"Circumcision is a sign to set you apart from the people of the nations"

by stuckinarut2 36 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  VW.org

  I was born with out eyelids. So when I got circumcised, the surgeon grafted the foreskin to my eyes to make eyelids. Now I have very good foresight.
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  jp1692

  So god supposedly said, "I want you to prove your love for and devotion to me by cutting off the end of your dick. And just to be sure you're serious, cut off the end of your kids' dicks too!"

  That's some seriously fucked up shit.

  Religions are highly articulated expressions of mental illness.
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  jp1692

  Wake Me: maybe JW brothers can start identifying themselves as a part of God's nation by snipping the ends off their ties.

  My ties remain uncut ... that is, when I wear them, which frankly isn't all that often any more.
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  Pete Zahut

  I was born with out eyelids. So when I got circumcised, the surgeon grafted the foreskin to my eyes to make eyelids. Now I have very good foresight.

  Could be worse...you could have ended up being a little cockeyed.
  
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  David_Jay

  So god supposedly said, "I want you to prove your love for and devotion to me by cutting off the end of your dick. And just to be sure you're serious, cut off the end of your kids' dicks too!"
  That's some seriously fucked up shit.
  Religions are highly articulated expressions of mental illness.

  Jews don't believe circumcision was a directive that came straight from God like Jehovah's Witnesses do or as you proposed in your comments.

  Again, as I've already stated above, the Hebrew Bible is not meant to be a historically factual work. It is a liturgical collection.

  Liturgy is something Jehovah's Witnesses don't have in their religion like most others do, so this leaves their adherents and even their ex-members somewhat ignorant and without a reference of what a liturgical works is.

  Meant for public proclamation during formal worship to give religious explanation for cultural celebrations and customs, liturgy consists mostly of religious folklore. It gives a religious "explanation" for why a community does something.

  But you're in good company if you think it's "fucked up shit." Let's see, there's the Spanish Inquisition judges and clergy, the murderous mobs of pogroms that would constantly attack us, the Nazis who murdered us in concentration camps--they all felt the same way about our practice and views on circumcision. So get in line.

  There's been a whole lot of others here before you. They never lasted, they went down in infamy, and probably like you, they thought it would never happen to them because they felt they were in the right...probably like you do now.
  
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  stuckinarut2

  Vw.org: I was born with out eyelids. So when I got circumcised, the surgeon grafted the foreskin to my eyes to make eyelids. Now I have very good foresight.
  

  Haha funny!

  So does that mean that when it is cold, your eyelids shrink?

  Or if you are "happy", do your eyelids enlarge?😉
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  fulltimestudent

  David_Jay: "It seems that the Jews and Greeks knew virtually nothing of one another until the Babylonian exile ended, the Hebrews being so insignificant as we were then."

  David, I seriously doubt that!

  I'm sure you appreciate that 'Greek' people lived on both sides of the Aegean sea. So on the Aegean coast of Asia minor Greek culture prevailed. And, in cities like Miletus, as elites developed, who had sufficient leisure time to think and discuss ideas, we find the first of the so-called Pre-Socratic Greek thinkers like Thales (c.624 – c. 546 BCE). So historians ask, Why Miletus? and the usual answer is that Miletus was on a trade route that linked that city (and others in Asia Minor) with older cultures of Babylon, Egypt, Phoenicia and so on.

  Its considered axiomatic that 'ideas travel with trade,' and it so happens that the ancient Palestine area was on both a land and sea trade route that linked Asia Minor to Egypt, (And, as I have posted extensively before, long before that time, the Egyptian Empire controlled the area that encompasses the greater Palestinian area). I think it quite likely that the Israelite/Jews were, as you said, "insignificant,*' but that doesn't mean that the Israelite/Jews did not also pick up ideas of the world as traders passed through the area. For example, I once listened to Professor Boyo Ockinga compare the first chapter of Genesis to Egyptian ideas of creation. I left the lecture convinced that Genesis had been written by someone completely familiar with Egyptian creation concepts.

  Then there is the Book of Job, Jewish tradition attributes it to Moses, but today's scholarship see it as being produced much later between the 7th and 4th centuries BCE. And its seen as comparable to "... several texts from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt (that) offer parallels to Job, and while it is impossible to tell whether the author of Job was influenced by any of them, their existence suggests that the author was the recipient of a long tradition of reflection on the existence of inexplicable suffering.

  May I offer one more example. Where do you think the author of Daniel 2 (the dream image) got his imagery of the statue being formed from different metals, metals that became inferior to the previous one (i.e. There's a head of gold - representing Nebuchadnezzar- then breast and arms of silver and so on. (and for the benefit of bible believers, the third on is said to "rule over the whole earth." Surely, a real god in heaven would not say that).

  Surely, if you have ever read Hesiod's (usually considered to have lived between 750 and 650 BCE) "Works and Days." you would immediately see the similarity with his five ages of Humanity.**

  And, even if a particular Jewish document (i.e.OT) could be demonstrated as being produced at an early date (i.e. by a contemporary writer/observer of certain events) that would not mean that our copies (i.e. as we know the document) had not been redacted at another point in time. Why? Because we there are not many copies/extracts that reach back in time. And we now know that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, modified documents were sometimes being written.

  Footnote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David - that entry notes that some scholarship considers Chronicles and Ruth to be fourth century documents
  

  * My personal view is that Judaism (Jewish thought) only became important, and studied, because it was linked to Christian tradition and mythology. If Christianity had not become important in the western world, then Judaism would be even less important than ancient Babylonian thought.

  ** Hesiod divides human history into five distinct eras.The initial Age of Gold. then the Age of Silver, Then the Age of Bronze, The The Age of Heroes and finally the Age of Iron.