Well, it's certainly been a while since I've stumbled across something that made my brain hurt bad enough to consider shaking my fist at it. Unfortunately, today I have. It also turns out that one can be part of the secular crowd and still be - for lack of a better word - stupid. "How stupid," one may ask. Well, as stupid as getting up in front of a crowd and having another idiot blow dry away your Christianity. This is the sacred ceremony known as debaptism. Please understand me now, celebrating one's freedom is healthly, even fun. But dressing up in a robe and holding rites of passage seems almost exactly what we're all escaping from. Some, like Gary Mueller, have even mailed the certificate to the churches that performed the original baptisms. "I'm friends with so-and-so now and not you!" says the milk-mustached grade schooler.

Truely though, not all of these people are taking him seriously. Those that are merely in it for the parody simply don't understand. Professor Laurence Stookey of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington sets the record straight. De-baptizers misunderstand baptism when they caricature it as an attempt at magic. Baptism is a kind of adoption where you become a child of God, of the church and of the family. You can renounce your physical parents, (the church and God), but they cannot renounce you because you are their child. Anybody who makes fun of baptism probably hasn't gone into it in enough depth to know that."

For the record, I don't exactly agree with baptising children, enlisting them before they have a voice. But it's not like it actually means anything. My baptism still stands and always will, simply because the catholic church wants it to. Though I believed for several tortured years, I've never actually practiced any religion; and I'm not going to start now with a kooky debaptism.

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