Religious Crackpot of the Month, November 2008

That’s right, two Crackpot posts in a row. And they said it couldn’t be done.

This month, it’s everyone involved in the most pointless argument I have ever heard of:

Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps. ... "We ask you to respect us and our Judaism just as we respect your religion," [Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors] said in a statement released ahead of the news conference. "We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough. ... Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable,"

Essentially, among the less insane beliefs of the Mormon church is that in order to be reunited in the afterlife, you need to retrospectively baptise your ancestors. A group of Jews are angry at this, even though they presumably believe that a Mormon baptism is just a meaningless set of rituals that has absolutely no effect on reality. The Jews say this isn’t good enough because according to Michel

100 years from now, how will they be able to guarantee that my mother and father of blessed memory who lived as Jews and were slaughtered by Hitler for no other reason than they were Jews, will someday not be identified as Mormon victims of the Holocaust?

It seems to me that the clue is in the question there. I wonder if Michel routinely identifies people in the most passably-accurate-but-misleading way he can think of, referring to his family the way I might summarise a random internet contact if I want to pass on something from a blog that amuses me… I wonder if he has children and if so whether they tell their friends that they can’t come out to play because the honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors says they have to do their homework first. He should go on QI.

But no. According to the link I just posted, the standard Mormon defence is that the soul of the dead person doesn’t have to accept the baptism.

This just seems too surreal to me. I would have thought that Jews would ignore any rituals the Mormons did, believing them to be nonsense. I wouldn’t care at all if they wanted to baptise me. I’m pretty sure I’m already baptised into something, though I can’t for the life of me recall what exactly it is. Something with Jesus. I’d have thought that the Jewish faith, which teaches that the soul is already in heaven and not, as the Mormons think, in God’s waiting room watching the Holy Goldfish amble about for centuries on end and reading millenium-old magazines and cardboard books for four-year-olds, and so they wouldn’t even be told about the offer of baptism. I would have thought that, being dead, if the baptisee still has any existence then they’d have a pretty good idea if they’d picked the right religion by now and be in a far better place to make this call than their surviving relatives. This is like watching children try to argue semantics.

In fact, you know what this is like? I think I’ve found a parallel. (Bonus for regular readers: you may recognise the poster.)