Justify infant baptism to me [View All]

[ButterflyBlood]

Serious question. I've been pondering this for awhile. I was baptized as an infant, in the Catholic church which I'm not a part of anymore. Now I know that leaving your church doesn't invalidate your baptism and other ones accept it as valid and won't require you be rebaptized as long as you were baptized in accordance with their tradition. But I'm not a fan of the Catholic views on baptism because I don't believe in Original Sin and even though the Catholic church doesn't exactly teach anymore that infants that die without baptism go to hell or some type of "lesser heaven" (like Limbo), it's still kind of the origin of the tradition which I find pretty offensive. Now I know that other churches that do infant baptism that never held this type of view don't insist on baptism right away after birth and often wait several months, so I'm interested in hearing other positions.

Now where I'm pretty torn is if I should be rebaptized. On the one hand there's the stuff above, and the fact that I'm not a huge fan of any ritual someone can't consent to that in theory connects them to any organization. Of course I find the "indelible mark on the soul" and "once a Catholic always a Catholic" stuff to be complete bullshit, I am not a Catholic, and am no more a Catholic than someone who was never involved in the church so that way of thinking doesn't bother me. However I also know that it's not the right thing to do to get rebaptized just because you don't like the church you were baptized in. I know that if someone received an adult baptism in some crazy fundamentalist church and then fled to a more liberal mainline church, they won't insist on a rebaptism despite all the disagreements with that church. Baptism shouldn't be a statement against your former church. I've asked myself if I was baptized Lutheran like the other side of the family, and the church I identify with more culturally (and that my family even started going to more often after I was confirmed, my teen years were pretty free of Catholicism), would I care so much? The answer is probably not. So I can't help but feel if I were to get rebaptized it'd be for the wrong reasons, but my doubts about infant baptism still remain.

Now the church I'm going to now actually does do adult baptism, but their position if you were baptized as an infant (which probably applies to most people in my church, which is mostly made up of other ex-Catholics and people bored with mainline Protestant traditions) is that while you are definitely open to being rebaptized, it isn't something you should feel obligated to do because God isn't some type of bureaucrat who condemns people based on whether or not they did any rituals the "correct" way (another thing I was never do fond of in Catholicism.), they are definitely not fundamentalist or big on condemning other churches with different traditions like it seems a majority of the churches doing adult baptism are. They also do it only once a year, and did last month, so I have almost a year to consider it. I'm just wondering what alternate perspectives are on infant baptism and if I should acccept mine as valid, flawed church regardless.