Going to a Christening

Today I took part in quite a weird experience, or at least weird from my perspective, very unweird from others. I have been to other christenings before in my life, but I can barely remember them as I was young, and so today would be the first christening I've been to in my adult life, and as I've just mentioned it was kind of a new weird experience.

Let me quickly preface things by saying I am absolutely comfortable with different religions, how people practice these and with anyone having whatever belief they would like. Personally I am an atheist, this is for a number of reasons, mainly just because of my nature and how logical and evidence based I am.

Going to a christening today I got to properly witness how the ceremony goes, what is involved and what is asked of of the child and of their parents. Having seen all if this, personally I left feeling kind if weirded out (not the most technical term but it aptly describes how I felt).

Thinking on this for a short while afterwards I came to the conclusion that it was due to the somewhat forceful nature of the whole ceremony. For example, everyone who was invited was meant to, it seemed, take part in the reading of responses to the vicar when he read out particular phrases during the ceremony. There was one question the vicar asked where the response was basically “I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, my Lord, and my saviour". Now I'm not making a big thing of anything, if anything i'm coming at this from more of a scientific/sociological perspective, but if anyone in the room was say a Hindu, or Muslim, or Buddhist.....then no one was told that this was what you would have to say, there was instruction to what part people had to play then, "please read the bold parts of the script".

Obviously you can just do what I did and not say anything during this point, but I kind if felt like I was being rude as I wasn't taking part in the thing I was invited to take part in.

Again I'm in no way saying this is wrong or that people shouldn't do it, etc...it was just very different to how I thought the ceremony would go, and how involved the audience were made to be through these readings and the whole singing of hymns and such. It was a intriguing experience and also somewhat enlightening to have gone through at the same time.