Brahma's atheist

Back in my dim and distant youth I actually got baptized in to the mormons. Why? Because my friend was one. My brother got dipped as well. It's quite bizarre really. {Insult deleted}... I mean mormons.. came to my dads house and gave us the sales pitch,no fun more or less. We got dipped at the church and we went a couple of times and that's it. We stopped going and moved away.
It goes to show how little it all means really. Saying that I think it's effects have been cancelled out by us going to x-number of Hindu temples and getting blessed by Lord Murugan et al.Because we were born Hindu the mormon baptism hopefully didn't get through to our souls.
Is it the mormons that are baptizing people posthumously? If it is isn't that totally disgusting?

Ego

If I remember correctly, Mother Teresa and her mob in india, were baptizing hindu's who were in their care because they were dying, I think that's what I read some time ago, can't remember where though.

But yes back to the topic at hand; baptizing people postumously, and on the death bed as a last minute conversion, doesn't sicken me as much as if I was a religious person (and many eons ago I was ) but as an atheist, I look at them and pity them for those sort of actions, there attitude to death is so childlike - by spreading some magical water the dead person will spend the rest of their afterlife in eternal happiness...

...ugh, they think they are doing good, they're so convinced that they are doing something good that they're completely blind to everything else around them.

liquid

I don't mind the mormons 'baptizing' people posthumously. Don't forget that these are long dead people and at a distance, they aren't rushing into mortuaries or hospitals!

I don't mind because it has no effect whatsoever, it makes the mormons happy, and I even suppose they are carrying out a little bit of Pascal's wager effort free! Plus some seriously good geaneology records have come out of it that have been used in scientific studies for other things.

There are other things I could get more worked up about.

trendkill

I'm not going to say Mormonism is an ingenious belief system, because it isn't--{Insult deleted}.

Re: Posthumous baptism--It sounds like you guys are envisioning Mormons actually baptizing corpses. That's fairly humorous. Baptisms for the dead are done by proxy--living people volunteer to be rebaptized on behalf of dead individuals (usually people who lived a long time ago and whom they know nothing about except their names, from genealogical records). And baptism is not believed to be a guarantee of salvation for the dead any more than it is for the living--which is to say, it guarantees nothing. It is looked upon as giving those who did not have a chance to be baptized into the true faith a chance to accept it.

The worst thing that can be said about baptism for the dead is that it is a waste of time.

Amos

But that can't be true if Mormonism itself is a waste of time.

It's freeking ugly thing to do and it is an offshoot of Catholics praying for the death who in reality are praying for the living death among them.

Sensei Meela

Hmmm. I was having this discussion with a Mormon just two days ago, on another message board. He says that "baptism for the dead" is a Biblical directive/doctrine. As proof-text he offered 1 Corinthians 15:29 "Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?"

How ridiculous? I mean, it should be obvious that here Paul refers to Christ, if he were NOT resurrected, as "the dead," lamenting how their faith would thusly be in vain; he repeats this message 4 times in chapter 15 alone!

I don't mean to ridicule; I guess it just shows how "open to interpretation" all things Biblical are.

Amos

Interpretation is exactly true. We baptize on behalf of our own death image of God with the hope (or assurance?) that it may be redeemed in us as our spiritual body in the image of God.

John the Baptist was born from the netherworld where he prepares the way for the son of man to be born in us.

Not to side-track the issue here but Gogol wrote a hilarious comedy on this called "Dead Souls." Not easy to grasp because he drove a troike which is just a Russian concept for man in the image of God: "he has no equal, he is God."

butswana

Baptism for the dead is NOT pointless or a waste of time.
Why I got my finger wet during the van ride from Indy to DC!
A free trip to Washington DC and a stinky pinky.
The inside of that temple is fucking wild too.
One of the girls that went with us was turned away because she happened to be "unclean" at that time of the month.
I remember that really bugging the shit out of me. Who were they to tell this nubile little honey that she couldn't stand in their fucking hot tub.

Sedim

So, what was inside that temple??????? It's supposed to be some huge-ass secret, and I wanna know what's in there, without actually falling into their clutches!

*Sedim asks: will you tell us what you saw in there? Pretty please with TWO sacrificial virgins on top?*

Gawen

If he drove a troike (troika), a troika is a vehicle drawn by three horses abreast. I could find no translation for troike Also, a troika is a group of three; especially an administrative or ruling body of three. Could you tell me how you know ?