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.