Properly Awry

Someone else summed up my thoughts:

Christianity:
The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magically tree.  Makes perfect sense. 

I don't care for religion, any religion.  Religion in general is a cult, a club that survives through its never-ending cycle of brainwashing.  Think about it - if you are religious, have a specific religion - did you choose it yourself?  More likely this religion is yours because your parents chose it for you, as their parents did them and so on.  Or perhaps your spouse had an ingrained religion and now that is your religion and the religion of your children.  It's pretty rare for a person to go out and seek a religion and make a personal choice - sure, it happens, but not enough. 
I believe a club is something you choose to be part of, not something you participate in because your parents did (if your parents were in a polka club would you be?  If your parents jumped off a bridge would you?).
I consider myself fortunate to have not been brainwashed into a religion growing up - the fact that my parents came from different religious upbringings meant that we essentially had no religion in our house.  My brother and I are not baptized or christened.  I'm pretty sure I only went to church once on Easter Sunday and once on Christmas Eve, any other appearances at church were for weddings or funerals.  My summer camp was a Christian non-denominational camp, and we attended "chapel" twice a day and they gave us Bibles and tried to convince us to let Jesus into our hearts.  I refused to be brainwashed, though I did like singing the songs, and camp was fun and it was what my mom could afford, so we put up with the religion.  I do remember there was one counselor who told us dinosaurs did not exist and were made up by scientists - which, even at 12 I thought was hilarious/crazy-town.

If you feel you need religion to get through the day, to feel better about yourself, to purge yourself of your so-called sins, that's fine, that's your choice, even if it wasn't initially your choice.  But if you have children, is it fair to make that choice for them?  Baptizing or christening your child as a baby is the first step in taking choices away from them. Do you want them to grow up feeling obligated to the religion you chose for them, or do you want them to grow up feeling free to make their own choices?