It’s not quite April 1st yet, but the recently initiated craze for getting yourself debaptised seems to be gaining ground in the UK. The National Secular Society has all the details here, and claims that 100,000 people have already done it. Well, they’ve downloaded the form to see what it’s about, which isn’t quite the same thing necessarily. A fair guess that some of them will be like us, who took a look out of curiosity just to see what all the fuss is about.
It’s being presented as a rational approach to life, by renouncing whatever it was that your baptism as an infant did for you in the first place. Which on the face of it seems a very strange thing to do, especially if you don’t believe it could possibly have done anything at all because you don’t accept its underlying philosophy. But then that’s not the first example of the irrationality of rationality that you’ve come across, is it? Nor is it likely to be the last. And of course being conflicted in this way is by no means unique to self-proclaimed secularists. A lot of religious believers are just as confused.
March 30, 2009 at 11:57 am
Does this concern only the catholics?
I think ‘debaptizing’ is just another useless rite.
March 30, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Exactly. If baptism is meaningless, debaptism is equally so.
March 30, 2009 at 6:49 pm
I blogged about this myself and can’t help but agree that it’s a strange thing to do. The implication from the Secular Society seems to be that somehow churches may make reference to the numbers of baptised people to argue that they represent a greater number of people than have some form of active connection to the church… a claim that certainly can’t be backed up for my own denomination which has long taken a count throughout October to look at the number of attenders and I’m sure plenty of others do something similar.
In some ways it’s quite funny, the irrational knot that they tie. They say themselves on their website for example that “Religion should be a private matter, for the home and place of worship” – so why even provide a way of publicly stating a religious position through a De-Baptism Certificate? Isn’t that contrary to what they stand for?