Report: Mormons Posthumously Baptize Anne Frank (this past Saturday)

[Johnny Rico]

89. An explanation.

The analogies you give:

If you are of African heritage, and therefore share a similarly tragic history, you might just be offended, by, let's just say, the Catholic Church putting out a press release claiming Frederick Douglass owned slaves.

- If you are gay, you might just be offended by someone's claim that Matthew Shepard was self-hating and an avowed hater of homosexuals.

aren't good analogies. Claiming that Douglass owned slaves or that Shepard hated homosexuals would be revisionist history. The Mormons aren't claiming the Anne Frank wasn't Jewish when she was alive, but rather that she her soul has been baptized into their religion, thus allowing her to enter Heaven. This is, of course, absurd.

As for my example of Martin Luther, please let me assure you his anti-Semitism didn't even enter into my mind. I simply used him as an example of someone whose post-death conversion (given his history) would be ridiculous...setting aside the absurdity of the subject in the first place!

I certainly accept that you feel deeply offended about this subject, and I appreciate your explanation. That having been said, I still don't really understand it. Declaring that someone's soul has been converted to another religion is so inane on the face of it that I don't see how anyone could it seriously enough to be offended. I asked my life-long best friend about it, who's Jewish...and his reaction was essentially identical to mine; he found the whole concept so preposterous that he wasn't upset in the slightest.

In closing, let me emphasize again that I had no intent to offend, but I do stand by my words. You're certainly entitled to feel any way you like about it, but I don't understand why...talking about someone's "soul" (whatever that's supposed to be) is like discussing the characteristics of ectoplasm and fairy dust.