Here is a riddle for you. Given the staggering number of people that have lived or are alive right now on Earth, and given the vast number of religions and sects and denominations spawned over our history--what do you think the chances are of being born into the one, true religion?
Answer below the fold.
Apparently about 100%.
I have a lot of trouble with religious proselytizing. It is outrageously disrespectful at its very core, and dangerously prone to abuse. Imagine for a moment how much richer our world would be if we could have back the thousands and thousands of entire cultures annihilated in the name of religious salvation! The image of missionaries being cooked in a big iron pot has always struck me as a good response.
But wait! Not simply content with forced conversions, now one religion has even branched out into "remote baptism." Your religious affiliation--your religious Pledge of Allegiance, as it were, can be changed after you're dead!
At least Jehovah's Witnesses have the decency to knock on your door.
And the Republican Party is contemplating (if that's not too strong a word) the nomination for President of the United States, Mitt Romney, a man who admits he has participated in posthumously baptizing people into the Mormon Church, a man who is OK with that! He is OK with usurping the very meaning of someone else's life for what--for the greater glory of the Church of Latter-Day Saints! And Republicans are worried about Sharia law...?
As you can see this has really got me to the end of my rope. So, last night I was doing a little research into the doctrine of "remote baptism" and I started playing around with the ceremony, and not to put too fine a point on it, I hacked it. It was surprisingly easy. It seems Joseph Smith was not thinking "Security" when he designed it.
An article a couple of days ago in the Huffington Post about a nice looking young woman who had the remarkable ability to immediately pronounce backwards anything said to her got me thinking. You can see where I'm going here. I practiced reciting the Baptism for the Dead ceremony backwards and let my intuition guide me in reversing a few other aspects of the ritual.
I hadn't tried very many hacks when all of a sudden there was a kind of loud "boink" in the air, and it happened: WHOA MAN! I had unbaptized Mitt Romney! NO WAY! YES! HE WAS UNBAPTIZED!
But then it hung. I couldn't get it to work any more until I discovered that you can't just unbaptize somebody and leave them unbaptized, in a zero baptism state, so to speak. You have to put them somewhere else. I immediately thought to rebaptize him as a nudist, just for the fun visual , but then I thought, "Why afflict nice people like that with him?" So with no qualms I rebaptized him as a Narcissist.
Well, but there is a problem here. This unbaptizing hack has most of the same moral failings as the original, which brings me to the point of this diary. Just what do you think I should do with this information? I have it all written down and its efficacy is reproducible. I unbaptized a few other people. I don't feel too bad about it given how mixed up they are in this issue.
I was thinking of revealing the entire unbaptizing hack to Wikileaks or maybe Snopes but I don't know. So I am coming to the Kos community for guidance.
Peace. But that's another story.