rlew.com

“Belief in God sym­bol­i­cally evap­o­rated when more than a hun­dred athe­ists were ‘de-baptized’ with a blow dryer yes­ter­day,” writes the Colum­bus Dis­patch. The arti­cle quotes the cer­e­mo­nial for­mula intoned by Frank Zindler:

“Do you agree that the mag­i­cal potency of today’s cer­e­mony is exactly equal to the mag­i­cal effi­cacy of cer­e­mo­nial bap­tism with dihy­dro­gen oxide, and do you agree that the power of all mag­i­cal cer­e­monies is nonexistent?”

If this didn’t make me so sad, I would find this rather funny.

A cou­ple notes: First, this cer­e­mony, albeit funny, shows that athe­ists con­tinue to define them­selves by what they are against. Sar­cas­tic humor unites by tear­ing down a foe, but sar­casm is hardly cre­ative. Nor does it cre­ate community.

Sec­ondly, the de-baptismal for­mula quoted is utterly devoid of any sort of moral demand. Bap­tism in the Bible is about both faith and repen­tance from sin. At it’s barest mean­ing (i.e. devoid of “magic”), bap­tism is a state­ment and com­mit­ment to humil­ity, growth and change. The de-baptism for­mula above is sim­ply about declar­ing “unfaith,” which I find insipid and unin­spir­ing. As such, and quite iron­i­cally, Chris­t­ian bap­tism is more human­is­tic than this athe­is­tic de-baptism.