Friday, January 30, 2015

re: Campus sexual assault

If I were a professional writer, I would write to you in my own words the same analysis you could have  found on any other website, by any other author, the same analysis you would see any where else. There  would be nothing original, I wouldn't be rocking anyone's boat, and it must pass journalistic muster.

If I wanted to become a professional writer, then I'd try to provide for you my own analysis.

But as it is, I'd really like to not waste anyone's time, so I will provide for you my own analysis.

A few months ago, I crossed a term in an article that I had not seen up to that point. "Slut-shaming".. This is a term in the phrase book of feminist organizations that have made university life an onslaught for man, and unleashed a castrating, matriarchal system in education.

I want to consider the intersection of rape and "slut-shaming" and what "slut-shaming" means for rape culture. It is said that 1 out of 4 women on a college campus are at risk and, indeed, will become a victim of rape or sexual assault at some point in their lives, or have been victimized already.

From reason and my intuition considering the numbers involved, I find this to be preposterous, and I believe "slut-shaming", or really the fear of it or its anticipation, serves to drive these numbers up.

Because women on college campuses more frequently engage in indiscriminate, casual sexual intercourse as  compared with women in the broaded population, women have manufactured this thing, "slut-shaming",  although I'm not even sure what to call it. The argument suggests women are conflicted with contradictory impulses via society to be overt sexual in appearance and appeal to this aspect of their being, while simultaneously being expected to remain chaste. Women engage in these casual sexual encounters but are subsequently inundated with shame, as society, despite hailing sexually liberated women, calls them sluts when they practice that ethic. She feels that she is a worthless slut.

Feminism provides the panacea: Women are told that a great number of consensual sexual encounters are  not consensual at all, rather they are coerced, and procured by fraud and deceit. The woman absolves  herself of the guilt of being a slut by accusing the male of rape. Not all women fabricate these lies. Many are led into believing they are true after being brainwashed by the feminist narrative. A few women can be coerced into believing they have been raped, just like witnesses can be coached into lying on the stands. (Or if you're a police officer, "testi-lying", which just means that the brass are willing to do what has to be done to make a case. It's part of the territory."

Some women, however, are lying, and know they are lying, and have plotted to concoct a lie. They even  delusively imagine that they are heroes in society. Because for every made-up accusation of rape, a feminist can simply say, there are five that go unreported. Or ten. It doesn't matter. Statistics aren't even a factor in feminism.

Case in point, the NRA produces a pro-gun crime series, where they record a story of how a law-abiding  citizen used a permitted firearm to sto an intruder or would-be robber, or sexual attack. There was a story reported on one episode about a deterred sexual attack. A woman had used a gun in self-defense. Very "sensitively", the NRA, despite being a right-wing organization invited a spokesmouth for a women's rights group to speak about the risks of being a woman in society, and without any critical evaluation either. The woman very clearly states that, In America, every 20 seconds a woman is raped or sexually assaulted. (I think it was 20 seconds, I may be off a little bit.) I thought about that a second, 86,400 seconds in a day, 365 days a year, that's according to my calculator, well over 1,500,000 rapes a year!) So again. Statistics, within feminism, are not useful unto themselves in being correct, rather they are useful in their ability to affect social change. Hey, social change is good if it means safer communities and greater respect for human dignity. In this case though, it means numbers must be invented, and exaggerated wildly out of proportion.

So, the rape numbers are drastically inflated merely because it makes women feel better about the casual trysts that they engage in.

As statistics are really only valuable in their ability to affect social change, one could fall back on presumptuous pontifications, such as, "We need to start a national conversation on the rape epidemic!"

But when Nancy Grace tried that several years ago (re: Duke case), that failed because it was discovered it the allegations were fabricated from whole cloth.

And when Rolling Stone tried that a few months ago, that one failed too because those allegations were  similarly fabricated, or possibly unsubstantiated, there's a lot of controversy about that.

So really one of two things must be true.

Either

1) There is an actual rape epidemic and the media is inept to report it and law enforcement is inept to  prosecute it, or there are many rapists both in journalism and law enforcement, and they are working to  shield the true offenders and the true facts.

Or

2) There really is no such crisis and the media has not been able to seize upon a nationally prominent case because rape IS such an uncommon event on college campuses that no legitimate instance can be provided. This would explain why when the media has sought opportunities to bring the issue to the public square, it has failed miserably when the accuser's lies were outed as fabrications.

I obviously do not believe media and law enforcement are colluding with rapists to hide their crimes and to deter their victims from seeking justice.

I must conclude that the true extent of rape is in some way exaggerated, perhaps to an insane degree even. That "slut-shaming", a fictional "rape culture", exaggerated statistics, and feminism are socially and politically useful tools for connected groups, and that much like old black civil rights activists would lose business if racism were entirely defeated, feminist groups would be similarly unnecessary if women were not being raped regularly. In fact, rape seems very good for their business and in fact, they seem to suggest if they had their way, there would be far more rapes in real life than there are now, when they report that the incidence of sexual assault is several times higher than it actually is!

(It's like this.. Why do women's groups report higher levels of rape? Wishful thinking? Do they wish rape was more prevalent? Because if deterring rape was satisfying to them, then it should be especially satisfying to realize your numbers were wrong and rapes are really only one-fourth as frequent as you originally thought! That would be something to celebrate! So it must be they wish rapes happened several times more often than they actually do, otherwise I can't make sense of it.)

Finally, if one quarter of women are either victims of prior assaults or can be expected to become victims of assault in the future, then it is certain a great number of the men we encounter in our lives, perhaps many of our acquaintances, friends, or family are actually rapists, and women deserve a huge amount of blame for failing to out these rapists and get them arrested, and for lacking the conviction to testify against them.

James v. Paul: Handling tragedy with dignity

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness (James 1:2).”

Did Paul bear his tragedies with dignity? I find it hard to believe he did.

Often times, in his letters, he frets about the trials he endured. He seems to live in the past. He can't move past things, and forgive his tormentors, and he never prays that they are saved. Instead, he viciously "hands Hymeneaus over to Satan" and wishes harm and evil on others. He does not even say this regrettably, as in, "I unfortunately had to hand him over.." He says it more with glee, satisfaction that, "I have handed him over to Satan!" He seems like a distorted man.

Consider how dying is an art.

It's always a pause, and a deep nod to those who die graciously, with dignity. Some how, they have a sort of rare strength, and they never felt slighted by their hand in life. They take it all for what it is. And they die a very noble death.

Not all people die heroically. Most people die very normal, routine deaths. But we hear stories in the news and in inspiring articles about people who touched others throughout their lives, even unto their end.

Was this what Paul did? I don't see that either.

He pompously declares he's going to go to Jerusalem no matter what God says, he says he's ready to be  bound. When he's taken into custody, he causes a scene in the court of Festus and demands to be given an  audience with Caesar. He believes he's been wronged. He demands justice!

Jesus, as a lamb, He never resisted His captors. He never disputed the charges against Him. He patiently  endured His trials, as the most innocent Man to endure it, and He suffered cruel embarrassment and torture, but it is the most powerful expression of humanity we have, and virtually all time stands in heed, as preceding and following this event. It is the defining moment in God's plan of redemption for mankind.

Paul showed none of this. He huffed. He puffed. He blew Stephen's house in, and many others in my  estimation. Luke describes him at one point as breathing murder against the Christians. This seems like a member of a violent biker gang rather than a wayward man.

Often times, Paul got himself into trouble. He did wrong. Then he turned around and defended it. He complained to one of his churches, Why do they call me a sinner?!?!?!?! Elsewhere, to Timothy, he whines that all the churches in Asia have deserted him (gee, I wonder why. Seems like a real swell guy, this Sha'ul figure).

Let's make it even simpler for the Christians that still can't understand it yet.

Paul was a big blubbering mess. He was completely dysfunctional. He would have been referred to social services if he were alive today, if he were not already serving a life sentence in San Quentin or a supermax. He was a foul murderer, but even after all of his meddling and conniving, he'd still write to all the people he spent most of his latter years harassing and annoying via mail, like this annoying anti-Catholic fundamentalist sicko David, to complain about the awful injustice that had been wrought on him.

Oh.. they will say "annoy".. that's not true. Oh, so the churches in Asia weren't totally pestered with him and abandoned him after all? Oh that's right, they did abandon him. So clearly, he was a pest, he was bothering everyone.. In fact after 1900 years, his words are still bothering people. They've made some parts of my life a living hell and my real salvation has been to learn to ignore him and virtually every time someone decides to bring him up. Sure, I walk out of church if I hear him mentioned. I'm tired of him, I don't want to hear what he said.

Preface to Muslim evangelism

Can Christianity and Islam be reconciled?

This is a complex question. Namely, one question cannot satisfy the parameters of the problem, and that at least two questions are needed.

But this means it is only a hypothetical. For the first question is If...? and the second question is Then...?

One cannot be certain that even if the If...? is given, that the answer of the Then...? will follow.

The real power to appeal to Muslims is in being able to communicate the truth to them.

And this is only valuable if the Muslims are really interested in truth at all.

The truth about

- Origins

- Life

and

- God

Christians feel their system is best at answering these questions. Obviously, Muslims do as well. (And  everyone believes [i]they[/i] have the answer, or the answer most meaningful to them, or else why should they hold it?)

The belief of Christian evangelicalism is that if we argue strong enough, powerfully enough, with enough truth, broadcast it on enough stations, to the widest audience, with the most published materials, that the Muslims will eventually see the superior truth of our religion.

There are two ways that that might go.

1- Either the Muslims are not interested in the truth, but only power and authority, or to be seen, themselves, as authorities.

or

2- Muslims are interested in the truth about life and about God, just as we are. And therefore we have a  powerful common ground to appeal to them on.

But you cannot argue that one is morally constrained to do good, to a person who only believes in power and "might makes right", and that power, law, the appearance of power and the color of law, are ends in  themselves.

If Muslims are motivated to seek the truth, then the pivot point of Christian evangelicalism is that it has it, and that it communicates it effectively.

It does not.

I have no way to quantify the effects of any element that contribute to this problem, but I know if we target the "truth" element then we can better quantify and finally solve the problem.

To adopt a line from earlier and to modify it with a pertinent and necessary argument...

"If Muslims are interested in the truth..." Let us assume they are. Now let us take a step back and acknowledge that often Christians advocate for demonstrably false teachings, known errors.

If Muslims are certain of the epistemological supremacy of their religion, a large reason for that is because Christians have made it that way.
The Muslims are not going to accept a shady argument from a liar that they know to be false. For that reason, a Muslim holds on to a kernel of truth that their religion teaches but misses the opportunity to hear a more full presentation of the truth.

Christians are wrong on such basic points, and are so stubborn in their refusal to acknowledge how wrong  they are, that no sincere man can fully adopt their arguments, or I'm afraid, any of them.

Part of this is dynamically propped up, from basic presuppositions of their faith, to institutional dynamics.

If a pastor has the truth, if a missionary has the truth, then his real selling power, if the occasion arises that a more knowledgeable member in his personal audience stands to correct him (even for miniscule error), is to shut him down, shout him down, deny, deny, deny.

Very cynically, the pastor calculates he does not lose much. If he admits error, he might lose a great deal of his audience, who now see that he really is an ordinary person like we are and that he isn't so profoundly knowledgeable on spiritual matters as he pretends to be (in my opinion, a greatly exaggerated fear. For me, it takes strength of position and character to acknowledge an error). Yet if he strenuously defends his position, his acolytes will love him all the more, and perhaps in the best case, he will only run off one potential convert, who likely would only have caused problems for him anyway.

Further, in the hierarchical system, which is really any system that man has created, a pyramid, top down system*, it's very hard for authority to admit at any time it has made a mistake. Because if there is one man, or one council, that we all answer to, then even if they are wrong, AND we call them out, then it is very possible they acknowledge the error, but also illustrate that you have committed insubordination by announcing their error.




*( And contrast this with God's system which is about servanthood. Such as Jesus saying, that if any man seeks to rule over you he would have to become your servant. Or Who said, the Son of Man hath not come to be served, but to serve others. This is very different from man's system, where one proud, and weak man
is so afraid of losing it, that he demands everyone be beneath him and answer only to him.)

So the problem, the cancer of authority, and hierarchical structure, is that the frail, prideful man that it all leads to, is not endowed with strong wisdom to be able to righteously direct it, he will make mistakes, and if he is new to this, he will try to cover it up.

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I'm saying there are forces at work in evangelical Christianity that are undermining our position and witness!

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If Christianity teaches the truth, we can contemplate the reasons why no one else is accepting it. I want to announce, that we are not special. It is not because they are jealous of us, or they envy us, or because the devil has taken hold of them.

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It is because we ourselves are advocating error!

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I would jump at the opportunity to see a true, inspired presentation of the holy Gospel to noble Muslims, from Christians who can very sensitively convey their message and meanings to them, and never conveying antipathy toward Islam or their Prophet, but to diligently stress the truth our message contains, and the Saviour it heralds.

I have heard venom directed at Islam, and Muslims, and in terms of the problem, as an equation, I see that no one would appreciate a rival sect or people who by their actions, day in and day out, live to antagonize them and their beliefs. I have no way to discern how much of Muslim resistance is from stubbornness and how much we have created ourselves!

In that sense, I sympathize very readily with Muslims!

And yet, it's also clear that Islam has varying factions, and voices, vying for attention within it. Not every Muslim on TV or radio speaks for every other Muslim. And just as Christianity has its demagogues, Islam does as well. Some of these demagogues hold the same antipathy towards the West and Christianity, as many westerners and Christians hold for Islam.

I want to see these voices neutralized and for the noble in both camps to have a dialogue.

Muslims need a presentation of the holy Gospel.

This means your job as a Christian, if you are talented in eloquent public speaking, in spiritual things, and reaching out, to make yourself useful. If you are not gifted in these things, please shut up and stay out of my way and stop making this more difficult for everyone else.

You stupid Westerners are going to get a lot of people killed because of your stupid rhetoric. Charlie Hebdo is complicit in genocide and hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world. (Aww, you never heard anyone say that yet, did you?) Many in the east feel this is a fair representation of who we are, and churches have burned, and Christians murdered in retaliation for the jokes of morons in comfortable Parisian office buildings and apartments. And even Muslims will suffer backlash, because many of them do not authorize the inter-religious killings of non-believers and believe this will end badly for them as well.

--

Final remarks

As to what constitutes the error that I have referred to so often in this article, I am going to wisely withhold that information at the present time. The errors that Christianity teaches are not tangential in any way and are not footnotes. They are given center stage in our religion and to many represent non-negotiable salvific truths. Many are embodied as components to orthodoxy and for me to append these disputations now to this letter, will only diminish the value of this letter to illustrate the forces at work in this vexing problem.

Many are unable to rightly divide between very valuable teachings and the appearance of error contained  therein. This message has its greatest effect by succinctly acknowledging that this problem exists, defining it, and anticipating a resolution.

Further reading on these errors will be found on virtually every other page of this blog.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Duke and Dhimmitude

(As a member of the United Methodist Church, it is specifically troubling to me that this policy was adopted, and it is certainly in line with the trend in United Methodism toward a progressive value system, and one I do not support. My personal belief on the matter is that despite it's history as a Christian school, I consider it an imposition when ANY religion is given an opportunity to proselytize on campus under the direction and endorsement of the university administration. I feel it is imposing one's religious view on another, no matter what religious it is being promoted. However, I am more concerned with a school founded originally with a Christian mission to make the concession that was made here, and this issue trumps any other concern of imposition I would typically have.)

I learned of this story early last week, around Tuesday. Duke University had proposed and passed a  resolution that would allow the Muslim call to prayer, the adhan, to be sounded from the Duke Chapel.

I learned Friday night that the issue had been revisited after public outcry, and the earlier decision was reversed.

In the wake of this new decision, naturally another party was dissatisfied with the new (old) policy and the NBC Nightly News featured a report on it Friday evening. One individual lamented that we had "lost an opportunity to begin a dialogue with Muslims."

So I want to talk about having a dialogue with Muslims, which I think is very important, and one that too many Christians overlook.

I want to stress why evangelicalism toward the Muslim religion is so important to me. Ultimately, when it comes to salvation, the Muslims are souls, but they are lost souls. In this regard, they are like any other group that engages life removed from God and true religion. They are people that, without the intervention of Christ, they are lost. That is personally disturbing to me that it is one of the greatest untapped sources of missionary activity, and the Church, by virtue of its resignation from its duty and indifference to Muslim lives, will allow over one billion people to perish in flames, merely for because they are indiffert. They will say they are afraid of Muslims, they will say it is fruitless... These are side issues. The real issue is that Christians are indifferent.

---

As I have stated, I look forward to a dialogue with the Muslim communities. I hope that at some point in the future, meaningful activity to this purpose can be accomplished. However, I disagree with that man who was interviewed and others who have expressed the same feeling about the Duke controversy.

To the Christians who pursued this policy, this is seen as a real advantage to Western Christian and secular Western society. Because of the liberal ideals that Western societies hold dear, that it does not favor groups over individuals or large groups over smaller groups, the West prides itself on this basis, seeing it as an important illustration of what is so good about the West.

But it would be incorrect to say Muslims see this in the same light we do.

Muslims would consider a society that does not yield to central Muslim precepts not merely as a society that prioritizes a competing vision or ideology; it is instead viewed as an evil society, or even a shaitanic society.

Muslims would not only not recognize it as an endearing facet of our way of life, they would rather ask why such a policy had not been adopted sooner. Their rigid belief in the rightness of their way would never allow them to concede that a society even has a prerogative in deciding to not follow Muslim practice at all. Society must follow the dictates of Islam. Even they were given the vote in several Arabic and North African nations, they voted, rather than for a sort of democracy, to be ruled by the imperatives of the Qu'ran and Islamic tradition, which seems far more like a totalitarian state to people in the West.

It seems then that many Muslims who are still deeply impacted by the way of life in the East, view such  consolations as NECESSARY PRECONDITIONS to dialogue.

I call this a form of Dhimmitude.

It is really asking for unconditional, total surrender. Before we can have dialogue with you, the Muslims figuratively are saying, you must kowtow and acquiesce to all of our cultural idiosyncrasies, your churches must sound the call to prayer, you must agree to the superiority of our culture, before we consider you to have standing.

This is not a genuine precondition to precede a true debate. This is the request for total, unconditional surrender.

If Muslims cannot have a debate until our culture concedes in its entirety cultural superiority to the East, then a meaningful dialogue cannot be had with them.

I do not feel this is the majority of Muslims however and again, I will reemphasize, I look forward to that dialogue in the future, with those Muslims of noble manners and customs, that will engage biblical Christians with the same eagerness that we will greet them.

Why Did God Create the Foreskin?

Why Did God Create the Foreskin?

To start off, we need to ask a more general question: Why did God create the penis at all?

Or phrased neutrally, without respect toward religion, What is the function of the penis?

These questions are asked in two different manners. The question, Why did God create the foreskin?, you  often will hear posed by critics of religion to poke fun at religious fundamentalism, which seems to fall victim so often to obvious plot holes and inconsistencies. The supposition of the skeptic is that the foreskin is purposeful, and either God designed it purposefully, or that as a consequence of evolution, it evolved for the sake of its functionality.

But the skeptic does insist that the foreskin is purposeful in its function.

So this question is asked by ideologues. It would not be meaningful to ask "Why did God create the penis?" with these constraints in mind. That would be like stating the penis is totally functionless and unnecessary.

So my question is to its function. What is its function?  Its task is narrowly defined as serving dually an excretory and a reproductive purpose.

The next question is what is its use. Its use can be described by the last two functions, but the category of its uses is more wide-ranging than the list of its functions. Among some of its uses, men like to stick it in things. They like to stick it in lots of things. There really isn't anything that someone somewhere has not thought of sticking it in, other than perhaps a blender, although I'm not so sure of that.

Aside from things, men like to stick it in people and animals, and it doesn't really matter whether man, woman, or child, or animal. Anything, no matter how young, how old, whether it has feathers... The stories are horrifying, they cause decent men and women to shudder at the graphic details. But these are things men do with their genitals.

Because I believe in a creation, and that the Bible is a basically reliable and inspired text, there really is no other way for me to answer than that in the "Genesis" era when creation is described, there was a deliberate purpose in the design of the male sex organ, including the foreskin. Something obviously changed in the course of ongoing development and God asked men to remove it.

I am not saying it was a mistake. But it was one feature that God later altered in His original design.

One thing I've long noticed about the Bible is that the Old Testament is an extensive listing of the naivete of God's design. The stories it records contain some very important commonalities.

1) God creates man in a state of harmony and good. Man destroys it.
2) Within a few thousand years, humanity reaches the pinnacle of evil and God destroys it by flood.
3) Many years later, God has developed a relationship with a certain tribe descended from one Abram, and
    He leads them into Egypt, where they are taken as slaves.
4) During hundreds of years they are held as slaves, toward the end He leads a meek, stuttering man to
    their defense, who Pharaoh virtually laughs off.
5) Though He leads them to freedom by the hand of Moses, they very immediately fall into various
    indecencies and idol worship. He curses them to wander the desert for forty years and the death
    of that generation.
6) He finally leads them into the land of milk and honey where they begin crying for a king. God gives
    them Saul, an evil man, easily corrupted, with many flaws about him.
7) Various other things transpire, David becomes king and is provoked to number Israel. God kills many
    thousands as a consequence. David passes, Solomon becomes king. He sets up abominations and is a
    polytheist who worships many nations' false gods. Followed by many other maniacal and evil
    kings, and also the evil Jezebel and Ahab.
8) Despite having given them an excellent legal code, the people set up for themselves law givers, who
    write hundreds to thousands of additional regulations, coming to set aside God's law for the
    sake of promoting their human law and place such burdens on people, "that are grievous to be
    borne."
9) Meanwhile, God sends them numerous messengers to reassert His holy law and path, many of whom the
    people assassinate in various and public manners, some of whom they only manage to wreck their
    lives and make their existences a living hell.
10) Finally, God sends His true son, who they likewise kill.
11) In a couple short generations, the rebellious Jewish people continue killing the remnant and causing
    such a general uproar in the provinces of Rome, and ultimately desecrate their temple, leading
    up to the day the Romans march in, destroy Jerusalem, the temple, killing many Israelites, and
    dispersing them to the winds.
12) And for nearly 1900 years, the Jews were separated from their ancestral land.

This being God business is tough work.

When one studies the Bible, without any doctrinal or denominational presuppositions, but to engage it as an intrinsically reliable document about which we likely will come to conclusions that make the churches and those around us uncomfortable, and likely, even ourselves, but we agree to pursue it, one cannot deny that there is an overwhelming sense of collapse and failure in God's design.

One sees in it the acts of a good God, who has created the earth and man in as a good thing, for a beautiful purpose, and at every step of the way, man and the devil intervene to destroy His creation and overthrow His plan.

We see that man is basically evil. A few are evil in a villainous way. The others may be good fathers, good friends, like the pagans, Jesus said. But they are driven by the negative vices, greed, ambition, destroying one's enemies. It's not enough to love your children. That's not enough to living a noble life.

On the other hand, there are really only a few that are good and virtuous. These God had compassion on and took measures to protect throughout history.

The ordinary man, though no villain, was not virtuous either.

What I believe happened between the days of Adam and the days of Abraham... I think is the same that we  see in every other story of the Bible. God's design never adequately handled the human dimension of abuse and misuse. Nor was it designed to. God gave us free will to make horrible choices, even to work to destroy, and even come very close to destroying, His overall plan and purpose.

Put briefly, men began sticking them in things and finding far many more uses for it than God ever had intended. It became advantageous at some point for the rite of circumcision to be instituted.

As with all the laws, it had very purposeful health consequences; chief among them is that it lessens the rate at which diseases transmit, and this is very important in a society of liberal sexual standards. It really was a safe sex practice in a time that syphilis and VD would have been spread unchecked.

To this effect, medical science has established circumcision as being very crucial to suppressing disease transmission, and this is seen chiefly in African society where it has been a very efficacious manner in which HIV has left not much of an impact on a society, whereas in those where it is not practiced, it has had a truly devastating impact. Male homosexuals also contract disease more frequently and pass it more frequently when they are not circumcised.

Overall, the question posed at the outset, "Why did God create the foreskin?" which asserts its purposeful evolutionary history, comes to be disproven on a scientific level as being untrue. Scientifically speaking, the advantage is toward circumcised males who have lower disease and infection rates and science has definitively established the rite of circumcision as a beneficial practice.

The social experiment of suppressing religion and Judaisms/Christianisms in society is reckless. It is no proof to say that we see low disease rates now; we shall see in some years whether the foreskin does cause so many diseases as in Africa! Because in so many years, the epidemiologists will come to acknowledge, at the height of unprecedented public health crises, that the experiment to abandon circumcision was a foolish, novel enterprise, that was embarked upon only on the basis of ideological, rather than established medical, bases.