Actually, while several of his opponents have provided evidence for their positions, Intrinsicvalue has posted no evidence of anything beyond his intractable belief.
It is interesting that you find gratuitous assertions as “credible” as evidence and logic. It would explain your fondness for that behavior. Those who have argued the “naturalist” position (as opposed to the straw man that Intrinsicvalue posts in place of that philosophy) may be entirely wrong, but neither you nor Intrinsicvalue have posted anything resembling evidence for your positions. You resort to irrelevant cherry-picking and he resorts to repeating the same baseless errors.
Ever been to a bris? My cousin’s kid never even cried. And I’ve suffered no ill effects from mine, which I of course don’t remember.
You might as well call tonsilectomies, which turned out to not be very useful, torture also. My understanding is that they caused far more discomfort than a circumcision. And were more dangerous.
What evidence? And I haven’t offered any evidence- I’m not making any claims. Maybe there is an objective morality- I’ve just seen zero evidence for it, and therefore no reason to believe in it.
Armchair speculation, “argumentation,” and stand-up philosophy are all fine starting points but eventually a person needs to check their notions against what is measurable in the real world.
And what about all the kids who did cry? What about the ones who were affected by it? If a girl doesn’t cry at her clitorectomy does that make it ok?
If circumcision had any actual benefit that was worth what it causes, it might be different. But it doesn’t have any good effects, so any bad effects at all mean it’s pain inflicted needlessly.
I’m not sure why “torture” is used instead of, say, “eat”, but I understand the reasoning, assuming we define 'natural philosophy" as a philosophy without a god. And yes, if there’s just me and an infant, and we’re both starving with no prospect of food from elsewhere in the environment, I know where my next hearty meal is coming from.
I think that this claim is intended to say, “God protects the weakest of us from our animal instincts.” Of course this is only true if we accect Gad as the external source of morality and our understanding includes that we are not supposed to eat infants.
However, since I’m sure lots of infants or other defenseless people have been killed and eaten for 10s of thousands of years, either God has no reliable enforcement mechanism, or the whole thing is just made up bullshit.
As **Intrinsicvalue **keeps repeating “torture” that must be an important point. I will continue to address the question of torturing an innocent child.
Apparently, the idea that we should abstain from inflicting pain upon children is so alien to human experience that it needed to be imposed from the outside. Which means that humans, unique among the animal kingdom, should be spending their time not torturing their offspring. This could thus be easily illustrated by showing how many other animals, especially social mammals, are torturing their descendants all the time.
But wait. They aren’t. In fact, I cannot think of a single other species which routinely inflicts torture on its own young. Which kind of takes the props out from under the argument that this inhibition was a matter of morals as opposed to a Darwinian survival imperative.
For girls there is negative impact later in life, which is reason enough to not do it.
As for pain - I suspect more babies cry from being in front of lots of people than anything else. I was born long before the technology they use today, but I don’t remember anything - from what my parents told me, they got me drunk.
Remember, we’re talking torture here. Is the pain greater to the kid than a hard to dispose of BM? (My kids cried about that all the time.)
But I understand that some people love their foreskins so much that it can only be removed from the cold, dead fingers.
Perhaps the fans of external morality could give some rules that can’t be easily explained by biological or cultural evolution? Certainly most of the rules in the Bible count, but they are hardly universal. Surely this external force could think of something beyond not torturing children. Murder is right out, since outside the tribe murder has been permitted in lots of cultures.
I’m thinking of the Flanders and Swann song about not eating people, where the kids has decided that eating people is wrong, and has a big fight with his father about it. At the end his father says “next you’ll say we can’t kill people.”
To which the kids responds “not kill people? Ridiculous!”
For men there is decreased sensitivity. Since there are no positive effects, any negative effects at all are inexcusable.
Oh, well as long as it doesnt hurt any more than X, it’s ok to inflict that on a person? A smack upside the head hurts less than having your foreskin cut off, so it should be ok to smack a kid upside the head whenever you fee like, right? After all, more kids cry from being in front of other people…
well, what if that pain is to prevent the child from doing more harm to itself and to remember the lesson?
you know - throw some boiling water on them to show them the dangers of playing with the stove? smack 'm on the ass to remind them its not good to play in traffic?
If you’re gonna throw boiling water on a kid for a lesson about hot stoves, for a traffic lesson you should throw them in front of a car. Just to be consistent …
The Spring Queen needs a blood sacrifice to make the land fertile. It is a great honor for your daughter to be chosen to be sacrificed in the stead of the Spring Queen’s daughter (who is Herself at a different point of the yearcycle). And we have had good harvests every year we did this, except for that time that the girl might not have been a virgin, or was menstruating, or had the wrong color hair, or when the Spring Queen decided to punish us for some other transgression, or when She was trapped by the Frost Elves or something….
