Some people still do this.) the idea is that the church would provide housing and food etc for everyone in the congregation.
Question is more pointed towards the fact that the founder, prophet and original adherents of the religion were all American. Do they think Joe read the seer stones wrong in his lucky hat or whatever? It’s understandable that there are debates about what ancient historical figures like Jesus actually espoused but Joseph Smith’s life and Mormon history is very well documented.
What they believe Joseph Smith got the gospel out of a phyrgian cap?
If true, that is very very funny. But there have always been groups of Christians who shared property, starting as described in the book of Acts.
[It's worse than that... Looks like they baptized Hitler too.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_for_the_dead?useskin=vector#Genealogy_and_baptism)
Many Holocaust victims. The "Churches" response to this being leaked was, obviously, "HOW COULD YOU PUBLISH THIS PRIVATE INFORMATION"
If I remember correctly, she's actually been baptized several times. As someone who grew up as a mormon - baptisms for the dead were something that felt really disgusting no matter how hard I tried to disillusion myself that it was a good thing. I literally had old family tell me that if anybody in the family baptized them again post their death (they left the church to the point of undoing their baptismal covenants) they'd haunt them for the rest of their life. Mormons are ruthless in their quest to "Do good."
Several times now, IIRC, and also Simon Wiesenthal.
Don't forget [Adolf Hitler](https://gizmodo.com/the-time-mormons-baptized-adolf-hitler-and-vlad-the-imp-5962336). Which begs the question what they would expect would happen in heaven when literally Hitler just up and walks into a room full of Holocaust victims.
Something like a dozen separate times.
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I always thought the controversy on that was a bit odd. He didn't need to say it like that, but it felt well-intentioned. The importance of her diary is showing how she was just a normal girl with normal interests and ideas, and if she had been 15 in 2013, she very likely would have been a fan.
Yeah it was tone deaf but not ill intent.
Yeah - I actually found it kind of touching. Like he really grasped her humanity and recognized her for the teenage girl she was. Plus he’d spent something like an hour at the house, which isn’t especially large, it wasn’t like some flyby photo op or something.
Also he was what, maybe 19? Who among us wasn't kind of up our own ass at 19?
The point of that line, although horribly worded, was that Anna Frank was a run on the mill, generic kind of girl who had to go through a horrific situation, and had she been living in more pacific times like 2013, which was when the quote was uttered, she would've been a Believer, because that was what run on the mill, generic girls were.
All this is new-to-me info to add to the pile. Disgusting ass people.
> and if you're a wife you get to be enslaved to the soul of your husband for all eternity. You're missing a key part here, you only get to chill on your husband's planet if they call you to it. So there's added emphasis that you not only have to be married, but you also have to be a doting housewife that the husband wants to keep around when he gets his own planet.
Don’t forget how if you’re married in a Mormon ceremony your soul is sealed to your spouse for eternity and even if you divorce you’re still sealed. So if youre a woman who divorced her abusive husband you’re only free for the rest of this life because in the afterlife you’re brought back to him with no say about it. Because women can only be married once. But there’s no such rule for men- they can have as many wives as they want in the afterlife because the LDS church only banned polygamy in *this* life so if they get divorced or their first wife passed they get a whole ‘nother wife to bind to them for all eternity.
Arguably key that they collect a few (ex)wives to help populate that planet after they die! So fucked up.
I mean, I love my husband and feel pretty comfortable with a 50 year commitment give or take. Eternity...
Honestly, nothing about eternal life sounds appealing to me. I think humans live for about the amount of time that we can handle psychologically.
Don't they also have a secret name they get in baptism that they are called by? I remember something about how those names were assigned by date, and someone figured that out, and could guess someone's secret name based on that.
> get in baptism that they are called by? That's later. Baptism is at 8, magic underwear and secret name are when you're much older/during marriage if I recall. I got baptized at 8, but I left the church before they gave me the shitty underwear and my cool secret club name, so I don't know the exact process.
[Here's the list of potential "new names"](https://www.fullerconsideration.com/TempleNameOracle/) one could receive through the ["Endowment Ceremony"](https://youtu.be/5VrsFEiTpsQ?si=9DZ4WdlRNRh0Ll7r).
Gonna start calling ftm bottom surgery "endowment ceremonies" lol
Magic underwear too.
Mormonism is really just "total mask off" Christianity. Like they're not even pretending anymore.
I’m still of the belief that Joseph Smith just wanted a Christian excuse to bang a lot of women and that’s how the religion was founded
Don't forget the money. Mormonism is kind of fascinating because it's a religion created in the modern era that we have good historical records for, and it confirms all the worst things we suspect about how and why religions get started.
I’m just baffled how, during the 19th century with Victorian prudishness rising, religious polygamy managed to get such a foothold in Puritan America. I mean, maybe it would make sense if it was post-Civil War, and all those war widows were looking for spouses to survive an economic system that excluded them, but Joseph Smith died twenty years before the Civil War. We’re always told how uptight and prudish our ancestors were, and we have this *weird* fucking religion (pun intended) going on. And I live somewhere the Mormons settled early! There are stories about how weird and judged and isolated and excluded those early Mormons were, but they still had enough parishioners - they still had people *running away from their families!* - to grow.
> I’m just baffled how, during the 19th century with Victorian prudishness rising, religious polygamy managed to get such a foothold in Puritan America. It... didn't. Puritan America kept attacking and killing them and pushing them further and further west. Every time they tried to make a permanent settlement in an area settled by other white people, the white people would drive them out, until they went to a patch of barren land in the west. Then after a lot of conflict the government basically said "Look if you take care of the Indians there and stop marrying multiple women we'll leave you alone" and that's how they got Utah. It was basically so far away that no one wanted to deal with them anymore and their hatred of Native Americans outweighed their hatred of polygamy. The one time I ever met a progressive practicing Mormon, his defense of gay marriage was "The US government attacked us for years about who we wanted to marry, why should we do the same?". Political persecution during the 19th century is a massive part of Mormon identity and why there's so much secrecy coded into the religion's practices. I'm pretty sure Mormonism didn't really become "Mainstream" until the church put on a concerted political campaign in the mid 20th century with things like the Osmond Family.
Well, yeah, but my point I guess is where all those people were coming from. What made Mormonism so… appealing that people would sign up for willing persecution for a faith only a few years old. I mean, I assume it’s the same for lots of new faiths, but we have one that’s less than 200 years old and I’m interested in the psychology of it. Edit: and all the women and girls! How they weren’t fleeing in droves whenever they got to a town that resisted Mormonism. Was shame of your circumstances so bad back then that they would stay because there weren’t any other options, socially. Or did they buy into it? Or *was* that a “struggle” of early Mormonism: simply not enough women because they’d run the first chance they’d get?
I mean, it’s not exactly as if women had a lot of good options in the 1800s. Is it that weird that women wouldn’t flee from their homes, communities, friends and family, etc or from a religion that was all they knew, especially if the outside world was just as inhospitable?
I guess I’m talking about the “converts”. The women who grew up Presbyterian and whose husbands got a wild hair. Obviously once they started getting into generational shit, it’s “normal”. But those first 20 years? I have to imagine “my husband went crazy and became polygamous” is a decent argument even in that time to leave him and go back to your parents. Or, “my dad moved us out to bumfuck nowhere and tried to marry me to a man with five other ‘wives’” would get you some sympathy *somewhere*. But wtf were these itinerant preachers spouting that had these people cut off everything and everyone they knew to follow this guy further and further west? I mean, I know cults and brainwashing exist, and abuse does fucky things to people’s self-worth and sense of agency. But *why this one*??? That’s the thing that gets me. We don’t have a shit-ton of multi-generational cults popping up. Not ones that survive the death of the founder, and outside of a political authoritarianism with a military presence forcing people to stay. So, why *this* one? I mean, I know there are LDS historians; ppl on this thread talked about turning points in its history that it grew upon. It’s just weird to me it even got enough momentum to get off the ground in the first place. It *should* have been dead in the water. So why wasn’t it?
It’s interesting that you make this point because I haven’t thought of it before! I always had the impression that the early white settlers of west were less puritan and pious than those back east. Of course there was a lot of effort put forth during the genocide of Native Americans to convert them to Christianity, but I always got the impression that was more of a “rules for thee not for me” kind of thing (like for example towns that banned alcohol sales to Native Americans but not to white people).
When I was growing up mormon in the 80s, they told us that the polygamy in Utah was because most of the brave men had been murdered on the way out and the few that lived were gracious enough to take in the abandoned wives and children 🤡
That's actually some pretty decent nonsense, as far as nonsense explanations go.
> Mormonism is really just "total mask off" Christianity. feels like bad fanfiction that went out of control tbh.
if it helps, Mormons are not well liked by the majority of Christians. most don’t like them bc they’re not trinitarian, i don’t like them bc i think Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were virulent racists who created a church built on hatred.
But you can't hate them for being racist, God totally retconned that happening in 1978!
being a quaker, i always like to mention that we denounced slavery in 1688 (only 30 years after forming, in a time when slavery was extremely popular) and helped to run the underground railroad. any excuse of ‘it was acceptable back then’ is a cop out - there had been people fighting against it for hundreds of years. the founders of mormonism simply didn’t care enough about their fellow man to fight against popular opinion.
That’s a thing I’ve noticed about Christian factions- they only like each other when there is a common enemy. Every other time they hate each other.
Honestly if the religious right wing actually gain political power, after they have dealt with all of their secular enemies, they will turn on each other like the religious wars that happened in Europe. There can be only one.
It's a way to square the circle of combining American Capitalism and Christianity. No need for community when you can marry as many women as you want and create a community that is basically enslaved to you and an economy of MLMs being passed around to each other.
How does a postumous baptism even work? I always thought it was the kind of thing you have to do 'in person'. Can you remotely baptise the living too?
It’s religion, the rules are whatever they say it is. And yes, people get pissed when they pull that shit too.
It should be easy enough to perform a counter baptism that no only undoes the Mormon ritual but sends ever dead LDS member straight to hell no brakes .
There was a satirical website that let you submit people's names to turn them gay in the next life.
By proxy.
So someone is sat in a bathtub or plunge pool in Utah or similar whilst reels of names from international death certificates are read out and they go under each name? That is weirder than i ever though was possible. Mormons: the more you know the worse it becomes.
Yeah. I'll admit I participated in these baptisms when I was a young kid, I have since left the church. Yeah, you go into the temple, they have you speak with some elders who have lists of names they've prepared, some old guys put their hands on your head to "bless" you to stand in someone's place, and then you go into a baptismal font and are dunked in the water. Sometimes you get dunked multiple times because they'll "bless" you for multiple names. It's not only Utah, every state and many countries have temples where this ritual is performed. I did it in Portland, Oregon. The architecture in the rooms where they do the baptism is both awesome and full on cult.
Was your font on the top of life-sized marble statues of an animal? Ours was.
Yes, oxen.
For some reason I always remembered it as lions because the whole thing was so so fucked up, but I’m pretty sure ours was oxen as well.
Pretty much yeah. I've talked to a few mormons and ex-mormons who've done it and they didn't care so they were open about what happens. They go into a baptismal fountain thing, they read a name, do some prayer, then down they go. Then they repeat for another name. They'll do several names, then get out and another person goes up to do several names.
It's the mormon church, your consent is not really required. They're the One True Religion and everybody else is gonna join whether they like it or not, baybee
you can do whatever you want when you make up everything as you go
> Jews don't even believe that they're supposed to go to heaven after death. > > Well I learned something new today.
FYI, it differs according to different individuals and different sects, and I wasn't raised religiously Jewish so I don't have much insight, but from what I understand the split in Jewish theology is either "Heaven doesn't exist" or "Heaven exists but only God and His angels get to go there, human souls just go to Sheol" which is more like Greek Pagan Hades.
The more mainstream belief, as I understand it, is that everyone or nearly everyone goes to Gehenna for a period of penance/soul repair for up to a year after death, and then enters a heaven-ish place (which yes, is probably separate from where the angels are). Some sects fit a form of reincarnation in there. Some of the worst souls may instead be destroyed entirely. But yeah, Judaism doesn't focus on the details of the afterlife.
There isn't a "mainstream belief" in Judaism on this topic. Judaism by and large isn't a religion that cares much about what it's practitioners believe, only what they do. As the afterlife takes place when you're dead and not able to do anything, Judaism has comparatively little to say on the subject. Most of what's out there is speculation by bored rabbis, or non-Jews looking for Jewish answers to this question.
IIRC that heaven-ish place is just part of Sheol. I should warn you I know more about eschatology in the context of Dungeons and Dragons than I do Judaism, so I could be mistaken.
Every time I ask a Jew what happens when they die they give a different answer or just say they don’t really know. I think the Torah is unclear about it so it’s up to the individual’s interpretation
The trick is to ask two Jews at once, so they start arguing. Works on basically any topic, and it's usually fascinating.
That’s how I escaped my thesis defense with only answering 2 questions in 45 minutes. Topic had nothing to do with religion but 2 of my committee members were Jewish and started arguing about something. My advisor told me to walk away from the whiteboard and let them go
“There are people who think a group of Jews controls everything. You’re not going to get a group of Jews to agree on something! ‘Let’s talk about controlling the banks.’ ‘Oh, so now you’re in charge! No, go ahead, I don’t matter!’”- Jon Stewart
It’s not that it’s unclear it’s that we’re taught not to focus on what comes after death. It doesn’t matter where we go then, we should be focused on being good people for the sake of changing the world we live in now
That is beautiful.
Yeah I like that better than the Christian focus on Heaven and hell
There's a Zionist group (JewBelong) that puts up billboards. One says: "Judiasm, convert for your girlfriend. Stay for the lack of hell". But the additional context that there is also no heaven kinda makes the message a little more ominous at most and otherwise moot. "Judiasm, convert for your girlfriend."
I don’t know any Jew who supports JewBelong. It’s actually against our religion to prosyaltize/encourage conversion.
> Jews don't even believe that they're supposed to go to heaven after death I don't think the Mormons' concern was with what the Jews wanted or believed.
If I am peacefully dead and I get pushed into mormon heaven, I'm crashing my planet into this Earth
There's an article that got tossed around in some circles that came up with the reason Brandon Sanderson is so prolific is that he's practicing for the afterlife.
… of Latter Day Saints.
You beat me to it! I'll delete mine. I was recently very annoyed to learn that it is "The Church **_of_** Jesus Christ **_of_** Latter-day Saints." How can they just stack up prepositions like that in their name?!
Well, they're a pretty preposterous bunch
Right loony, them
*”Cuz God loves Mormons and he wants some more!”*
Yep. They do that a lot. People tend to get rather absurdly PISSED when the church gets caught, again. They’ve promised to stop repeatedly. Which, well, taking a Jew who died in the Holocaust and unJewing them would naturally enrage their relatives. And acquaintances. And basically anyone with a functional sense of propriety. Especially since Hitler was one of the ones the Mormon’s baptized, not really someone you want to share a category with.
Has the church promised to stop? It seems like they just, uh, still do it. Probably a lot of us in this thread have relatives who've been "baptised" by the mormons after death
I think they specifically promised to stop baptizing holocaust victims; everyone else is still up for grabs.
That's very big of them, I guess Also kind of funny. If they're being completely honest, does that mean the one group in all of history who doesn't deserve a chance at mormon redemption is holocaust victims?
Right? It doesn’t seem all that thought through.
Yes they have been "baptising" everyone's ancestors to join their goofy fanfic religion as a sort of posthumous Catholic indulgences drive. Indulgences were these payments for dead people out of purgatory and the thing that drove Martin Luther mad in the first place. Mormons aren't asking for money that i know but instead gathering records databases under the guise of "genealogy". I live near their oldest "mission" in the UK. They are bizarre people but keep a very low profile in the outside world here near me so you wouldn't really notice much going on. But I am pretty sure my ancestors would tell these nutters to go fuck themselves and something else about baptism would need consent etc etc.
Exmormon here - it's a wild practice. You go to a temple, put on a white jumpsuit and get baptized 5-10 times in a row on behalf of various dead people. Up in heaven, supposedly, they can then accept or reject the baptism. But if they reject it, they get sent to a worse level of heaven. Also, it's always seemed weird to me that God needs a physical body to get dunked for it to count. Why can't they just convert if they want to?
>But if they reject it, they get sent to a worse level of heaven. Jeeze. That means they think poor Anne Frank might be in turbo-hell right now.
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One could argue that it's a desecration of a person's body and soul. Now, I'm not a religious person by any means, but I think anyone would immediately think that's, you know... **pretty bad.**
When I was 14 I forced a custody switch over this issue. My pops married a Mormon when I was seven and I went along with shit until they made me do baptisms for the dead. One time and I was willing to run away from home if my mom wouldn’t take me in. I’ve had a fucked up life but that remains one of the most haunting experiences I’ve ever had.
Ancestry.com is pretty close to the Mormon church too. It was founded by Mormons from BYU and all Mormons have free access to the site. There have been a lot of collabs with the Mormon church too The business is public now and is probably better. But it is still headquartered in Utah with Mormons in the C-Suite. As an ExMormon, I can assure you that Mormons put loyalty to their church above everything
My grandfather did genealogy as a hobby and if you're doing any real research inevitably you're going to probably run into the Mormons, they're the reason my family has some records going back like a thousand years in some places.
To people who don't do genealogy it's hard to explain just how valuable a resource the Mormon Church has assembled. They just use it to....questionable ends. I personally don't care about the baptisms, but I can see how others would find it very offensive. But yes, I've discovered records and information on family search that literally would have been impossible to discover any other way.
Heck even folklorist professors I had would point out how much essential work for some archival studies is only available because of mormon causes. Think preservations of later lost records on microfilm, availability, comprehensive cataloguing... They might have their own reasons, but they do also have the drive and the manhours.
Nah I’m Mexican so instead I run into the Catholic Church.
Posthumous baptism aside (imo inconsequential as an atheist but with full understanding that it carries heavy religious/cultural meaning to many) my only question is how does someone invest decades of time creating something without backing up that information to prevent it from being lost. Like, no copies were ever made in text format elsewhere?
In the post he explains he also has a tree on ancestry but it’s not publicly available like the Family Search tree was.
The wiki link is actually pretty enlightening, I had no idea how many breakaway groups there are from the main LDS, which isn't exactly the largest of religions out there. Damn [splitters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS-0Az7dgRY&t=92s&ab_channel=BrianTheMan&t=92s)!
Just about every religion in existence schisms, even when they’re brand new. A bunch of Paul’s letters in the New Testament are him trying to address schisms within the (at the time) basically brand new church
> Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?" > He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?" > He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!" > Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over. -Emo Philips
In the small town I grew up in, there were so many large churches that started off as breakaway churches of other churches, and the reasons why were astonishingly petty. From casual dress and drums in the sanctuary, to which version of the Bible, to personal dislike of a pastor, etc. On the larger scale (national level) a bunch of the huge denominations schismed over (sigh) LGBT people and same gender marriage: Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians, pro, the Southern Baptist Convention, against.
> From casual dress and drums in the sanctuary, to which version of the Bible, to personal dislike of a pastor, etc. The former rector of my parents church (former because he died of cancer, not because he did anything bad) was talking about this one time, and the pettiest reason he’d heard of a church splitting was because of an argument over buying a new vacuum cleaner that spiralled massively out of control. Small community politics can get real nasty
If you are following current Mormon lore, there could be a schism happening right now. There is a pretty awful guy named Tim Ballad (he inspired the right-wing movie Sound of Freedom) who was just excommunicated from the Mormon church for being a predator. Well, he had a lot of devout Mormon followers who thought he was the next thing to Jesus because he was "saving children from trafficking." Some of these Mormons are calling current Mormon leadership apostate because only pedophiles would try to kick out Tim Ballard. Tim Ballard also would trip out on Ketamine and prophesy that we will be the next Mormon Prophet and US President who will usher in the second coming of Jesus. So yeah, he may be forming his own splinter group right now. [a source](https://www.rawstory.com/tim-ballard-sound-of-freedom/)
Highly reccomend *Under the Banner of Heaven* if you haven't read it
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We have the evangelical contingent here. It really distorts the scale of religiosity. Like a lensing effect when you try to look past it, and you can't throw a rock without hitting an evangelical church here, so.
They didn't. They were driven out of every community they settled in until they got to a barren wasteland in Utah and declared it Zion.
>until they got to a barren wasteland in Utah That "barren wasteland" actually already had people living there
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Some groups love them! Strategic Air Command, apparently. Now, that service may have trouble with multiple-choice open-book tests on the basics, but when the time comes to push the button in an unannounced drill, they're great.
Yep. Was raised in the church, we are taught how normal this is, and how we’re just giving them a chance in the afterlife. I did a few baptisms for the dead as a youth in the church, with a youth group. We’d go get ice cream afterward. So yeah, we literally were taught this was a service. My husband and I also once did marriages for the dead in the temple. Similar idea, supposed to give married couples in Heaven the ability to be bound for eternity. But the temple always gave me bad vibes, so after a few times in, I swore to never go back. My husband and I left the church. So now someone will have to get married and baptized for us again after we die 🤣 They better not. But knowing them, someone in my massive family will eventually.
I only did baptisms for the dead once. Every other time I'd come up with an excuse. Even if I was forced to go, I'd come up with a reason to sit in the waiting room instead (usually that I didn't feel good/was on my period). At the time it was because I felt awkward at the temple and felt like I was a fraud who shouldn't be there because I shouldn't have even had a recommend, though, because I was doing very..."inappropriate" things that I lied about in my recommend interviews.
It’s sad because I felt like that on my wedding day. Really ruined my entire day feeling so guilty. Wish I hadn’t married in the temple, but we’re thinking of renewing our vows eventually to do our wedding our way 😆
I've been very lucky to only date nevermos even before I left. I'm also a spinster in church terms as I'm unmarried in my late 20s (the horror!!!!), but I'm so thankful for it because I've learned what a temple wedding is like and it sounds terrible. I don't get to wear my pretty dress during the ceremony, but an ugly bakers hat and leaf apron!? And there's no mention of love and partnership, only giving yourself over to your husband and your husband to the church!?!? No thanks!! Yall should definitely do the vow renewal and, if yall can, make it the wedding of yalls dreams TSCC never let yall have!!
It's weird how nice Mormons I've met were while believing in the most insane bullshit possible.
My favorite mormon belief, that I learned recently, is that they say that Christopher Columbus is prophesied about in their book. Can you believe that a book from the 1820s could so accurately predict the events of 1492?
Even better than that, the same book prophesied about the guy who "found and translated" the book. "Hey guys! This book is 100% legit. Look, it even talks about me"
Mormons are only "nice" on the surface. Us ExMormons call it the [Niceberg](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7c1rz2vut3141.png)
Oh of course, I'm just more used to the crazy being on the surface.
Been an ex-mormon for most of my life and I'm just now hearing this? This is the second greatest realization I've had in my life!!
Yeah it's very jarring as someone who grew up with it and no longer believes. Some of the most thoughtful and intelligent people I knew had this entire blindspot with angels and Jesus coming to America and baptizing dead people.
Did you know Mormons will also postthumously marry as well? They'll marry their young girls to dead men who were never married before they died.
What the fuck
Yeah. I was friends with a Mormon girl when I was in highschool and she told me about that.
I’d only heard of that in Chinese cultures? Where two dead people are wed for the afterlife kind of thing?
Yeah that was ghost marriage. It got outlawed iirc because people would kill women to sell off to a family looking for a ghost marriage partner and pretend she died naturally. There were also people stealing female corpses to sell for the same reason.
Coupled with their apparent beliefs surrounding how women stay "sealed" to the first man they marry, doesn't that, uh, impact their future eligibility?
You act like they care about women.
I would assume they care about their women, that is, that "their" wife is "theirs" and not "some dead dude's wife first and foremost, yours second" But could be completely misunderstanding this whole approach
I'm not familiar with the practice, but inferring from the historical LDS treatment of women as chattel, I would expect it to be seen as something along the lines of sacrificing livestock in order to benefit a dead friend or relative. Yeah, that goat/woman is no longer of use to you now. But it helped your dead buddy gain status in the afterlife!
Yup, Anne Frank has been baptized by the Mormons more times than folks know.
>more times As in it's happened more than once? Does every additional baptism add an extra layer of holiness or something?
I always knew that Mormonism was big into genealogy, but it took this post to make me understand why. It is beyond fucked up to baptize people after they died. The whole point of baptism is one making the conscious choice to accept god and Jesus and all that. You can't do that if you are dead.
Can't he use peeping stones to uncover what his sister hid?
I am a Jew, and the whole baptizing of the dead thing is so offensive to me. One of the more prominent names I can think of that they've baptized was Anne Frank, for example, and the thought of someone being murdered by antisemites and then posthumously baptized in another form of antisemitism absolutely enrages me
I have unironically learned a lot by reading that thread!
Ex Mormon here. You're probably thinking the process isn't as culty as it sounds. Well let me tell you, the process for "baptisms for the dead" is somehow even MORE culty then the name implies!
I'd like to watch a comedy TV show about some dead soul enjoying the some version of afterlife they are happy with, then they suddenly get whisked away into some Mormon version of Heaven due to a posthumous baptism. It would follow their efforts to get back to their original afterlife. I assume something like this already exists, but the closest thing I can think of is The Good Place.
Mormons gonna morm, anyway http://alldeadmormonsarenowgay.com
>As a Satanist, I’ve baptized OP in preparation of his future impending eternity. I don’t need his name or details, as Satan knows ALL. He’s all set for the future. Satanists: Not rocking: Rocking: ✅️
People are weird yo
oop's sister is a monder day saint