VULNERABLE PEOPLE ARE BAPTISED INTO AN ENTITY THAT IS NOT VULNERABLE BUT WHICH HOLDS POWER

Commonsense says we need to be wary of organisations that are bigger than us.  Keeping out of them until you inform yourself carefully would be the only prudence choice.

Babies and mentally disturbed people are baptised into the Catholic Church.
 
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that it is infallible and irrevocable doctrine that faith is infused by God’s miracle power at baptism. You can't then be a Catholic and deny it. But the Church is unable to prove this. Statistics certainly show that Catholics today show a weaker inclination than say Mormons or Muslims to believe in their religion without picking and choosing the doctrines that suit them. That cherry-picking is a sign that faith is absent! There is faith but not in Catholicism! So, in the context of all that, baptism is just an excuse for claiming the right to indoctrinate children. There would only be such a right if proof existed.
 
The child that is baptised is not allowed to doubt any information about faith and morals coming from the Church at all. The Church teaches that the teaching authority of the priests and bishops who are one in heart and communion with Rome must be heeded and obeyed by all who are baptised. What is so special about these men that we should do that? This is manipulation. At least pagans are better off for the Church says they can doubt all they want before they are ready for the gift of faith. Infant baptism is vicious and an assault on human rights when it is claimed that it turns a person into a believer and member of the Church, the body of believers. Making the child a Catholic at baptism makes the child feel that adults have the right to make decisions for it. They do but not to that extent!
 
Conditioning is dangerous. It makes young Catholics hate Protestants. It makes young gay people hate themselves. It makes some young Muslims become suicide bombers or approve of such activity. People like to fit in so they absorb the prejudices of others. The young are not sure about how to live in the world so they take the easiest and most convenient route. They start to depend on the example and opinions and influence of their segment of society and environment and take on some of that identity.
 
The prejudices may be against groups and races and seen to be bad or against certain views which is just as dangerous. Conditioning works like hypnosis. It takes away our freedom and restricts us.
 
It is said that children have an inclination to believe in God so human nature then is inherently religious. Even if that is true, why not teach children spirituality without forcing any particular religion on them? A child would be happy not to go to Church which indicates that we should not describe children as religious but maybe as spiritual. Children have a tendency towards animism. If they fall over a brick they blame the brick because they think that things have consciousness and are bad or good. So it is more correct to say that their nature is inherently superstitious not religious. If they become religious later on then are they not swapping childlike superstition for religious superstition? If the religion is true, they may still be motivated by superstitious desires to follow it. It is better to be conditioned by science and secularism than religion for at least you are going to have a high regard for criticising your beliefs and you will be humbler than the believer in religion. You will revere evidence while religious people manipulate evidence and twist it to suit their faith. As Valerie Tarico noted, the brain is like a lawyer. It wants to be seen as believing what is right or true. It does not really care about being right (page 217, The Dark Side, Valerie Tarico, Dea Press, Seattle, 2006). That is a warning that the promotion of religion or anything else that decides what to believe and then looks for evidence to justify it is dangerous. Evidence should create belief. Science can't explain everything that does not change the fact that we should use the critical scientific method and only apportion belief to evidence.
 
There are so many things we are conditioned to believe or assume and religion is just one of them. There can be no doubt that the lack of interest in most religious people to find the truth - if they did work hard to find the truth there would not be so many different squabbling religions - is a sign of being conditioned. Brides get upset if they think their husbands-to-be see them in their wedding dress before the ceremony. This is another example of conditioning.
 
A woman is raped. The rapist drowns himself. Should we then hypnotise the woman to think the rape never happened? It will help her get on with her life if we do. But all agree we should not do it. If so, then religious delusion and religious conditioning and religious hypnosis are wrong. Religion doesn't mind deluding and conditioning people so it makes a travesty of right and wrong.
 
Religion should encourage people to find the faith or non-faith that works for them. Catholics should be encouraged to become Protestants by Catholics if they so wish as long as they are acting seriously and with deliberation. This doesn’t happen which shows there is a lot of prejudice and perhaps hatred simmering under the surface.
 
Baptism is against the kind of religious freedom we have commented on. It is pro-conditioning. It marries a child to the Church and the Church’s idea of God (God is not necessarily the Church’s idea of him so it is really the Church that is being served not God when God is served) and is making a commitment to the Church for the child and resolves to condition the child to make that commitment later on his or her own.
 
Conditioning is dangerous and degrading and individuality must be explored and nurtured. It is bad not because of the bad results that it can have – St Padre Pio would have been an Islamic suicide bomber had he been in the time and place for that when he was a boy. Religious conditioning is saying to the child, “We don’t want you as you are. We want you to be like us or our Church.” It is child-abuse.
  
Conditioning cannot be avoided completely so it is important to teach a child only what is true and proven. The religious fantasies that religions makes doctrines of are dangerous. If you teach a child that God will send her to Hell for being bad, the child will see God as bad and the universe he runs as a threat. It will fill the child with anger for she will feel she cannot be free when she has to do good to avoid hell. To tell her that God is good is to present her with a bad example for she will see God as somebody bad who you have to pretend is good.

Nobody has the right to promise to unduly influence their child never mind indoctrination!  Don't impose what was done to you on somebody else because it was done to you.

Doctrines such as that bad people or sinners go to suffer forever in Hell are perversely satisfying especially to children. Parents who know what they are doing will not expose their children to a religion that teaches such doctrine. And baptism requires them to so it should be abandoned. Atheist children who harbour a vindictive pleasure at the misfortune of their enemies will not be as malign as those who believe in Hell. You would be very evil if you would enjoy the thought of somebody suffering forever. Christianity will deny it encourages such thinking but it knows that children will be children so it does encourage it.
 
Only a few Christians do what may be described as heroic good works. The rest find that their faith helps them to cope with the harsh realities of life but they are not very willing to change these realities! Generally speaking religious faith is a vice. For example, if you believe God is all-powerful and ultimately responsible for all that happens then his will will be done. Whether you help cancer patients by giving donations or not doesn't matter. God is working and there is every reason to be optimistic even if all cancer patients never get another minute of help.
 
Psychologists have shown that we have the tendency to see the world as fair though the evidence is that it is not. We tend to treat people who win big prizes for example as if they deserved it. We tend to blame people for their own misfortune. The concept of a God who is in control and who is fair makes this vicious tendency worse. Catholic Church, we are bad enough as we are without you coming along to make us worse!
 
Every hypocrite goes about pretending and claiming to be a well-meaning person. A religious person who teaches a faith that isn't true is not a well-meaning person no matter how much of a do-gooder they are. You are only well-meaning if you do the wrong thing while genuinely meaning to help others and don't have the chance to know any better. Religionists can and should know better.
 
The Catholic Church teaches that we have no free will to live a sinless life. We only have free will to decide what sins we are to commit. This is not an encouraging message. A child with the use of reason - which means he develops free will then - that wouldn't sin would have to do it to avoid contradicting the faith and is in fact conditioned to sin. The Church reckons children become capable of sin around seven years old.

The lies and obvious contradictions in Catholic teaching are not conducive to having real honest faith.  Faith and prayer come across as window dressing.  Is the true motive of the Church just to claw power by sticking a religious label on you?  A label may not be yours but it will still have an impact.  It still provides a social construct, a tool of power.  It is undeniable that just like the Pharisees Jesus complained about, the focus is mostly on getting the label glued on to you when you are at your most vulnerable.  Helping you to believe and trust in God takes a lower place.