So today I finally asked my mother, because the conversation was going that way, why she and my father baptized me in exchange for me finally telling her why I cried during it (the old man in pompous regalia was scary).  I always found it strange that I was baptised since my mother is a “nothing,” which is kind of like an atheist basically.  Well, do you want to know her reason?

“Just in case.”

To that I laughed, and I’m sorry mother, I’m not apologizing.  That’s a really crappy reason to baptize someone and a kind of funny one that at that.  Well, if it’s just in case, why wasn’t I also baptized as a Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Muslim, and Jew (for Jew, she said I’d have to get a circumcision, so alright, thank you for that mother).  But why not also baptize me into every other of the world’s religions; get me indoctrinated into the Cult of Cthulhu even, why single out Russian Orthodox?

“Just in case?” and “Because we don’t really know?”  Honestly, I thought a Masters in Chemistry would do much more than get one following tradition that one themselves does not believe in with hopes that if a god or a supernatural power of some sorts exists, it is such a legalistic god or supernatural power that it would simply say “Oh, yeah, you’re baptised (and into a relative obscure branch of Christianity too), you can go ahead and live in heaven.”  Never mind what you believed in, never mind what you did in your life, never mind... anything at all.  “Just in case.”  Ha!

Dearest future parents, if you’re going to baptize your kids, please do it in a religion that you actually believe in and not in hopes of an afterlife that’s as equally stuffed with a legalistic bureaucracy as this one.