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Greetings:<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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!<br><br>
Power hungry pastors and mad mullahs will do just about anything to
enforce their religious views on us.<br><br>
Nick Gier<br>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=2>"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the
application of it to human affairs."<br>
--Ralph Waldo Emerson<br><br>
"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings
who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."<br>
--Mohandas Gandhi<br><br>
"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." --Ma</font><font size=1>x Planck<br><br>
</font>Nicholas F. Gier<br>
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho<br>
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm</a><br>
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950<br>
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm</a><br><br>
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