Circumcision

[jedusor]

I can't believe this is even debatable. I can't believe that in a society we consider civilized, I have to actually present a structured argument against cutting off pieces of babies when they're born.

Comments

[cazique.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of people out there who would replace "cutting off pieces of babies when they're born" with "killing babies in the womb." they call themselves pro-lifers, I prefer the term anti-choice, but I can't help but tell you that this is a bit what you sound like.

Against circumcision? don't have your kids circumcised.

Seriously, you're smarter than this. And, there's so much more important stuff that your really powerful brain should be working on.

(Including - to infuse a touch of levity here - thinking about themes and structures, right? It's February!)

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was thinking about that earlier today, the comparison of abortion to circumcision. It's a valid point.

Watching the interactions of people in the comments to this entry has given me an idea about the use of the representativeness heuristic in initial social interactions for my honors thesis. Hope that's important enough for you.

[uncanny-npl.livejournal.com]

I've been reading through this discussion (if such it can be called), and find myself resonating most with some of the things Cazique is saying. The tone and even some of the issues here remind me so much of the pro-choice/pro-life debate. (Or anti-life/anti-choice, or however you wish to label it.) And the thing that always makes me nervous about that debate (and this one) is that both sides tend to be so absolutely certain of the rightness of their positions. It's a disconcerting thing, listening to so many, often very smart and honorable, people take up diametrically opposed positions whose rightness they consider self-evident. It's not that an extreme position *can't* be the right one, or that, always, "the truth lies somewhere in between" (a phrase I get so tired of, even as I'm often resorting to it). The truth is out there, or I guess so anyway. It's just that at my ripe old age of 50 I find myself no longer smart enough to tell you exactly what it is. All I know is that we have to inspect our thoughts really, really carefully, even--no, especially--the ones we find self-evident. And when we face opposition from people we respect, we really ought to consider it as fully as we can bear to.