Mormon temple enters space-age

Press, 9 October 1982, Page 9

Mormon temple enters space-age

NZPA Atlanta When the new Mormon temple in north Fulton County. Georgia, is opened to temporary public viewing early next year, visitors will not see a typical pew-filled church.

A typical church does not have 110 rooms. Nor does the usual church have a laundry room, cafeteria, computer system or video display terminal.

The temple will be something of a space-age marvel of electronics. Only church members in good standing will be allowed to enter the temple after the public tours end. Magnetically coded plastic computer cards will be required to gain entrance. Foreign-speaking Mormons will be able to hear ceremonies translated into four languages and transmitted over an infra-red beam into wireless headphones. The centrepiece of sophistication in the temple will be a computer system linked to a genealogical library housed deep inside a Utah mountain.

The system will include a video screen installed beside the temple’s baptismal pool for baptism of the dead by proxy, one of the most important Mormon rites. Mormon doctrine says that no-one can reach the highest level of heaven without having been baptised, said Bishop Gerald Scott. A primary goal of church members is to help everyone who has died without being baptised reach the top level. “We believe that baptism is an essential earthly ordinance. But what about those who were born at a time when they could not learn about that essential ordinance? One. purpose in our general work is to find the names of those people and perform the ordinance for them,” he said.

The names are taken from official documents in a process called extraction. The church members pore over the documents for names and send the ones that they find to the central library in Utah.

As many as 190,000 names will be read from a terminal screen as a volunteer church member is baptised by proxy for the dead person.