SERIOUSNESS OF CHILD BAPTISM MEANS IT IS NOT A PRIVATE MATTER

THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE VOWS AND OBLIGATIONS
 
Hypothetically if you can impose vows and obligations on a baby to God and a Church you DEFINITELY cannot impose serious ones.  You cannot make them apply to a child anyway.  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.

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.
 
THE COMMAND TO BAPTISE
 
No genuinely good person commands what they have no right to command. Yet we have the Christian God and the Christian Church commanding people to have babies baptised. It's just paying homage to interference and authoritarianism. Why? Because we lived for millions of years without baptism. We do not need it like we need food. Therefore there is no right to command it.
 
NO BETTER THAN RACISM
 
Canon 208 of the Code of Canon Law states that all Christians are equal by virtue of their baptism. That undeniably makes the rite an initiation into something that is just as bad as racism. It tells us that we are not equal as human beings whether we are baptised Christians or not. It tells us that the unbaptised should not be treated as the equal of the baptised. The unbaptised infant should not get the same care as the baptised should. All this tells us that the doctrine is very very serious indeed. People are blind to that for they tend to think that one faith is as good as another and look on Christianity with a huge degree of apathy. The Canon follows the evil teaching of Lumen Gentium, a Vatican II document, which teaches that baptism makes Christians equal. The equality is said to rule out any possibility of any Christian claiming a monopoly on grace and holiness.
 
ERROR AND BAPTISM
 
Error is worse than being evil because at least the evil person sees they are bad. The person in error does not see the damage he or she can do or does. If religion is fiction, then the rights of the unbeliever come first. Usually the unbeliever is bullied into agreeing to the baptism on the basis that if the religion is rubbish then the ceremony is nothing more than a sprinkle of water. Nobody thinks that the unbeliever might want to show integrity and not be showing disrespect to religious people by putting on a performance.
 
THE SCHOOLS
 
Catholic schools require that pupils must be baptised. For a lot of Catholics, their main concern is to have the baby baptised as a prerequisite for having the child enrolled in a Catholic school later on. Instead of having the guts and the courage to insist that this rule is discriminatory the parents go along with it. If Catholic education is a good thing, it should be provided to children that may become Catholics and who have Catholic parents and not just to the baptised. The rule is a disgraceful attempt by Catholic bishops and priests to interfere in families and in what is none of their business. They resort to such tactics to force parents to make their babies members of the Church.
 
BAPTISM AND SECULARISM
 
To have your baby baptised is to use him or her against secularism. Secularism does not care about God. Baptism is implicitly opposed to the rights society has won through secularism.
 
Moreover, Catholicism teaches that the Church and the state have different jobs to do, but that it is a sin to insist that Church and state must be separate. So baptism implies you must support the Church when it seeks political advantages or special favours from the state. The ideal state for the true Catholic is one that thinks like Catholics do.
 
More than other religions, Catholicism is a threat to the freedom of the state and the people.
  
NOT TAKING BAPTISM SERIOUSLY
 
People don't take religion seriously these days and indeed many clergy don't. Few would get their babies baptised if Christianity lived up to its hard morality and lived like it says Jesus lived. So the faith thrives on disobedience. But that doesn't justify the child being enrolled in the religion. For all the child knows, he or she could be enrolled in the Nazis. For religion, if you enrolled a child in the Nazi party or the Labour Party for the child to be raised as one of these the Church would squeal that this is exploitation and the enrolment was devious and manipulative and seeking an unfair advantage by trying to step in and have the child conditioned when it is naturally prone to conditioning and gullible in learning about the world. The Church is a fine one to talk! It assumes baptism is not exploitation and yet it has the nerve to say that when any other religion does something similar it is exploitation! Infant baptism clearly seeks to demark the child from members of other religions and implies an insult to them. It invites the child into unfairness based on religion and into hypocrisy and superstition. Baptism is the superstition that if you undergo the rite with the right dispositions then you will have spiritual luck from God called grace. There is no difference between it in principle than carrying a rabbits foot. Carrying a rabbit's foot brings luck primarily by seeming to bring a spiritual sense of peace and security.
 
Those who get their children baptised usually do it because everybody else does it. They do it out of a respect for tradition. They may do it to respect the beliefs of their locality. Baptism doesn't respect the baby. Respecting the baby is more important. If everybody respected tradition there would be no progress in the world. Respecting beliefs and traditions is not about respecting them because they are true. Protestants may say for example that they have to respect the beliefs of Catholics despite not agreeing with them. Beliefs of small religions are not respected. If a small sect was advocating the sacrifice of goats this belief would get no respect. People only talk about respecting beliefs when the religion with the beliefs is very large and influential. This is unfair. A sect leader who commanded a woman to have an abortion would be excoriated while it is fine if a woman dies in pregnancy because of the pope's command that though the doctor told her to avoid getting pregnant and use contraception she must not heed him. To baptise out of respect for tradition is unfair and disgraceful. The ceremony is what matters to the participants and not the sacrament.
 
It is horrifying how people who believe that God sends unbaptised babies to Hell to burn forever to justly suffer for a sin they never committed would want to enter their child into a faith that teaches that and put them through a ceremony that expresses support for such an evil God. Such people are common enough among religious believers.

If you are forced by society to have your baby baptised a Catholic and you don't wish to, you could baptise the child outwardly yourself. If you withhold intention the baptism is invalid. It's no more valid than a baptism on a TV soap opera. Or you could simply use the words, "I baptise you in the name of the great force of all life". That would be invalid in the eyes of the Church. Keep a record. Doing the baptism yourself could really take off! The child later on can decide if he or she wants a real baptism or not.

CONCLUSION

Baptism is a big deal. If you don't think it is, then respect your baby. Respect religious people and don't be a fake. Don't have the baby put through a ceremony that is meant to be a big deal when you think it isn't. Be sincere. If you don't think baptising your baby is a big deal then why bother? Why not let the baby grow up a bit to decide for herself or himself if she or he wishes to be baptised?