BAPTISM - A PROMISE TO MANIPULATE YOUR CHILD INTO CATHOLICISM

Parents take their babies to the Roman Catholic priest for baptism into the Catholic Church. Most of them would not if there was a trend for the baptised to become real Catholics in their belief. Parents often see baptism as superstition or as symbolism as best but know that their children will turn out ordinary. They don't mind watered down Catholicism much and they will not send their children to a Catholic school that teaches Catholicism in all its vice. They usually get their babies baptised for the wrong reasons. The fact remains that they are promising to have the child converted to real Catholicism. It is wrong.

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.

As baptism makes a statement of faith that there is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit who have the authority to be obeyed as God it is clearly promising to raise the child in accordance with that faith.

Baby baptism is supposed to confer membership of the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith on the baby. Therefore it involves a promise made for the child by proxy to turn the child into a believer. The baptism is meant to oblige the child to honour the Roman Catholic Church and its doctrines. Adam and Eve caused all the children to be born after them to have original sin meaning they are born outside God's family and faith and need baptism to be brought in. The Adam and Eve story has them breaking a law of God not to eat from a tree. The message is clear: Adam and Eve didn't do anything harmful. If you break a law of God that is sin. Goodness is not really about being harmless or helping others. It is about obedience. That is a vile message to give a child. And it is a message that is demonstrated and represented by baptism.
 
If children become Catholics at baptism, then when they get older, others have a right to expect them to believe exactly what the Church tells them to believe and to be able to state the case for such faith - evidence etc.
 
The Catholic child is not raised to honour say Islam or Mormonism or Evangelical Christianity but raised to honour Catholicism. Parents may say that a child being raised to honour Catholicism does not imply the child is being raised to dishonour or disrespect other religions. The child is being raised to just not honour them or dishonour them. But if say Islam is the true faith then it follows that the child is being raised to dishonour it. Truth deserves honour. To approach it with the attitude that you will not honour or dishonour it is to dishonour it.
 
Manipulating a child in religion is never well-intentioned. It is a refusal to accept say a child as he or she is. She or he must be a Catholic or regarded as Catholic in some sense to be accepted. We all know and see the power of conditioning - we know how easy it is to do to a child. There is no excuse for we have experienced it ourselves and been hurt by how sneaky and manipulative it is. If a child was truly accepted, the child would be nurtured to condition herself or himself rather than it being done by the Church and teachers and parents. Parents need to be guides not brainwashers.
 
If indoctrinating or influencing a child to embrace a particular religion is not taking advantage of the child, then why would Catholic parents object if they send children to Protestant schools that said they would give the children an education to develop their Catholic faith and they end up educated in another faith? If it is not taking advantage, why should it matter what faith the teachers propound to the children? You may answer that it is cruel to teach children a faith that does not match that of their parents. Let us keep that view out of it. Anyway the view implies that mixed marriages are unhealthy for children. A child reared in Islam has every chance of being as well-behaved as a child raised Catholic or Mormon or Calvinist or Buddhist for example.
 
Parents would not approve if children were conditioned to follow a cult like Militant Islam or Jim Jones People's Temple. They think of those who get caught up in those cults as gullible or stupid. No. They were and are as smart as anybody else. Conditioning works on the emotions to trick the victim into thinking he or she believes and it influences them to cleverly invent reasons to see these beliefs as plausible. If Catholics should condition then other religions should do it too so that should show you how dangerous and anti-truth conditioning is.
 
Some people think that the conditioning is no big deal when very intelligent theologians seem to believe in the Catholic faith. But they don't realise that the reason clever people can believe nonsense is because they are experts at coming up with reasons and excuses that seem to justify the belief. But they are clearly deciding what they want to believe and tricking themselves that they believe. When you work too hard to make a belief sound reasonable you show a need to convince yourself that it is correct. You can use 99% truth and correct reasoning but the 1% tiny errors and distortions that are hard to spot could be the Achilles heel of your whole argument. The best liars make tiny lies go a long way. When scientists are very very wrong, they use a lot of truth and correct logic in the process so that the errors are hard to find.
 
Truth will win out and expose the lying doctrines and errors that we have been conditioned to support one day. Conditioning endangers and hurts. Imagine the disappointment a child could have when realising that Jesus was a fraud if he lived?
 
It is natural that if a child is baptised that the parents should buy her or him a Bible. In it she or he should read that God ordered the genocide of the Canaanites. Jesus spoke a lot of repetitious and unhelpful tripe and never condemned all that God-sanctioned mass murder. That silence says a lot about him. Also he went as far as to declare the revelations from God that demanded such evil to be truly God's impeccable word. Approval. Christians attempt to justify this by saying the Canaanites were completely evil and there was no other option but genocide. There was no room for loving these sinners and hating their sins for there was nothing worth saving or worth loving about them. Is that the kind of thing you want your child inspired by? Baptism would require that he or she should have access to this evil poison. If you should hate then you should hate those who have personally hurt you. But the Bible incites to hatred purely on religious grounds.
 
Christianity is guilty of moral relativism. That is it thinks it was right for God to urge his people to murder and rape and pillage before Christ and that kind of behaviour is wrong now. I am not saying moral relativism is wrong or right. I am saying that it is what the Christians have got. It happens because the Bible cannot agree with itself. It has one moral principle contradicting the other. This is dangerous. Many fanatical or insane Christians have actually gone out and murdered people because the Bible God commanded the death penalty for these people.
 
We cannot hope to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus Christ unless we know them. And we cannot know them unless we know ourselves. Catholicism claims that it works to give children such a special relationship as a gift. This is a lie for children do not know themselves and yet God and Jesus are pushed on them.
 
Prayer is self-centred. Children are taught to pray for their parents. Like all human beings, they will care for their parents and not give a toss about some other child's parents in some strange land. This not caring shows a willingness to see others hurt. If you don't care for others then whatever evil befalls them is okay with you. That is a bad human trait. But prayer makes it a worse trait. How? Suppose you are a praying child. You are asking God not to care that you don't care. You wouldn't be praying and offering prayer unless you thought God approved of it. So you increase your evil by indicating that God approves. Also, you are trying to get God to run the universe in such a way that your parents get special treatment. It is actually attempting to hurt others supernaturally. A belief that you had only so much magic power and that you were using it to cast a spell to help your parents only simply because you can't do it for all parents would be better.
 
Is the prayer both self-centred and unselfish? If it is then how can we call any act selfish? When a child does not share his sweets he hurts his relationships with others and so wasn't thinking of himself. But he is still selfish. So in that case we can safely say that the prayer is selfish and in a vicious way.
 
Jesus said seek and you will find. Millions have prayed for years to be able to see that Christianity is true and their prayers were never answered. That is proof that the faith is false. To say that those people were not true seekers is just insulting and a cop-out. It is like saying you have a cancer curing medicine and if it saves no lives it is because the cancer patients didn't really want to be cured. To give Jesus to your children as a friend when he makes false promises is just demeaning to the child and also cruel.
 
Christianity encourages children to look forward to Heaven where they will get rewards for the good they have done on earth. Suppose a child does well in an examination. The child may feel the rewards that come after diligence and hard work and success. Giving the child a reward such as a party will dull the satisfaction she or he will have felt. It takes away the most important rewards. So we conclude that Heaven is not a good thing to be teaching children. Also, it increases the likelihood that the child will prefer the reward for doing right to doing right. Worse, rewards make children less likely to do things that do not carry a reward.
 
You can do great good and be ready to swear that you do it selflessly and without any selfishness. And you can still be wrong. You cannot see all your motives or priorities. Indeed you often mask them from yourself. You could still be chiefly selfish. The atheist who does not believe in God or heavenly rewards has a better chance of being selfless than a believer. This is because religious faith adds to the temptation to be selfish and to have ulterior motives. We care about goodness. We do. But if we feel we are doing good out of selfishness, we will tend to hide that from ourselves. Religion adds to the pressure to do that.

The result of baptism is a child goes to a Catholic school and is gaslight with toxic and harmful doctrines.  The child is effectively brainwashed.  A child that does see through it may brainwash himself or herself just to fit in and not stand out.