If you don’t know about it, the Mormon Church has a curious habit (tradition? doctrine? what would it be called?) of baptizing dead people as Mormons posthumously. In other words, they get “saved”—like it or not—after death. Apparently baptizing famous people became a bit of a “fad” in the 1990s.
Believe if or not, infamously outspoken hater of religion George Carlin is now, that’s right, a Mormon in the afterlife. I’m sure this will be news to him. (Can you imagine his reaction???)
Name: GEORGE DENIS PATRICK CARLIN
Gender: Male
Birth: 12 May 1937 Manhattan, New York County, New York, United States
Death: 22 June 2008 Santa Monica, Los Angeles, California, United StatesIndividual Ordinances
Baptism Completed, 14 August 2010, Columbia South Carolina Temple
Confirmation Completed, 26 August 2010, Provo Utah Temple
Initiatory Completed, 8 September 2010, Jordan River Utah Temple
Endowment Ready
Mormon temples across America have also claimed The Breakfast Club director John Hughes, sportscaster Harry “Holy Cow!” Caray, Nancy Spungen, Richard Burton, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, George Orwell, Jim Morrison, Tupac, Timothy Leary, Carl Sagan, Vlad the Impaler, Freddy Mercury and Truman Capote as their own. Here’s a head-scratcher: dead rapper and drug dealer Eazy-E is now a Mormon, too. Hilarious, but it made me wonder how a Mormon has even heard of Easy-E in the first place?
Would this be considered the Mormon equivalent to a prank? It’s so… Mormon I just can’t tell! Maybe they really are trying to “save” these folks and the only irony is what we non-believers might project onto this type of behavior? Who knows?
Jewish groups were outraged to find that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun appeared on LDS “genealogical” records. Heinrich Himmler’s name was also submitted for baptism. In 1995 an agreement was made to “un-baptize” 300,000 Jewish names, many of them Holocaust victims. In 2008, after he secured the Democratic Party’s nomination, Barack Obama’s dead mother, Stanley Ann Dunham—who passed away in 1995—was baptized posthumously.
Apparently even Alexander the Great converted to Mormonism (twice) many centuries after his death in 323 BC.