This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

I was baptized in a swimming pool in Zaragoza, Spain. My father and I stood in the deep end, him on the bottom and me on a folding chair. Members of our tiny LDS branch, most of them dubious, lined the edges.

When the appropriate time came, the Old Man hooked the chair out from under me with his foot and shoved me under with his hands. Until the moment on my mission when I timed the baptismal prayer with an oncoming wave, it was the easiest baptism on record.

If I surfaced free of sin from my own baptism, I don't remember. It was a long time ago. Mostly I recall wondering if the Old Man would just go ahead and drown me. He had sworn to do worse on prior occasions.

After a brief moment of hesitation, he let me back up. We both knew that my sins would immediately return and grow exponentially with each passing year. Despite what I had told everyone, I had no intention of behaving myself. Hell, I didn't even know about sex yet.

Maybe that's because I was only 8 years old, the standard age of baptism in the LDS Church. It's said to be the age of accountability, when a human being can tell the difference between right and wrong, or, in my case, the difference between right and what I could reasonably get away with.

What 8-year-old kid tells the complete truth? If they're smart, or even if they're not, they say what's expected of them.

Adult: "Do you want to make Heavenly Father, your mommy and daddy, and all your friends happy by getting baptized?"

Kid: "Yes?"

I'm not saying that baptizing children is bad or wrong, only that it doesn't entirely make sense to say the age of accountability is 8. For most people, it doesn't happen until they're 30-something.

Science claim: According to research, men's brains aren't fully developed until approximately the age of 25. It happens earlier in women, but that's a different column.

So you can hardly expect someone to be truly accountable for their actions when they don't have much of a forehead yet.

I didn't reach the age of true accountability until long after I was married, specifically when I finally realized that I actually had something to lose. I'm a lot more afraid of my wife than I am of the Judgment Bar.

Were it up to me — and you should thank God it's not — we would use a sliding scale for baptism.

For example, I probably shouldn't have been baptized until I was alert enough to know what I was getting into. Somewhere around 36, I should think. By then my wife had knocked some manners and responsibility into me.

Other people would be eligible for baptism based on background checks, political affiliations, credit scores, church attendance, cholesterol levels, and general physical attractiveness.

Based on the outcome of this analysis, most people wouldn't be eligible for baptism until they're dead. You can't get more accountable than that.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.