August 3, 2002

• This go-round, I’ll be talking about two of the  “damned human race”‘s (as Mark Twain put it) worst ideas–sexual mutilation and organized religion.  If this neither upsets you or offends you, I have failed.

  
  

  Most of us, when we think about sexual mutilation, it is either in the context of psychopathic killers or obscure tribal practices in some place like Bumfuck, Egypt.  Female circumcision is pretty heinous,  and I imagine is roundly condemned by all right-thinking people.  Not that we Americans much give a damn about what happens in the rest of the world, as long as we have cheap gas for our SUVs, and can super-size  our kids’ Happy Meals so they can get as fat as their parents.  No, what I am about to address is cruel, horrid, and despicable–and it happens many times a day here in the good old US of A.  I am talking about regular old male circumcision.  So what’s the big deal, you may ask?  Well, MC, like FC, reduces sensation, making sex less pleasurable.  The only reason MC is really done is to make it harder for little boys to jerk off.  I have a pretty strong stomach for guts and gore, but the very idea of someone, for whatever reason, whacking off part of my willy just creeps me out to the max.  I mean, it has to hurt like hell.  And don’t try to tell me that infants don’t feel pain like adults, they just can’t let others  know about it as well as adults.  If you are a parent and you had your kid circumsized, I feel he has every right to cut your throat while you’re asleep.  Payback is sweet.

  
  

  What’s more, I contend (free doctoral dissertation idea ahead) that every circumsized male has a deep reservoir of subliminal rage directed at women in general and his mother in particular.  I would bet the rent that the vast majority of serial killers who prey on women are circumsized.  Circumcisim is fucked up, and the sooner it goes the way of buggy whips and whale-oil fired reading lamps, the better.

  
  

  What is also fucked up is organized religion, all of which are more or less fucked up, with the possible exception of Ba’Hai, Cat Stevens notwithstanding.  Then again, no one knows anything about it, or cares, Cat Stevens etc.  Why do I say this?  Well, look at all the missionaries who did their level pest to destroy tribal cultures (I think I’ll leave in the preceding typo, sort of Freudian.)  Look at the Spanish Inquisition.  At my grandmother’s funeral some years back, the officiating sky pilot (who never even met Mama while she was alive) went on and on about this weird and distasteful idea known as the resurrection of the body–sounded like night of the living dead to me.  And all those religions which mandate circumcision are way fucked up.  Which brings me to Jews.

  
  

  I feel sorry for Jews, and not just because everyone on the planet, it seems some times, hates them or fears them.  If you are an Orthodox Jew, you don’t have a piddly ten commandments, you have about 450.  And their god doesn’t discriminate–eating off the wrong plate is as bad as knifing your neighbor for no good reason.  And you wanna talk about capricious and arbitrary–just read the book of Job sometime–all his troubles resulted from what was no better than a bar bet between God and Satan (who sounds a lot like God’s equal in the story).  And if that weren’t enough, with the zillions of rites and rituals and seders  of Lebanon and bar mitsvahs and bas  mitzvahs and so on, you don’t even get the promise of eternal life–when yer dead, yer dead.

  
  

  Oh and lest I sound too discriminatory, let me close with one little comment on Catholicism–how do you get a nun pregnant?  Dress her up like an altar boy.

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