3 ms·

You're moving the goal posts. Your claim was about productive and fulfilling lives and the implication that circumcision does not impair that. Regret doesn't f

You're moving the goal posts. Your claim was about productive and fulfilling lives and the implication that circumcision does not impair that. Regret doesn't factor into that and is a separate issue. Clearly you can have productive and fulfilling lives with or without regrets. Whether the lack of regrets is rational or merely a self-defense mechanism of the person's mind is another question.

EGreg 9y ago
The goal posts have been set by the original issue: whether circumcision harms the person or benefits them. The main people who can answer that are adult males who were circumcized. I am confident that if you asked 1000 religious Orthodox Jewish men whether they would have preferred to NOT have been circumcized at 8 days old and instead had to choose it later, an overwhelming majority would say they were glad they were circumcized that early. And they prefer that over never having been circumcized. I would be hesitant to say the same about non-Jewish men. The reason Jewish men are happy about having been circumcized early is because (perhaps this sounds ironic) it gives them FAR GREATER CHOICE when it comes to their own community and membership in three thousand year old people, marriage and - above all for most religious people - serving God in the way spelled out in the Torah. They can choose to leave the lifestyle or increase their observance etc. much more easily since one of the biggest challenges is already out of the way. You can of course tell them they don't understand what real choice is, that this is stockholm syndrome and that religion is mass delusion. But they may not agree and they collectively are ultimately the judges of what was better for them. It is a different conception of morality and rights than the individualism that comes out of the Scottish Enlightenment These ideas that a parent "knows better" because they - and millions of others - were in the same situation and are glad this was done, are valid. It is a collective morality of a people. And again I would say that unless they believed that God commanded it, it could be possibly changed but as it is, when the vast majority of complaints are from the OUTSIDE of the community, perhaps the downsides far outweigh the upsides.
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  You know what, i could say a lot of words, but really, i tire of it. You sound like the former marines i know who defend newbie hazing as noble and necessary. Much the same back and forth applies in both cases, and i really do not want to repeat discussions i've had multiple times already. I'd be happy to read that study i asked for at the start though.
  - jquery 9y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3881635/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3881635/ No statistically significant difference in: * Ejaculation time * Erectile dysfunction * Sexual desire * Orgasm difficulties * Pain during or after sex This is important, because circ'd individuals are often targeted online as having inferior sexual organs (count how many times the word "mutilated" is used in this thread). I'm willing to bet the mental health impact of this rhetoric is greater than the impact of circumcision itself. If circumcision should be banned, it shouldn't be banned on exaggerated pretenses that intact men have superior penises and circ'd men are inferior or incomplete (which seems to be underlying a lot of the arguments).
    - Mithaldu 9y ago
      They threw together a bunch of contradicting studies, assigned weights without discussion of the assigning methods and parameters, then decided on an average and declared it a fact, instead of being honest and saying "we don't know either way". Based on this overall pattern i don't think i have much trust that their decision making process wasn't biased. As for incomplete. I'm sorry, but there are no two ways about it. Incomplete means to be missing a part. It is. How important this is in the big picture is a different question.
      - jquery 9y ago
        For something that's so obviously damaging and mutilation and horrible and obscene, you'd think the science wouldn't at least be equivocating. The science should make you happy. You can still oppose circumcision, and you don't have to feel so much sympathy for circumcised people like me. Win/win.

EGreg 9y ago

The goal posts have been set by the original issue: whether circumcision harms the person or benefits them. The main people who can answer that are adult males who were circumcized. I am confident that if you asked 1000 religious Orthodox Jewish men whether they would have preferred to NOT have been circumcized at 8 days old and instead had to choose it later, an overwhelming majority would say they were glad they were circumcized that early. And they prefer that over never having been circumcized. I would be hesitant to say the same about non-Jewish men. The reason Jewish men are happy about having been circumcized early is because (perhaps this sounds ironic) it gives them FAR GREATER CHOICE when it comes to their own community and membership in three thousand year old people, marriage and - above all for most religious people - serving God in the way spelled out in the Torah. They can choose to leave the lifestyle or increase their observance etc. much more easily since one of the biggest challenges is already out of the way. You can of course tell them they don't understand what real choice is, that this is stockholm syndrome and that religion is mass delusion. But they may not agree and they collectively are ultimately the judges of what was better for them. It is a different conception of morality and rights than the individualism that comes out of the Scottish Enlightenment These ideas that a parent "knows better" because they - and millions of others - were in the same situation and are glad this was done, are valid. It is a collective morality of a people. And again I would say that unless they believed that God commanded it, it could be possibly changed but as it is, when the vast majority of complaints are from the OUTSIDE of the community, perhaps the downsides far outweigh the upsides.

Mithaldu 9y ago
You know what, i could say a lot of words, but really, i tire of it. You sound like the former marines i know who defend newbie hazing as noble and necessary. Much the same back and forth applies in both cases, and i really do not want to repeat discussions i've had multiple times already. I'd be happy to read that study i asked for at the start though.
- jquery 9y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3881635/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3881635/ No statistically significant difference in: * Ejaculation time * Erectile dysfunction * Sexual desire * Orgasm difficulties * Pain during or after sex This is important, because circ'd individuals are often targeted online as having inferior sexual organs (count how many times the word "mutilated" is used in this thread). I'm willing to bet the mental health impact of this rhetoric is greater than the impact of circumcision itself. If circumcision should be banned, it shouldn't be banned on exaggerated pretenses that intact men have superior penises and circ'd men are inferior or incomplete (which seems to be underlying a lot of the arguments).
  - Mithaldu 9y ago
    They threw together a bunch of contradicting studies, assigned weights without discussion of the assigning methods and parameters, then decided on an average and declared it a fact, instead of being honest and saying "we don't know either way". Based on this overall pattern i don't think i have much trust that their decision making process wasn't biased. As for incomplete. I'm sorry, but there are no two ways about it. Incomplete means to be missing a part. It is. How important this is in the big picture is a different question.
    - jquery 9y ago
      For something that's so obviously damaging and mutilation and horrible and obscene, you'd think the science wouldn't at least be equivocating. The science should make you happy. You can still oppose circumcision, and you don't have to feel so much sympathy for circumcised people like me. Win/win.