suppose). If they tattooed their foreheads instead of slicing bits off of their
penises, YHWH could more easily see them (rather than having to look up
their robes), or they could have branded their buttocks (my personal favorite
option), or notched their ears (early Vulcans perhaps?). Like circumcision, all
of these alternatives are unalterable too. But they had to go for the penis,
didn’t they? I guess YHWH likes to look under men’s robes to see who is
HIS. The world will forever bemoan the fact that YHWH didn’t want to mark
his people out by requiring them to wear silly hats instead of brutally
mutilating their and their children’s bodies.
I have often read that the Muslims accepted the practice of circumcision
from the Hebrews, but as I have noted, this is wrong. The Hebrews didn’t
invent the practice (Muslims also don’t consider the Jews to be the “chosen
people” thereby requiring special herd markings ordained by God). As noted
before, the earliest record we have of it is from the Egyptians. This was a
cultural practice that became justified and sanctioned by the religions
developing in the region where it was practiced. It’s not even in the Koran as
a requirement from Allah. But it was a practiced custom during the lifetime
of Mohammad in this region and was adopted and applied to others through
the oppressive instrument of religion (“if I had to cut my penis, I am going
to make sure you have to cut yours too;” a sort of reverse penis envy I
suppose).
Muslims Against Circumcision
The best site I have seen against circumcision and examining it critically is
actually a Muslim one. There are a number of places in the Koran where
Allah states that humans are perfect creations, so why the need to cut
anything off? This is true in the Hebrew Torah too, where man is supposedly
made in El’s or El Shaddai’s (he was not YHWY back then at the beginning)
image. I am told that there is “a ton” of early and medieval Jewish
“scholarship” on the issue of whether that means that YWHY/El Shaddai had
a foreskin or not—but it seemed a total waste of time to try to track it down.
In any event, circumcision, as I noted, was a cultural parasite at the time of
Mohammad and does get mentioned in the Hadith (probably by people trying
to justify the practice by linking it to the religion, despite the fact that the
religion didn’t espouse it). In Bukhari, Book #72, Hadith #779 it discusses
practices which are laudable or advisable, including circumcision, shaving
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