Oh, sorry, that's pretty important: this ruling only goes up to age 18, which I think is because it's lined up with legal age of consent. Spiritual age of consent is 8. If you think it's confusing, it's because IT MAKES NO DAMN SENSE. (Possibly literally.)
I absolutely consider it ostracism, and find denying baptism extremely theologically suspect. One of the things I didn't say in the post because it slipped my mind, being so ingrained in this faith, is that baptism is absolutely important both spiritually and culturally, and ARGH.
To be perfectly fair, the LDS faith does not baptize when parents of children under 18 do not give their consent (which, yeah, I find this reasonable), and they do not baptize children from polygamous families, which is another thing they used to justify this policy. (But which is... not really the same thing at all; the LDS church has a long and contentious history with polygamy that makes the polygamous exception kind of special.) Also, we have a doctrine of baptism for the dead, so if you don't get baptized in this life it can, er, be fixed, but still.
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I absolutely consider it ostracism, and find denying baptism extremely theologically suspect. One of the things I didn't say in the post because it slipped my mind, being so ingrained in this faith, is that baptism is absolutely important both spiritually and culturally, and ARGH.
To be perfectly fair, the LDS faith does not baptize when parents of children under 18 do not give their consent (which, yeah, I find this reasonable), and they do not baptize children from polygamous families, which is another thing they used to justify this policy. (But which is... not really the same thing at all; the LDS church has a long and contentious history with polygamy that makes the polygamous exception kind of special.) Also, we have a doctrine of baptism for the dead, so if you don't get baptized in this life it can, er, be fixed, but still.