Circumcision is not a Christian practice.
It’s popular in America because some 19th Century RFK jr style health freaks convinced everybody that masturbation caused disease.
Fun fact: Adventists (Kellogg’s religion) run the second largest system of Christian schools, behind the Catholics. It definitely won’t leave you weird and sexually repressed for the rest of your life.
I know it more from Islam.
Arguably the same thing in different colors tho.
Kellogg was never actually that influential. People mostly knew he was a crackpot at the time.
An episode of Adam Ruins Everything gave him way too much credit, and then people on the internet just keep repeating it because Kellogg was such a weird guy.
Even biblically speaking, it’s anti-christian. The first chunk of Galatians talks about how they should not force anyone to be circumcised. It goes against the bible to force anyone to be circumcised.
People on here really hate you if you’re a Christian.
It’s sad what America and its bullshit has done to give Christianity a bad name.
Jesus was in fact the one to say “yeah all this old rules don’t matter, just focus on these two: don’t be a dick and don’t be a fucking dick, god damn”
And that is why they crucified him, The Old Testament Repeatedly says “Be a dick against gays, infidels and non-virgin women who are not your wife. And whoever comes to say otherwise, be the most absolute dick against him”.
But even the new testament says to fear god, why would a all loving god want us to fear it? The abrahamic god is not all loving at all
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
Matthew 5:17
The law of the prophets was a costly covenant between old-testament god and humanity. Or, you know, whatever subgroup was in charge of translations at the time.
The “fulfillment” mentioned is a single lump sum of holy lamb blood in place of the never-actually-complete exchange of not wearing blended fabrics, not getting tattoos, and sacrificing your firstborn on a rock in the mountains. And slaughtering prisoners of war who you tricked into getting circumcised as a condition of their surrender so that they would be vulnerable.Matthew, particularly, was so obsessed with this idea that he even made up new scriptures that didn’t exist and said Jesus fulfilled them.
Aleluya
Genital mutilation for all your babies! Use myths and lies to explain why it’s necessary!
You mean to tell me it’s not physically impossible to clean the dick if the foreskin isn’t cut off? My whole uncircumcised life has been a lie!
It’s fucking crazy bro my parents were believers but weren’t actually subscribed to any traditional religion and them mfers still trimmed my shit
Blame Kellogg
And ultimately Christian sexual repression
The cereal guy? Next you’re gonna tell me Nestle’s been up to some shady shit
Well the cereal was invented cause he thought bland foods would stop you masturbating but that was clearly not working so he leaned back into foreskin hoarding.
I am not kidding as much as that sentence would make it seem.
Let’s clear it up though, it’s the guy who invented the cereal who was a nut. His brother was the one who was like “I’m gonna sell the flakes, not the dick snip bit.” They got into a huge battle when the quack doctor realized his brother was making more money selling the cereal than he was selling religious pseudoscience.
Yeah you’ve got to wonder if that extra bit they trimmed off would be nicer to have there or not. But I guess the mutilated pecker is all I’ll ever know so I guess its fine?
Actually there was a huge debate among early Christians whether circumcision was still required because Jesus never spoke on the issue (or if he did, there was no verifiable record of it).
To crudely summarize:
The earliest Christians were primarily Jews, so they were already circumcized as required by Judaism so it was a non-issue. However unlike Judaism where you’re almost always born into the religion, Christianity actively encourages adult conversion, so as more non-Jews (e.g. Greeks) began to identify as Christians, the circumcision issue became a conundrum. Some felt Christianity was a branch of Judaism and as such Jewish practices like circumcision were still required, whereas others objected because they saw Christianity as a new approach to Judaism, or even as a separate religion altogether (circumcision specifically was hotly debated due to such issues as adult circumcision being more, shall we say, unappealing than infant circumcision, plus getting circumcized would “out” non-Jews in nude spaces like bath houses, which was at best awkward and at worst deadly).
The earliest followers of Jesus thought Jesus was going to return in their lifetimes, so these types of issues were not discussed (or at least not resolved) by the original founders and proselytizers (researchers have determined the Gospels weren’t even composed until well after everyone involved was dead), but as generations passed it became clear that the Second Coming actually may not happen anytime soon, so practical issues of “how to establish a new religion (is it even a new religion or just a Jewish sect???)” turned into gigantic internal debates for the community. That’s what much of the New Testament is: letters back and forth trying to interpret the words of Jesus to resolve doctrinal conflict. In other words, the New Testament is basically four different versions of the story of Jesus (Mark, Matthew and Luke which were based on Mark and a lost “Gospel X”, and John), followed by a curated back-and-forth commentary section debating issues of the day such as circumcision and women’s role in the church, and controversially capped off by the (theorized) hallucinations of a hermit tripping balls off donated moldy bread.
The history of the New Testament (how it was written and later compiled, early texts that were lost or discarded, and all the doctrinal conflicts that boiled over into variously incidents of geopolitical chaos) is fascinating and seriously worth exploring.
That’s fascinating. Can you recommend any books on the subject? The easier to read the better!
I don’t know if I’d call it “easy” reading, but this is a well-regarded college textbook that’s popular in “Christianity 101” religion classes (so at least it’s entry-level and doesn’t assume prior knowledge on the topic):
For something much lighter, Extra Credits did a video series on early Christian schisms that mentions the circumcision debate:
I’m far from a religious scholar (just someone who enjoys history from time to time), so I’d be curious if other folks have additional recommendations.
Thanks :) I found a free PDF copy on anna’s archive
Tbf Jesus didn’t start this shit.
Somewhere in heaven, God is sitting on top of a huge pile of foreskins like Smaug.
My skins…a hurricane!!!
Circumcision of children should be highly illegal. Any health practitioner doing the procedure should be criminally liable for assault and malpractice.
I think religiously mandated circumcision is as dumb as the next guy does but c’mon now… there are legitimate reasons to do it and getting it done does not have that terrible health outcomes for the kid compared to FGM. I think society as a whole should start to think of it as a bygone practice, but putting doctors on pikes over it is extreme.
The rational behind it is flimsy to begin with. Stopping bacterial buildup? Sure. Then you have the whole “circumcision as a remedy for masturbation” … which was actually a movement.
nah my nephew had to get one because his foreskin wouldn’t grow. it literally was cutting off blood flow to his pecker, so they give him a circumcision. sucks but kinda had to happen.
Even with phimosis, circumcision is not needed in most cases. You can make the foreskin bigger and more flexible with stretching over time. Still, people with phimosis get circumcised without ever even hearing of an alternative option. Shit sucks
agreed. not needed in most cases but absolutely needed in some. exactly what I meant in my original comment
I would say that any… if the people live in a group or a society that is religion-based, and that religion requires it, then I am not against infant circumcision.
Basically, if you were born to Jewish parents living in Israel or Palestine or born to Muslim parents living in a Muslim-run country, then yes, participate in the culture that you were born in.
But, like in America, where every single person decides their own faith for themselves and only the most culty stay in this same religion that their parents were in, infant bodily autonomy outside of life-saving procedures should be the rule.
It seems to happen less often in Europe, but wouldn’t hurt to add that as a rule there, too.
At least wait until the kid is 13 years old as a minimum.
It’s sexual assault
Don’t eat pork, don’t eat shell fish, don’t work on Sundays (or Saturdays depending on who you talk to), no sex before marriage, don’t masturbate … but you can bend the rules and get close to doing those things and even get away with breaking the rule because God is an idiot that can easily be outwitted or deceived with human logic.
And this is just a small list of rules and regulations … there’s a whole list of things that are not allowed in the bible but Christian leaders have made workarounds on everything because they are smarter than God.
Jesus basically came in to say: just follow the commandments, love one another, love your enemy as yourself, don’t be greedy and selfish, and you guys don’t have to keep doing those self-imposed rules the Israelites made themselves do like don’t eat pork or shell fish, etc.
Israelites believed that they were supposed to be purists about everything they do to some degree and saw being a purist as being holy; such as never mixing two different kinds of fabric together or don’t raise your goats with your sheep. Jesus said you don’t need to be a purist about all this unimportant stuff, but be good people.
My favorite one is do not boil a calf in its mother’s milk, which has been interpreted to mean no cheese or butter on beef.
Which means that cooking and eating a bacon cheeseburger yourself after sundown *on a friday while wearing cotton underwear and polyester pants is 4 sins, 3 of which are burger
God is not an idiot, your leader are.
So there is that story in Genesis where the sons of Jacob have an army of 318 men circumcised so they could follow their religion.
Just think they probably put then into a pile, a small little mountain of foreskins.
They made them into some wallets
You know how you can collect rubber bands over time, wrapping them around each other, and eventually you have a great big ball on your desk to play with?
My wallet is really at the end of its life cycle and this comment made me consider
If I remember my history correctly, one of the primary draws of the at the time new christianity over judaism was specifically that dudes wouldn’t need to lop off part of their dongs in a pre-anesthesia world.
I can understand desert people coming up with some excuse to preform the operation because sand is coarse and rough and irritating… and it gets everywhere.
But it’s just nicer to think they wanted their kids to have the most attractive cocks in the village
Found some really nuts messianic Christian family on Facebook, and the mom just gives birth on the back of the skoolie they live in without any medical care, thankfully they only have one son but the father circumcised him with a razor by himself on the bus, and mom thinks that is a swell idea and wrote up a manual about it for her website. They drive around putting up religious signs and begging donations off their fellow believers to live on, and I want to call CPS so badly but I don’t know how to find them. It’s SO much worse than that too.
Egads, that poor child is probably going to have significant scarring around the cuts. Assuming he didn’t get a massive infection that they didn’t bother to get treated until amputation was necessary.
Those kids have never seen any medical care providers of any sort. They let the boy get an almost 107 degree fever one time, and he’s obviously autistic so it must have been extra miserable for him. No vaccines, no dentists, no school, etc etc.
Casual reminder that many religious rules were just basic Hygiene practices from prehistoric times which were later absorbed into the local beliefs.
The whole “hygiene” and circumcision is a myth and a lie. Your foreskin has no bearing on your ability to wash your dick
The whole “hygiene” and circumcision is a myth and a lie.
It’s not like there microbiology science existed thousands of years ago. It may have been a hygiene practice because people thought it was helpful. Bloodletting is BS as well and people thought it helped drain the body’s poisons.
Bloodletting is therapeutic… for some very specific conditions. For example, hemochromatosis, where the body has too much iron, and there has been some preliminary study that blood donations are a way to reduce the amount of PFAS in blood.
But everyone has PFAS in their blood; not every male has (beyond normal) phimosis.
From the context it’s 100% clear that I meant the medieval practice, before modern science.
deleted by creator
I imagine the whole circumcision thing makes sense when you’re wandering the desert for years and there’s not a whole lot of water around, but other than that, yeah.
So blowjobs 3 times a day?
Not so long ago people would go weeks without washing their bodies, let alone in prehistoric times.
It does if it’s tight. I couldn’t wash it due to the extreme tightness. I don’t agree with doing it for religious reasons, just saying your argument there is not without holes.
You are quite right. There is a tribe in East Africa which makes a hole on their lower lip and place a huge disk into it. It is theorised that the practice started to prevent lockjaw disease that may have been prevalent in the area eons ago. I am not sure how this prevents lockjaw but maybe for them it works.
You know, I have a personal theory that this particular law was established as a measure of genital hygiene, since without the foreskin dirt does not accumulate on the glans; but over the years it was distorted until it became a divine mandate that is just for the sake of it.
The vast majority of the Bible was simply guidelines to keep people healthy and happy. All this “the skin of the pig is unclean” stuff? They hadn’t figured out germs yet. No sex until marriage? No contraceptives, so don’t create uncared for children. I won’t waste my time on it but, when examined in context, this is the vast majority, if not the entirety of the bible: lessons on how to be safe and happy relative to the time, made digestable and relevant to the common person.
Sucks they had to get there via fear of imaginary, post-life pain, and it sucks twice as hard that they’ve neglected to rationalize that part as the rest of the belief structure has modernized.
I can definitely get behind that. Like, if you read the Bible, especially some particular chapters, there’s a lot of old man yells at clouds vibes.
“I will cuteth off the member of him who pisseth against the wall”
Doesn’t really sound like a god thing. It would be very weird for the ruler and creator of the universe to get really, really fucking mad that any person who pees on a wall anywhere, regardless of the situation, should have their dick cut off.
It kind of sounds more like, you know, one of the leaders of a community is writing down laws and threatening to cut a bunch of boys’ dicks off because they keep peeing on walls and stinking the place up rather than using appropriate facilities.
I wish we had accurate historical records of the time, so I could see if this was ever actually enacted. Like, how much would it suck to be that guy?
Walking home late from the bar, you gotta take a whiz, you piss, the cops catch you, and like three hours later, your penis is lying in the trash.
And, I mean, talk about disproportionate response, like, did the concept of community service not exist? Like, what the fuck?
Then there was one phrase about, do not go and shave the sides of your beard, something something yada yada, and it reads like a protest against the kids and their fashion.
There’s lots of stuff where if you have the capacity to take the one mental step to say that every single word in the book may not have been written by God himself, but instead the texts chosen to be in the bible contain a historic medium of communicating laws, rules, and regulations that made sense at the time, inspired by God and definitely containing some legitimate things that were directly written by the Holy Spirit, but also invariably containing some information that was derived from that original mandate.
I mean, even the whole thing about the Sabbath, it was more a nicety to say, even God rested, you should rest too. You should have at least one day off a week where you’re not beholden to labor for somebody else, where you can enjoy life.
I highly doubt that God is throwing people into hell for working on the Sabbath. I get that it’s special to God because he rested for a day, which is something he had otherwise not done throughout existence. But at the same time, why torment someone forever for just working one extra day out of our comparatively very short lives?
I don’t know. I can rant forever. I’m sorry, I’ll stop here, but yeah.
Cross-amputation is still a thing under Sharia Law. I wouldn’t be surprised if people ever, or even still do, get their dicks cut off for pissing on a wall. John Wayne Bobbit had his cut off by his wife, but that was over marital rape.
I’m guessing this is the verse you are referencing?
Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will take away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone.
That’s not a commandment from God saying that he’ll cut peoples dicks off if they piss against the wall, that’s part of a curse where God is saying that he’s going to destroy Jeroboam’s family line. Its a curse on a specific guy in history.
One of my favorite examples of this: Leviticus 11:13-19
“These are the birds you are to detest and not eat because they are detestable: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, the red kite, any kind of black kite, any kind of raven, the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe, and the bat.”
Most of these are either scavengers, or eat rodents which carry diseases that are awful to humans. The societies that ate them didn’t tend to last long.
When people get afraid they get superstitious. And then they walk into the wolf’s arms.
The best way to test the resolve of your fellow cultists is by making them commit to very rigorous rules that affect their life significantly.
I mean if you can get them to cut of a piece of their reproductive organs, you have insanely loyal followers. Also resisting something to eat that is very tasty, of it said ‘don’t eat shit’ it’s not a very hard rule to follow.
Somehow this works like a drug for some people. There a reason that many rehabs are ran by religious fellows.
Religions prey on the weak, hence the rehabs and homeless shelters. It’s not charity it’s recruitment
I see nothing here that contradicts my point.
So i agree
Everybody was filthy back in those days.
