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Members of the Mormon Church last year posthumously baptized Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was captured and killed by terrorists in Pakistan shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to records uncovered by a researcher in Utah.

. . .

Pearl’s parents, Judea and Ruth, said it was “disturbing news” to learn that Mormons had baptized their son, in a rite that they understand was meant to offer him salvation.

“To them we say: We appreciate your good intentions but rest assured that Danny’s soul was redeemed through the life that he lived and the values that he upheld,” Judea and Ruth Pearl said in an email. “He lived as a proud Jew, died as a proud Jew and is currently facing his creator as a Jew, blessed, accepted and redeemed. For the record, let it be clear: Danny did not choose to be baptized, nor did his family consent to this un-called-for ritual.”

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It's my understanding that the one baptized need be dead for 70 years before such is performed.  I'm questioning the veracity / truth of the original paragraph.

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In 2009, the church acknowledged that it had baptized President Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, after her death. And just this month, officials were forced to apologize after they learned that the parents of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal had been posthumously baptized. They also admitted that three dead relatives of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel were almost baptized, as well.

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ORIGINAL: LanceHughes

It's my understanding that the one baptized need be dead for 70 years before such is performed.  I'm questioning the veracity / truth of the original paragraph. BRB

ETA: Well, seems the baptisim was done w/o permission of Mormon church.  The reason for Mormon emphasis on geneology is becuase baptisims are for relatives.

Mormon leaders are correct when they say "Hard to police 14 milion members."

What do I really think?  I really think this string is going to quickly degenerate into a "Does God exist?" debate.

What I think is that the baptisim has little bearing on anything.  I'm sorry that the parents are offended.  My "take" on an after-life is simply this:  Imagine a disk of music that has been broken into many pieces.  Where did the music "go"?  It didn't "go" anywherre.  There is no longer physical support for the music.

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I had thought that the Mormons only baptized the dead when a family member requests (and pays for) it.

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Helen Radkey, an excommunicated Mormon who combs through the church’s archives, said that records indicate Pearl, who was Jewish, was baptized by proxy on June 1, 2011 at a Mormon temple in Twin Falls, Idaho.

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Terryl L. Givens, a scholar of Mormonism at the University of Richmond, said the tradition of performing baptisms for the dead springs from an impulse toward generosity and “the universality of salvation,” the notion that “everybody can be saved.” Church theology teaches that the baptized can choose in the afterlife whether to accept salvation and join the church as Mormons.