If you're really an atheist, I don't see what difference it makes if you were baptized. It seems to me that a de-baptism just legitimizes baptism as something more than a little water dumped on your head, empowers it in a way that simply ignoring it never would.
I mean, I get the symbolism of it: There are certainly times I wish that I didn't have to carefully unwind years of being told by God-Chosen Menfolk (tremble) that I was less than because of what is (or isn't) between my legs. Not to mention other bigotries. But what feels more liberating to me now is existing in a space where I am free of that tribe, afloat on my own, my ethics self-contained, not connected backwards to that which once held me, not by resentments nor recriminations—just free.
Only of myself.
Truth be told, I don't really get group-minded atheists at all—by which I don't mean membership in a group like Americans United for the Separation of Church and State or in the ACLU or some other group that defends atheists' right of freedom from imposed religion, but participation in group rituals and atheist services and so forth, which strike me personally as turning atheism into a variation on organized religion of its own.
Most of my issue with organized religion is the religion part, but some of it is the organized part, which is what allows for institutionalized bigotry and corruption.
Especially when so much of the stuff seems centered around hatred of religion, which is quite separate from both atheism and standing steadfast against the legislation of religion or a specific morality which extends therewith, I must admit I deeply worry that movement atheism risks becoming a reactionary version of that which it purports to reject. Same shit, different dogma.
I hope I'm wrong.
I guess I just have this (possibly fanciful) ideal of a world of people, free and only of themselves, bonded to others in ways wholly separate from god-belief or the lack thereof, for reasons that are decidedly human, earthly, chosen and renewed every day.
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* More power to ya if you find that stuff cathartic. It's just not my cup of
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