Mormons- how could you? "Killing her twice" Your church does not offer an appropriate response

[Lefty0908]

You’re being dramatic.
It’s not that big of a deal. So what if she was given proxy baptism? It’s not “despicable.”

This whole forum is degenerating into an anti-Mormon crusade. Sadly. And most of the Mormons on here are being driven out.

Thanks, FM! But I’ll hang in here! Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, life goes on, Strawberry!

 

[TexanKnight]

That is an excellent point! Infants have no choice in the matter when it comes to their baptism in the Catholic church. However, baptisms for the dead in the LDS church must be accepted by the individual before the ordinance receives final approval by the Holy Spirit.

Wrong. The infant can reject the faith later just as a person can reject the LDS Baptism later. Hence, again, your hypocrisy…

 

[mtolympus]

As I said above, anyone is free to reject Christ after they are baptized if they so desire. They don’t have to go to heaven if they desire to spend eternity somewhere else.
What you are missing is the fact that we have this life and this life only to get it right. This is where we make our choices that affect our eternal destiny. It doesn’t bother me at all that Mormon’s baptize the dead because it is absolutely meaningless. I would rather have you spend your time in the temple doing this than out knocking on doors.

Your comment is logical and I applaud you for your firm belief in your faith. I believe that those who are offended by LDS baptisms for the dead are scared to death that we might be right.

 

[zaffiroborant]

Your comment is logical and I applaud you for your firm belief in your faith. I believe that those who are offended by LDS baptisms for the dead are scared to death that we might be right.

This illustrates Rebecca’s point about empathy and arrogance. I would add smugness.

 

[KathleenGee]

MtOlympus…

You echo Mormons who think the Vatican was actually scared of something, and didn’t want your religion to have any more access to our sacramental records.

And how would you feel if we had our Catholic prosletyzers looming around your temples and wards, going into your neighborhoods, knocking on your doors, targeting your teen girls and boys, to work on them and befriend them, because we are better and we are more loving to them and can take better care of them than you…

My religion is not based on condemning a peoples with 2,000 year old history. My religion is based on Jesus Christ. Yours is based on the conviction that the Roman Church and any other belief is based on corruption and an abomination.

That puts Mormonism as oppositional and denigrating to my faith and all of Christianity.

Right there…all other beliefs corrupt and an abomination…are just like Mohammed’s…and that construct puts you at war particularly with the Roman Catholic Church…while ironically ignoring the Orthodox Church, as John Paul II calls, the other lung.

There is great, great, great lapse of depth, thought, belief, practice, history, and much, much disinformation about who you are and who we are. It is muddy to say the least. Anti-Catholicism was the main thrust of Mormonism up into the 1980’s. And to say just because the president says to not be that way anymore, you cannot erase such sentiment from many Mormons’ hearts and minds.

Yes, we and the Jews, and any other person make a full conscious effort to develop their own convictions, with the free will and intellect and grace…which Mormonism does not understand because it has no developed theology and philosophy but a constant probing to find anything in any other religion to justify some kind of belief in itself as a man god…the very thing that brought the fall of Adam and Eve…

I had all my children baptized as infants to receive the grace of Christ and to be part of Him. To say that all baptisms going back 2,000 years are false and do not bring someone into the life of grace in Christ is a great lie.

We are fully aware, that living in this modern world, that the chances of them losing their faith is great. We teach them the life of Christ, encourage them, admonish them in the Lord, but give them the freedom to chose. We give them space…and many constant and devoted prayers to uphold them in the Lord. Many leave their faith but come back. One of mine was gone for several years, and after searching knew the Catholic faith was right, and its practices most solid.

In the meantime, we Catholics do not target Mormons or any other people to make them Catholic.

I pray every day for the conversion of people, and the perseverance of the just. But I do pray for the Mormon people to come to the truth and light of Christ.

I do not pray for Mormons to become Catholic. But yes, I pray for them to come to the truth of Jesus Christ.

Catholicism teaches that Mormonism has disparity of cult. It does not call it corrupt or an abomination, and never will.

That label is coming from Mormonism, and labelling people like that is a reflection on Mormonism and its founders, not Christianity and in particular our Catholic faith.

In essence, Mormon baptisms are not of the Truth of Christ, and do not represent the faith and good will towards other beliefs.

 

[TexanKnight]

Your comment is logical and I applaud you for your firm belief in your faith. I believe that those who are offended by LDS baptisms for the dead are scared to death that we might be right.

Nope. I was LDS. I KNOW you are wrong. I am just offended at people so arrogant that they think they can do whatever to people without their consent.

 

[mtolympus]

Nope. I was LDS. I KNOW you are wrong. I am just offended at people so arrogant that they think they can do whatever to people without their consent.

Believe me, if we knew how to get their consent we would do it.

 

[TexanKnight]

Believe me, if we knew how to get their consent we would do it.

Do you realize how much like a S_ X offender that sounds? If you knew how to get consent, you would, but since you do not know how, you do it anyway without consent?

Please brother. Come home to the truth

Let us help you and work with you.

Let us pray with you and study with you.

 

[SteveVH]

Your comment is logical and I applaud you for your firm belief in your faith. I believe that those who are offended by LDS baptisms for the dead are scared to death that we might be right.

Well I wouldn’t go that far. I understand why some may be upset but I think your baptisms are invalid to begin with and those who have died have nothing to fear. They have already reached their eternal destiny. As far as getting someone’s permission, I pray for Mormons to convert all the time without their permission. I have a dear friend who followed her boyfriend into Mormonism. I pray for her every day to come back to the truth. I have even prayed for you.

 

[mtolympus]

Well I wouldn’t go that far. I understand why some may be upset but I think your baptisms are invalid to begin with and those who have died have nothing to fear. They have already reached their eternal destiny. As far as getting someone’s permission, I pray for Mormons to convert all the time without their permission. I have a dear friend who followed her boyfriend into Mormonism. I pray for her every day to come back to the truth. I have even prayed for you.

Thank you, I believe you are sincere and I am not offended in the least.

 

[TexanKnight]

Thank you, I believe you are sincere and I am not offended in the least.

I do not blame for not addressing my point. I knew you would dodge it.

 

[soren1]

Well I wouldn’t go that far. I understand why some may be upset but I think your baptisms are invalid to begin with and those who have died have nothing to fear. They have already reached their eternal destiny. As far as getting someone’s permission, I pray for Mormons to convert all the time without their permission. I have a dear friend who followed her boyfriend into Mormonism. I pray for her every day to come back to the truth. I have even prayed for you.

Steve,

I agree that there is a similarity between us praying for the dead and Latter-day Saints baptizing them. That point should be repeated often and emphatically. In fact during the Counter-Reformation, Catholic apologists like St. Robert Bellarmine used 1 Cor 15:29 as a proof text for that very practice, although he interpreted “baptism” in the sense of works of penance rather than as a literal ordinance. Nobody thinks prayers for the dead rob anybody of their free will, because the prayers only help them if they want it. For the same reason, people posthumously baptized by Mormons are not having anything done to them unwillingly, not at least from the standpoint of Mormon theology.

But there are differences to be noted as well. One is that we pray for the “faithful departed,” that is, in the hopes that people died in a state of grace. The Mormons, however, baptize by proxy on the presupposition that people died outside the regenerating grace of God. Baptizing them, therefore, implies a negative judgment about the state of the dead person’s soul at the time of death. That is why it comes off as offensive by contrast to our prayers.

And yet it’s still not so bad as it sounds. While Mormons thinks everyone else is invalidly baptized, they do not think that they possess a monopoly on moral virtue or that non-Christian people do not act in ways that further their salvation. Their scripture supports this, although I have yet to encounter a Mormon who made this point specifically in response to offense at proxy baptisms. In D&C 137:7-9, Joseph reports a vision of his brother Alvin in heaven, and hears God say to him:

Thus came the voice of the Lord unto me, saying: All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God; Also all that shall die henceforth without a knowledge of it, who would have received it with all their hearts, shall be heirs of that kingdom; For I, the Lord, will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts.

The text, written in 1836, says nothing about proxy baptism for anyone, which would not appear in D&C until 1842, but it justifies Mormons in believing that even unbaptized people have the kinds of virtues that merit salvation, an openness to the gospel. By baptizing them after death Mormons are merely extending to them a good they would have desired had they known. I don’t say this is good theology, but I don’t see reason for anyone to be personally offended by it, not us and not the Jews. If I believed what the Mormons believe, I would stick to my guns, defend the practice on these grounds, and keep on baptizing holocaust survivors.

 

[Anna_Scott]

Are some of you missing the point that Anne Frank died a Jewish girl? We are to respect the dead. At the most basic level, all of us would like our decisions honored. She was old enough to have made a choice about her beliefs. She made that choice and died for it.

It does not matter if the ritual is useless. It is an attack on what she believed in life. Believers and non believers such as myself should be able to respect others choices or decision to abstain once they are an adult. While I understand that many believers rituals have an indelible nature to them, most all religions do these rituals to living people that while they may not have a say as an infant in, they can loudly proclaim they reject them. The dead have no way to protest affiliation with a belief system. It is dispicable to disrespect the dead who have made decisions while alive.

StrawberryJam,

It is a terrible offense. There is no way, IMHO, to justify these actions by Mormons; and this isn’t just coming out for political reasons, though politicians will use whatever they can. This issue has been discussed on a number of threads over the last 3 years.

Mormons continue to break agreements they have made with the Jewish people. I don’t believe for one second that baptisms, such as this one, just slip through against LDS leadership. The LDS know what they are doing, and I doubt they will stop.

Peace,
Anna