(FOX News) - American atheists lined up to be "de-baptized" in a ritual using a hair dryer, according to a report Friday on U.S. late-night news program "Nightline."
Leading atheist Edwin Kagin blasted his fellow non-believers with the hair dryer to symbolically dry up the holy water sprinkled on their heads in days past. The styling tool was emblazoned with a label reading "Reason and Truth."
Kagin believes parents are wrong to baptize their children before they are able to make their own choices, even slamming some religious education as "child abuse." He said the blast of hot air was a way for adults to undo what their parents had done.
"I was baptized Catholic. I don't remember any of it at all," said 24-year-old Cambridge Boxterman. "According to my mother, I screamed like a banshee ... so you can see that even as a young child I didn't want to be baptized. It's not fair. I was born atheist, and they were forcing me to become Catholic."
Kagin doned a monk's robe and said a few mock-Latin phrases before inviting those wishing to be de-baptized to "come forward now and receive the spirit of hot air that taketh away the stigma and taketh away the remnants of the stain of baptismal water."
Ironically, Kagin's own son became a fundamentalist Christian minister after having "a personal revelation in Jesus Christ."
"One wonders where they went wrong," he chuckled to the TV show.
Monday, July 19, 2010
"It's not working! Set it to high!"
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"Hot air" just about sums it up, I think.
ReplyDeleteThere's so much wrong with this I don't know where to start.
ReplyDeleteFive will get you ten this guy is a materialist. So why the ceremony? The water dried up ages ago, the wet skin and hair long ago replaced by new growth. There's nothing to dry up. It's nothing more than a temper tantrum by a child mad at his Father.
"I was born atheist, and they were forcing me to become Catholic."
Alrighty then, but why stop there? I was born un-vaccinated, and they forced me to get shots. I'm going to start leeching people to symbolically remove the vaccines.
Which saint was it that basically said "we don't ask kids' permission before we feed them, so why would we wait till they can choose to be baptized?"
This is somewhat of a pet topic for me. The misunderstanding about the role of parents in caring for their child by children who think parents doing their responsibility is something being done to them and not for them is all too common. I posted on it way back here:
ReplyDeletehttp://byztex.blogspot.com/2009/04/story-of-de-baptism.html
To quote from Schmemann:
If the Orthodox Church remained alien to the long Western debate on infant versus adult Baptism, it is because she, in the first place, never accepted the reduction of faith to "personal faith" alone which made that debate inevitable. From the Orthodox point of view, the essential question about faith in its relationship to the sacrament is: what faith, and even more precisely, whose faith? And the equally essential answer to the question is: it is Christ's faith...