Princess Charlotte agrees to be christened at nine weeks old?

All say, “Ahhhhhh!” Nine week old Princess Charlotte is to be christened today at the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Sandringham. Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall will be in attendance, as will Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who will carry out a private baptism, it says here, “using a font from Victoria’s reign and with water from the River Jordan”.

I am particularly concerned about the water from the River Jordan because the river, the site of the alleged Jesus of Nazareth’s baptism, is these days heavily polluted with high levels of sewage. Let’s hope old Justin boils the water first.

I’m afraid no number of photographs of the sweet baby will fill me with joy about today’s ceremony. In fact, it fills me with gloom and despair. The idea of today’s christening will be to inculcate young Charlotte into a religion not of her choice. I find it quite absurd that we still inflict religion into children when they are far too young to make up their mind. In fact, Charlotte, at barely two months old, will not have the first idea about anything at all, let alone the age-old story about the world being created by a supernatural being and all the stuff that followed it in ancient texts. But her story is no different from those who have been forced to accept a particular god before they are able to make a choice of their own.

Only this week, we heard a story of a Luton family of 12 who went off to live in the Islamic State in Syria. Among their number are young, very young, children, who have been taken to a world ruled by barbarism and evil. They, no more than Charlotte, have not made a choice of their own freewill. There is no such thing as a muslim child, a christian child, a sikh child, but what you have are the children of muslims, christians and sikhs. Children almost always grow up with the religion of their parents. I have never seen a mormon family, for example, where the children are a mixture of religions or, perish the thought, believers in no religion at all.

We might as well demand that Charlotte is also educated into the economic practices of John Maynard Keynes or monetarism. She would not understand any of it, of course, but then she won’t understand the religious superstition either, until she grows up and it will all be too late by then.

The BBC informs me that, “babies, royal or otherwise, react differently to this moment of celebration”. Well, who knew? The act of dunking a baby’s head in cold water, rather as if one was dunking a rich tea biscuit into a mug of tea, would probably make the baby cry in surprise or even shock. She is hardly going to say, “Oi! What’s going on here then?”

Why can’t we just let people make their own minds up about god as they grow up? Allow them to have the evidence in front of them, details of all the religions that are available and then allow them to choose of their own free will. That won’t happen, of course, because religions have a vested interest in ensuring that they catch their new believers young, and preferably before they are confronted by the need to make a choice, especially on the basis of evidence. Things can get tricky then.

Good luck to the royal couple and the royal sprog but let’s not kid ourselves that forcing babies and very young children to believe a particular religion is always a good thing. What’s happening in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Tunisia rather suggests it isn’t.