Anne Frank, a Mormon?

[scandal 951]

Personally, as a Jew, I don't have a problem with Mormons inducting deceased people into LDS. They're dead anyway, so what's the difference? It's not like they are going to notice.

I also have no issue per se with Mormons, with the idea of Mormons seeking higher public office, or with Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman on the basis of their Mormon faith.

If Mormonism is a bit wacky, that's fine by me. Show me a religion that isn't. They're all grounded in superstitions so it's understandable that there will be weirdness. Why is having your own planet after death weird, but ascending to 70 virgins in heaven isn't weird, or playing harps with St. Peter isn't weird? It's all about the same, and none of it has anything to do with credible men who aspire to lead our country.

It just so happens that the only 2 GOP candidates for president in 2012 who aren't quacks or flakes happen to be Mormons. The other 6 are quacks or flakes or both. Make of that what you will.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/opinion/dowd-anne-frank-a-mormon.html

Anne Frank, a Mormon?

By MAUREEN DOWD

At an appearance at George Washington University here Saturday night, Bill Maher bounded into territory that the news media have been gingerly tiptoeing around.

Magic underwear. Baptizing dead people. Celestial marriages. Private planets. Racism. Polygamy.

“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ”

He said he expects the Romney crowd — fighting back after Robert Jeffress, a Texas Baptist pastor supporting Rick Perry, labeled Mormonism a non-Christian “cult” — to once more “gloss over the differences between Christians and Mormons.”

Maher was not easy on the religion he was raised in either. He referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “an international child sex ring.”

But atheists, like Catholics and evangelical Christians, seem especially wary of Mormons, dubbed the “ultimate shape-shifters” by Maher.

In a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll released on Tuesday, people were asked what single word came to mind for Republican candidates. For Herman Cain it was 9-9-9; for Rick Perry, Texas; and for Mitt Romney, Mormon. In the debate Tuesday night, Romney said it was repugnant that “we should choose people based on their religion.”

In The Times on Sunday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg chronicled Romney’s role as a bishop in Boston often giving imperious pastoral guidance on everything from divorce to abortion.

Stolberg reported that Romney, who would later run for Senate as a supporter of abortion rights against Teddy Kennedy and then flip to oppose those rights in Republican presidential primaries, showed up unannounced at a hospital in his role as bishop. He “sternly” warned a married mother of four, who was considering terminating a pregnancy because of a potentially dangerous blood clot, not to go forward.

Another famous nonbeliever, Christopher Hitchens, wrote in Slate on Monday about “the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Aside from Joseph Smith, whom Hitchens calls “a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities in upstate New York,” the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.”

Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.”

The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank.

It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.

Mormons desisted in 1995 after Michel, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, “discovered that his own mother, father, grandmother and best childhood friend, all from Mannheim, Germany, had been posthumously baptized.”

Michel told the news agency that “I was hurt that my parents, who were killed as Jews in Auschwitz, were being listed as members of the Mormon faith.”

Richard Bushman, a Mormon who is a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, said that after “the Jewish dust-up,” Mormons “backed away” from “going to extravagant lengths to collect the names of every last person who ever lived and baptize them — even George Washington.” Now they will do it for Mormons who bring a relative or ancestor’s name into the temple, he said.

Bushman said that “Mormons believe that Christ is the divine son of God who atoned for our sins, but we don’t believe in the Trinity in the sense that there are three in one. We believe the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three distinct persons.”

Kent Jackson, the associate dean of religion at Brigham Young University, says that while Mormons are Christians, “Mormonism is not part of the Christian family tree.”

It probably won’t comfort skeptical evangelicals and Catholics to know that Mormons think that while other Christians merely “have a portion of the truth, what God revealed to Joseph Smith is the fullness of the truth,” as Jackson says. “We have no qualms about saying evangelicals, Catholics and Protestants can go to heaven, including Pastor Jeffress. We just believe that the highest blessings of heaven come” to Mormons.

As for those planets that devout Mormon couples might get after death, Jackson says that’s a canard. But Bushman says it’s part of “Mormon lore,” and that it’s based on the belief that if humans can become like God, and God has the whole universe, then maybe Mormons will get to run a bit of that universe.

As for the special garment that Mitt wears, “we wouldn’t say ‘magic underwear,’ ” Bushman explains.

It is meant to denote “moral protection,” a sign that they are “a consecrated people like the priests of ancient Israel.”

And it’s not only a one-piece any more. “There’s a two-piece now,” he said.

Republicans are the ones who have made faith part of the presidential test. Now we’ll see if Mitt can pass it.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Why is having your own planet after death weird, but ascending to 70 virgins in heaven isn't weird, or playing harps with St. Peter isn't weird?

There is nothing in the Quran about 70 virgins in heaven. It's a well exploited myth.

[Saddle Bronc 124]

In the specific case of Anne Frank....

Even had she been baptised as Mormon as an infant (edit: I know little about Mormons, other than that they send pairs of "elders", sometimes with a third who may be a trainee--as I recently had a visit from such a trio, of which the trainee was an ABCD), Lutheran, Catholic, ...the very fact of having Jewish ancestry at all would have meant her lifelong presence on Nazis' list and their seeking her (and her familiy's) extirpation.

[scandal 951]

In the specific case of Anne Frank....

Even had she been baptised as Mormon as an infant (edit: I know little about Mormons, other than that they send pairs of "elders", sometimes with a third who may be a trainee--as I recently had a visit from such a trio, of which the trainee was an ABCD), Lutheran, Catholic, ...the very fact of having Jewish ancestry at all would have meant her lifelong presence on Nazis' list and their seeking her (and her familiy's) extirpation.

You apparently didn't read the article.

It's not a question of Anne being born or baptised as a Mormon, or ever having lived as one.

The point being made in the article is the following:

the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.”

Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.”

The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank.

Perhaps I should be offended by that practice, but I guess I'm really not.

If Mormons want to baptize me into their church, I say go for it, no skin off my nose.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

In the specific case of Anne Frank....

...the very fact of having Jewish ancestry at all would have meant her lifelong presence on Nazis' list and their seeking her (and her familiy's) extirpation.

Then who were these guys?

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Jewish-Soldiers-Descent-Military/dp/0700611789/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319070454&sr=8-1

An estimated 150,000 with Jewish ancestry, serving in the Nazi military forces - some appointed to high positions by Hitler himself.

Politics makes strange bedfellows...

[scandal 951]

Then who were these guys?

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Jewish-Soldiers-Descent-Military/dp/0700611789/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319070454&sr=8-1

An estimated 150,000 with Jewish ancestry, serving in the Nazi military forces - some appointed to high positions by Hitler himself.

Politics makes strange bedfellows...

What does that prove? In particular with regard to SB's comments about Anne Frank? (Anne was fully Jewish on both sides of her parentage, btw).

All your book ref. proves is that indeed the Nazis formalized the concept of mixed Jewish/Aryan "mischlinge" and explicitly accounted for that status in the infamous racial Nuremberg Laws. The vast majority of mischlinges caught in the Nazi net did not serve in the Wehrmacht, they were treated as all Jews were treated. Certainly a mischlinge young girl of Anne's age would have had no reprieve by seeking a military post!

Besides, from the Amazon blurb in your own link:

"By 1944, many of the loopholes in the racial purity laws were closed, and many military mischlinge perished in the camps. Those who survived were later often rejected by the Jewish community because of their service in the German armed forces. "

Tragic, all around. A consequence of formalized racism and hatred as expressed in the Nuremberg Laws.

[Dan and Judy 614]

There is nothing in the Quran about 70 virgins in heaven. It's a well exploited myth.

If it aint true, then I'm un-converting, Im giving back my muslim name. Afifah Aludra is too hard to pronounce anyway.

I have been converted under false pretenses

[웃 910]

There is nothing in the Quran about 70 virgins in heaven. It's a well exploited myth.

Hilarious you say that. Cause it's a great incentive for suicidal homicidal maniacs. Why don't they know this?

Edited October 20, 2011 by Lord Infamous

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Hilarious you say that. Cause it's a great incentive for suicidal homicidal maniacs. Why don't they know this?

Suicide is also against the faith, as is murder. They will be going to hell, not to any virgins. They don't know this because they don't know Islam.

[웃 910]

Suicide is also against the faith, as is murder. They will be going to hell, not to any virgins. They don't know this because they don't know Islam.

Heaven went into foreclosure about 50 years ago.

Too many entitlements

[Dan and Judy 614]

Hilarious you say that. Cause it's a great incentive for suicidal homicidal maniacs. Why don't they know this?

All I know is Sofi saved me. I will be internally grateful. She is saving us one misguided martyr at a time. It's almost like she is on a

one woman crusade to spread the light. I once was lost but now I am saved. Even my dogs are grateful. I couldn't find anyone to

feed them once I was gone. All I need to know now is. How do you undo a circumcision?

[scandal 951]

All I need to know now is. How do you undo a circumcision?

Foreskin reattachment surgery

[SMR 368]

In the specific case of Anne Frank....

Even had she been baptised as Mormon as an infant (edit: I know little about Mormons, other than that they send pairs of "elders", sometimes with a third who may be a trainee--as I recently had a visit from such a trio, of which the trainee was an ABCD), Lutheran, Catholic, ...the very fact of having Jewish ancestry at all would have meant her lifelong presence on Nazis' list and their seeking her (and her familiy's) extirpation.

I see what you're saying but you can't be baptized a Mormon as an infant. You have to make the choice to be baptized. And it's the same for dead people. The ceremony takes place but in the hereafter the dead person has the option to accept or reject baptism.

It's like offering to light a candle for a dead person. Maybe I think it does absolutely nothing. But I'm not offended by it.

And I really don't understand the hoopla. Either you believe that Mormons are right, in which case a great service is being done to those who can now accept baptism, or you believe Mormons are wrong, in which case it's a bunch of people flopping around in white clothing in the water and has no actual bearing on the dead person in question.

Edited October 20, 2011 by SMR

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

What does that prove? In particular with regard to SB's comments about Anne Frank? (Anne was fully Jewish on both sides of her parentage, btw).

All your book ref. proves is that indeed the Nazis formalized the concept of mixed Jewish/Aryan "mischlinge" and explicitly accounted for that status in the infamous racial Nuremberg Laws. The vast majority of mischlinges caught in the Nazi net did not serve in the Wehrmacht, they were treated as all Jews were treated. Certainly a mischlinge young girl of Anne's age would have had no reprieve by seeking a military post!

Besides, from the Amazon blurb in your own link:

"By 1944, many of the loopholes in the racial purity laws were closed, and many military mischlinge perished in the camps. Those who survived were later often rejected by the Jewish community because of their service in the German armed forces. "

Tragic, all around. A consequence of formalized racism and hatred as expressed in the Nuremberg Laws.

What is this tangent supposed to be about ? I was specifically responding to these words:

In the specific case of Anne Frank....

...the very fact of having Jewish ancestry at all would have meant her lifelong presence on Nazis' list and their seeking her (and her familiy's) extirpation.

I even quoted it in my response to help people follow along at home.

[Dan and Judy 614]

Foreskin reattachment surgery

You were just teasing me. That link goes to" Foreskin restoration surgery"

I would have sewn it back on myself but I was feeling guilty about my plan to abandon the dogs

in favor or all them virgins. I didn't think I was going to need it where I was going so I gave the

dogs a little treat.

Now that I've been deprogramed, I'm kinda missin that little #######.

All of the options listed on that site seem to be sub optimal, primarily due to lack of proper sensation.

I'm thinking I'd like to try for a transplant. Preferrably from a rather large 18 year old.