The Sage Garden

[memphis]

Anything critical of Christianity will inevitably be posted by Nathan in this thread.

It has nothing to do with religion in this case. His contempt for all things masculine is the issue in this circumstance. Should the issue be genital cutting on female babies, he would be the first to break out the victimhood rhetoric.

[memphis]

Those who have had parts of their genitals cut and removed as babies are universally "defended" and "well served?" Is this before or after they are shipped off to war and shoved down into coal mines? What a strange, delusional world you live in, Nathan.

[memphis]

Internet 'discussion' of circumcision should be prohibited.

A mod supporting censorship. How delightfully unsurprising!
Does anybody care to take on the pro- infant circumcision cause, even just for the sake of playing devil's advocate? Freedom of religion perhaps? Although it is uncommon today, we are all aware that religious rituals have included throwing live people into volcanoes? Should that action also be condoned and all discussion thereof "prohibited" so as not to hurt the feelings of believers? The blind deference and outight suspension of reason in otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people is both baffling and disheartening.

[memphis]

I actually have to agree with Joe on the main point, though I'd like if he'd put it in less condescending terms.

Oh come on.  It was Nathan's typically condescending tone that inspired me to call him out for it.  It's incredible how people here constantly praise him for it.

As far as I've seen, Nathan was only being condescending to posters like Einzige and Memphis, who fully deserve to be "condescended". Especially when they make the outlandish claim that circumcision has anything to do with Christianity.

Citation needed. I have never linked circumcision to Christianity. There are other religions out there, you know.

[memphis]

I stand by the content of everything I said in all of those posts. The first two and last two are considerably more impolitic than I wanted them to be and I apologize for that.

That's convenient as you've provided precious little content outside of personal attacks in this thread.

[memphis]

I stand by the content of everything I said in all of those posts. The first two and last two are considerably more impolitic than I wanted them to be and I apologize for that.

That's convenient as you've provided precious little content outside of personal attacks in this thread.

Ha!  A guy who thinks of the Pope as nothing more than "a creepy old man in a cape" lecturing others on personal attacks.

Please, oh sage, further enlighten us with your theological wisdom.

Tell me again about how the SBC is a cult, Mr Religion Expert.

[memphis]

I stand by the content of everything I said in all of those posts. The first two and last two are considerably more impolitic than I wanted them to be and I apologize for that.

That's convenient as you've provided precious little content outside of personal attacks in this thread.

Ha!  A guy who thinks of the Pope as nothing more than "a creepy old man in a cape" lecturing others on personal attacks.

Please, oh sage, further enlighten us with your theological wisdom.

Tell me again about how the SBC is a cult, Mr Religion Expert.

Dude, I think you knew damn well what I meant when I called the SBC a cult.  Structurally, is it a cult?  No.  Does that in any way change my opinion of how the vast majority of its churches operate, often to the detriment and marginalization of those who aren't associated with it?  Hell no.

Try again, though - this time, without semantics 'gotchas.'

Honestly, I have no idea what you meant. Feel free to elaborate.

[memphis]

For the record, irrationality is not my objection to infant circumcision. Choosing circumcison as an adult would still be irrational, but I don't see why that should be controversial. Furthermore, people are irrational in all sorts of child rearing decisions that I don't think ought to be illegal. The issue at hand is one of personal autonomy, especially in regards to matters of sexual choice. I'm a firm believer in the importance of consent. A pity others don't share that view.

[memphis]

My position remains that, even if circumcision’s supposed health benefits are highly dubious and even if the real initial ‘reasons’ for doing it weren’t the reasons of a culture that any of us would want to emulate were we to construct a religion or ethnoreligion from scratch right now, it’s, as you acknowledge, simply untrue to suggest that it is anywhere nearly as damaging, dangerous, and prima facie unreasonable as FGM, and that considering the almost uniformly stupefyingly awful outcomes of laws banning non-life-threatening religious practices (I say ‘almost’ because I suspect someone may bring up polygamy or whatever and I want to say that yes I am aware that there are instances of laws of this kind both being good ideas and more-or-less working if you look for them but that doesn’t mean it’s not best approached with extreme caution) it’s, and I know at this point I’m just repeating myself but I want to underscore that having fully read and understood your argument I’m not going to run away from having said this, intellectually and morally irresponsible to actually go and treat it with the same sort of legal condemnation as we do FGM.

And with the above sentence (yes, it's all one sentence) Nathan has won the Sage Garden. The rest of players, however, will enjoy some lovely parting gifts.

[memphis]

Is sage about writing style now? Really? Really? I know that writing style exacerbates sage but I don't think it can be sage.

Dude, all sage means is a haugty self-important attitude. And you constantly revel in it. Needlessly using million dollar words and absurdly complex sentence structure out of a sad little need to prove your intellectual worth through form rather than devising a logical and consistent content. Proust was absolutely a sage.  Sage has very little to do with quality of content. For bad content, we have another thread entirely.

[memphis]