baptism by fire

My boyfriend was brought up Jehovah's Witness and was mercifully born with enough intellect to know that it was complete bullshit and left the church as soon as he was able. Because the rest of his family are still active members, most of their family friends are JWs as well. I've met a couple of these and one that I really quite like. Sarah (not her real name) is bubbly, vivacious, outgoing, and just all around really friendly and sweet-natured. She also happens to be painfully pretty in ways that make other women want to hate her, but she's just so NICE and SWEET that you just can't bring yourself to do it.

Anyway, had I not known she was actually a devout JW, I never would have guessed. She doesn't have the aversion to 'sinful' or 'immoral' things that I expect from cultists and is actually quite openly sexual--and openly bi-sexual--in a religious culture that thoroughly scorns sexuality in any form and especially sexuality in a form other than the traditional 'think-of-England' heteronormative kind. She wasn't especially smart, but she was great fun to talk to and mess around with and even after I found out the depth to which she was devoted to her religion, I still liked her. She's been the boything's twin sister's best friend for many years so she's essentially part of the family now.

I happen to be a very openly flirtatious person, even around people in whom I have zero interest, which is how I behaved with Sarah. (To be honest, if polyamory was in the cards I would totally be trying to nail her.) I jokingly insisted that she should come back with me to New York so we could get married, because they legalized that shit just after I moved here.

"What about Max?"
"Oh, he can just be our live-in sex slave and sleep at the foot of the bed like any dog."

For the record, he thought that was FUCKING HILARIOUS.

When I left, Sarah apologized profusely to him for trying to steal me away and he had to explain to her that I'm like that with just about everyone and no harm was done. Every now and then I reference my intention to rescue this girl from her cult and marry her--he'll still be my pet, naturally. Yesterday he gave me some 'disappointing news' about her. I was seriously afraid something bad had happened until he told me she had just gotten baptized and was officially a 'proper' JW.

"Oh, is THAT all? Geezis, you scared me!"
"Yeah, but she's a full JW now. She got baptized."
"Not irreversible. It's not like anything serious actually happened there! They just got her hair a bit damp."

I do intend to rescue this child, even though I'm only half kidding when I say I'm totally gonna marry her. (The joys of having polyamorous tendencies in a monogamous relationship.)

And then this conversation segued into one about baptism and for some reason I was reminded of an old Spartan practice I read about several times from several different sources over the years, for school and otherwise. I explained this to him and compared it to baptism and he thought I was one sick and twisted little genius.

Life for the Spartans was pretty fucking harsh. Every citizen was trained from the cradle to be the perfect warrior, and every baby born was expected to become a warrior. Deformed or sickly babies were killed outright, but they weren't content with that level of ritual infanticide in a time and place when infant mortality was still extraordinarily high. They took it up a notch.

There was no sense in raising a baby to be a good, strong Spartan soldier (or a good strong Spartan breeding machine--which was all the women were good for) if they didn't have that Spartan fighting spirit, a test was devised to determine if a newborn was a good Spartan. Shortly after birth, the newborn baby was plunged into a basin of cold water for a few seconds and then brought back up. If the baby came up squalling and shrieking, then it was nice and strong and worth raising. If, on the other hand, it came up shivering and blue, then it was weak and would never make a good soldier.

So naturally they threw the 'weak' babies into a ravine to die.

Only tangentially related to baptism because of the whole newborns and water thing, but still.