Exactly, Mr. Dawkins! It’s so simple even an atheist gets it. Our Church teaches that every child born into this world enters in the state of sin—Original Sin. Our Church teaches that Original Sin must be wiped clean from the child’s soul so that he can become a child of God and an heir to heaven. Our Church teaches that the only way to remove Original Sin is through Baptism, arguably the most important of all the seven Sacraments since without it we cannot receive grace, can receive no other sacraments, and cannot enter heaven.

So Dawkins is quite right: Why in God’s name would Baptism be all that important if Adam and Eve—our first parents, who committed that original sin for which purpose Christ instituted Baptism—didn’t even exist?

Oh dear. Sometimes both Catholics and atheists get it hopelessly wrong. Whatever the merits or not of the Bible....I'm a firm believer in arguing against what it actually says.

'Sin' is not some list of wrongdoings to be wiped clean. It's not some mysterious stuff that gets attached to you at birth. It is described time and again as being the actual physical state of creatures. A modern day equivalent would simply be 'subject to decay'. Paul uses the term 'perishable'.

Its the Catholic chuch that twisted that to some doctrine about how one is born with a list of 'sins' a mile long all thanks to Adam. But what you actually inherited from the past is not any 'moral wrongdoings' but simply that perishable nature. How can the Catholic church get this so wrong, when it's spelled out in detail in Paul's letter ?

Baptism has nothing to do with 'original sin'. It is symbolic of the Christian belief of dying to this world and being 'born again' and taking on the 'imperishable' nature. There is nothing anywhere in the Bible about baptising infants to wipe away 'original sin'.......in fact that doctrine is totally at odds with the whole definition of 'sin'.