Mormon church baptising thousands of dead Victorians - atheist or not

[Heddi]

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/mormon-church-baptising-thousands-of-dead-victorians--atheist-or-not-20170306-gus640.html

n a windowless underground room, six Mormons are cheerfully working day in, day out to digitise the records of dead Victorians. So they can be baptised.

One by one, many of the dead – Mormon or not – are being offered salvation by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' controversial Baptisms for the Dead process.

..
The scanned records go back to Salt Lake City and are inserted into a global database, allowing Mormons worldwide to piece together their family trees. The data is also shared with several private ancestry sites, including Ancestry.com. The Public Record Office also gets a copy – for it, the Mormons are essentially free labour.

The church sends teams of missionaries all around the world to work on similar digitisation programs. Why? To swell the ranks of the Mormon faith, and to offer salvation to the dead.

When a Mormon finds an ancestor in the records, they can baptise them into the Mormon faith through a Baptism for the Dead. That allows the dead relative's soul to be saved, even if they did not die a Mormon. And it swells the ranks of the church.

However, it's not just ancestors getting baptised. The practice hit the spotlight in 2012 when it emerged Mormons were enthusiastically baptising many non-relatives. Holocaust victims, Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and reportedly even Hitler have all been baptised.

The church has promised to crack down on such instances. A local spokesman could not supply numbers on how many dead Victorians have been baptised, nor if any notable Victorians have been baptised – although he conceded it was highly likely some had.
...

[Cracklin Charlie]

1. So, they're baptizing everyone on ancestry.com.

Just as I suspected. How many millions of members have been added to church rolls since that site came online?

[lisby]

4. This is nothing new. Back in the 1980s they were doing it.

The local Mormons libraries were the only hope of (more) easily finding genealogy-related public records back then and I thank them for their efforts, which allowed me to find my own ancestors. I doubt the dead people care much about retroactive baptism. You can be offended if you like, but really, why bother?

[Cracklin Charlie]

5. I am not offended.

There's actually a good chance that I have been baptized by proxy in the RLDS church, even though I am not a church member. I live in the World Headquarters of that church, and I suspect that many people here have been unknowingly baptized. It really doesn't bother me in the slightest.

They recently built a great new genealogy center near my house, and it is used by many people, from near and far away. It is a wonderful historical reference center.

The only thing that bothers me about counting those who are proxy members on the church rolls, is it seems kind of bogus.

Just my opinion.

[BarbaRosa]

2. I wonder how many of those newly baptised

Mormons voted for trump.

[Lordquinton]

3. Joseph Smith was an atheist

Pass it on.

[hrmjustin]

6. I certainly hope the don't baptize me when I drop dead.

[No Vested Interest]

7. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do to stop them and this practice

(as far as I know.)

I have used the result of their genealogy work many times, though I have seen instances where it was not accurate.
When they photograph actual records, you can count on a good accuracy rate; however, when they do their personal genealogy work and put it out, there may be some stretching to make a connection.

At one time, some other religions would not cooperate with Mormons who came knocking on church doors asking for permission to copy church records.

A funny little story I read concerning some Irish Catholic pastors who suspected that the young people knocking on their doors asking permission to copy the parish records were Mormons. The pastors, to determine the question, would invite the visitors in for a spot of tea (or maybe a stronger beverage.) Being faithful Mormons, the visitors would refuse the offer, and that answered the pastors' question.