Les Bonnes Choses

I assume you keep coming back because you have come to appreciate my out-of-the-box thinking. This evening I stood in the kitchen, mop in hand, on hold with the telephone banking people when I got to thinking about alternative financing arrangements. By alternative, I mean using something other than a major financial institution. I am also excluding from consideration the prospect of hitting your parents up for money.

Warning: if you believe in moral absolutism, please select another link from your bookmarks and click it. Yeah, that one there -- the one with the cats.

Still here? Okay, first, to forewarn you, I don't care what you believe in. I don't have a say in it, because I wasn't there. And, frankly, the thing about religion is that it's based on faith, and therefore no set of beliefs is any more justifiable than any others, objectively speaking.

Did you know you run the risk of an overachieving Mormon changing your beliefs behind your back? No, I'm not talking about Mitt Romney's election machine managing to win over so many Republican voters. At worst, that sort of hoodwinking will persuade just enough independent voters to wreck eight years of your life, and that's nothing compared to eternity. Apparently the Mormons have been running around baptising people in absentia. Dead people, even. This is, of course, an outrage to the millions of holocaust victims who had a date with the Patriarchs and found themselves instead talking with some guy named Peter, who naturally did not have a reservation under their names. That's awkward, and so the Mormons have agreed to stop. Or at least, stop making it so obvious.

This sort of thing isn't just a spiritual problem, either. Dungeon Masters have long have had to wrestle with the problem of what happens when Paladins from different pantheons fight each other. I mean, does their protection from evil aura still work?

The offensiveness of the proxy baptisms is obvious to me. What I don't get here is why it's a serious spiritual problem. Either these baptisms are done under divine authority, or they're not. If a Supreme Being is acknowledging the baptisms, then the baptised should be thankful they escaped eternal damnation. If not, then why are we concerned with the declarations of a bunch of crackpots in Utah? Furthermore:

But the practice offends members of many other religions, especially Jews, who have expressed outrage at attempts to alter the religion of Holocaust victims because they were killed based on their beliefs.