Circumcision

This is a part of my series on biblical superstitions that, when believed, have done damage to human lives.

As has been well covered by the Los Angeles Times, a recent major controversy in California has been over new laws making it illegal to perform circumcision on any male under the age of 18.

The group sponsoring the MGM bill to make it against the law, believes that the male circumcision is a painful and unnecessary procedure. The MGM bill is Male Genital Mutilation. They want it on the November ballot. The opponents say…it is not painful. Don’t you believe them. Vivid in my mind to this very hour is the day in my mind when I was about 4 years old and living through “genital mutilation”…called “circumcision”. My father took me to the doctor’s office in his home. I was put flat on my back on an operating table. No doubt a mild pain reduction shot was given me. It made no difference at all. It was horribly painful, even to the degree that it is vivid in my mind today, 84 years later. Female circumcision is outlawed in the U.S. Doing it to a male is accepted everywhere. In Judaism it is a religious requirement. Based on biblical superstition.

My friend Ben Akerley has brought out this truth about superstition in a most articulate observation:

“In ancient Israel, a stillborn male baby’s corpse had to be circumcised at the graveside. If there was a history of hemophilia in the family, the third son was excused from the operation, but only after two previous sons had hemorrhaged to death….ample proof that the rite was nothing more than a superstitious blood sacrifice performed without anesthesia on a helpless infant.”

Parents need to know this is an elective procedure and not required by hospitals for birth services. And it is irreversible. Later a man discovers he was a victim of misguided parents. But, in Judaism of course it is a required religious ritual based on biblical laws and ancient superstition.

“And God said unto Abraham ‘this is my covenant which ye shall keep between me and you and thy seed after thee; every man child among you shall be circumcised, and ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin and it shall be a token of the covenant between me and you. And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed, must be circumcised; and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.’ ” (Genesis 17;1-15)

From that time, circumcision was practiced on both male and females where this evolved as a ritual and tribal rite. It did not usually occur until puberty at which time circumcision of both male and females is easily performed. Death was decreed for any male whose foreskin was not sacrificed to Jehovah. And in Genesis 17-14 it reads, “and the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised; that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant.”

This is known by biblical scholars as a “blood sacrifice.” And the superstition, still practiced today in 2011, is just absolutely beyond human comprehension.

My series on “biblical superstitions” is as important as any I have ever written. We, as a “religious, Christian” nation, are drowning in biblical illiteracy and historical religious ignorance.

My former patron wrote that my columns were “…monumental in raising the level of religious literacy.” Even though that “patron,” Walter Annenberg, was born into Judaism, he totally rejected very early in life the biblical superstitions of orthodox Judaism.

What a blessing it would be if biblical superstitions were seen as what they are… by the “true believers”… seen as superstitions that do such damage today to human lives.