In Judaic societies, circumcision is performed on the eighth day after birth. Moslems and many other tribal cultures perform this rite in early adult life.
I’m intrigued by the fact that most people don’t really think about this practice - the idea itself seems to be acceptable to many of us, one of those cultural blind spots.
Ask any (otherwise) loving mother why she would allow her son to undergo this pain, and she would probably answer by pointing to a cultural, religious, or health benefit. But we now know that this procedure offers no real medical benefits - the story was made up by the prudish Victorians, whose real goal was to cure masturbation - which leaves us with the supposed cultural and religious benefits.
In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul gets so incensed about this issue that he wishes those promoting it “would castrate themselves” - even though god commanded it. But then, St. Paul was promoting a new religion - one we would barely recognize today.
Why did the god of the Old Testament (the god of todays fundamentalists) command the Israelites to inflict pain on the source of their pleasure? Why were they not marked somewhere else, and why only the males?
Perhaps god did not really command it, as it is clear that many ancient nations performed this rite well before the Israelites:
Like other bodily mutilations… [it is] of the nature of a representative sacrifice. […]The principle of substitution was familiar to all ancient nations, and not least to the Israelites. […]On this principle circumcision was an economical recognition of the divine ownership of human life, a part of the body being sacrificed to preserve the remainder. - Encyclopaedia Britannica (1876)
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