IF YOU SENSE THAT YOUR BAPTISM DIDN'T WORK THEN ANNULLING IT IS YOUR RIGHT

The Roman Catholic Church claims that sprinkling water on a baby or an adult while saying, "I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" does amazing things. It takes away the sin we are born with, original sin, and any other sins and grafts us on to Jesus making us his servants. It puts Jesus and God inside us to live in us and inspire us. The Church says that baptism heals the inclination towards sin that original sin causes. Baptism is a sacrament. It pictures cleansing from sin and the effects of sin and actually does what it pictures.

Is it really that simple?

Canon 19 like all decrees of Nicaea I, is considered infallible as it was delivered by a general council of the Church. It discusses the followers of Bishop Paul of Samosota who taught that God was one person and that Jesus was not divine at all but merely a holy man. Though they baptised the same as the Catholics did, the baptism was considered invalid because of their denial of the Holy Trinity which teaches that God is Father and Son (Jesus) and Holy Spirit, three persons yet one God.

Concerning the Paulianists who have flown for refuge to the Catholic Church, it has been decreed that they must by all means be rebaptised; and if any of them who in past time have been numbered among their clergy should be found blameless and without reproach, let them be rebaptized and ordained by the Bishop of the Catholic Church.

So baptism can be invalid though it seems the ceremony was done correctly.  The Catholic Church at the end of the day only guesses that it validly baptises children or that any particular baptised child is really baptised.

If baptism is so great for children then how come children have only self-regarding desires?  Work has to be done to address that and yet we are told that baptism turns a child into a forgiven friend of God who is healed from the selfish human outlook put in us by original sin which it remits.

The Church claims that when you were baptised as a baby you were made a member of the Church and obligated to obey its Bible and its God and its popes for all eternity. This claim is very vindictive. If there is indeed an obligation, the Church has to hope that you will suffer if you fail to keep it.

Luther despite his intentions hinted that if God does not give a baby faith in some magical way or mysterious way the baptism is useless.  Luther wrote, “Before one baptises, or at least at the same time, faith must be present. Else we make of baptism a mere mockery of God’s majesty, as if his majesty were present there offering grace and no one were accepting it. Therefore, it is our judgement that through the faith and prayer of the church, young children are cleansed of unbelief and of the devil and are endowed with faith, and thus are baptised: because this is also the gift given to the children through the circumcision of the Jews. Otherwise, Jesus would not have said in Matthew 19 'Let the children come to me for to such belongs the kingdom of Heaven.' But without faith no one has the kingdom of Heaven.”  This doctrine of infant faith raises eyebrows but all Churches that believe in baptising babies and children hold that the baby is treated as a person of faith.  Catholics say the baby has no faith but the faith of the Church stands it for her or him.  So the connection to faith is there.

Obligations mean things you have to do on pain of being condemned as an immoral person worthy of suffering punishment. Any obligation with no punishment is not an obligation at all. Religion cannot prove religious obligations to be real. You need proof before you have the right to make obligations for people.

The Church claims it is not vindictive but wants those who do not do their duties to repent. But that is admitting that it is vindictive towards those who do not repent. Oh the hypocrisy! And inventing more obligations than is necessary is intrinsically vindictive.

It is far more vindictive to say people should be punished for breaking the vows made for them to be faithful to the Church than it is to say they should be punished for vows they made themselves as adults. Parents need to ponder this stuff before considering getting their babies baptised.

Baptism needs to be declared null and void and incapable of conferring fair and just obligations. Annulling is not an option. It's an obligation.

ARE YOU REALLY BAPTISED?

The purpose of law is to regulate human affairs. We can't have chaos so we need law.

Nobody can prove that a person who was baptised was really baptised. The priest might have withheld his intention thus turning the ceremony into an act. Canon law assumes that your baptism is real - it has to. But that still does not mean that it is right to. By assuming, it clearly indicates that it does not claim to be right. Laws are about regulation not about being right though the law hopes it is right. The Church recognises this point for it says that if a man becomes a woman in the eyes of the law he is still in reality a man.

The Church says that the effects of baptism include making you a child of God and a member of his Church and cleansing you of all sin including original sin. If you are an adult and you go through baptism without intending to receive any of the effects then the baptism is null and void. It only looks like a baptism. The baptism is as invalid as a baptism performed on television by an actor in the role of a priest. The baptism will have to be repeated when the person has the proper dispositions. Then the baptism will be valid.
 
Anglican priests and bishops are not really priests and bishops at all according to the Roman Catholic Church. Through Leo XIII the Church definitely declared that Anglican ordinations were "absolutely null and utterly void." Yet Anglicans have retained the Catholic way of making priests and bishops. The Church argues that because Anglicanism does not really believe in priests who offer Mass it cannot confer real ordination. This is proof that the Church knows a person can go through a sacramental ceremony and while there is seemingly no real problem with that ceremony, the ceremony might fail to confer a sacrament.

RENOUNCING BAPTISM

Baptism is principally about receiving the obligation to believe in the revelations of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. That is why it is so important for the minister of baptism to use the words, “I baptise you in the name [ie authority as revealed to us] of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit“. To renounce your faith is to renounce your baptism at least implicitly.

PERSONAL IDENTITY

If an exact copy of me was made and there were two mes are they both me? Some philosophers say no for there can only be one me at the one time. If time had a blip and a time warp caused me to meet myself as I was five minutes ago are both of me me? Again the philosophers say that only one of them is really me.

They reason that uninterrupted bodily continuity makes me me. If so, I am far more different from myself when I was baptised as a baby than I would be if a time warp led to there being two mes. My body has been rebuilt many many times and my mind has hardly anything in common with my baby mind. Thus it is safe to say the validity of my baptism is suspect if not to be rejected outright.

The Church will respond that my soul or mental substance does not change which is why I am the same person as I was born. But this substance is a function - a scanner. There is no reason why it cannot be easily cloned. If it is not me if it is cloned then why say it is me when it is not? You cannot argue that the original me is no longer me because it is duplicated for that is like saying an apple is not an apple but a pear when cut in half.

BAPTISMAL ANNULMENT

Some secular organisations issue de-baptism certificates.

I think Baptismal Annulment Certificates are a much better idea.

Another possibility is that Initiation Annulment Certificates could be used if one does not wish to have one’s baptism invalidated. The only thing that is annulled then is the initiation into the Church allegedly conferred by baptism. The possibility of annulling the initiation stems from the fact that when a baby is baptised even in a Catholic Church by a priest that does not necessarily make her a Roman Catholic . The Church holds that Protestant baptisms are valid and they work but they do not make Roman Catholics of the babies. Initiation is still necessary.

The Church says the bond made with God in baptism is far more important than all the marriages in the universe. Bearing that in mind, when marriages can be annulled or declared void because one or both partners didn’t fully understand what they were doing how could baby baptism be valid? There is more consent between drunks who marry than there is in baptism!

A commitment you make yourself is more binding than any commitment made for you. Indeed, a commitment made for you and on your behalf is not a commitment at all. It’s a lie and an attempt to force religion on you.

Most Catholics do not feel free to refuse to have their child baptised. There is the pressure of the Catholic bigots up the road and the pressure of the relatives and the grandparents. Yet the Church tells them the baby cannot consent to baptism and needs them to consent for it, How could their consent suffice for the child? It is fitting in and an easy life they want - not the baptism!

Who would want to be made a member of a Church that says that if we die in serious sin we are so bad that we will turn our backs on love and suffer for all eternity out of hatred for everybody and God? That is a very serious extreme accusation! If an adult cannot give valid consent to unite with such a faith how can a baby?

Catholics have not been informed properly about the dangerous and deceits of their religion. Many of them don’t even know the rudiments of the Church’s teaching about baptism. Such people are only nominal members of the Church. If it is important to belong to the Church, then your consent to become part of it needs to be valid. It cannot if you do not know the religion very well. How could consent put a baby into the Church in reality when the parents themselves haven't validly consented to their own membership?

Your choice with regard to religious membership when you know what you are doing takes priority over any choice made by your parents and godparents to enter you into such membership. A choice made for you cannot have the same force as one made by you. Your personal choice matters most. So if you reject the religious membership that baptism gave you, you should be annulling your baptism. God is almighty and nothing can violate his will not even the sinner for God then permits the sin to happen. So God knows if a baptised baby will accept the choice made for her or him. Seeing a rejection means that God will have to regard the consent of the godparents and the parents as invalid and not impart membership of the church on you.

Many parents think in terms of baptism putting the label Catholic on their baby but without seeing it as engrafting a child into the Church properly.

The Catholic Church provides conditional baptism for people who are not sure if their baptism was real or valid. If baptism really had power, if baptism really made the baptised person different from an unbaptised person, then the person would know if his or her baptism had worked or not. There would be no need for conditional baptism.

If you were raised a Catholic and look into your soul and see no spiritual or spiritual effects that can only be explained by baptism, then your heart is telling you that your baptism was ineffective. An ineffective baptism means a null baptism. People who come up with a spiritual testimony that their baptism didn’t work, have the right to have the baptism declared null and void.

Transsexuals have the right to have the sex on their birth certificates altered to the sex they believe themselves to truly be. We should have the right to have our baptism declared invalid and have it on paper. We should be struck off the parish registers and be provided with certificates that declare that the baptism is invalid or uncertain. If you are uncertain that your baptism really initiated you into the people of God then this should be taken as evidence that despite appearances the baptism was invalid and no true initiation into God’s Church took place. There is nothing else that one can go by. Nobody has the right to tell you that the baptism was effective and genuine when you see internal evidence that it is not.

If you can’t get a certificate that annuls your baptism, you should get one that declares the validity of the baptism to be doubtful or uncertain.

DANGERS OF BAPTISM

The Catholic claim that baptism enters babies into the family of God and makes them his children the Church and changes them without their consent into friends of God puts out the red carpet to racism. Then why not say that babies born with very dark skin alone are the children of God? What’s stopping you?

When baptism accuses you, without evidence of having been divorced from God and as the kind of person that would sin if able to, and has so many other terrible implications clearly it is not something you would have consented to if able.

The Church sees failing to baptise the child as harming the child spiritually and getting it barred from God's love in Heaven. If the Church really believes that it is right to baptise the child because the child is so helpless, then if the child is really that helpless and dies unbaptised God will not let him suffer any punishment or bad results. The child will go to Heaven. The Church isn’t even semi-coherent. It is just showing its vindictive wishful thinking and how it longs to pressure people to bring babies to it for baptism.

Anne Hathaway left the Catholic church because of its homophobia to join the Episcopalian Church. The Church she joined was simply a church that disobeyed and misrepresented Christian teaching. Thus her joining it was still support of homophobia. If my local Nazi party says it wants equal rights for Jews, it is either not a Nazi Party at all but only pretending to be, or it is lying or ignorant. If it is a real Nazi party I am unwittingly supporting the destruction of Jews. Period. If it is confused and fails to understand its own anti-semitic values to join it is still to support it's evil values.

Merely having your name on the membership rolls of the Church is supporting the Church. As long as it is on, you consent to the authority of the Church and are doing wrong if you disparage or ignore that authority.  It is supporting the Church whether you like it or not because to keep things simple the Church has to count you a member until you defect officially or get into another religion.  What can you expect?

CANON LAW AND INVALID BAPTISM

The Code of Canon Law states: “An oath is the invocation of the divine name as witness to the truth. It cannot be taken except in truth, judgment and justice…An oath extorted by deceit, force or grave fear is by virtue of the law itself invalid (Canons 1199, 1200).”

You cannot swear or promise or vow to what you do not know or understand properly. The Church uses these laws to argue that the oath, promise and consent to keep the secrets of Freemasonry is invalid. Freemasons do not know when they take their oath of secrecy what it is they have to keep secret. The Church says such an oath is evil and demeaning.

The Canon Law we have seen shows that the baby or child cannot have any obligations towards the Catholic Church - ever. The attempt of the Church to impose Church membership on him or her was invalid. If the consent of the Freemason is invalid how much more is the membership of the baby in the Catholic Church?

CONCLUSION

Baby baptism confers no obligations whatsoever and is merely an empty superstitious ritual that pays homage to nonsense and bigotry.