DO PARENTS HAVE A RIGHT TO HAVE CHILD BAPTISED?

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.

It may be common to baptise but is still VERY strange

Why is it strange to put your child into Christianity? It is strange if you really want the best for your child.

It is strange to make a child a member of a religion you have not checked out well.

It is strange to commit the child to committing to Jesus above all people. Nobody really wants their child to love God not them or God most.

It is strange to commit the child to a faith that thrives on a kind of joy that comes from desensitisation.  The idea of somebody being at risk of Hell or the crucifix or God making viruses that slaughter little babies should cause a horrified reaction that is hard to get over.  Desensitisation is a form of abuse and brainwashing.

It is strange to commit the child to a faith that says the child should be prepared to die for it - faith is historical claims (eg Jesus was evil-free) and ethical claims – sex outside marriage is a sin.

It is strange to commit a child to a religion that hails and honours as top book one that is riddled with God inspired and religious inspired violence. Jesus was violent in the Temple and condemned anybody who says any Old Testament law however small is wrong (Matthew 5).

It is strange to commit a child to the protection of a God for what of the child if there is no God for she has to realise?

List of reasons why it's wrong to have a child baptised:

If you took the religion seriously, it makes serious claims and people have died for it,  you would be happy to let the child wait and decide for herself or himself

A good God will understand if you choose to delay

You risk devoting the child to a God who is not real or evil for he supposedly makes diseases to torment and kill little children

You commit the child to believe the evil Bible is holy and God's word - the brutality is so normalised that you will search hard for a Christian who left the faith over it - that is child abuse.  What passes for religious faith is really just habit and familiarity and normalisation of what should horrify us.

You commit the child to agree that women who have abortions are murderers who should know that the zygote has an equal right to life to them!

You commit the child to agree that God who does not respect many choices should respect the choice to go to Hell simply because you happen to have died without repenting sin

You may hope the religion will be a source of comfort for the child but religion is about historical and ethical claims - loyalty to that system of doctrine is what it means when it speaks about faith.  Faith is not a placebo.

You are evangelising and involving others and thus causing them to be evangelised.

Foreword:
 
Baptising your child is not a choice but a lack of information.  Nobody, certainly not the priest, makes sure you know why or why not you should make this decision for the child.  A child is not you or your property.  That is why any major choice made for the child should be informed thoroughly.  A religion of integrity and genuine faith would grant equality to the choice not to join or to join.  Even if there were a right to enrol your child into a religion, most parents abuse that right by not caring about truth and evidence and even what the religion teaches.

There is no such thing as a right to have your child baptised. But those who have the child baptised a Catholic have less right to get this done than somebody getting the child baptised a Protestant who will not impute the Catholic meaning to baptism. The reason is that with a Catholic baptism the child is put under laws that may affect her or him adversely later in life. Those consequences are usually never spelled out by priests which is very manipulative of them.  The baptism degrades the child by making her or him the public property of a manmade religion. 

When it is pointed out that baptism seems a cynical or manipulative way to get recruits people point to the parents and the culture they are part of some say.  "You can’t really divorce your religious background.  A person raised say Catholic will always have to live with aspects of Catholicism.  It will affect how they feel and think to some extent." What kind of argument is that for infant baptism being acceptable and even desirable? You are a product of the religion and culture you are born into but that does not stop them allowing you to make your own choice!  Mormons do not become Mormons until they are eight.  Indeed how could they? And if you being a product of your culture happens in the long years after your first birthday how could that justify baptising you before any of it even starts?   It bans it actually!  And you are more than just a religious product of your culture.  If you are gay that may mean everything to you while your Catholic formation means little.  You are a product of loads of things not just religion.

NO RIGHT TO FORCE RELIGIOUS OBLIGATIONS ON A BABY
 
It is hideous to say that God's grace is needed to get you into Heaven and this grace corrects the moral and spiritual defects in you and that receptivity to grace is administered to babies in baptism. This is clearly forced conversion where the child is anti-God by default and then forced to be receptive by baptism. The implication is that the force is justifiable for the baby is so bad.

Parents who don't know enough about Catholicism to make a truly informed decision for it themselves have no right to try and make their child a member. If parents really believe that the child has a right to choose membership in the Church or reject it then why do they not choose a religion that encourages them to leave if they don't feel it is for them?

Religion says that it is necessary to hate sin in yourself and others but tells you to love the sinner. Hating sin is not very nice or happiness inducing. It is personal ill-feeling in a hypothetical but real sense. It seems fake to direct ill-feeling and rancour away from the sinner to the sin. It's artificial and self-righteous. But religion might keep maintaining that it is a necessary evil for the alternative is worse. But then religion should stop pretending to be so safe and goody goody. It needs to tell us the risks of being religious. It should certainly not be influencing and conditioning and imposing membership on children and on the unwary.

Even if baptism could make you a Catholic, it cannot make you Catholic as in believer.  Nobody considers an Anglican a Roman Catholic for believing more Catholic doctrine than a professed Catholic.  Catholic summarises different ways of being Catholic.  It covers living as a Catholic, believing as a Catholic, going through the rites a Catholic needs, confessing the Catholic faith etc.  Though people deserve respect for what they believe sincerely a problem arises: is it really their belief or are they conditioned?  An idea is not truly accepted if you are programmed to accept it.  Conditioning means it is not your belief but somebody else's at best.

The Catholic Church today claims that it is the one true Church so it has the right to make babies members of the Church and obligated to believe its doctrines when it baptises them. But the religion is not clearly the one true Church and the vast majority of students of religion find serious errors in the Church's doctrine and science is against the faith. Thus the baptisms are clearly forced conversion. Priests who cannot give a convincing case for Catholicism being all true have no business baptising babies and thereby degrading them.
 
The Church says that imposing the obligations of a Christian life on a baby is fair because the benefits hugely outweigh the obligations. They mean that baptism puts you right with God and protects your soul from sin. This is nonsense for most Catholics believe what they are not allowed to believe and ignore the moral directives of the Church. There is no evidence that baptism does anything for anybody. Those who think it helps them to be good may just be naturally good anyway. It may not be down to the ritual. Plus Mormons who are supposedly invalidly baptised can live good lives. Baptism then insults pagans and those who are not baptised and calls them miserable and evil and dangerous.
 
Parents, by having their babies baptised, are saying that the religion they are entering the children in is good and therefore the children should be raised as believers in whatever that religion teaches and raised to practice what it practices. Yet most of these parents contradict this by only accepting religion on their terms not its terms. They pick and choose what they want to adhere to and what they want to discard. That is really saying that religion is man-made and bad when followed properly. It is hard to see how if parents and godparents consent to church membership for you when they make vows relating to that at your baptism how their consent could be valid. It's intending to expose the child to bad influence. The priests know that the consent is worthless but turn a blind eye in the hope of having the child brainwashed into becoming a Catholic or whatever at school and in the home. When there is no valid consent by the representatives of the child how can anybody say that baptism isn't a violation of the dignity and freedom and person of the child?
 
A baby cannot belong to any religion no matter how many godparents she or he has that make the profession of faith in the Church or vows of commitment to the Church for her or him. To say otherwise is absurd. The religious leaders make these laws that they can because their chief goal in life is not to help others find the spirituality that is right for them but for others to agree with their beliefs. Parents have a duty to help their child find what works for her or him not to limit a child to some religion.  
 
People are afraid of what demands God might make of them. So they invent a God for themselves. He is their mental idol for he is a God that suits them. To get a baby baptised is simply to vow to rear it to become a hypocrite.
 
If baptism were not an attempt to force religious membership on a child, the godparents would not be commissioned by the Church and the parents to choose membership for the child by proxy. What could happen is that the child would be baptised but the membership would be conditional on the child's response when he or she gets old enough. The rite will only work if the child accepts it later. For example, God should treat the child as baptised and a member of the Church if the child dies and so let the child into Heaven. Then he should take the baptism as valid. If the child does not die and he or she repudiates the baptism then his or her baptism will account for nothing and need to be repeated. If he or she accepts then the baptism is validated. The Church holds that if you accept the sacrament of confirmation you only receive the powers of the rite and the graces if you are antagonistic to God. You get the graces only when you repent and turn to him. So it is only a rite until the person is suited. It should be the same with baptism and it is not. However baptising the child is still an act of religious intolerance. It implies that being a human person born into a good family who will raise the child well is not enough. It is insulting.
 
If you get confirmation when you are asleep, the rite has to be repeated for you were asleep. You can't get communion, you can't get confession, you can't get ordained, you can't get any sacrament barring baptism unless you are awake. With extreme unction, if you pass into a coma before you are anointed, the sacrament will not work if you went into the coma set against the idea of being anointed. So it depends on what your state of mind was before you passed into the coma. So consent is still necessary for it. So you need to give consent to get a sacrament and so it is a violation of your rights if you can't give it and are given the sacrament. If it is a violation to give you a sacrament without your conscious consent at the moment of the rite. Extreme unction is an exception for it is a sacrament for the sick or dying and so one might not be conscious. But it still requires your consent though, just that your conscious consent is unnecessary if you can't give it. Baptism violates the rights of the baby. It cares not a whit for consent. It cares even less when it can be given when the baby is asleep. At least if the child was awake it would be closer to the power to make consent.    
 
Religion makes misrepresentations. A misrepresentation is something that is said to persuade a person to make a contract which they wouldn't do if they were told the truth - it is making a person mistakenly believe they should ratify the contract. Even if the victim accepts the contract, the victim is not bound by the contract if misrepresentations were made. Religion makes misrepresentations to persuade people to go to it for baptism. Baptism contracts the recipient to God, or more accurately the religion for people only worship what others say God is like. The contract is made for the baby by godparents at baptism and adults make their own contract. Misrepresentations are a legal matter. And especially considering that baptism seeks to make the baby a member of the baptising Church in the eyes of the law. The failure of the Church to provide any evidence that baptism does any supernatural good shows that baptism is a very manipulative and cheating contract.

When a natural disaster strikes, or when a civil conflict breaks out, the Salvation Army is often among the first to respond and provide relief to the victims. If you accept Catholic baptism you express and commit yourself to the belief that if you are not baptised you are not Christian. It doesn't matter then how much you pray and worship you are not a Christian. This is outrageous. It is clear that no good person would consent to Catholic baptism if they knew what they were doing. That alone makes it wrong to assume that you can baptise babies into Catholicism without violating them.
 
PARENTAL RIGHT TO BAPTISE CHILD?
 
The Church claims that parents have the right to decide that a baby should be baptised and that the baby should be raised as a believer. This is untrue. The fact that parents have to decide things for their babies does not mean that this amounts to having a right. If I am forced against my will to sack John unfairly that does not mean I have the right to do it. Even though it would be worse if I didn't sack him, I had no right to. Parents are forced to make decisions for the baby because the baby can't make decisions. If parents need to make a decision about having the baby baptised, that need is not a right but a necessary evil.
 
It is wrong to create necessary evils. Such evils are not necessary at all. Before Christianity came along, it was recognised that babies did not need to be initiated into religion. To make a need to decide if a baby needs baptism or not and in what Church is simply a mockery of human rights and the dignity of the baby.
 
To say parents have a right to have their babies baptised is too strong. It implies approval of their interference with their child's soul. Their business is to look after the child's physical needs. It is nobody's business what state anybody's soul is in.
 
Why care about the parents rights in relation to the baptism of the baby? The parents are not the ones being baptised. It is the baby that has to live with the obligations and duties and alleged effects of the baptism. This implies that the baby is what is important. The parents are not important at all. Thus we see that the idea that babies should be baptised logically implies that parents should be forced to have their children baptised if baptism is what the child would want if it knew better. The Church certainly says that we would have to assume that it would want it. We force parents to have their babies vaccinated. If baptism is a more important vaccine, a vaccine for the soul, then it should be enforced on the baby whether the parents consent or not. Because of the revulsion this would create, the Church pretends to frown upon enforced baptisms. The baptism of a baby is regarded as valid even when the parents do not consent. The claim that parents have a right to have their babies baptised is simply priests trying to manipulate society to keep it bringing babies for baptism. The doctrine of baptism saving infants certainly implies that forced conversion is lawful. Grandmothers are notorious for babysitting their grandchildren who are not going to be baptised so that they can discreetly baptise them. Also, they may bully the parents to have the children baptised. The Church if it is honest will have to say that they have no choice and are doing right. They will admit when pressed that the will of the parents is not as important as the spiritual salvation of the baby. If conversion by force is unlawful then many baptisms are unlawful and invalid. 

Parental rights are overridden by decency in this case

Catholicism makes martyrs and heroes of those who die for it.  A religion that calls on people to die for its doctrines is a murderer actually and potentially if it is a manmade religion.  A religion that regards evil revelations from God as sacred and true - or worse which justifies them or ignores them - is sharing in the evil.  Nobody should enter such a religion.  That would be bad but to put a child in it would be heinous.  While it is wrong to call all members of any religion, even a murderous one, murderers for not all toe the line or have enough faith to obey, it is right to tell them to leave the religion for they are too good to tarnish themselves by being members.  No religion or culture is worth a single life.
 
Finally
 
The Church lies about parents' rights to have their babies initiated into membership of the Church, because it wants to trick and whitewash parents to co-operate with its endeavours to steal their children and shove Church membership on them. It disguises its malice towards and disrespect for the baby by acting as if it wants babies baptised out of respect for the parents.