It's FESTIVUS! So drink a beer for a Mormon, okay?

Let me explain that beautiful stein in the picture. (And if anyone out there knows how to obtain one of these for me, please let me know)

Mormons are big into the idea of performing important ceremonies for people who are unable to participate themselves. Why can't they participate? Because they're DEAD, that's why. Mormons believe that you have to be baptized to go to heaven. By them. Yup, nobody not baptized by the Mormons gets to heaven. Period.

But...but...Mormons have only been around for less than two hundred years and they are still only a fringe group barely emerged from cult status. How is everyone supposed to get baptized by the Mormons? To make things worse, the people that DO have the chance to get baptized by Mormons have to swallow a giant load of male bovine feces and say they believe a whole list of things that are all demonstrably false. Almost nobody takes them up on the offer. 

Mormons have a solution. They'll just wait for you to die, and then baptize you anyway. It's one of the things they do in their V.I.P. only temples. The call it "baptisms for the dead".

I've done this. Groups of Mormon youth get together and go to the temple to do this. When I did it we drove for 5 hours to the nearest temple and made a weekend of it. They dress you all in white and you gather around a giant hot tub resting on the backs of 12 oxen. Nothing weird at all. Definitely does NOT look like anything out of a Conan movie.

So what happens is they have a whole bunch of names of dead people. You go into the font in a white onesie that gets uncomfortably clingy and transparent when wet. A guy reads a prayer and dunks you thirty times or so, depending on how long the list of dead people is. Can any dead person get baptized by the Mormons? You bet! Here are some of the "redeemed dead":

• Barrack Obama's mother
• Steve Irwin, aka the "Crocodile Hunter"
• Elvis Presley
• Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler. Yes, both of them.
• Princess Di
• Pope John Paul II and Mohandas Gandhi, those poor, misguided fellows
• Both Nazi war criminals and holocaust victims and survivors
• Carl Freaking Sagan, of all people

Nobody is safe!

Here's what they say when they do it.

"Brother/Sister [last name of person standing in for the dead people], having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you for and in behalf of [dead person's name], who is dead, in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy ghost. Amen."

So apparently, that's how you make sure something important gets done for someone who cannot do it for themselves. Back to our picture at the top. Sometimes the consumption of beer definitely qualifies as a "saving ordinance". On this occasion of Festivus, make sure you do some "temple work" by quaffing a few for a Mormon in your life. They are only kept from the truth because they know not where to look. Or where to drink. Or they've been told not to look. Or drink. Poor, unfortunate souls!

Cheers! Amen.