Sacrament of Confirmation

The Church attempts to force membership on the Church on babies when it baptises them. That cannot be done which is why we call it an attempt to force. The baby grows up and when able to decide for herself, she is offered confirmation a ritual that supposedly confirms the baptismal obligations and has her deciding for herself that she should have been baptised. Confirmation makes her a full member of the Church and gives her another fuller share in the presence of God, the Holy Spirit. It is a sacrament that is given once in life and usually by a bishop though a priest can give it.

In reality, children are manipulated by the Church and forced by parents and pressured by the Catholic parish and the school to take confirmation.

In Catholicism, confirmation is about seeking a power that will make you Catholic. If you see Catholicism as a crafty form of occultism that could be worrying!

Confirmation means making a vow to accept the teaching of the Church as true and infallible and thus to confirm your membership that you allegedly got by baptism as a baby. It is renouncing cherry-picking. It means accepting the evil doctrine that the Bible with its evil teaching in the name of God is really God's word and authored by him. But nothing gives you the right to vow to believe that God was right to command the Jews to stone people to death.

A rite that is supposed to turn you into a proper Catholic and change you internally and externally into one magically can lead to bigotry. If you refuse to have it done, you will look like a person who has shut off the allegedly good spiritual effects of the sacrament. It is a rite of soft bigotry and it would be surprising if many children were confirmed with any concern for their right to refuse. All that is bad enough - but if there is no God and Catholicism is man-made it amounts to a very serious evil indeed. It would be strange to think the viciousness in the Bible and the Catholic religion is excusable if there is a God but not if man not god wrote the Bible or if only man created the Church!

Catholics say that you must go for confirmation in a state of grace - that is you must be in a good relationship with God.  If you are blocking God out by serious sin or whatever then the rite will do nothing for you.  The confirmation is not activated until whatever day you turn to God.  For that reason, we cannot assume that a boy or girl who is given full membership of the Church by confirmation has got that full membership yet!

Confirmation is based around the idea that God is three persons and the Holy Spirit is one of those persons and he is the one most associated with confirmation. The bishop tells the candidate when anointing her or him with oil that they are sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is called paraklsis - a defense attorney on the spiritual plane by none other than Jesus himself in the John gospel. Who does the Holy Spirit champion your cause against? God the Father?

 There must be a dispute then among those three people in God!  Confirmation is a blasphemous rite.  The fear aspect has been watered down.  People would get their children ready for confirmation and skip the ceremony if they were not ready on time!  Such a mockery of spirituality should be granted censure and not treated as an excuse for a cultural show and then a party.