Thursday, March 08, 2012

1692 Bap Ties

There's been an interesting inter-religious flap in the news of late. I guess it's just a part of our great country—freedom of religion means actual freedom to be different from your religion.
Here's the basic story. Turns out the Latter Day Saints, AKA the Mormons, have decided to baptize Anne Frank into their religion. As Anne Frank was indisputably a Jew, what with the evidence of her diary and all, certain Jewish leaders are upset.
The same flap occurred with Catholics when Mormons posthumously baptized dead Popes.
Now I don't pretend to know, nor as a non-Mormon can I know, the arcane intricacies of the Mormon Baptism process. But the way I understand it is that when Mormons do genealogical research they can posthumously baptize any ancestors into the church. Rumor has it there are different levels of heaven one can obtain in the faith and this helps facilitate entry into them.
"That's dumb," my dad said when I told him; "there's only one heaven." Um yep. At least so far as his Methodist religion is concerned. Whether there's a Jewish heaven, or the Catholic heaven restricts the entry of Protestants, someone more omniscient than I is going to have to sort out.
The absurdity here is if you really believe in your religion, it shouldn't matter what rituals some other religion is subjecting your dead ancestors to. To believe that the baptism makes a difference is to admit a smidgen of belief in the Mormon religion. Some other group could say they were officially renaming the Apostle Peter "Peter Pan" and they wouldn't freak out.
As the soon-to-be posthumously baptized Shakespeare once said. "Methinks they protest too much."
By the way, I just found out they posthumously baptized Groucho Marx. Now that's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard...
America, ya gotta love it.

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