Circumcision.

I’ve been reading more than is normal for me. This is a good thing. It has also altered thoughts and desires and morals I may have held as good or at least acceptable….even some that were fairly recent.

For instance, I held maybe not even a whole year ago that there was nothing inherently wrong with male circumcision. I now differ in this idea. I think that any choice about a child’s body that does not benefit the child’s health, both mental and physical, is immoral. For the purpose of this post I will specifically write on circumcision. Circumcision is a purely cosmetic practice rooted in archaic superstition.

If the United States holds that female circumcision is a savage practice, it should hold the same for male circumcision. There is no concrete evidence to support circumcision in male children, and there seems to me to be plenty of natural evidence that foreskins not only don’t impede normal functionality, but to remove them is barbaric. I feel that perhaps there should even be a law to protect newborns from their well-meaning, but uninformed parents. I’m sure there would be religious outcry, but this is unfounded. Religious rights, when they deal with newborn infants, have NO BASIS in particular when the desires of the parents differ from what is in the best interests of the child. No infant ever asked to have its body mutilated needlessly. This sadistic behavior is then rationalized to the infant through a preposterous set-up of divine decree.

Consider animals. Male animals that have similar reproductive organs as male humans, and I’ll specifically focus it on mammals, have foreskins. They don’t seem to be suffering because of them. The mere idea that some big white-bearded buddy in the sky gives a damn about a piece of skin on the human male’s penis is ludicrous. Anyone who defends circumcision yet is an advocate of pro-life rights is walking an odd line to my mind. To think a child must be born only to have his first day of living outside of the womb greeted with a knife to his sexual organs is truly a sad state of humanity. It should come as no surprise to parents that there children should then become adverse to them, after all your first act as parent was to harm their body. This should ashame any parent responsible.

When considering what is morally good, I would hope the education about sexuality, about abortion (see note 1), about contraceptives, and to shed light on the true malevolence in male and female circumcision would be what we would conclude. Whereas, to preach abstinence-only, preach contraceptives as hardly helpful, preach the importance of cutting your child’s body, and to preach that all of these practices are righteous is surely one of the more damaging aspects of our society. It should be obvious to humans that cutting an infant’s body, with no imminent health emergency, is immoral. There is a distinct difference between cutting an umbilical cord and removing an infant’s foreskin. It isn’t necessary to remove a foreskin; it is mutilating something that is unnecessary to remove on the only true innocents of our species. The fact that the practice is not condemned more uniformly in our society is abominable.

I’ll conclude that male circumcision is merely an act of superstition, unfounded and immoral in every way, except those that pose imminent danger to the newborn infant. To my current knowledge, I don’t know of any circumstances where this imminent danger arises. Thus, I think that it comes out only of a desire to differ ourselves from “lesser” beasts. We are animals, this does not belittle our existence.

I refuse to continue it’s practice.

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1. I thought it necessary to point out that education about abortion was not the encouragement of abortion, but to educate on the use of items like a type of “morning after pill”. This is of course a sexist pill, but soon there should be versions of contraceptive treatments for males that have similar effects as the morning after pill, i.e. the prevention of unplanned pregnancy. I think if this was educated uniformly that it should follow, as it seems in other countries, that the rate of partial-birth abortions and abortions in general would decrease.

On matters of the “Christian” Founders of the U.S.

“…consistent with nothing but the stupidity of the Bible”

-Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense. Common Sense is attributed to building support for the colonies’ declaration of independence. The fragment quoted is located in The Age of Reason, Part 2, page 142 in the edition I am reading. The fragment is not a misleading fragment meant to twist the entire meaning of a work, but indicative of the opinions expressed within.

Thomas Paine held that the Christian Bible was fallacious and an affront to, in his words, the true “Word of God”. He held that the true “Word of God” was all that surrounded us in the world, and that the pursuit of knowledge and science was the only true way to know his god. He also believed that a man’s reason was his god’s “gift to man”.

In The Age of Reason, particularly Part 2, Paine sets to refute the legitimacy of the Christian Bible by using…the Christian Bible. By using its own chronology and structure, he picks apart the errors in assumed dates and questions the legitimacy of the authors. He wrote The Age of Reason shortly after the French Revolution, if memory serves, with the intent of guiding individuals away from not only the clergy but keep them from falling prey to atheism.

I’m almost done reading it and this book alone seems reason enough to believe that the somewhat popular claim that the “Founding Fathers” were “all Christian” is a fallacy at the least, and a great evil invented to twist the minds of the governed at most.

So you can either believe what your president and your preacher says, or you could read literature and question the words of a C student from Harvard and the impassioned speeches of individuals behind pulpits. Or you could ignore this bulletin. hahaha.

~Joel

(This was originally merely a bulletin that I typed up to post on Myspace, but felt it held enough merit to repost for Pink Domino. Besides a few grammatical edits, I didn’t edit it further than this parenthetical to illustrate the reason behind its brevity and the mention of ‘bulletin’.)