The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #85446 Message #2119962
Posted By: Little Hawk
05-Aug-07 - 06:20 PM
Thread Name: BS: Circumcision: pros and cons
Subject: RE: BS: Circumcision: pros and cons
Peace, you and McGrath and I ALL think it is an evil thing to do. And yes, it is absolutely barbaric. It stems from a barbaric attitude toward women and toward sexuality in general, stemming from an archaic religion. That doesn't mean that the Muslim clerics who passed those fatwas did not, however, think they were going "a good thing". That was precisely the error in their thinking...they definitely thought they were doing a good thing, and they had ancient traditions to back them up on that.
I think they were wrong to do it, you think they were wrong to do it, everyone here thinks they were wrong to do it. Everybody here thinks it's evil.
McGrath's post of 05 Aug 07 - 04:19 PM sums up the matter perfectly, and with clarity:
"Actually "moral relativism" is more or less the reverse of how I see the world. All kinds of evil things are seen as good things by the people who do them, and may be seen as good things by the people around them as well, and by whole societies for that matter.
A moral relativist would say that this meant that it'd be wrong to call such things "evil". I wouldn't. I wouldn't necessarily feel entitled to call the people involved "evil", but that's a very different matter."
You see, McGrath is quite ready to call the custom of female circumcision "evil"...but at the same time he recognizes that the people who support that custom are not, by definition, "evil people". They are ordinary people...ignorant people who imagine themselves to be doing "the right thing", "as God requires it", as tradition has taught them, as their parents and grandparents did before them. Ignorance is not evil...but it can certainly lead to a great many evil acts.
Our common medical western customs of removing a child's tonsils (now out of style), the infant male's foreskin, and an adolescent's wisdom teeth may also be based primarily on ignorance...and the overpowring weight of social tradition. I still have my wisdom teeth, though, and they aren't causing me any trouble at all. Because I questioned tradition, some dentist is short $1,000 and I still have all my teeth.
But what cultural group, what nation will EVER admit to or even be aware of their own ignorance, when they feel much better ranting about someone else's?