Baptism makes one part of the Church. It is said to remove the divine ban on the child from entering Heaven to enjoy everlasting happiness there with God. It is said to do away with the weakness that inclines us to sin. It puts the Holy Spirit in our hearts. It puts the gift of faith in the baby. The baby will grow up to be a believer - unless he or she resists - and is called to be a saint through baptism. All that is serious stuff.
The Catholic Church considers baptism to be a big step. Its even more important than marriage. The Church says that the sacrament of marriage is only possible if the man and woman have been baptised.
The Church is not supposed to baptise babies that will not be raised to believe the Catholic Church is true. If baptism cures the baby of sin and sinful inclinations then surely it should be given the baptism. The Catholics retort that the baby receives the inclination to see that their doctrines are all true and receives the power to have faith through the grace of the sacrament. Thus if the baby gets bigger and does not believe he is resisting God and not responding to the grace within.
Incredibly the priests contradict teaching that babies must not be baptised if the chance is unlikely that he or she will be helped to become a true believer by baptising babies of parents who never go to Mass. The parents having some weak faith is considered to be enough. Chances are the parents know very little of the faith. They only have a weak opinion that the faith is true. But that only refers to what they know of it or think they know of it. An opinion is not faith.
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. Its 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.
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.
Most Christians take babies to church to have water poured over them by a minister or priest who says, "I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit". They are baptised into the name of God which means the authority of God. They are under the authority of God and therefore under the authority of the men God has chosen to run his Church. You can't be baptised and put under the authority of the Father, the Son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit unless you believe in them. Baptism confers the obligation to believe in what God has revealed. For Protestants, this is whatever the Bible says for it is supposed to have been inspired by God. For Catholics, it is whatever the Bible and the infallible Church say.
For example, if a gay couple take their baby for baptism they are obligating that child to believe that homosexuality is dirty and wrong and an abomination! If an unwed couple take their baby for baptism they are obligating the child to disapprove of the very act that brought the child into existence!
Most Christians believe the rite puts grace into the baptised. Grace is a power from God that puts belief and the inclination to become a committed Christian into the babies as if by magic. It is an attempt to use the supernatural to control the child. This is a reflection of baptism being entry into the Church and commitment to what the Church believes. That is why vows of commitment to the teaching of the Church and the life the Church requires of its members are made on behalf of the baby by the parents and godparents.
For the religion doing the baptism, the baptism is a big deal. Its main purpose is to declare that a religious creed and structure comes before the child. When you believe without proof that your baby needs the Devil's influence and original sin cast out by the power of baptism that is declaring that the religion comes first. You need very strong evidence to have the right to look upon your baby as needing the magic of baptism. The casting out of evil supposedly makes the baby a member of the Church meaning that the baby is not as important as a baby but as Catholic baby.
Nobody has the right to ask you to believe anything no matter what it is. Real belief is caused by the evidence. It is perceiving that based on the evidence you have, something is probably true. Thus belief is personal. It is your own business. Yet baptism has parents trying to magically create belief in the Church in a child. This implies that the parents and the Church have a right to ask the child to believe. And more than that, they are obligated to! That's even worse than asking.
Jesus asked for faith and belief. This showed his true colours. It shows what his Church is really like too.
If belief is not just your own business, then it must be the Church's business. It is this idea that was and is behind Church campaigns in favour of censorship. It is in favour of the Church's attempts to condition children which are a form of censorship. It is in favour of the Church baptising babies into Church membership. If you have no right to ask anybody to believe, you have even less right to try and make Catholics of your children.
The more extraordinary a doctrine is the more extraordinary is the evidence you must be able to present to anyone who you invite to believe in it. Every single Catholic doctrine is extraordinary in its content and also in its importance. For example, if you refuse to believe any doctrine or if you refuse to obey you refuse to obey the most important being there is: God. And you may go to Hell for all eternity. Catholic doctrine is so serious that nobody should be allowed to enter the Church as a member without being informed of it. The Church for example teaches that an accident that destroys the universe is better than a single little sin. Nearly all Catholics have been manipulated.
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 is said to be a big deal because it spiritually changes the baby and is an essential for fitting the baby for Heaven. Babies prior to baptism are thought to be in such a spiritual condition that it is as if they are guilty of sin and this is because they are contaminated as a result of the sin Adam, the first man committed when he ate the forbidden fruit. Though they never actually sinned, they are in the same condition as if they did. This is called original sin. The baby then comes into existence spiritually lifeless and spiritually dead. The baby stays that way until baptism. The central idea and central motive for why Catholics baptise babies is so that the baby may be reborn, regenerated or born again. The terms all refer to the same thing. This new birth is compared to natural birth. With natural birth, you come into the world. With the new birth you have a birth as well. This is birth into a life with God. The Church says this new birth is the most important one. When you think about it, the meaning of baptism is extremely insulting and arrogant. The new birth doctrine outlines the difference between the baptised and the unbaptised as being the same as the difference between day and night. The difference is not in the life the baptised have to live as in going to Catholic school and living as a Catholic but spiritual. A person mistakenly thought to have been baptised could live as a Catholic but would not be a real one. A person should feel very very uncomfortable about these vicious doctrines of the new birth. Such teaching pretends that something that isn't very important is of extreme importance. Few parents would feel that way. They have baptism performed to imitate everybody else. They will see no difference between their baptised child and the unbaptised Muslim child next door. They have to insult their intelligence to serve the Church and pretend there is a dramatic difference. The Muslim will be slandered as bad and dangerous and the baptised as good.
When you are baptised, you are declared a member and therefore supporter of the Christian faith. Even dissident Catholics are responsible for the damage the papacy does for they support the papacy in the sense that they give it a reason to exist and a reason to claim to know the mysterious mind of God. It is not right to impose such a heavy responsibility on a baby. Baptism dedicates the baby to a specific interpretation of theology and morality. The baby is considered evil and sinful if he or she grows up to reject the religious system that initiated her or him. Then he or she will be in danger of suffering in Hell forever. Even if you don't believe in Hell and there is no Hell, there is no escaping the fact that if he or she fears Hell he or she is making himself or herself deserve one when he or she turns away from the Church. People always lose faith bit by bit and this cannot be done without believing one has committed a very serious sin against faith that deserves Hell at some point. When most Church members are really just following what they want to believe rather than what the Church says they are obligated to believe because of their baptism, it is simply spiritually dangerous to have your child baptised!
Christianity says that if there were no God life would be about the survival of the fittest instead of kindness. They say that is why belief in God and ingraining it into children is so important. This marks belief in the importance of God as an implicit attack on atheists. It says that if one is to become an atheist one should be a brute. Even if the atheist were not as bad as that he or she stands for a position that will encourage others to be so the atheist is still doing great harm merely by being atheist.
Even if there were a God, survival of the fittest might still be the law. Christian believers in evolution say that the mutations necessary for evolution to happen did not happen by chance but this process was planned by God. So God was using the survival of the fittest method. He might need it like he needs human suffering. He might need it for one of his mysterious purposes. Plus most people do not want to live the survival of the fittest kind of life and even those that do don't live it a lot. People want to be kind.
Religion says that without God, we can drop moral beliefs altogether and just live by survival of the fittest. But even survival of the fittest is a kind of moral code itself. It seeks to make the strongest and the best win out. So it is clear that dropping God does not mean dropping beliefs about right and wrong. It does not mean dropping morality. The point is that even without belief in God we have some kind of moral code. I am not advocating any might is right philosophy.
Baptism offers a child a relationship with an evil God. God's good points can't justify adoring him when he does great evil. It is because he can do good that he is evil so he merits no praise. A God who sets up nature so that some people will die in sin and go to Hell forever to suffer and abide in sin is an evil God. Even if there was some justification for him punishing somebody forever there is none for him letting somebody be stuck in sin forever. Catholicism teaches that Hell is our own choice, a choice made to live without God, that is confirmed by death and ratified by God. In other words, this sympathetic religion claims that Hell is all our own fault. If there was no Hell or danger of it or even if only a handful of people went to Hell, it wouldn't matter a lot if one was baptised or not. The stress on the importance of baptism reflects the fear of everlasting torment in Hell. Death cannot confirm everlasting antagonism to God unless God has given it this power. So it is God rather than death that puts you in Hell forever. How could dying - especially unexpectedly - necessarily mean you want to be fixed in whatever state of sin you are in? Living would say that more than dying - you live on purpose but you don't usually die on purpose. The Catholics contradict themselves. The Hell they envisage is God's fault and then they admit that and then blame the sinner. In other words, they think it is wrong to damn a person forever so they blame the person instead of God knowing fine well its his fault too. Its mainly God's fault - he is the creator. Hell is a doctrine of hatred disguised as love. It leads to feelings of hatred and bigotry.
How can the Christian child or indeed any Christian be happy if they could possibly go to Hell? What happens is they resort to the sin of presumption. This is the sin of assuming that you can be a heretic and a sinner or both and still go to Heaven for God will miraculously forgive you on your deathbed or before. It is the attitude of "Oh I am too great to go to Hell it only happens to other people like that old pervert up the road." This attitude is full of subliminal hatred and contempt for others and as for the arrogance it is anything but subliminal. Baptism commits a child to belief in Hell. Indeed if Hell does not exist then baptism is hardly very important. Presumption is such a dangerous sin that the Church says that it is the reason why the Pharisees who said Jesus was a servant of the Devil were declared to be inevitably going to Hell. They were blinded to their need to repent.
God supposedly ratifies the eternal damnation chosen by the sinner. Its a kind of, "O have it your own way!" kind of thing. If somebody chooses something they choose it. There is nothing anybody can do about it. Letting somebody choose is not ratifying - there is nothing you can do but let them. Letting them choose is strictly speaking impossible for they will choose what they choose. Letting them is not an act because you can't make anybody choose something or not choose it. It is nonsense to speak of ratifying somebody's choice unless you have the power to stop them changing their minds but decline to use it. The Bible speaks of everlasting punishment by God meaning he must ratify this punishment. If the damned torment themselves then this is not punishment. The jailbird cannot call jail punishment when the jail door is left open for him and he won't use it. Eternal punishment is not punishment by God even if it is punishment. The doctrine of Hell implies that God is right to set it up so that a sinner will be attracted to sin forever and punished forever. Its vindictive.
Christians urge people to have the attitude, "You are a good person but you should not have done x y or z for it was sinful." The deceit of this is plain when you put it into different words but keep the meaning intact: "You are not a sinner but you have sinned". A child would feel persecuted when reprimanded by a Christian for bad behaviour when that deceit is at the heart of Christianity. And it gets worse when the incoherent Christians then start bleating, "We are a Church of sinners. The Church is not a haven for the holy but a hospital for sinners. We are all sinners." That proves the insincerity of their loving and un-condemning words. Also, if I am a sinner myself that does not mean I should not condemn other sinners or say they have sinned and are bad. If I am a bad businessman does that mean I should not point out the clear mistakes made by other businessmen? Am I supposed to say nothing and refuse to help because I am so bad myself? To say that me being a sinner means I should look at myself instead of judging others is silly. It actually insults me and shows no genuine concern for them. I should look at myself yes but also look at them. I have a right to know the truth about others and myself. Jesus said you must throw away the plank in your eye before you look at the mote in another's. And this silly man is thought to be God and a wise teacher!
If the Christians didn't class themselves as superior people or people who have been cleansed of their sin and are like they have never sinned, they would not be in a position to tell you that you have sinned. Jesus said that if you have sins on your conscience you must clean it up before you think about anybody else's sins. The implication is that all sin is equally evil. The "mild" or average sinner can't speak out against the sins or impending sins of somebody who plans to rape or murder etc. The Christians saying, "You will sin if you do such and such. I do not condemn you for we are all sinners" is just sycophantism. It is really an encouragement to sin for it states we are all sinners giving the impression that you may as well sin as a dog may bark.
Condemning a sin that somebody has committed and then saying, "We are all sinners", is using the phrase as an excuse for condemning others. Christians feel a need to say it which implies that you cannot point out somebody's sin without being judgemental unless you say it and believe it. A forgiven and changed person is in the same present situation as a person who never sinned - that is, they are morally clean. If you have forgiven yourself your sins, you have to unforgive your sins to say it! You have to insult the forgiveness God gave you!
To baptise a baby is to say, "Baptism took my original sin away and I want you to be like me." Its pompous. It is saying, "I am so good that I must have been cleansed of the evil that is in human beings - translation, baptism works for I am better than others even those who seem to be good." Baptism commits a child to arrogance and evil.
Those who decide to have the baby baptised and who perform the baptism are persons who are said by Christianity to be real sinners. These real sinners judge the baby as being as if it were a sinner! Jesus Christ told his hearers that if they greet only their brothers there is no good in that for even the pagans do the same (Matthew 5:45-46). Why didn't he simply say, "Greet all people, greet strangers and enemies"? Mentioning the pagans the way he did was quite disparaging and implying that because they were not members of his religion that any good they do would be surprising! He was telling the people to be better than them! This is the idea of one religion not just being true and the others less true or false, but the idea of members of the true religion alone being deserving of respect.
The baby receiving a Catholic baptism does not promise to be a Catholic. But the Church says that the parents and godparents promise it for him by proxy. So for the Church it is the same as if the child consented. That is why the child receives Catholic membership at baptism. Catholic baptism is not the equivalent of a baby dedication service. Such services promise to bless the baby and encourage the baby to become a believer when he or she grows older. They do not confer membership but hope to encourage membership. For the Catholic Church, baptism confers membership and the obligation to stay a member forever. Despite what the Church says, nobody else can make your decision for you even if you are a baby. The parents and godparents consenting to put God's spirit into a baby from which it is absent cannot count as the baby consenting. The baby is being demeaned in the name of religion. It is forced conversion.
For the unbeliever, religion accuses her or him of endangering their child's happiness and spiritual welfare and soul by not having her baptised. It accuses her or him of raising a child to endanger other souls. Baptism is a big deal. It indicates that an unbaptised child has the right to condemn the sin of her or his parents in not having her or him baptised.
For Christians, the main commandment is to love for the love of God - ie to make pleasing God the only real motive you have for all the good things you do. This love is caused by the supernatural power of God and is a miracle - it only happens to those who have been baptised in some way. So baptism is of extreme importance. Also, baptism is the gateway to the other sacraments - the Church says that an unbaptised person has no right to get communion even if they want it on their deathbed and also says they receive no grace or blessing in taking it.
Religion claims that it is objectively bad to fail to have your baby baptised. It isn't wrong just because Catholics believe it is wrong or their consciences tell them it is wrong. It really is wrong. To have your child baptised is to tacitly consent to the accusation. The accusation is unjust. The Church cannot justify it. When you get on good terms with a religion or organisation that is being unreasonable, is their acceptance of you real acceptance? If you really accept people you don't ask them to do silly things to please you. The acceptance is just hypocritical whitewash.
Nobody should accuse you of doing something objectively evil without proving it. Religion cannot do that. Religion is advocating hatred when it accuses.
Catholics believe that a good Catholic will respect people who do not believe in Catholicism as human beings. Catholics say we must respect freedom of conscience. But they say that respecting this freedom does not mean you must respect beliefs that defy logic or human decency. They say that a person who believes that the world is made of wood does not deserve to have this belief respected. He can be respected as a person and as sincere but his belief should not be respected or affirmed. They say it is the belief not the person that is being opposed. They say they can do this for they oppose the belief for the person's sake or benefit. Clearly then Catholic baptism seeks to turn a child against the truth - assuming that what is truth is not what the Catholic Church believes. If the Church is wrong, then the Church opposes truth. Baptism is a big deal for the parent who is not sure that the Catholic Church really is the true Church and a bigger deal for an unbeliever.
Catholics would say that if you baptised your dog that you were somehow mistreating the animal for it didn't consent to be baptised. And they would say this mistreatment is compounded by the fact that the poor dog can't consent. By that logic they admit they are mistreating their babies whom they get baptised. Its a big deal if you mistreat your child for a religion. And the less faith you have in the religion the worse you make yourself.
Baptism must never be dismissed as a minor thing. It matters for believers. It matters for unbelievers. A lot.
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. Its 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.
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.
Baby baptism is child-abuse or attempted child-abuse when the parents take religion with a pinch of salt. The Church senses this for it has banned Catholics for giving the Mormons information on the dead for it knows the Mormons depend on it to be able to perform baptism by proxy for the dead. This bothers the Church even though Mormons believe the dead person must accept the baptism done for her or him for it to be any good! If it bothers the Church in relation to the dead, it shows that the Church knows it is wrong to baptise innocent babies.
The Book of Mormon God severely condemns infant baptism. He says that those who believe it saves babies are committing a grave sin that endangers them of Hell. If a Mormon and a Catholic have a baby, the Mormon cannot permit the Catholic partner to have the baby baptised. Some say that for a Mormon, the baptism is just a useless rite and so it wouldn't be a sin for the Mormon to let it happen or to consent to it. They say that the baby could undergo an infant dedication ceremony as practiced by Mormons and a Catholic baptism and the baby could decide later what religion to follow. But it would be consenting to let others do what the Book of Mormon says insults the child and which damns the souls of the insulters! It would be implicitly approving of the evil. And if a child is baptised, the Church says the child must never be encouraged to go to any religion for spiritual sustenance but the Catholic Church. This is commonsense when baptism is intended to be the rite that admits one into the Catholic Church. The Mormon then cannot consent to a Catholic baptism without betraying her or his obligation to promote Mormonism.
If you are really concerned about treating your child fairly, if you really believe the child should decide when old enough, then it must be wrong to impose a religion on that child to give that child the bother of perhaps renouncing the religion later on! Some people suffer a lot as they make the transition from believer to non-believer. You claim that baptism confers an obligation on the child to believe and obey the faith that baptises it. You are making out that if a child rejects the baptism or church membership that the child is letting you down and breaking loyalty and has no sense of duty to the faith. You are urging the child to live up to the baptism on pain of sin and everlasting torment in Hell. In other words, you are acting like a spiritual bully. You are a bigot.
Baptism is so important that the Church agrees with people who have a child all covered in sores and who is very sick being baptised with stagnant water. This happened a lot in the poor hygiene of the Middle Ages. It can happen today in war zones. Infection will happen and may result in the death of the child. The Church holds that baptism must still be given for spiritual life that is being made pleasing to God by baptism matters far more than physical life. Jesus put his spiritual life before his physical life and didn't try to escape the arrest that led to his cross. He risked the life of his mother and friends and brothers in the way he practiced his spirituality.
Show solidarity with the babies and the sick who were killed by filthy baptismal water by keeping your baby away from the poisonous waters of baptism.
CONCLUSION
Baptism is a big deal. If you don't think it is, then respect your baby. Don't have it go 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?