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Needless to say, I really love your "simple Baptist" approach, along with your simple Baptism sense of humor. :)

You remind me of the good and simple folk in Greece and Serbia, who believe from the heart. If you get a chance read Tolstoy's "Three Little Hermits." It's a short story (it's on Google) and it's very, very poignant. When I was growing up, the grownups used to tell me "this is true Orthodoxy." It shows the difference between true faith and institutionalized faith in an exaggerated manner.

Baptism is a petition for adoption. God adopts us by His mercy and adoption does not require consent of the adopted child. He does it out of mercy and love for all who ask. It is not our doing, nor something we earn, nor something we "qualify" for at a certain age, not something we understand.

But the core of our disagreement lies in your concept of baptism: it holds God's grace hostage to human intellectual "understanding" of faith. In essence you are saying that God cannot bestow His grace on those who cannot understand. That places an awful lot of brain-damaged humans on the train to perdition. God is Mercy and mercy does not require conceptualization of the one who receives it. He spares us.

Do not accuse us of excluding the unfortunate. This is by no means true. My cousin has severe Downs syndrome and I am very confident of her salvation. We are pleased to believe that God has their fate well in hand, just as He does our own. We believe that His judgment is certain and compassionate. When we embrace believers' baptism, we by no means exclude infants or the disabled from the possibility of God's grace. However, we do follow that example in scripture and we offer baptism to the repentant as scripture did. And we allow God the liberty to deal with all persons as He sees fit. That's awfully generous of us, no?

I would suggest the apostles and the early church did not and modern Baptists do not hold such doubts about God's mercies as what you baby-splashers do.

If you truly believe that having the clergy splash a baby makes the difference between heaven and hell, then it would seem to me that it is the Orthodox (and the Presbys etc.) who hold a view of a cruel and capricious God. Not us Baptists.

I'd also point you toward scripture which refers repeatedly to being born again. What use does a baby whose umbilical is still attached have for being born again? He's barely dry from his first birth. It's makes nonsense of scripture, turning it into a fable. And for what? Because some spiritually immature parents might grieve excessively if their children should die prematurely? It's not worth it. And it's not scriptural. And it harms the churches.