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> One of the core tenets of Mormon faith is that the dead can be baptized into the faith after their passing. Baptism of the dead evolved from the beliefs that baptism is necessary for salvation and that the family unit can continue to exist together beyond mortal life if all members are baptized.

> Mormons trace their family trees to find the names of ancestors who died without learning about the restored Mormon Gospel so that these relatives from past generations can be baptized by proxy in the temple. For Latter-day Saints, genealogy is a way to save more souls and strengthen the eternal family unit.

http://www.pbs.org/mormons/etc/genealogy.html

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That leads to my afterlife nightmare scenario.

I die bravely in glorious battle and am chosen by the Valkyries for Valhalla. One evening as we feast after that day's fighting, quaffing giant tankards of mead and boasting of our deeds, there comes a knock at the door.

Two young men in suits enter, and go to speak to Odin.

Odin then call for me to come over. He tells me that the young men are Mormons, and that some distant relative born long after I died (great-grandkid of a second cousin or something like that) has joined the Mormon church and has been busy baptizing the whole damn family tree.

Odin tells me I'm Mormon now, and cannot stay in Valhalla. I must move to the Mormon afterlife.

(Actually, the Mormon afterlife doesn't seem all that bad compared to that of most Christian or Christian-adjacent religions, in the sense that if you reject their teachings but still live a decent life you get a decent afterlife).

Valhalla is only good if you keep winning the afterlife wars!

Valhalla is nothing but a training ground for the forces of Odin. Once Ragnarök happens, they will die a final death fighting the forces of evil.

If you want eternal life, you want to go to Fólkvangr.

Ragnarök is the only afterlife war.

I believe the "if you live a good life you go to heaven" is a common tenet of many Christian denominations since the Vatican Council.

At least, I recall my religion teacher (a catholic priest, we have such a class in public schools in Italy tho they vary in content and quality) telling us that some decades ago.

You do not go to heaven if you're an atheist tho, as _denying_ there is something divine puts you in the bad list, sorry.

Definitely not on the Protestant branch of things.

I mean does it really matter what the church says? The important part is what God actually thinks here and that seems to be very different depending on who you ask.

To be more precise, what matters is not so much what God/gods "think", but what they want us to do. In this case, the textual foundation for Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus is Mark 16:16: "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned." Assuming these really are the words of Jesus, they leave very little for interpretation, no matter what Vaticanum II says.

Only if your priest disallows other interpretations. Here people can disagree what constitutes faith. Many Christians believe that God is everything good, so if you share good values, it's thinkable you are effectively a decent Christian. But yeah, for Protestants faith is formality: if you only believe in these and these letters and remain a miserable sinner, you get a ticket to heaven.

These can not be the words of Jesus since the language of these words did not exist at the time (assuming a deity that doesn't express itself in yet unformed languages).

Is this better?

"ὁ πιστεύσας καὶ βαπτισθεὶς σωθήσεται, ὁ δὲ ἀπιστήσας κατακριθήσεται."

That's the closest we can get, although Jesus would have assumedly spoken these words in Aramaic, not Greek.

Source: http://bibletranslation.ws/trans/markwgrk.pdf

God would hardly allow the church to go around spreading falsehoods, would He? Surely the various Popes/Patriarchs/Grand Wizards are just a mouthpiece for the almighty and all of his confusing and inconsistent proclamations.

That's a fairly new development BTW, I believe 2005-2007. Before that, unbaptized "good" souls were collecting dust in limbo.

Mormon baptism for the dead is conditional - it doesn't automatically convert them, but rather the dead person gets a choice to accept that baptism or not.

But then again, while in Mormon theology the spirits are immediately sorted into paradise and "spirit prison" upon death, they can apparently communicate across the boundary between the two; and those in paradise can thus evangelize to those in prison, until they convert. So by the time they get their proxy baptism, they would presumably be convinced of its necessity.

(Although I never understood why that would even be necessary, given that by that time they already know, and thus don't have to believe...)

And yeah, Mormon theology is not what you'd expect from a religion that's so rigidly socially conservative. Between near-universal salvation and extreme Arminianism, it's really one of the most liberal among Christian denominations.

> those in paradise can thus evangelize to those in prison, until they convert.

So even the Mormons admit that having Mormons constantly trying to convert you for the rest of eternity is what hell is like... :D

The mormon belief of being able to preach and convert after death stems from new testament teachings in Peter that Christ preached to those in "prison".

And while many Mormons take the necessity of baptism (even if after death) very literally, it is important to understand that they also believe that anyone who missed the chance to accept a posthumous baptism, will get that chance during the millennium of Christ's reign on earth, pre-judgement day.

All of that is to say, Mormons aren't frantically searching their genealogy to baptise everyone for fear their ancestors will burn in hell. There is a belief that seeking out and understanding your geneology and then setting aside time to go to the temple is beneficial to ones spirituality and well being.

Sounds like The Saga of Biorn https://youtu.be/MV5w262XvCU

There is an interesting sci-fi version of Mormonism's baptism of the dead & Tipler's Omega Point in Charles Stross's Accelerando: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

> The Church of Latter-Day Saints believes that you can't get into the Promised Land unless it's baptized you – but it can do so if it knows your name and parentage, even after you're dead. Its genealogical databases are among the most impressive artifacts of historical research ever prepared. And it likes to make converts.

> The remaining faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to resurrect their ancestors.

> ...the panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human beings in real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved).

That results in a a fun version of the simulation hypothesis where we're all simulated beings in some Mormon-Tipler Heaven.

Why not just baptize every human then?

Ha! Get a load of this guy, caring about people outside his family /s

That's the whole point; they intend to baptize everyone living or dead, and theoretically even the dead get to decide whether to accept.

Genealogy is a side effect of this, I have the vague impression that they need to know who you are to baptize you; however, everyone on the planet is a member of the same "family".

That is a correct impression. A name, date, and associated place, with all three assumed to uniquely identify an individual in most cases, are required to perform the ordinance. Most typically, that's a birth name and a date and place of birth, date and place of death, or date and place of marriage.

If it turns out that there were two people with the same name born in the same town on the same day... well, the angels will help figure that out later.

I think they actually try to in what they call baptism for the dead.

There has been a bit of that. Although it is officially against church policy, some Mormons have baptized some deceased Jews, including Anne Frank:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/us/jews-take-issue-with-p...

I feel like taking offense at this is not worth it. If they sincerely believe they are saving souls, and you don't, then it shouldn't mean anything to you.

Baptizing the dead seems silly and quaint, but Christians used to ask, how is it fair to send the unbaptized to hell that never had a chance to be saved? Mormons should get some credit for acknowledging the unfairness and coming up with a "solution".

I think it's a sad commentary on human nature that the Christian sects that don't believe anyone goes to hell at all are even more fringe and taken less seriously than Mormons.

>I think it's a sad commentary on human nature that the Christian sects that don't believe anyone goes to hell at all are even more fringe and taken less seriously than Mormons.

One reason they might not be taken seriously is that in the Bible Jesus directly talks about people being in Hell.

I don't think that is true, see for example: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/31/824479587/heaven-and-hell-are...

>Bart Ehrman says the ideas of eternal rewards and punishments aren't found in the Old Testament or in the teachings of Jesus.

What about Matthew 25:46?

> Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

That article seems to assert that Jesus taught the soul cannot live apart from the body. There are various other quotes from Jesus contradicting that. John 14:1-3:

> Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.

John 18:36:

> Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place."

Luke 23:43:

> Jesus answered him, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise."

In the gospels Jesus is a guy who walks around talking in parables and analogies 100% of the time. Taking his sentences literally and building an elaborate theology involving an eternal lake of fire doesn't seem true to the spirit of things at all.

Nevermind that the gospels themselves are copies of copies of texts that were written long after this man lives.

Having been brought up evangelical Christian I just find the whole thing kind of baffling and a little enraging now. What I was taught was in scriptures isn't, really. If you read them again without the template of the interpretation given by the church there's dozens of different ways to interpret that look nothing like Christian (protestant or catholic) theology.

If I weren't an atheist now I'd at least be some kind of heterodox non-Nicean blasphemer, because it's absolutely confusing to me that anybody can take the council of Nicea and related councils seriously.

Sure a lake of fire is an analogy. But "eternal punishment" seems pretty clear and not an analogy.

Taking parables literally obviously we shouldn't do. But interpreting them and building a theology around them seems to be exactly what Jesus wanted. Jesus even interpreted some of them for his apostles (Mark 4:3-20).

Jesus never said we should take scripture as our sole source of truth and ignore other sources. Jesus gave the power to guide the Church to his apostles, and specifically Peter (Matthew 16:18). We can even see the apostles using this power in Acts 15 to establish doctrine. A good explanation of this is in this video[1]. They can continue to use this power at the council of Nicea.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJCbCs-y1_k

>the Bible Jesus directly talks about people being in Hell.

Jesus talked about people being in Gehenna (burning trash dump outside Jerusalem), Hades (Limbo or Paradise, Sheol in Hebrew) and I think Tartarus (deep pit). Tartarus may be OT only, I can't recall ATM.

All those terms, each with it's own intent and meaning, were later rolled into Hell (which received a new meaning, one different from any of the original terms). This was eventually codified during one of the Ecumenical councils (1st council of Nicea?)

I don't really think the name matters; Jesus wasn't speaking English. It's the concept that matters. I think Matthew 25:46 covers the concept well:

> Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

>I don't really think the name matters; Jesus wasn't speaking English.

Diction mattered a great deal to Christ. Gehanna (Hebrew: Valley of Hinnom; גיא בן הינום) was a location in Christ's time, that was likely associated with burning, destruction and loss - things that one might be expected to feel in the absence of the Creator.

Hades was where all dead went and remained until the day of judgment. Christ's reference to it as Paradise implies it isn't a place of suffering. Catholicism's Limbo implies it is a place of waiting.

The modern notion of Hell as a location dedicated to the eternal suffering of man, is quite different from either of those places.

Jesus said "Then they will go away to eternal punishment". That seems clear enough to me that there's some place (not necessarily a physical place) where people will suffer eternally. I think that covers the basics of the Christian view of Hell. Whether it's associated with burning or not seems a lesser matter to me.

>That seems clear enough to me that there's some place (not necessarily a physical place)

Did God create this place?

This doesn't seem relevant to the original question of whether the Bible says Hell exists or not. People can agree that something exists without agreeing how it was created.

One view[1][2] is that Hell isn't really a place, but rather a state of being, and the primary suffering of Hell is the separation from God[3]. God didn't create it, rather we ourselves created it by separating ourselves from God through sin.

[1] https://www.stbensduluth.org/blog/fr-joel-hastings/who-creat...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_Hell#State

[3] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p12...

I grew up with evangelical christian teaching (one of the 2 big christian Churches in northern Germany) and as far as I understood in their version nobody goes to hell.

I don't know, I'm neither a Christian nor a theological expert, but I was thinking of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Baptist_Universalist

...who are described as taking Calvinism to its logical conclusion.

It says "Bill Leonard estimated in 2011 that there were 1,000 or fewer PBU adherents in total, concentrated in 20 counties in Appalachia"

> Baptizing the dead seems silly and quaint, but Christians used to ask, how is it fair to send the unbaptized to hell that never had a chance to be saved? Mormons should get some credit for acknowledging the unfairness and coming up with a "solution".

Mormons were hardly the first Christian or Christian-adjacent group to come up with a solution to that, though perhaps one of the earlier groups to adopt a single solution as a firm doctrine rather than leaving the question doctrinally open with multiple possible solutions proposed and not condemned by authority.

That's what they're trying to do. In Mormon theology everyone who dies without a chance to be baptized must be given a proxy baptism by someone living, so they have a chance to accept the gospel in the afterlife. The goal is that this will eventually happen for everyone who ever lived. (Source: former Mormon.)

Send someone up to space each year and sprinkle water on earth, do a bulk lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_Y%C3%BC-hsiang#Conversion...

There was a Chinese general who supposedly did something like that using a firehose.

Unfortunately won't work unless you flood the world, because Mormons only do baptism by full immersion.

They only need to wait a century or two then... and try to release more greenhouse gases if possible.

Even discounting the procedural difficulties, which would make such a baptism invalid to the church, it doesn't count without knowledge and consent.

How do the dead ancestors give consent in the current scheme?

Asking them in the afterlife, apparently.

Correct. Proxy baptisms are never considered to make someone a member of the Church, precisely because it is not possible for the earthly Church to confirm with a dead person that they have given their consent. It is merely considered to make the opportunity for giving consent available to the person in the afterlife.

I’m a Jewish atheist and the first time a couple Mormons knocked on my door and explained proxy baptism to me my first reaction was to be taken aback. But hey, may as well cover all my bases right?

It sort of addresses a fundamental issue with a lot of Christian religions that teach that people who never had a chance to hear about Jesus and be baptized automatically go to hell. There's a lot I dislike about the Mormon church and its doctrine, but the Mormon conception of the afterlife is quite a bit more fair than a lot of other religions.

Note: in Mormon theology, those that die and receive their baptism by proxy still get to choose to accept or reject that baptism in the afterlife.

> It sort of addresses a fundamental issue with a lot of Christian religions that teach that people who never had a chance to hear about Jesus and be baptized automatically go to hell.

This always struck me as one of the most stupid and illogical tenets as it's in opposition to the concept of loving and just God: why create millions of people who have no chance to meet the Gospel, and then automatically condemn them to suffer forever, just like that, for nothing? It really makes no any sense! And yet, the modern world lives on remnants of these ideas.

Most Christian denominations do not believe that those who are unaware of Christianity automatically go to hell. They usually say that it's down to divine providence and God's mercy, and that it's pointless to speculate beyond that, those being ineffable and all.

Pascal's wager-by-proxy.

Why does it require genealogical research, though? Can proxy baptism only be performed by living relatives? And if not, then wouldn't just knowing the name of the person suffice? Or, for that matter, wouldn't any way to unambiguously identify them?

In practice, you just need the name and birth year and maybe another detail or two. And a recent rule does require that members focus on their own ancestors.

But the point of the whole thing is actually to spend time learning and researching your family history. In other words, the literal posthumous baptism is not the point. That's the ritual. It's what to learn and do along the way of accomplishing the ritual that is the point.

That's such an incredibly rude and conceited practice.

Oh, nonsense. Proxy baptism doesn't make you a member. That's not what they believe. Century after century Catholics taught that if your loved one had the misfortune to die before baptism, no hope. Eternal misery, because Christ said baptism was mandatory. Mormons say, well Christ was right of course but certainly not cruel, so the good news (gospel) is that if you don't get baptized before death for whatever reason, someone will take care of that formality for you so you can still choose in the next life whether you want it or not. If you decide you want it, then you were officially baptized. If you don't want it, you weren't baptized. (Someone else was, offered it to you, and you declined.)

If buying your ticket for a party that requires a ticket but you don't have to go to if you don't want to is "incredibly rude and conceited", you would have good reason to condemn all of Christianity similarly for Christ's claim that he paid the mandatory price for your sins, buying you a ticket to heaven that you'll need (Christians claim) but that you can either accept or reject, as you wish.

Mormons offering to extend the deadline for you to decide into the next life is hardly "incredibly rude and conceited" IMO.

My life is none of their business.

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