[Vision2020] Validity of Baptisms

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

Someone on this list appears to be saying that a Catholic baptism that I 
did not assent to and do not currently recognize is somehow valid.  That's 
absurd, and my daughter, who was baptized as an infant by a Danish uncle 
bishop, would agree with me.

I have come to the conclusion that infant baptism, never commanded by Jesus 
and never practiced by early Christians, is a church's way to control 
families and their children.  I'm also convinced, especially since I now 
know how much Doug Wilson has been corrupted by power, that he supports 
infant baptism for this very reason.

The history of Christian baptists, first called Anabaptists, who, once they 
could read their Bible in the vernacular, insisted on adult baptism is a 
horrid story of persecution.  The sad irony is that Luther was the one who 
translated the Bible so that these good people could make up their own 
minds about their religion.  But "orthodox" Protestants and Catholics 
combined forces to hunt down every Anabaptist they could find.  Their 
preferred way of dispatching these heretics was to sew them in bags and 
throw them into rivers for a third baptism that they would not 
survive.  How dare they defy church authority!

Power hungry pastors and mad mullahs will do just about anything to enforce 
their religious views on us.

Nick Gier

"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to human 
affairs."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who 
represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
  --Mohandas Gandhi

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
--Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

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