It's not kosher, but it's still pretty funny.

Context. Let the proxy baptisms not continue, because we don't want to break the laws of thermodynamics by creating perpetual posthumous conversion motion.

Okay. A couple thoughts.

First of all: it's all a little bit silly, because the dead guy's not going to get pissed off because you said some words directed (I assume) at a fictional character in the sky to change their posthumous fate. That's my opinion, personally. If someone wants to baptize me when I'm dead, I'm not going to care, because I'll be dead.

However, that brings me to point two: I certainly hope that, after my demise, there'll be at least someone out there still alive who cared about me. This person will know me as a Jew. Not a particularly religious or observant one, but raised Jewish my whole life. It says it on my official Army paperwork, so there you go. And if this hypothetical person who cares about corpsified me finds out that someone took it upon themselves to declare me not Jewish, well...yeah, that might be a bit upsetting.

I know that if I found out that my grandparents have been posthumously baptized, I'd be pissed as hell. I have no problem with your religious beliefs, so long as you leave the religious beliefs of the dead alone. That wasn't a choice my grandparents made in life, so you know what? You don't get them. That's just the way it is. They weren't Mormon, they lived their lives, they died. The end.

So the big picture leaves me feeling a bit icky about it. Now let's look at the specifics: The Mormons take it a little bit deeper by posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims.

...

I'll go ahead and say it right now, I've got two biases here. One: I'm Jewish. Two: I'm a far-left liberal and have absolutely no great love for the LDS church. I don't claim to be approaching this objectively, but here goes.

You are using the names of holocaust victims who did not belong to your religion to bolster your numbers. Or to give them a chance at salvation. Or to try and save puppies. Whatever. You are subjecting those names, the idea of these people who are now gone, to a religious ritual which they by definition cannot consent to. They can't consent to this ritual because someone killed them for their religious beliefs.

Yes, this is problematic. Please stop doing it.

The issue - even beyond the fact that the religious beliefs of the dead can't be changed, beyond the fact that these people may have living descendants who don't want their ancestors baptized, beyond any of that - the issue is that there is a very, very large number of Jews who were killed because they were Jews. Their crime was having different traditions and beliefs, and for that roughly six million Jews were killed.

This, on top of a couple thousand years of other people lining up to take a whack at the Jews, has led to modern-day Jews getting a bit...I don't know, twitchy? defensive? when people start talking about converting the Jews. Particularly if it's done in a manner in which the Jews in question can't freely say "no thanks, not interested." I will be the first to say modern American Jews can be downright neurotic...but I'll also admit that I can see where it comes from. It's not paranoia if They really are out to get you, and it's still within living history that They were really, really out to get us.

Is it the biggest issue out there? No. Is it something that would be really great if the LDS church finally, as promised years ago, put a stop to it? Yes.