If you haven’t heard of Pascal’s Wager, it’s a rather silly way of arguing to someone that they should believe in God. The argument goes something like this: in deciding whether or not you believe in God, you should approach the problem the way you approach a wagering situation. Ask yourself what you could possibly gain, and what you could possibly lose.

Given that you have two choices (believe in God, or don’t) and that there are two possible results (God exists, or he doesn’t), there are four possible outcomes. Traditionally, these are arranged in this decision chart to help you conceptualize.

Clearly, the most sensible solution for a soul-wagerer would be the first row: believing in God. The payoff is potentially high, and the risk is low.

Nevermind that this kind of wagering goes against the very faith-in-the-absence-of-evidence that the Christian God asks of us. Such a disingenuous attempt to feign belief in the deity probably wouldn’t go far to impress Him.

But that isn’t my main problem with the Wager. My beef arises from the fact that it only assumes one possible god. To be a real wager, you’d need to consider all possible outcomes, and that means other gods. Which is why I devised Elliott’s Wager, and the corresponding decision chart.

Unfortunately, it won’t fit in this blog format, so you can find it (here).

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So where’s your money?

I recently received a reply to my piece ‘I am a Militant Atheist’ over at Plasma Pool. Since I neither have the time to address these trite sneers nor the patience for the commenter’s snark, I’m posting a quick run through of his post here, with my immediate thoughts.

“I am not the least surprise [sic] that he launched an attack on the Bible; it’s an old political trick – assassinate your opponent’s character in order that you can appear credible.”

Nonsense. Non-Catholic Christians justify their beliefs all the time with the assumption that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That’s their premise, and if you successfully challenge it — which any half-wit can do — you challenge every assumption they make thereupon.

“He has not submitted any credible evidence to prove the non-existence of God outside of his aberrant views of the Bible.”

This really pisses me off — when people declare that it’s my obligation to debunk their belief structure.

First off, a bunch of them unabashedly admit at the outset that there’s nothing I could do to change their minds, so you might as well stop the discussion there. And second, they’re the ones making the positive claim about the way the world is! The burden of proof is on them. If they can’t produce a single scrap of evidence for these grandiose claims they’re making about the metaphysical structure of existence, I’m under no obligation to take them seriously, or treat them with deference.

Really, I don’t have time to run around disproving every stupid idea everyone has ever had. If you want to believe there’s a bearded man in the sky who cares what gives you a boner, or that there’s some cosmic soul-soup that we all return to when we die, fine, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that warrants the slightest bit of respect in public discourse when the best evidence you can drudge up is a bronze age book of fairy tales.

“The Bible and Christianity have laid down their propositions. Where is his?”

Here’s my proposition: the world really is as simple as it seems. If you can’t touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it, see it or perceive it with the extended senses given to us by science and mathematics, it just doesn’t exist.

“Let me assure Mr. Callahan that Christianity has been down this road before and always came back stronger than before.”

By what gauge do you make this assertion? Christian faith is — and has been — on the decline in the US.

Church attendance is on a 70 year decline (just since Gallup began tracking, so likely longer than that).

And then there’s Europe, which was formerly the most Christian place on the planet. I don’t think Jesus freaks are rallying a major comeback anytime soon over there.

“May the story of Madelene O’hare [sic] be a lesson to you: God walked right into her house and pulled out a preacher. That’s not hallucination; that’s realithy [sic].”

So what? Her kid’s a preacher. Unless he turned lead into gold on national television, or predicted the exact time and location of some unexpected stellar event, or shit, did anything that couldn’t have just happened anyway it’s not a miracle.

I often reflect on my sentiments towards religion, and wonder why I hate it so much. I ask myself why I dedicate so much time to railing against an institution that has done me no more harm than a few shattered delusions and wasted Sundays. I even feel ashamed of this seemingly puerile obsession with denigrating faith, despite a lack of any ostensible wrongdoing on the part of the religious.

However, I’m reminded that there is one grave disservice that religion has done me which I cannot bring myself to forgive. It mutilated my genitals.

Yes, that may seem a hyperbole; even writing it I feel I am being deliberately provocative. But I have to stop and ask myself, am I? Is there any sense in which surgically modifying an unconsenting child’s genitals is not a reproachable human rights violation? Due to its cultural normativity, circumcision may fail to arouse our sense of disgust in the same way footbinding or female genital mutilation do. However, just because we don’t have a gutteral aversion to it does not mean it’s not an egregious act. We tend to look on other cultures’ barbaric rituals with a smug superiority, reassuring ourselves that we’re civilized, but maybe we should turn the lens inward.

Circumcision, is at its root a religious export, and it’s in religion that it takes refuge and perpetuates itself. When a mohel in New York was responsible for the death of a child, no one spoke up against practice of circumcision as a Jewish ritual. Instead, we pussyfooted around the topic, saying that it was merely a problem with the orthodox techniques, or that proper precautions were not taken. No one considered that cutting off part of a child’s penis was inherently wrong. They dare not denounce the religious practice itself, either for fear of being culturally insensitive, or because most of us live in glass houses.

And therein lies the problem. No one will stand up and call this atrocity that it is, because if we don’t respect everyone’s right to have irrational beliefs, then someone may come after our own. Well I won’t feel ashamed for being strident anymore, because we should all have the right to savagely critique one another’s irrationalities; to lay them bare and hack away at them, just like they did to my newborn privates.

This essay is in response to an article found at Plasma Pool, and is cross posted.

I’d like to thank Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke for their willingness to have this exchange. As much as our opinions may differ, I believe it’s important that we keep them open to discussion; I have encountered far too many people who would avoid topics of import for fear of confrontation.

From their response to my essay, it is apparent that their respective faiths are more nuanced and malleable than many today. Their appreciation for science is admirable, and their brand of belief is almost entirely unobjectionable to me. To be sure, if every believer comported himself as they do, I would likely not be complaining. However most believers do not. Moreover, I firmly believe that most believers cannot and will not. So the question becomes: knowing that a certain amount of extremism invariably accompanies any system of religious irrationalism, do the handful of benefits we gain from religion outweigh its negative aspects? I submit that they do not.

While I reject the claim that “lead[ing] fulfilled lives with only an awe of the natural universe … is not a realistic vision for everyone,” I do not seek to provide a manifesto for the abolition of religion, or even advocate it per se. It is my goal to explore the issue at hand, and at most, propose a new standard of discourse to which rationalists can hold themselves.

I shall begin by addressing the contention that religion and science are exclusive spheres of inquiry, which can peacefully coexist. Steven Jay Gould, in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, provides a name for this line of argument: the Non-Overlapping Magisteria principle, or NOMA. Gould is of the view that science and religion occupy different realms of human experience — what he calls magisteria — the former being primarily concerned with material observation, and the latter, with the immaterial. He maintains that they do not in principle, and therefore should not in practice, say anything about each other.

For the discerning believer, it is quite possible that these magisteria do not overlap. However, for most people, they do — quite frequently in fact. Practical Christian doctrine* makes many material claims about the world, which science can test. For example, that a man could live inside a whale, that rabbits chew cud, that placing striped sticks in front of breeding livestock will cause them to bear striped young, that the world was flooded 5000 years ago, and that we are all descended from one family who survived that flood. Central to Christian doctrine is the belief that a virgin can conceive, that the sick can be healed by sorcery, and that a cold corpse can spring to life. Material claims, all. So excuse me, but it appears your magisterium is overlapping.

Granted, one who is committed to the principle of NOMA, as Finley and Hilke may be, should be willing to reject these intrusions, or admit that they are figurative or allegorical stories. However, if you surrender the only substantive claims a religion makes, you must also admit that you are only left with the issues for which you can offer no more insight than I: the existence of an afterlife and/or universal morality. Here we are on equal footing, so I find it wildly and offensively presumptuous that the religious would declare knowledge of the unknowable. Frankly, there is no reason any one of these fantasies should trump another — they are all at their core masturbatory, self-aggrandizing hallucinations. But if it feels good, and it isn’t hurting anyone, why can’t I do it? My reflexive response is that you can’t build a healthy worldview on a platform of lies and delusions, but why not, if it engenders no palpable menace?

This leads me to a question Finley and Hilke raise, a rebuttal commonly heard from apologists: if I keep it to myself, who does it hurt? I tend to agree with this position; I have no right to tell you what you may believe on the most personal level. But my concern is that religion isn’t content to remain personal, it inevitably jumps the boundary from personal to interpersonal. Before their essay is through, Finley and Hilke manage to praise religion as a “source of simple but crucial rules for societal interaction.” Tell me, of what use is a rule if it others cannot be held to it?

Religion as Moral Code is a common criticism thrown in the face of atheists, and it needs refutation. Morality is a societal construct, and it exists regardless of spiritual dangling carrots, or threats of eternal punishment. Ethical codes are arguably the most remarkable development of human society, but there is no need to build them an altar, so to speak. This seems to me as nonsensical as an obsessive compulsive who believes unspeakable harm will befall him if he fails to turn the doorknob thrice before leaving the house. We know his ritual has nothing to do with his continuing safety, yet he is too afraid to break free of the habit. Allow me to rephrase this argument as a question, if god were disproved tomorrow, would you take to stealing VCRs and raping indiscriminately? If yes, please stop reading this and head to the nearest psychiatrist. If no, fear of god is not the root of morality.

In fact, those who believe are usually less well behaved than those who do not. It is well attested that, besides drug or alcohol abuse, religiosity is the best indicator that a father will abuse his children, that prison populations are more or less entirely composed of believers, that conservative Christians are more likely to divorce than atheists, and that religious states generally consume more pornography; the state with the biggest appetite being Utah. If “moralizing force” is to be entered as evidence in a debate about the benefit of religious belief, it would seem to fall squarely in the stack of reasons not to believe.

Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke will be reminded that their understanding of religion is privileged. Liberal theology is acquired, appreciation for science and evidence, instilled. It’s only through education and higher thought that fundamentalism is beaten back^†. Again, if all the religious believed as they do, I would have nothing to protest — I’m not in principle opposed to people stoking warm fantasies about what happens after death; even less so should they admit readily that their beliefs are indeed such. However, delusion, like fire, is not easily contained: some of us may be able to admire it safely behind the hearth, but others will surely be less vigilant, and it will consume them.

Exemplifying such imminently dangerous delusion is the fact that a majority in the US believes that Jesus will return within their lifetimes. As Sam Harris says, there are people in this country who, upon turning on the television and seeing Israel replaced by ball of fire, could not help but see a silver lining. Is this fatalism not dangerous? Is not the belief that this world will be destroyed and most of its inhabitants incinerated for eternity a severe impediment to forging respect for nature and human life? This is not a perversion of the Christian faith, this is an outgrowth of the irrationalism inherent to it. Finley and Hilke may try to distance themselves from this manifestation of belief, but I ask: if so much effort must be spent on getting the right interpretation of religion, why bother at all? Are murder, genocide, racial/sexual oppression, or, worst of all, a self-fulfilled prophesy of global annihilation acceptable risks to take to maintain a gelt belief in the supernatural?

This is all, admittedly, grossly hyperbolic, but in the last century alone we have seen numerous atrocities spring forth from the fetid loins of faith: suicide bombings, abortion clinic murders, Muslim sectarians drilling holes in one another’s heads, mass suicides, armed standoffs, continuing genital mutilation of infant boys and young girls, car bombings in Ireland, a protracted bloodbath in Kashmir, to name a few. All of these issue directly from religious conflict. If we should be so daring as to frame larger issues, like the Western conflict with the Middle East, or the holocaust — arguably the culmination of a millennium of ecclesiastically endorsed anti-Semitism — in religious terms, the cost we have paid for these fantasies becomes staggering.

Perhaps these terrible consequences only arise when the religion is abused. However it remains true that religion is a powerfully addictive drug. Its method of action: hallucination. Symptoms of overdose: persistent delusion, accompanied by sadistic, homicidal, and/or suicidal impulses. Most users manage to curb their dependency — these are the ‘functionally religious.’ But as with any dangerous drug, we do not just leave it to the judicious to espouse moderate usage.

To be clear, I do not advocate anything so radical as the illegalization of religion, this is obviously not a practical solution. I am merely insistent that belief be stripped of its privileged place in our discourse. Automatic deference towards someone else’s worldview is dangerous. As history has demonstrated, faith often becomes infested by other delusions. If we allow it a bulwark against the forces of rationality, what sinister miscreants might amass therebehind, scheming to lay waste to the prosperity of the age of reason? Abominations that might otherwise be apprehended and extirpated.

It remains the case that we do not need religion to be happy or good to one another. Consequently, as long as we can point to a single instance of harm caused by this edifice — and there is no shortage — any moral supplement, sense of community, or impetus for charitability that it educes is simply not worth it. Our collective unwillingness to wean ourselves from the belesioned teat of this monster does not constitute an argument to continue suckling.

* I use Christianity as an example only because it is the religion with which I am most familiar.

† Interestingly, in the United States, the expansion of science over the past century has been paralleled by the expansion of biblical literalism, which before the turn of the 20th century was quite rare. I submit that this is a kind of defensive posturing on the part of the religious; as science encroaches on their turf, they push back full force, with ever more furious delusion. I suspect this tide of loony will retreat in time, as it has done in other developed societies.

In Florida, a woman has slain her son, and then herself. In her suicide note, she says ‘I had to send my son to heaven and myself to Hell.’

I wonder if she didn’t believe in heaven or hell, if she would have done this anyway. She reportedly had a history of mental illness, but surely, the religious crap she was being fed did nothing but fan the flames.

Crazy breeds crazy. Religion is one form of crazy. ‘Nuff said.

I have recently been deeply pondering the relationship between morality and society. The question driving me is whether society defines its moral precepts, or whether morality exists independently. In the end, I think it’s some combination of the two: the trolley car tests point to a universal moral compass, but in other cases we have more liberty to define boundaries — sexuality and drug use, for example.

Anyway, the conclusion I am leaning towards leaves no room for morality from god, or other supernatural source. This flies in the face of those who think god’s law is a moral standard, and that without it, our world would be some frightening combination of The Garden of Earthly Delights and Mad Max. These religious types equate god with morality, and therefore maintain that a world without the former entails a world without the latter. However, I think their line of reasoning is fallacious.

The religious person first looks at the world around them, and sees it is governed by moral principles, and then looks for a source for these principles. However, unlike a sociologist, anthropologist, or biologist, they default to “goddidit” immediately, and say “mystery solved.” They then say, “if you don’t acknowledge my hypothesized source of morality, morality will cease to exist.” This is insane.

If you know anything about history, it is readily apparent that the so-called “moral absolutes” of religion are bent to the trends of the era. Things like slavery, which the bible permits, are thrown out and judged immoral when society says they are, and things like divorce get reclassified as permissible when the bible cleary says they aren’t. This is strong evidence that our morals do not derive from god.

Further evidence that morality is not indexed to religiosity is the atheist, like myself. I am not running through the streets raping children and stealing VCR’s, and neither are my buddies over at Unreasonable Faith. The atheist understands perfectly well that morality just is. You don’t kill and lie, because it’s a dick thing to do, not because your imaginary sky-papa told you not to.

I know that what it really comes down to is religious people are unsettled by the “just is” part. Morality has to come from somewhere, they’re right, but we don’t have to immediately identify the origin, and build it an altar to keep it from forsaking us. Leave it to the philosophers and social scientists, and in the meantime, just be happy I won’t steal your cookies.

[Update 5/18: apparently, Billy Graham didn't write this. Blast! Foiled again by the e-mail forward goblins.]

Yet another silly e-mail. This time, a friend of mine got one entitled ‘Prayer for our Nation.’ It started with a huge black and white picture of a seated Billy Graham, staring stoically off into space. Following that was this prayer:

Billy Graham’s Prayer For Our Nation

‘Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good,’ but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the earth with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and Set us free. Amen!’

I don’t even know where to begin, it’s just so wrong. I guess the worst part is that it just forgoes the debate as to whether or not these things are indeed wrong, calls them a loss, and beseeches the sky fairy for forgiveness.

I think the ridiculousness of the self-flagellatory judgment is evident enough, but there is one sentence that was particularly ridic. When Graham said “We have polluted the earth…” I was on the verge of conceding that he had at least one point, but then he went on to totally ruin it by specifying “with profanity and pornography.” Damn him.

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It’s amazing how religion mutates with time. The ’sins’ it obsesses about are totally a product of the political climate of the era. Religious people ally themselves with a certain political group, and all of a sudden, the positions of their political opponents are listed among the religious transgressions, and the behaviors of their own party that are explicitly condemned in their holy-book are just swept under the rug.

Abortion? The bible says nothing about it, but it’s arguably one of the most egregious sins, according to fundies.

Usury? The bible condemns it repeatedly, but it’s a non-issue among religious conservatives, because the business world runs on interest, and Republicans love business.

Destroying the environment? I’m sure there are plenty of verses in the bible that could be used to condemn those who knowingly destroy that which god has given us. But conservatives pussyfoot around this topic, because environmental protection is the Democrats’ bit.

Slavery, subjugating women? The bible condones it throughout, but it’s not in vogue today so religious people just jump on the bandwagon.

Homosexuality? There are a few passages about it sprinkled through the bible, but there are far more about how it’s immoral to be rich. Nonetheless Christians fixate on gay marriage, and virtually ignore the socialistic implications of their holy-book.

Religion can a tool of political movements: it allows the difference between you and me to be more than a matter of opinion, but a matter of supernatural law. It’s a powerful weapon to wield against your ideological adversary, to call him/her damned. It’s even more powerful when you try to take some kind of moral high-ground — like Mr. Graham does above — by asking for forgiveness for your rival’s political positions.

Lately, my housemate and I have been having a heated debate about religious inclusion. He takes the position that governments should have an inclusionary stance towards religious groups in the interest of getting them on your side, and eventually liberalizing them out of their fundamentalist beliefs. Furthermore, he maintains that the benefits of this bridge building outweigh the risks to our separation of church and state. While he very cogently points out that secular government is not a mutually shared ideal, and therefore cannot be used as a nucleation point for reconciliation, I still believe that we can’t give these people any leeway: an inch of theocratic encroachment eventually amounts to a mile. He says I’m stonewalling religious people.

What initially ignited the debate was the the Israel-Palestine situation. He says that if Israel has any chance of ousting Hamas, it needs to beat Hamas at its own game; that is, move into Palestine, provide social services, and build mosques. His plan is essentially for Israel to appoint more liberal imams to run the mosques, and shepherd the masses to a more moderate interpretation of Islam.

I think this is a terrible idea, because it doesn’t address the core dispute between the people: the holy-land. Muslims want Jerusalem back, and while it’s true that the mutual antagonism over the years has obscured the root of the problem, it’s really a religiously motivated land dispute. Period.

Take for example the Sinai war. Soon after the creation of Israel, the entire Muslim world lined up at the side of Palestine, and basically attempted to choke Israel to death. They refused to let Israeli planes into their airspace, and wouldn’t let any ship coming from or bound for Israel dock at their ports. This ultimately culminated in Israel lashing out and invading the Sinai Peninsula, but it’s a good indicator of the importance of Jerusalem to the Muslim faith: it transcends borders. Any solution that does not take this into account will ultimately fail.

This is why if you went in and supplanted Hamas with Israeli funded religious and social programs, you could only get rid of suicide bombers and extremists temporarily. If there is anything we have learned from the existence Israel, it’s that you can deny a people their religious holy-land for a very long time, but they will continue to stew about it.

It’s clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its core a religious problem, and as long as people are allowed to confound religious political issues, it will remain a political problem too. This is why regardless of the side you support, the values you should espouse should be separation of faith from government. I don’t see how demanding reasoned, secular diplomacy is stonewalling when your opponents are religious nutjobs refusing to even sit down and discuss diplomatic solutions with an ‘illegitimate state.’ Having qualifications for what should be considered rational discourse is not stonewalling.

Anyway, our debate moved on to Obama’s new ‘faith-based office,’ which I believe is an absolute waste of time. I know it’s in the interest of everyone to move forward together, but I don’t understand why we have to kowtow to people who unabashedly admit that the US would be better off as a theocracy. We have standards for rational discourse, and just like we would have a hot fire under our asses to shut down Nazi talk in Congress (sorry…Godwin’s law…), we can’t tolerate people telling us that their invisible sky fairy opposes stem cell research. Or that some holy book written by some bronze age desert people offers genuine insight on gay marriage and abortion. I’m sorry, that just isn’t the kind of reasoning I expect from the governing body of the most powerful nation in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t seek to confront their beliefs — telling them that they’re idiots would be unproductive. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to base their political convictions on empirical evidence, and therefore keep god out of government. The problem is that if you place any limitation on these people they take it as an affront.

Take senator Jim DeMint, who is claiming that this stimulus package is actually an attack on people of faith because it specifies that any school facilities that receive federal funds for renovation may not subsequently be used for religious activities. He claims this is an infringement on existing liberties, because the activities are currently permitted, and may not be in the future.

Well no, not exactly. If you were getting free fruit from your neighbor’s tree, it wouldn’t be an infringement on your rights if that neighbor decided to cut you off. He would just be exercising his prerogative to keep his own fruit. In the case of the federal government, they aren’t supposed to be giving funds to religious institutions anyway, so this is really just enforcement of a previously ignored stipulations.

If you give Christianists an inch of political ground, they are bound to take a mile. They say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That’s why I think faith needs to keep its place.

I am circumcised, and have spent most of my life believing that circumcision was the right thing to do. However at some point in the recent past, it hit me like a ton of bricks: there are people out there who still have their foreskins intact. A lot of them in fact: most of my good friends and the people I have lived with still have the jacket on their little firefighter. As it turns out, I am actually the odd one out in my circle of friends, so I was recently driven to question the practice of removing the male prepuce.After doing a lot of research, and coming to the hard realization that I had lost something that I would never get back, I changed my mind. I now believe that circumcision is barbaric, unneccesary, and a terrible way to welcome your child into the world.

As you might imagine, I am a tad bitter about the whole affair, and while I don’t blame my parents for doing what they thought was best, I do take issue with the pervasive opinion that forcibly removing part of a child’s genitals is a good idea, and I have taken it as my charge to challenge circumcision at birth* whenever possible.

The most common reason I hear for circumcision is the same reason I was originally circumcised: religious affiliation. Now that I’m an atheist, I couldn’t imagine a worse reason to do anything, let alone subjecting your infant to surgery. However, I’d expect even the religious could appreciate that their children may not share their faith when they become adults. Given that in recent years, people have been changing faiths or abandoning faith altogether at unprecedented rates, any loving parent should concede that committing their child to one religion through body modification is unfair. They should at least wait until the age of consent.

Another commonly cited argument is that circumcision prevents disease. There is in fact a tenuous correlation between circumcision and lower incidences of contracting HIV, penile cancer, and–for female partners of circumcised men—cervical cancer. However, there is no disease circumcision combats that could not otherwise be prevented by good hygiene or responsible sexual behavior. More importantly, it shouldn’t even matter what the benefits are, as long as it’s such a violation of personal liberty. One could argue that giving a newborn gastric bypass surgery would lower their chances of obesity and diabetes later in life, but this conjecture would and thrown out before the benefits are even weighed, because it’s so ludicrous. Other than circumcision, there’s no other elective procedure I could subject my child to at birth , and still be considered a responsible parent.

Circumcision proponents often point out that a circumcised penis is cleaner. They’re right: it is cleaner. But to use an all-too-fitting expression, don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. Removing the prepuce is a high price to pay for genital cleanliness, as would be removing the ear for auricular cleanliness. No sane person would suggest cutting off their children’s outer ears just because they have to wash behind them. As with any other part of the body that requires care, you have to teach your kids to take care of their penises. We teach our children to brush their teeth, wipe their behinds, and wear tampons; cleaning under the prepuce is just part of the maintenance that comes with the human body.

To make a brief speculative aside, I believe the cleanliness issue may have played a part in the origin of the practice, but not in the way you might suspect. Uncircumcised genitals require extra care at bathtime. Thus, in the sexually repressive Abrahamic religions, mandating that the prepuce be removed ensured that the appendage wouldn’t draw any more attention then necessary. Another possibility is that circumcision was a rite of passage, whose intention was to demonstrate the machismo of the male undergoing it, as it still is in parts of Africa. Over time, the importance of the act as a rite of passage may have dwindled, but its importance to cultural identity remained, so men chose to perform the procedure on their children.

This brings me to another common contention of circumcision supporters, which is that circumcision doesn’t hurt if the child is young enough. However, if you have ever seen a circumcision, you cannot maintain this opinion. The procedure is manifestly painful, and doctors rarely use anaesthesia. It’s so painful in fact, that babies frequently go into shock. Entirely incapable of crying, their bodies flip into “I’m gonna die” mode. But since an infant does not have the vocal or expressive capabilities of an adult human, so it only seems not to hurt them. The cues that an individual is in mortal pain are not in the expressive range of a newborn, so parents may not realize the harm they are inflicting upon him. Therefore, although there is no evidence of a pain in the long term, it’s devious to assume that this constititues evidence for a lack of pain.

Another common rationalization is that the infant won’t remember it later in life. However, this is a poor reason to hurt to someone you love. I don’t remember being in a crib, so my parents could have gotten away with keeping me in a cardboard box, but they didn’t.

Many circumcision proponents make an appeal to tradition. As a friend of mine once jokingly said “it’s just one of those things you do. You drive on the right side of the road and you get circumcised.” But as someone who is already generally suspicious of tradition, this argument has to be one of the worst for circumcision. Even if we’ve been doing something since time immemorial, that does not lend any legitimacy to it. On the contrary, I think it is one of our highest moral imperatives to closely examine our traditions to see if they are worth passing on. Just think of all the barbaric traditions we have abandoned: slavery, public execution, denying women the right to vote or own property, corsets, foot binding, hair shirts, etc. In the end, I prefer to think of appealing to tradition as “I refuse to evaluate the prudence of my actions, because no one else has.” That does not constitute an argument.

The final argument for circumcision is the one I understand least: aesthetics. Many women—and some men—claim that a circumcised penis is more pleasing to the eye. Well, I believe a man’s right make it to adulthood with intact genitalia trumps a woman’s or a parent’s right to impose their aesthetic preference on a defenseless child. If a man wants to have his penis modified, he should wait until his eighteenth birthday, as he must for tattoos and other body modification.

So circumcision isn’t a good idea, but who’s to say it’s a bad one? It could still be true that while the procedure is ethically questionable, it’s ultimately harmless. In point of fact, a strong case can be built against circumcision. There are various studies that have identified a strong correlation between circumcision and decreased penile sensitivity, but I won’t go into that here. I feel there is a strong enough case without it. Moreover, there are likely members of my audience for whom risk of genital desensitization would not bear heavily on their choice to circumcize.

I feel the strongest ethical argument against male genital mutilation is the simplest: it isn’t your body, it isn’t your choice. The slight chance that the child may grow up to be like me, and wish the procedure had never been done, should give parents pause. Modifying the body of an unconsenting individual is cruel, regardless of their age.

When it comes down to it though, there are some really gruesome facts about circumcision that most people don’t know. It often results in deformity of the penis, and can ruin sexual pleasure entirely. Like any surgery, circumcisions can be botched, and they often are. Removing thirty to fifty percent of the skin from an organ the size of an almond is a risky endeavor, and if the procedure is performed incorrectly, or if the penis heals improperly, there can be terrible consequences [warning, this section links to graphic material]. The skin can heal too tightly on one side of the penis, resulting in erectile curvature. Too much skin can be removed, causing tearing or stretching of the remaining tissue during erection. Or instead, pubic skin can be drawn upward onto the shaft, resulting in a freakish condition known as ‘hairy shaft.’ Another risk is that the skin heals itself to the glans of the penis, forming what’s called a skin bridge. These side-effects are all too common, but once in a blue moon, something really bad happens. Keep in mind that an infant’s penis is very small and delicate, and thus very hard to operate on. Sometimes the entire glans is removed along with the prepuce, leaving a penis with no head. In the worst case scenario, a child’s penis is mutilated so completely, that it has to be removed. In certain cases, the child may even die. I am not making this up, this happens.

Do the perceived benefits of circumcision warrant these risks? Is the prospect of HIV or VD so terrifying that we should jeopardize our children’s sex lives? Is adhering to tradition so imperative that we must do so even when faced with these dangers? I say no.

For a naturalist like me, the final argument is that we evolved the foreskin for a reason; if it had no function, or were harmful to the organism, it would have been bred out a long time ago. Granted, there may not be an immediately obvious function for the thing, and we may be able to live without it, but it’s still part of our biology. It’s still part of what it is to be an intact human male, and no one has the right to take that away.

*I feel it necessary to specify at birth because I really don’t care if people do it when they are adults. Just like I don’t care if they are into S&M, testicle torture, genital peircing, or any of the other weird ass shit adults have the right to engage in. Just don’t do it to kids.