Why not make a tiny 10cm wire at the north pole to do the entire planet? And bless the oceans for unlimited holy water. Anyone who goes to the beach is baptised.
The whole idea of "the spirit vs the letter of the law" is a secular one that came up as a result of imperfect human lawmakers. But when dealing with holy texts, that is obviously not required because axiomatically God doesn't make mistakes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_and_meat_in_Jewish_law#Ra...
I mean, even apart from the fact god doesn't exist.
I’m not Jewish and this just my paraphrasing of an explanation I’ve heard a couple of times. The idea of God giving us a hacker nature and delighting in it makes me happy.
As for the former, that could very well be an example of the absurdities that Pharisaical thinking can lead to. On the one hand, there is the prudential application of the law. On the other, there is the semantic manipulation of the law even to the point where its observance is rendered comically vacuous and nonexistent.
In any case, you can't baptize an adult against his will. In extreme situations, when a person is in, say, a coma, there can be a presumption of consent, but as I understand it, if the person in question was totally hardened against the very possibility of baptism, then the presumption would prove false and no baptism would have occurred.
It's a pity the LDS church got there first on baptising the dead. Maybe there's some scope for baptising the unborn though.
W.r.t. your first question [0].
Following this logic, the entire ocean has been multiple flavours of holy water at once for centuries. Failing that, the subset which is has become homogenous throughout.