Baptism

In Western Christian doctrine, Baptism signifies an initial/initiating Connection Experience powerful enough to "enlighten" and individual and (more or less) permanently transform their orientation to the world.

List of Awakening Experience Types

Awakening Experience Types: Baptism, Initiation Experience

List of Associated Terms

Christianity > Baptism, Born Again, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Faith, Nicene Christianity, Redemption, Salvation, Theodosius I

Catholicism > Baptism, Born Again, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Faith, Nicene Christianity, Redemption, Salvation, Theodosius I

Notes

"Baptism is God's most beautiful and magnificent gift....We call it gift, grace, anointing, enlightenment, garment of immortality, bath of rebirth, seal, and most precious gift."

It's true.

Baptism, when understood as a powerful initial Connection Experience can have many positive Connection Outcomes. The problem is, the Catholic Church colonizes these experiences. It takes over their definition and shifts it, in a not very subtle way, into a prop suitable for System Maintenance. It strips it of its democratic component suggesting you need a System Agent to perform it. It redefines it as a physical event (immersion in water) conducted by loyal agent of the Church. It uses this event to symbolically insert individuals into its toxic archetypal system and to inscribe its authority on their consciousness.

Baptism is birth into the new life in Christ. In accordance with the Lord's will, it is necessary for salvation, as is the Church herself, which we enter by Baptism.

It turns the event it into a motivation and tool of colonization.

"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you."

Finally, it performs the event on children, which perhaps tells you something of its importance to the Catholic system.

Footnotes

References