A shocking and sad video of a baby drowned to death from a baptism is rapidly making the rounds on the internet, particularly within the atheosphere. My first reaction was to post a series of ways Christians would no doubt minimize the tragedy (e.g., “The baby’s got a free ticket to heaven”), but after further consideration, I thought better of it. After all, there are vanishingly few baptisms that result in death, at least as far as I can determine. The priest was simply criminally negligent, no different than the criminally negligent in hundreds of other non-religious fields.
Believers deserve approbation for many things, but I submit it should be based on their actions as directly derived from their faith-based doctrines that consistently result in harm—such as the withholding of medical care in favor of “prayer and anointing”. Anyone, believer and skeptic alike, can make a tragic mistake.
