Baptism for the Dead

Weird.

It's always bugged me that the Mormons do this. I'm not a Mormon and I never will be, life or dead, and doing some postmortem mumbo-jumbo won't change that. I do realize that one might do this for benevolent reasons if one were so confused as to think that it would save someone's immortal soul, but to cut to the chase, in actual fact I find the practice disrespectful in the extreme. Like corpse desecration, but worse. Respect for persons requires that we respect their decisions and conclusions in matters of this kind. Posthumous "baptism" seems to me to be a kind of sophomoric attempt to get in the last word, and somehow to pretend that non-Mormons were really Mormons after all.

I don't want your religion in life, and I certainly am not going to want it in death. Keep the damned thing off me.

Ahem. Sorry. But I find this practice odious on the extreme. People have gotten bent out of shape about the Mormons posthumously baptizing victims of the Holocaust, but, frankly, I don't see why it should be any more objectionable in that case. It's extremely disrespectful no matter who the target is and, in fact, if anything it's more disrespectful to atheists.

I'm probably rather too cranky about this.