An original spin on original sin.

I baptized a baby on Sunday.


She was a nice baby, too.  Scarlett was her name.  She was very sweet, smiled, didn't fuss about too badly, and the whole experience was lovely.

I baptized a baby on the tenth, as well.  His name was Linken, and he was perfectly charming as well. A nice kid.

Neither of them asked to be baptized, neither of them were able to speak for themselves, and neither will remember it.

So what the heck was I playing at?

You see, there's a question rolling around with infant baptism: what the heck are we doing baptizing people to forgive their sins, when they're about eight months old?  What possible sins have they committed in that time?

It's not just that they haven't had the time to commit sins, eight months is a while, to be sure, and I could find all sorts of sins to commit in that time, but it's that in those first months, you as a human being, are actually incapable of getting up to any antics.  Luke, my youngest son, is five months old, and all he can do is roll over, smile, laugh, eat, and void his warranty.  That's it.  And I wouldn't describe any of those things as overly sinful.  Bruce, our eldest son, now he's a different story.  This blog is not anywhere near long enough to catalogue all the stuff he does / can do, as he's three years old, and incredibly capable.  But with the capacity to do more right, comes the capability to do more wrong.  He can give us sweet cuddles, or he can give me a kick in the shins.  He can tell us that he loves us, or he can lie to our faces.  With any increase in capability, comes an increase in the ability to use this stuff for good, or for evil.  Now, our opinion on the sinfulness of babies is akin to our opinion on our own sinfulness, and it is how we view ourselves so favourably.

The saying goes that if you want to seem slimmer, your best bet is to hang out with people a lot heavier than you.  And if you want to seem moral, your best bet is to make a comparative with people who are less morally upright than yourself.  Simple enough.  The first comparison, obviously, is Hitler.  We all know that Hitler was a bad dude, and that he did a great number of things that were completely inexcusable, and horrifically evil.  He also had the ability to do these things.  He, and other dictators like him, tend to be corrupt.  They tend to be evil.  They tend to be catastrophic disasters, even though they may very well have entered into office with the best of intentions.

The other saying, that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, is extremely true, not because there is anything inherently corrupting about power.  It's what it does to you as a person.  All of a sudden, the normal rules melt away, and you now have to run the nation on your own honor system.  It's different in a country like Canada, in which there are various checks and balances to power, which makes sense, because we want to avoid giving some madman the right to run the nation into the ground. But a great many countries don't work like that, and folks who take power in Haiti, or in Banoi, or whatever, usually end up causing no end of trouble, because when the rules are gone, and the police work for you, and you make the rules from now on, what do you do, and whose interest do you act in?

Usually, it ends up being your own.  Most of us are nice enough folks, because we don't have the ability to re-write the laws to suit us.  Most of us would assume that if we did take power, we'd pursue causes of justice and righteousness, and make the world a better place.  And so did every other dictator, like ever.  Nobody runs for office based on a policy of cronyism and corruption, of murder of people they don't like, of stacking bodies up like cordwood.  But it happens.  When the rules are gone, and replaced by your rules, they may not end up being as just as you might think they would be.

But for a moment, forget about that.  You're never going to be in that situation.  Odds are, you won't even be elected to municipal alderman, much less dictator of a banana republic.  Think then, for a moment, about how you feel about those people who live around you, and the other drivers on the road, and you'll know that you would make a whole bunch of things illegal.  Things that pretty much benefit you.  It's like that conundrum on the game show Survivor, in which a contestant wins a car, and they can decide to either keep the car, or by giving it up, give a car to every other contestant.  Of course, each contestant who isn't in the position knows exactly what they'd do, and that is to share it with everyone else.  Of course.  But it's easy to make these decisions if you can't do anything about it either way.

And that's where babies are.  They can't really be good or bad.  They can be annoying, they can be smiley, they can be sweet.  But if you know anything about children, you know that as soon as they work out how to lie, how to disobey, how to deceive, how to be basically dreadful, they probably will. Yes, they'll be likely to do nice things too, but they'll do a whole bunch of junk that you won't like.  And that propensity only increases, that as they grow in years, and in ability. They can do more, good or ill.

That's what we are like too.  We think of ourselves as being basically good, and so does everyone else. But if that was the case, if we were all as good as though we were, then things like the Vancouver riots and looting wouldn't happen.  And the riots are a very good example to use, because those are ordinary people who all of a sudden had the rules melt away.  You reach critical mass, and you realize that the police can't / won't stop you.  So what do you do?  Most of those folks were presumably regular people, who thought of themselves as okay people, pretty good.  But when the rules vanish, what do they turn into?

The argument is that they get caught up in the moment, which I'll believe, but why is there that inclination to turn to violence and looting when others are doing likewise?  Why do the ostensibly normal folks not just leave when the riot starts?  Why do they get caught up in it?  Well, it's that same inclination that children have, that we all have.  It's easy for us, sitting at home in Regina or wherever, to cluck our thick tongues and suggest oh so very delicately that we would NEVER do such a thing, but if someone smashed a Sears window open and you know nobody was going to stop you from doing anything you wanted, and the police were just going to stand there and watch, what would you do?

Mac should be arrested for bringing his guns to this riot.

What would you do?

Your original sin is the part of you that is corrupt.  In comics, it's the devil that sits on your shoulder.  It's the voice in the back of your head, heck, in the front of your head, that tells you to run in and take what isn't yours.  That tells you to lie to protect yourself.  That tells you to cut in line ahead of someone who isn't paying attention, that tells you 'finders keepers' when you find something that you could easily return.  That's your sinful nature, and that's original sin.  Do children have it, yes they do.  And you will find that as they grow, they likely need to be taught how to be good.  They probably don't need to be taught to be bad.  And like with any addiction, with any crushing personality flaw, the first issue is recognizing that it exists.  If you ignore it forever, if you say to yourself that there is no such thing as a corruption of yourself, and that you're a pretty great human being always, if you pretend the devil on your shoulder just isn't there, it's not as though he shuts up.  You just hear his words without seeing him.  If you confront these flaws, if you deal with them, if you grapple with them for what they are, then you realize that when you're faced with a shattered window, and the possibility of free jeans, that nagging voice that tells you to take them is wrong.  It's part of you, but it's the part of you that's broken.  When we ask for forgiveness of sins, especially for babies who don't have sins of commission, we're asking for God to heal broken hearts and spirits, and to draw us to himself even though we are broken and corrupt.  And he does.

He died not just for what you do, but for who you are, your flaws and corruptions, the parts of you that you hate, he died for all of that.  For what you do, and for the part of you that makes you likely to riot, or to be a jerk.  That's original sin, and that's what Christ died for.

PJ.