Posthumously Baptize any Jews Lately?

As you, my loyal 3 readers, know I am in Salt Lake City right now for the American Society of Human Genetics meeting. We had a few hours to look around the city today and I wandered around, eventually coming across Temple Square. I went on the tour, conducted by two very nice women from the Phillipines. In fact for some reason all the tour guides were female. I'm fairly sure this was not by chance, as all of the travelling missionary Mormons are male, something I never really thought of until today.

They presented a very nice picture of the Mormon faith, including a 10 minute movie of Jesus healing some Native Americans in 34 AD (when they believe Jesus visited the North American continent to set up a church). Jesus was very white looking. All-in-all the tour was nice. There was actually a very pretty room painted with planets and stars with a statue of Jesus in the middle. The art was very not accurate (apparently earth is right next to something resembling saturn), but it was cool to look at.

By the end all of this niceness got to me and I bacame very angry at their practice of posthumous baptisms of non-Mormons. I did not know who to ask about this as everyone I went up to greeted me with a smile that was kind of eerie. There are even articles in the local Salt Lake City papers of this practice, going as far to say that Jews had been baptized in the same group as Adolf Hitler. Apparently the Mormon church said they had stopped doing this, but the article said diferently. I am not sure who was right and I wish that I had found the right person to talk to about this.

If I am wrong about this, and someone is in the know, please post here and tell me. I am going to try my best to find out if this practice is real. If it is, it stands against everything my fellow Jews have fought for to get to where we are as a people today. While I am not a "Super Jew", I still very strongly believe that a person's faith and relationship with God is their own business and other humans should not be involved with it unless the person is willing (informed consent anyone?). If a person died a Jew, they obviously wanted to be a Jew and worship God as a Jew. Not have someone yank their spirituality away from them after passing on.

I highly doubt that the Mormons would like it if another faith did something involving their spirituality after they could say nothing about it.

Anyway, thanks for the ranting time. I guess that's what these blogs are for... ranting and writing stuff down so you have an account of it. It's a great idea.