Religion and Circumcision

Had to look up what Stockholm Syndrome was.

Opportunity for learning.

Yes Eorl, but even deeper, since it's been going on for generation after generation.

Look at foot binding, that went on for 1000 years. Same thing, women looked down on those that didn't do it, and your prospects for marriage increased the smaller your foot.

It took on a real sexual fetish, but I'm thinking it started because the richer, more powerful the man, the more he could afford to have a useless woman around.

True for an infant, however today many adult males will offer an informed consent for themselves.

Even in so-called civilized countries.

For the non-Jew, that person would be your urologist. For the person, who's Jewish, that person probably would be a Rabbi.

By the way, adult males wanting to convert to Judaism must undergo a circumcision.

The circumcision of Jewish males is a sign of the covenant between God and man and the first male to be circumcised , as described in the Torah was Abraham ( who was rather elderly, when he had it done. ).



Jewish Virtual Library

yes thank you miller

"Moses and his sons were not circumcised. (Exodus 4:25) Although Moses apparently prohibited circumcision during the 40 years in the wilderness (Joshua 5:5) Joshua reinstituted circumcision at Gilgal after the death of Moses.(Joshua 5:2-10)"

www.cirp.org/library/history

Abraham was 90 years old when he performed a circumcision with a knife on himself.

See:

http://www.aboutcirc.com/abraham.htm

A fresco,( depicting the circumcision of Abraham ) dating from 1502, in the vault of the Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

The legal status is an arbitrary one. Medically, the unborn is a living human being.

The Dred Scott decision also arbitrarily denied to blacks any status , or standing, as 'legal persons' before the US courts.

But it doesn't mean they weren't persons; only that they had been unjustly denied the rights of persons.

How history repeats itself.

Circumcision in Australia

Today the vast majority of Australian boys grow up happily with the bodies that nature gave them. Although circumcision was common from the 1920s to the 1960s, medical authorities have been discouraging and advising against the practice since the 1970s, and it is now pretty much a thing of the past. Most parents want their boys to be as happy and healthy as possible, and they know that leaving their penis to develop naturally is the best way to secure these outcomes.

Despite this, a few die-hard enthusiasts for circumcision keep popping up in the media, full of alarmist claims about the terrible risks of retaining the foreskin. This propaganda is contrary to the advice issued by responsible medical bodies such as the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and is intended to confuse and mislead parents, and scare them into demanding circumcision for their boys. Most doctors are opposed to circumcision and will not perform the operation without genuine medical need (a rare situation). The fanatics have given up trying to influence responsible medical and scientific bodies; instead, they aim to use the popular media to frighten parents into putting pressure on doctors to agree to their demands.

Source: http://www.circinfo.org/

"The age of consent is the minimum age at which a person is considered to be capable of legally giving informed consent to any contract or behaviour regulated by law with another person...

The age of consent varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The median seems to range from 14 to 16 years, but laws stating ages as young as 12 and as old as 21 do exist.

www.wikipedia.com

January 14, 2007
A Real-World AIDS Vaccine?
By TINA ROSENBERG

Last month, scientists invented the AIDS vaccine. Missed it? Perhaps that's because you were still seeking the vaccine fantasy: the magic bullet, the impenetrable shield that finally pitches this disease into the trash bin, the shot that will end not only the AIDS epidemic but our anxiety about the AIDS epidemic as well.

The vaccine thunderbolt didn't strike ?- and might never. Drearily, the real AIDS vaccine is likely to be imperfect: one more tool in our arsenal, to be used along with condoms and all our other tools. It will most likely avert millions of infections and save millions of lives. But it will not end the Age of AIDS.

The vaccine that arrived last month was not actually a vaccine. It was, instead, a confirmation of what scientists had long suspected: circumcision helps protect men from AIDS infection. For years, AIDS researchers have observed that many African tribes that circumcise boys or young men had lower AIDS rates than those that don't, and that Africa's Muslim nations, where circumcision is near universal, had far fewer AIDS cases than predominantly Christian ones. The first research proof came in 2005, when a study in South Africa was stopped early in the face of evidence that the men who had been randomly assigned to be circumcised were getting 60 percent fewer H.I.V. infections than the men assigned to the control group. Last month, ethics boards halted two similar studies, in Uganda and Kenya, when they found similar results. In both, the circumcised men caught the AIDS virus half as often as the uncircumcised control group.

Circumcision would be given more weight if the world recognized that it is, in fact, the real-world equivalent of an AIDS vaccine. In some ways, it is closer to the fantasy than a real vaccine might be. Vaccine research began in the early 1980s but with little financing or urgency and went nowhere. In 1996, the effort was revived with the creation of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and financing has soared in the last five years. But a vaccine has proved elusive. Most vaccines work by mimicking infection, which stimulates the body to make antibodies that kill the disease. But H.I.V. infection generally does not produce those kinds of antibodies. H.I.V. also mutates constantly and comes in many different varieties, factors that further complicate the search for a vaccine.

Many vaccines provide nearly 100 percent protection ?- after my daughters finish their two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, for example, they won't have to think about those diseases again. But that's not on the horizon for AIDS. "Fifty to 60 percent efficacy is what people would feel really good about," says Frances Priddy, the director of efficacy trials with the AIDS vaccine initiative. The best candidates in the vaccine pipeline right now ?- which won't be ready until 2013 at the earliest ?- wouldn't keep you from getting H.I.V. They instead would seek to change your body's response to the virus so that if you did get infected, the disease would progress more slowly ?- or not at all ?- and you would be less infectious to others.

An efficacy rate of 50 to 60 percent is actually a lot better than it sounds, because of herd immunity. We get AIDS from one another. Every time a person is rendered less infectious, the chance of an uninfected person catching H.I.V. from each sexual contact drops, and in a virtuous circle, the whole community becomes progressively safer. A vaccine of 50 to 60 percent efficacy might come close to wiping out the epidemic in places with low AIDS rates. In high-prevalence areas, it could reduce the epidemic and save millions of lives.

In contrast to a vaccine, circumcision's origins are about as far from the laboratory as you can get; carvings depicting circumcisions have been found in ancient Egyptian temples. But the effects may be very similar to those of a vaccine. So far, we have proof only that circumcision protects the circumcised men. But there are strong indications that it also protects their sexual partners. A trial in Uganda is now testing whether H.I.V.-positive men are less likely to infect their wives if they are circumcised than if they are not.

Together, circumcision and an imperfect vaccine might be enough to stop AIDS. But they will need help from behavior change, microbicides, fighting malaria, treating genital herpes and other interventions we don't even know about yet. That is unsatisfying. The danger does exist that circumcised men will feel invulnerable and throw sexual caution to the winds, a risk that would also exist with an imperfect vaccine. But so far, there is not much evidence of a problem. In the Uganda and Kenya studies, the sexual behavior of the circumcised men was no more risky than that of the others. In the South Africa study, circumcised men did report 25 percent more sexual activity. But the circumcised group as a whole still had 60 percent fewer infections. Certainly one reason that risky behavior did not jump is that the men got counseling as part of the clinical trials. Counseling goes naturally with circumcision; counseling would be harder to include in a vaccine campaign, since one of a vaccine's great advantages is that it can be given assembly-line-style in seconds.

Circumcision is a surgical procedure, however, and in the hands of traditional ritual circumcisers, it has a high rate of infection and mishap. The solution is to train these circumcisers and give them decent tools, and at the same time encourage men to come to clinics. Since men in studies say that cost is the biggest reason they are not circumcised, the operation must be free. Countries will also have to equip these clinics and train counselors and medical circumcisers, who don't have to be doctors.

Research on an AIDS vaccine is more crucial than ever. But we must not let our hope for a thunderbolt prevent us from racing ahead with circumcision now. For the biggest difference between circumcision and a vaccine is this: only one of them exists.

NYTimes.com

by Tina Rosenberg huh?

Any chance you have a link to the actual study, Miller?

[quote="Miller"]In both, the circumcised men caught the AIDS virus half as often as the uncircumcised control group.[/quote]

Sounds like they circumcise people, tell them to screw around for a while and them come back to be tested for AIDS...

Quite honestly, I'd rather teach my son how to use a condom than mutilate him.

Cavalier or Roundhead?

I'm a Roundhead.

Big firking deal.

Got my foreskin snipped at two weeks of age. I'm so traumatised by it.


My son had the double hernia operation at three months of age.

He woke up five hours later, and wanted to play.

A mohel, actually. I don't believe that all Rabbis do this, it's a special role.

Actually, the best person to choose to perform a circumcision regardless of your religion would be a mohl.

They perform them for non-Jews all the time.

An sbstetrician delivers let's say 100 babies a year, 50 are male, let's say half in the U.S. get circumcised....that 25 a year. How many of the docs refer the parents to someone else? Basically, a physician may perform 12 to 25 a year.

How many does a mohl do?Find A Mohl

There's mohls listed who have over a thousand under their belt (no pun intended) and have 25, 30, 40 plus years experience.

From what I understand, the Queen of England chose a mohl to circumcise her sons....it just makes sense, they are more experienced.

Plus, they work for tips..


BTW, Reformed Jews DO NOT have to be circumcised.

You're a dork.

Coming from you, that's a compliment.