h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Have I missed something- is there anything about being a dead Mormon that is inconsistent with being a dead person in any other faith? Can you then only do the things that are permitted to dead Mormons? Religion is surely about what we can do with our lives before we are dead. e,g -as Islam has come up- so has the fact that Islam is the submission of the Living to the Will of Allah.

"Let the dead bury the dead".

For much of my childhood Malcom Muggeridge was campaigning for Mahatma Gandhi to be declared a Christian Saint. Now it is true that Gandhi had a particularly universal attitude to religions,especially those of the Indian Sub-Continent: but I do not think that Mr Muggeridge was claiming that Gandhi was ONLY a Christian saint. I believe that he argued that a "Great Soul" and the "Bapu" or Spiritual Father of the Indian Nation his conduct was consistent with that of Christian Saints.

Perhaps at the root of this controversy is the fact that the living tend to be intolerant of the Mormon faith. Whoever expects eternal truths to come from the USA?

Cass

Surely it is case of the Mormons being intolerant of others faiths and ignoring the wishes of the dead and their surviving relatives on the basis of an arrogant belief they have a monopoly on truth and spirituality - the same applies to Muggeridge, had Gandhi wished to become a Christian he could have but as he said.....
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ"

tucuxii

"Your Christians are so unlike your Christ"..

But surely that is why some people are singled out as Saints... To be a Christian is not to be like Christ but to attempt to follow his "way".. most failing often quite spectacularly.

Saints are judged as at least showing "faith in action"..often at the last when they come to die. And it was in this way that Muggeridge called for Gandhi to be acknowledged as a Saint- someone who in his own life showed Christianity in action. Certainly Muggeridge did not maintain that Gandhi needed to be "Christianised", but that Christianity needed to be Gandhi-ised..

I always feel that it is presumptious of any religion to claim property ownership of its God or territorial rights to govern and administer any Heaven. No God or Heaven subject to human will and governance would be worth the paper it was written on. So I think we agree on arrogant beliefs and monopolies on truth and spirituality.

It is, however, perhaps an additional challenge for Jewish people, compared with people of other faiths, to live with this ancient idea that by birth/descent they are the Chosen Ones of God, chosen not in the sense of being privileged, but as the bearers of a special and unique heritage that often has cost Jewish people dearly.

As for the Mormons- gnats and elephants comes to mind.. Compared to an ancient faith like Judaism surely the Mormons are a brash, modern and upstart very American sect. Children often say and play outlandishly when not taught any better.

But in 1933 H.A.L. Fisher wrote in the introduction to "The Liberal Experiment" that this period of history was under threat from totalitarianism: and that only when the moral spine of a country has been badly damaged is plaster of paris necessary.

Of course Gandhi had seen this in action within the British Empire during his struggles: and we are still largely lacking in "moral spine" and heavily dependent upon external mechanisms nb the State and money systems of men in blue-grey (according to almost all present at the Cameron-Sarkozy meeting this week-end). Hence the current global crisis.

Cass

<<But surely that is why some people are singled out as Saints... To be a Christian is not to be like Christ but to attempt to follow his "way".. most failing often quite spectacularly.<<<

However, and despite failing spectaculary, the Vatican has beatified John Paul II.

A man who ignored what the pederast Marcial Marciel was doing, ( and many more like that criminal)

JPII blessing Pinochet in the 80s is an image that I will never forget.
etc.

There´s also another beatification, J.M Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of the OPUS DEI, a sect, a very powerful one present in the Vatican and in high political spheres...

No doubt, be singled out as a saint now means just the reverse of being a good person to emulate.

Maria

I replied.. But it seems that I must have failed to post..

There are things about Mahatma Gandhi that one might object to though I still feel that I admire him more than any other 20c figure.

As for Sainthood generally, though not brought up as an Anglican, I think that my childhood Oxford with its Medieval University wrapped me in the Anglican tradition, so I tend to see the whole history of the Roman Catholic Church since the Black Death as something of a rearguard action. Faced with that great tragedy what G.G. Coulton describes as a belief in "The Omnicompetence of the Church" was difficult to sustain. At the Reformation, he says that it gave way before a growing belief in the Omnicompetence of the State.

I do not think that there is much active faith in either these days. It is a world of "doubting Thomases".

Mention of Pinochet always sends my mind back to the two sisters who were pupils of mine when their father was "shot while trying to escape" in Chile.

Cass

Pinochet was a monster - I always think of Chile's leading protest singer a brilliant classical guitarist who bled to death in the Santiago football stadium political prisoners were herded into when the fascist thugs cut his hands off to punish him for his music.
When Pinochet was under "house arrest" in Sunningdale they (MI6?) used to smuggle him out to a local beauty spot and I had the minor satisfaction of seeing him cringe when I called him "assassin de ninos" to his face - although it was impossible to express what I felt having known Chilean refugees who had be raped and tortured and in one case half drowned in a bath full of excrement by his minions - and the Church absolved him of the vile things he did when he would not even co-operate with the peace and reconciliation hearings in Chile so that relatives could at least have some idea what happened to their disappeared loved ones.
So I guess the Mormon's eccentric "baptism" of people who died before their sect was founded is fairly trivial especially given some of the terrible things they did when they took Utah from the Utes - but what can you expect from a sect whose belief system is based on "manifest destiny"