Circumcision: Sadistic Mutilation, or Meaningful Symbolic Act?
In his book, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens tries to argue that religion is the root cause of violence, intolerance, and sexual repression. One rather odd topic he seems to be fixated on is, as the title suggests, the Jewish practice of circumcision. In addition to originally being the “sign of the covenant” that distinguished Jews from Gentiles, in this day and age, the practice of circumcision has become a routine medical practice for thousands of babies every day, regardless of ethnicity. It is considered to carry a certain amount of health benefits, although the procedure is clearly optional in any medical sense. In any case, it’s a quick “snip-snip” and it’s over with—and I’m willing to bet there has never been a human being who has ever remembered getting circumcised as a baby.
Hitchens, though, expresses outrage over the practice—I mean real outrage. He calls it, “mutilation of infant genitalia.” Now granted, he is perfectly justified in his outrage over the practice of circumcising female babies in some Muslim societies. This practice certainly is mutilation—what else can you call it when the labia and clitoris is excised? But to equate that brutal practice with the practice of circumcising male babies is quite a stretch.
Interestingly enough, Hitchens does rightly speculate that the practice of circumcision of male babies probably had some symbolic connection to the animal and human sacrifices of the ancient near eastern cultures. Just as an animal sacrifice (or human sacrifice in the more depraved societies of the ancient near east), acted as a substitute for the offenses of the family or society at large, the “shedding of blood” during the circumcision of the male child acted as a symbolic sacrifice to YHWH, the God of Israel. It was a way of offering the child to God, and to have the child returned, with the circumcision acting as a sign of that sacrifice and covenant relationship between YHWH and his people.
Now if you ask me, with the situation in the ancient Near East, particularly Canaan, being what it was, with child sacrifice being an expected practice, the symbolism of circumcision is quite profound: God doesn’t want you to kill your child; symbolically “sacrifice” him and God will return the child to you. Since Hitchens clearly doesn’t believe in God in the first place, though, he just sees the practice as barbaric primitive ritual.
Hitchens then questions the supposed hygienic reasons for circumcision. His reasoning, though, is quite odd:
“It has been argued that the process is more hygienic for the male and thus more healthy for females in helping them avoid, for example, cervical cancer. Medicine has exploded these claims, or else revealed them as problems which can just as easily be solved by a ‘loosening’ of the foreskin. Full excision…is now exposed for what it is—a mutilation of a powerless infant with the aim of ruining its future sex life” (226).
Please note Hitch is splitting hairs here. First, by his own admission, the procedure (whether the removal or loosening of it) is more healthy and hygienic! Secondly, did Hitchens just claim that the aim of circumcision was to ruin the child’s sex life as an adult? Why yes he did! That’s highly ironic, given that Jews argued that circumcision actually enhanced the sex life of the individual. The paranoia about sexual pleasure came about in the Christian church, not from its Jewish roots, but rather as the result of the influence of Platonic and Stoic philosophies of the Greeks, the very kind of Greek thinking that Hitchens loves to praise.
Shhh…An Argument is Being Made From Silence!
There is one final issue I would like to address concerning Hitchens argument that religion is the source of violence and intolerance—his notorious habit of making arguments from silence. What this means is that Hitchens has the tendency to make an accusation against religion, specifically Christianity, that is based on complete speculation, with absolutely no evidence at all; his “evidence” is precisely what is never said. Note the following statements, in which Hitchens speculates on the “inner workings” of the various great innovators, inventors, scholars, and scientists throughout Church history who were, in fact, Christians:
- “We cannot know the names of all these men and women [who were afraid to voice their non-belief in God], because they have in all times and all places been subject to ruthless suppression” (254).
- “And we have now means of knowing, except in a very few special cases, how many of these architects and painters and scientists were preserving their innermost thoughts from the scrutiny of the godly. Galileo might have been unmolested in his telescopic work if he had not been so unwise as to admit that it had cosmological implications” (255).
- “In view of the terror imposed by religion on science and scholarship throughout the early Christian centuries…and the fact that most intelligent people found it prudent to make an outward show of conformity, one need not be surprised that the revival of philosophy was often originally expressed in quasi-devout terms” (260).
Let’s be clear: Hitchens is implying, without absolutely any tangible evidence whatsoever, that because the Church “just has always sought to silence and kill anyone who had doubts or questions” (a complete lie), there must have been thousands upon thousands of free-thinkers over the past two centuries who were too afraid to speak up, for fear of their lives.
Ah yes! The old, “All those Christian thinkers, architects, painters, and scientists throughout Church history weren’t really Christians, because if they ever voiced their questions they would’ve been tortured and killed” argument! In Hitch’s universe, if you are a thinker, or expert painter, architect, or scientist, then you couldn’t really be a Christian, because “we already know that Christians are stupid, backwards, close-minded, and violent.” Hitchens simply won’t allow his point of view to be challenged in any way. Dante? “No, he was a great poet…couldn’t be a Christian.” Galileo? “No, he was an intelligent scientist…couldn’t be a Christian.” Michelangelo? “Nope…too good of an artist to be a Christian!”
Now, this is not to say that men like Dante, Galileo, or Michelangelo did not have issues with the religious authorities of their day—of course they did. But what do we notice? They were not killed; they were allowed to continue in their respective fields. Even Galileo’s works were preserved. As for his “punishment,” he had to live in Florence, Italy!
The list of great Christian artists, architects, scientists, and poets could go on and on. This shows quite clearly that the Church did not have a consistent practice of systematically killing anyone who was a free-thinker; in fact, this shows that not only were there scores of great Christian intellectuals and artists throughout Church history, but they did not always completely agree with everything the Church said, and they still were allowed to live their lives and practice in their respective fields.
Furthermore, notice what Hitchens says in quote #3. Christians in the early Christian centuries imposed terror on science and scholarship? Really? It’s a matter of historical record that the early Christian thinkers embraced Greek philosophy and engaged in dialogue, despite the fact that THEY were the ones subjected to terror and torture throughout the first three centuries of Christianity. Furthermore, modern science didn’t exist until much later. How could the early Christians impose terror on a discipline that had not yet existed? The ironic thing about this statement by Hitchens is that he completely contradicts himself only a few pages later, when he says:
“I do not wish to repeat the gross mistake that Christian apologists have made. They expended huge and needless effort to show that wise men who wrote before Christ were in effect prophets and prefigurations of his coming. … I have no right to claim past philosophers as putative ancestors of atheism. I do, however, have the right to point out that because of religious intolerance we cannot know what they really thought privately, and were very nearly prevented from learning what they wrote publicly” (264-265).
How does this completely contradict what Hitchens said earlier? Simple—in the earlier quote Hitchens says, “the early Christians persecuted thinkers and philosophers,” (a time when they were in no position to…but never mind that). Then here Hitchens says, “I won’t be like those Christian apologists who engaged in dialogue with earlier philosophers and thinkers and tried to show how Christianity fulfills even them.” Hitchens can’t have it both ways—he can’t falsely accuse early Christians of persecuting philosophers and thinkers (when they clearly didn’t, and couldn’t), and then turn around criticize them for entering into philosophical dialogue with the surrounding culture’s philosophers and thinkers.
To quote Mugato, from the film Zoolander, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills! Doesn’t anybody see this?” Apparently not, at least not in the New Atheism camp. But this is a dynamic we see time and time again with people and groups beholden to a virtual idolatrous ideology. It doesn’t matter if its Christopher Hitchens, Ken Ham, or the chairmen of either political party: facts don’t really matter. What matters is preserving the ideology, despite what reality says. Right now, I am pointing this dynamic out in the New Atheism movement. Earlier, I pointed this out with Ken Ham. Sadly, you can see it everywhere these days.
