How can Mormons baptize for the dead?

Question

I don't get it.
I heard that's one of the reasons why their church is growing so much, because they're baptizing and adding the names of people who died a long time ago into their religion.

Answer 1

On Yahoo Answers there are many questioning how God can condemn people who are good, but do not accept the Gospel. They ask why if God loves them, they are supposed to suffer.

The scriptures tell us that only through Christ may we be saved. The Bible says that baptism is a required ordinance of salvation. The Bible also says the Christ went to teach the spirits in prison. So if Jesus brought the Gospel to the dead, and the dead who accept it require baptism, how will it be done? By proxy as Paul taught. There is a small remnant of this in the Catholic church, where their work for the dead is in the form of a mass and lighting candles.

So the real question isn't how or why Mormons do this, it is why not other churches?

Answer 2

The dead aren't members of the church.
They are baptized by proxy or someone being baptized for them. Actually they have baptized 40-50 million deceased people if not more. There are only 13 million members of the church and they are very much alive.

Answer 3

in case you have been to place in writing my ineffective grandmother's call on the jobs of a baptist church, might that make her baptist? We checklist what ordinances are finished for who, and incorporate in the event that they have been residing and ineffective. in the experience that your situation is that others might think of that your kin have been Mormon because of the fact they observed they have been baptized, it would additionally instruct that it replaced into after their dying. we don't have self assurance that baptisms by using proxy for the deceased "forces" everyone to alter into Mormon. It merely provides them an threat to settle for or reject it. Baptism is a actual situation that's had to flow into the dominion of God. It can not be performed by using the ineffective or on the ineffective, so God has presented a fashion that people who did no longer have an excellent gamble to be baptized by using one that has his authority on an identical time as residing can nevertheless get carry of the ordinance.

Answer 4

Well, Paul taught about it in 1 Corinthians 15:29. But, no, the LDS church doesn't include proxy baptism names on its membership list. The reason the church is growing so much is because the message is true, and we've got a very large, highly motivated, and highly trained missionary force delivering that message.

Answer 5

The baptisms are done by proxy... Meaning a person gets baptized in the name of the deceased person...

Names of people baptized by proxy are not added to the rolls of the group to be counted in the census of the group..

Answer 6

Here, let me put it this way:

Somewhere in africa there is a poor starving child. he has known nothing but death and destruction. One day he dies from the war. He has never known the truth. If baptism is require to enter the kingdom of heaven, then he has no choice. We are trying to help that poor child so that he will have the oppurtunity to go to heaven, along with other people.

But the people we baptize that are dead, don't get counted as current members. That's not the reason we have so many people in our religion.

For more info, check out mormon.org or LDS.org

Answer 7

Membership count only includes the living.

Baptism for the dead is just another quirky religious ritual. All religions have them. This one belongs to the Mormons. There really isn't any more to it than that.

Answer 8

No, we do not put, or keep, dead people on the rolls of our church. If someone who's a member dies, their names are removed.

When we do vicarious baptisms, the ONLY reason we keep records of it is so people don't keep baptising he same person over and over.

Answer 9

We don't count the number of those names we baptize for as part of our membership count. How would we know whether or not they accepted the baptism?

Here is a link to the official doctrine:
http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=bbd508f54922d010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&index=2&sourceId=1ec52f2324d98010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____

Answer 10

It's a delusion,

but keep in mind that NO one knows exactly what went on when John the Baptist and the apostles of Jesus were baptizing right in the beginning of the Gospels.

I realize that people think they know all about it... but NO one knows what that ORIGINAL baptism was all about, so the Mormons guess is probably not any better or worse than the guess of anyone else.