Panel Unanimously Decides to Regulate a Circumcision Ritual

"“They feel that if their child doesn’t have the metzitzah b’peh, he is not Jewish..."

OK, so their friend from the synagogue who did not have this kind of circumcision-- he isn't Jewish now? Or he isn't quite *as* Jewish because he didn't have a mohel suck blood off his penis after he circumcised him?

And what about completely uncircumcised Jews? Guess they aren't really Jewish at all then? Never mind actual Jewish law that says you only need a Jewish mother to be considered Jewish. Ignore that, it's too pop-cultural. No, you need to be circumcised just this particular way to actually be Jewish.

But only if you're male. Females don't need to do anything or have their genitalia mutilated and they can still be Jewish.

Does the same go for Muslims too?

I always thought that Christopher Hitchens went a bit too far in his aggressive condemnation of many things, including religion. His primary complaint (as I understand it-- sorry if I am wrong here) about it was that it encouraged people to stop thinking for themselves or to put common sense and basic human ethics at the forefront of their consideration when approaching problems involving the welfare of others. I always thought that religions by and large supplied more positive than negative to humanity so while they had problems, they were not all that bad. And when we had so little in the way of means to examine and more rationally understand the universe we live in, I can see why they were so embraced and what they did for people. After all, living in a world where you lacked the means to even begin to comprehend what the sun was or those blinking lights in the sky at night, or why there was night and day at all, could lead anyone to believe all sorts of things just so they can face the day. But I am not so sure any more. Author Sam Harris (as I understand it) has suggested that ethics can be viewed from a more scientific standpoint, using no appeals to higher powers as such as the basis for decisions around what is ethical and what is not, and that religions in essence are forms of failed sciences, not unlike the old belief that there was this thing called an 'ether' that matter traveled through, whose existence was finally disproven in the 19th century, or that the Earth was the center of the universe with the stars in the sky revolving around it, disproven well before that.

I don't deny that there are still Big Unanswered Questions out there. OK, so we know more about the universe than we likely ever have and we no longer think that an eclipse is a sign that the gods demand blood or the world will be snuffed out of existence. Good thing those days are gone. But we still don't have answers to other Biggies, like: How did it all come into existence in the first place? Just how many "dimensions" are there and even if we knew, what good would it do us, and how did they come about anyway? Is there life after death? What would it look like and even if we knew we had it, what's beyond death itself, if anything? The list goes on and on. Existence itself is a mystery and one that may never be answerable by what science would call conventional means. So we're still stuck. But we are finally past some things, and I would hope one of them would be this: We no longer put the welfare and well-being of our fellow men, women, and children (including baby boys and girls) *after* our religious beliefs, many of which just don't seem to make much sense in the cold light of day, nor bear up under medical scrutiny. The days when, justified out of fear of some unseen angry divine forces, we could commit violations of human rights, should be utterly behind us now.

So why the hell are we not there yet? Search me.