SHOULD BABY BE BAPTISED WHEN A PARENT OBJECTS? 

Christians take their babies to the clergy to get them baptised. Water is sprinkled on them and magic words are said and this is supposed to remove a sin they never committed but which they are blamed for (original sin). God then adopts them as his children - he rejected them before. They are made members of his Church and given the power to believe and love God. The gate of Heaven is opened for them and they belong to God meaning they must obey him instead of pleasing themselves.

The problem
 
Parents have the right to object to their child being made a servant of the Church and obliged to obey it. But what if one parent wants the child baptised to accomplish this and the other one does not?
 
The objecting parent needs to be respected
 
Babies should not be baptised if one or both parents are opposed to the baptism.

The doctrine of the Church is that baptism is not a right but a gift from God. Yet some seem to think they have a right to get their babies baptised or the baby has a right to get baptised! If the baby has a right parents have less right.

Baptism insults the child and captures the child in the name of religion.
 
Some say if a father objected to his estranged girlfriend or if a mother objected to her estranged boyfriend for taking the child of the union for baptism he or she would come across as a nutcase. This assumes that baptism is not nutty. It is extremely nutty. Just because in some places nearly all babies are baptised that doesn’t mean it should be done or is sensible behaviour. It is not prevalence but rationality that determines what is normal or at least not “nutty”. Is it not nutty to ignore the wishes of the father that the baby not be baptised?
 
Those people assume that baptism is just splashing water. If it is just splashing water then why should it be the person who wants to have the baby baptised coming first? Why not toss a coin? Or better still why not listen to the person who doesn’t put religious claims first? Would you let somebody splash your child even with a drop of water when the splash is an insult to the child and signifies a desire to brainwash the child? Would you let your child be baptised into the Ku Klux Klan even if the child won’t be raised as a KKK? By baptising the child you are resolving to make it feel superior to children that are not baptised. End of.
 
The Church should not be baptising when the participants don't consider the baptism or the Church initiation important and consider them to be mere things that people do, eccentric customs. If baptism is important then the father has the right to make a fuss and ask that the baptism not go ahead.
 
If the father does not want to be seen as a nut over a mere splashing of the baby with water and it is that insignificant, then what about the mother being a nut for making a fuss about getting the child splashed? Why pick on the father and not her? If a person says that something happens is just natural and somebody else says it is supernatural it is the first person who should be regarded as sane. The other is being a nut.
 
Is she not a nut for acting as if the baptism is not the father's business? And for what? Religion! There should be no baptism without his consent.
 
To accuse the father of being a nut for opposing the baptism denies the fact that his so-called nuttiness does no harm. He has a right to it. Maybe he does think that baptism is a load of hocus-pocus but just wants to assert his right to refuse to consent to his baby being baptised. It might be the violation of his rights that bothers him not the baptism. There is nothing nutty about asserting such a right. If it is nutty of him to object to his baby being baptised, then those Catholic parents who object when their baby is taken for Protestant baptism must be mega-nutty!
 
Why should one parent have the right to have the child baptised in defiance of the other parent? Where is compromise and discussion in all this? Again we see a Church that doesn’t care whose rights it opposes as long as it gets the baby.
 
The father or mother must be given the legal right to stop infant baptisms if the parent the child is with seeks to have the child baptised. Would this make the state interfere in religion? Not if the injunction is not about stopping baptism as such but about giving parents rights.
 
If a religion appeared that believed in saving babies for God by tracing a symbol on their foreheads using sheep urine an injunction would be granted without quibble if a parent requested that the baptism be averted and prevented by law. But is the sheep urine as bad as the meaning of baptism - that a child should be conditioned to accept the laws of the Church and subjected to them?
 
If Catholicism is man-made, if Jesus was a fraud, then nobody would object to infant baptism being stopped by a parent who objects to the child being brought to the baptismal font. Denying the parent that right is imposing the belief, implicit or explicit, that the Church and baptism are divine on the parent. Their right to decide for their child is ignored. It is therefore imposing on the child.
 
If enrolling your baby in the gym cannot make it a true member of the gym but only a nominal or pretend one, surely trying to enrol him or her in the Church is far sillier if it is true that our nature is to live without God? It is really down to a refusal to accept anybody as a person, they have to be accepted as a Catholic.
 



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