When I first arrived at the idea for this post, I pitched it to a person I knew would appreciate both its brilliance and bizarreness: my brother. After laying down my thesis, he paused, smirked, and asked me– and I’m paraphrasing what he said– how the hell did I come up with that? Well I didn’t have answer for him then, and I still don’t have one. It was just something that popped into my head in those minutes/hours while I’m trying to fall asleep and it was too good to forget. So here’s what I’m saying…
Infant baptism is like an eBayed level 80 in World of Warcraft.
I love World of Warcraft. I think it’s such an amazing game with so many things to enjoy. It has incredible detail, fascinating lore behind it, and there’s just so much to do. In WoW, like in the real world, there are people who just want the end result without putting in any of the work. This is where eBay comes in. It’s a well-known fact (among people who play) that there are people who have been able to turn quite a profit by purchasing a copy of World of Warcraft, leveling a single character up to the maximum, getting high-end gear, and then selling the account (the username and password) on eBay to the highest bidder. I have a friend who’s done this and said he’s made as much as $800 on one account.
So now we, the hard-working lovers of the game, have any number of level 80s in supurb gear who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. They haven’t been with their character since the beginning, meaning they don’t know all the finer details of how it functions. They don’t know the lingo, they don’t know the stories, they have no experience aside from logging in and beating stuff up. They’ve missed out on the best part of the game– growing up. These folks are not people you want in your group because they’ve yet to work out the kinks in steering their character around. They’ve arrived at Point B with no idea how they got there, or even where Point A is.
Likewise, I think philosophy and religion are absolutely fascinating. I find myself to be in a state of undecidedness on many things, but if I wanted to pin myself down with labels I’d have to say I’m an agnostic deist. I also have a penchant for investigating the writings of atheists and imagining how I’d feel if I didn’t believe in God at all, which is kind of the philosophical equivalent to trying on a bathingsuit without your underwear. I did it because it was convenient and more comfortable that way, and nobody will know I did anything at all. Maybe it wasn’t the best choice to make, but I did it and that’s that. And it looked great on me.
But I digress.
Anyway, I feel that religion has the potential to be a very great thing in the lives of some people. If I spend years and years searching for something I can call the truth for myself, then nobody out there can say I did anything wrong. No matter where I end up, the journey I made was mine. In fact, I can’t imagine anything more fun than being lost and exploring different avenues of faith and reason. Every new thing I learn and every new question I ask is uniquely mine, and nobody else can share that or take it away from me. In the Christian religions, the ultimate move to make when someone says “Yes, this is my truth” is to get baptised and fully embraced by their church. It’s like parking your car in your driveway and saying “Ah, this is home, and I’m glad to have found it!” Each person who has “found faith” and been baptised as an adult has probably found with it a sense of serene satisfaction. Their journey, while maybe not at an end, is at least back on the MapQuest directions on how to get there from here.
That being said, why does anybody think that baptising their baby is a good idea? It’s effectively a denial of their birthright to a free mind and ability to find their own truth. Sure, they can still figure it out later, but some people think “Oh, well I’ve been baptised… So I guess that’s it.” The kid has arrived on the scene having achieved– nay, been given the greatest prize of all. They’ve already missed out on the best part and they don’t even know it. They’ve got the “gear” but no idea how it works.
In conclusion, my friends, I hope I have done an effective job of explaining why though baptism might be your way of reaching the mountaintop of monotheism, it really doesn’t make any sense to plop your baby down at the summit. And it also baffles me that someone could care so little about the hows, whys, and wheres that they would pay $800 (and not even WoW gold!) to get the “what”. We gotta stop being such a bunch of eager beavers and realize that the best part of life is LIVING it and the most important part of getting an answer is asking a question.