this article was first published in the Press Republican, Plattsburgh, NY)
By DIANE PETRYK
PLATTSBURGH — Getting a
guy to notice you isn’t always
easy. You’re shy. He’s shy. What
do you do?
Renata Fromme, who got noticed and to
the altar, got help from
the Federation. At least in the
form of a Lake Placid Star Trek
Club member.
Here’s the data:
Renata, 18, of Queens, first
met Jean-Marc Di Battista, 21,
of Montreal, in a summer
library-skills class at
Plattsburgh State. They were
randomly tossed together as
partners in a homework
assignment, but Library 101 left
them in the Neutral Zone.
In the fall they were, by
chance, in the same public speaking
class. Their teacher,
Kathleen Duley, was scheduled
to host a pledge break at the
Mountain Lake PBS station. She
decided to make the trip a prime
directive for everyone in the
class.
Most students manned the
phones, taking pledge calls,
including Renata. From where
she sat, she had a good view of
Jean-Marc, filling in as a
volunteer camera operator.
(He hopes to go into broadcast
news. She’s majoring in hotel
and restaurant management.)
Renata said she was attracted
by his sense of humor. “And , to
be honest, that French accent.”
By the end of the day she knew
she wanted to see more of him.
But his hailing frequencies
weren’t open.
“I was too shy,” Jean-Marc
admitted. “I noticed she was
looking at me, but it didn’t click.”
At the end of the day, the
volunteers, which included
members of the Star Trek club,
went to the International House
of Pancakes.
Renata confided in Trekker
Cynthia Merrick.
Merrick decided to boldly go.
She came right out and said: “I
think she’s attracted to you.”
The rest is history.
Jean-Marc showed Renata
around Montreal. They visited
her parents in Queens. She
picked out a wedding dress.
They fell in love in a matter of
two months, Renata said.
She doesn’t think they got
there at warp speed.
“I don’t think we’re rushing,”
she said just before the wedding.
“Most couples go through an
awkward period, but we cut right
through that. The timing seems
right.”
Because they didn’t have a
church in common, and they
didn’t like the idea of a
courthouse wedding, they
decided to get married where
their attraction took hold: at the
Mountain Lake PBS station.
“And it was a great way to get
a free video of the wedding.”
The management of Mountain
Lake PBS said it hopes the
couple’s example will encourage
others to discover the benefits of
volunteering at the station.
Renata certainly understands
them. She always dreamed of
being a bride.
Saturday, Jean-Marc made it
so.
-30-
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
China's Real Olympics Over Sport of Hegemony
By Diane Petryk-Bloom
Lifestyle features that are filling the airwaves during lulls in Olympic coverage from Beijing have reported a fascinating fact: Chinese families that fled totalitarian rule and came to the United States are finding their children reversing the trend. Yes, some Chinese-Americans are returning to their homeland. They’re betting this will be the Chinese Century.
In the 19th Century, Britannia ruled the waves, presided over an empire on which the sun never set, and held the world in the grip of an uneasy peace. In the early 20th Century, starting after World War I and unmistakably after WWII, it was America’s turn to spread its influence and police many an international mess. In the words of Time/Life publisher Henry Luce, it was the “American Century.”
It is becoming increasing clear that the scepter is slipping form America’s hands. If we haven’t heard it hit the pavement yet, overextension of U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, worldwide opprobrium, and daunting debt hint strongly that the clink is coming.
Which nation, if any, will pick it up? As this is written, Russia is stepping up it militarism against the former Soviet state of Georgia. Islamic people scattered across the globe, and out-reproducing the people of liberal western democracies, believe Allah is top god—and they don’t separate religion and politics. India grows in population and economic clout. China? Well no one is about to tell this nation of 1.3 billion to tear down its wall.
True, the Chinese do not enjoy democracy or personal rights as we know them in the west. But they have the freedom to make money now and that is fueling their enormous growth. If they are still restricted in many ways, their prison is so huge it almost doesn’t matter to them. We can’t expect them to overthrow their government. They are charging ahead as an unprecedented economic force.
Moreover, they may soon be staring down at us from the moon.
In 2006, China unveiled sweeping plans for lofting Earth orbiting satellites for a multitude of duties, expanding its human space flight abilities, and carrying out a multi-step program for lunar exploration
Future historians may have a laugh reporting that the US-Russian space race was won by the Chinese! For those who scorn such exploration for exploration’s sake, there’s the military advantage of the high ground to consider.
In fact, China nominated itself for world leader back in the 1990s. China called for “a new world order,” a new “peace” over which it would presumably preside.
Periods of peace imposed by a single superpower have often produced substantial benefits to nations roped into the sphere of influence of the overlord. Conquered, cowed, or allied countries have been able to take down their fortress walls, open up their societies, and concentrate on productivity instead of defense and warfare.
But there have also been considerable disadvantages for those who are squashed under the thumb of a megapower. The nation running the world gets to influence – or dictate – how its vassals think, govern, eat and speak. It has the privilege of sending troops into lesser lands at the slightest excuse – even a trumped up one if it needs what they have.
Life in those places can be quite cheap. The Athens of ultimate democracy – that of Pericles’ Golden Age – annihilated populations of entire city-states and razed their buildings to the ground when Athens’ leader felt such punishment was necessary to make a point. Cities in the Athenian League were allegedly independent allies, but woe be unto the ally that got out of line.
Rome in the golden days of the Pax Romana crucified 6,000 rebellious slaves alongside one of its greatest highways, the Appian Way. The victims acted as writing, moaning billboards advertising the penalties of civic unrest.
Russia, when it imposed its version of peace on a good part of Europe and Asia in the 20th century, did without Rome’s theatrical flair. It systematically starved the Ukraine into submission, sent tanks into the streets of Prague, invented the Gulag for political dissidents and writers and artists and anyone else inconveniently vocal.
Even the United States, probably one of the most benevolent hegemons of all time, trampled on weaker nations and propped up vile dictators as long as they were against communism. It wreaked havoc in the Philippines, Cuba, and snatched territory from Mexico and Spain. Increasingly it has been hard to deny the adventure in Iraq was for anything other than oil and profiteering.
The lesson of these histories is simple. The tight grip of a monolithic superpower frequently allows average folks to go about their daily business without fear that they will be hauled off to unrevealed prisons for undisclosed treatment without legal representation -- or that any random vehicle or mode of public transport may explode at any time.
Islamic extremists have been trying to put an end to such security, but by and large we still have them in this country.
If we want to keep them, we need the central superpower to be us.
China disagrees.
The Chinese are calling for an end to “hegemonism” –the Chinese and Soviet codeword for domination of the world by a single power. Yet all the signs are that China is positioning itself to be the next great hegemon. China has been recruiting nations in South America, the Middle East, and Asia for what it has specifically told each of them will be the “new world order,” one that will put an end to the “gunboat diplomacy,” neo-colonialism,” and the “hegemonism” of an unnamed rival power.
That unnamed power is the United States.
What the nature of a Chinese-run global peace would be, we will have to see. Odds are it won’t involve peace and freedom for Tibet or Taiwan. It probably won’t make Japan or South Korea feel comfortable to be in the neighborhood. It won’t allow a parent to protest the construction quality of a death-tap school or a monk to worship freely.
Here’s what China is laboring on:
They have put big bucks into more than Olympic venues and displays. According to Jane’s Information Group, the world’s top gatherer of military hardware data, they are funding “leapfrog” military technologies.
The Chinese have long had a large nuclear arsenal mounted on some of the world’s most powerful Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and packaged in sophisticated MIRVed warheads (MIRV stands for “multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicle” – a device that allows one rocket to carry a cluster of nuclear bombs, each aimed at a different city). But the Chinese count on this nuclear arsenal as a deterrent – a way of keeping the U.S.’s nuclear forces a bay.
In other words, they can afford to smile and nod while President Bush scolds them about human rights.
In reality, the Chinese know that America’s military ability to operate overseas is totally dependent on just about a dozen aircraft carriers: The Kitty Hawk retires this year. That leaves the Dwight D. Enterprise, Nimitz, Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman and the Ronald Reagan. The George H.W. Bush is to be commissioned in 2009; the Gerald Ford is planned for 2012, as are two unnamed carriers, for 2019 and 2023 respectively.
But they could all be dust at China’s whim.
China’s ace is a missile designed to destroy every single one of these floating flight decks.
An expert at Jane’s Information Group says China’s ship obliterating cruise missile –code named SS-N-22, “the “Sunburn” – wa a dangerous aircraft killer in its Soviet version, capable of flying at supersonic speed just over the water’s surface and evading detection by following an unpredictable zigzag course while carrying a nuclear warhead.
With modifications made by the Chinese – whose experience in manufacturing consumer semiconductor devices has put them far ahead of the Russians in microelectronics –the missile goes into what the Jane’s experts call a “gray” category, That means it’s nearly impossible to detect and destroy.
China originally purchased at least 16 of the missiles from cash-hungry Russian sellers. Each is capable of delivering an explosive punch six times more powerful than the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.
We do not know how many additional Sunburns the Chinese have manufactured, and we do not know what sort of upgrades the Chinese have made. We do know, however, that the Chinese started their own cruise missile program in 1977, reverse engineered the US Tomahawk missile in the 1990s, and had nuclear-tipped cruise missiles by 1995.
We also know the Chinese created one of the most advanced anti-ship missiles of the late 20th Century, the Silkworm (referred to by China as the Hai Ying-2), were working on a cruise missile with an astonishing 1,500-mile range in the year 2000, and at that point had long since perfected mass production of the devices, cranking them out in sufficient abundance to allow for high-quality exports to other nations.
No wonder Chinese military documents proudly announce that “the strategic superiority which can be claimed by the US is close to zero. It does not even enjoy a sure advantage in terms of foreseeable scale of war and the high-tech content which can be applied to combat.”
The Chinese initially installed their Sunburn strike weapons on two new Russian-built, Sovremenny-class guided-missile destroyers. Their next plan was rumored to be one of greater simplicity –building vessels roughly the size of a PT boat capable of carrying one Sunburn missile each.
Here’s where the Tom Clancy stuff comes in. By skimming the water and using violent end maneuvers that throw off defenses, Sunburn missiles have the capacity to put the U.S. military totally out of business in the western pacific. AT it’s current detection capability, the Navy would have to plot a response in 2.5 seconds. Impossible.
If it’s on which swimmer’s fingers touch the pool wall a fraction of a second before another’s, the eyes of the world are watching the wrong clock.
In other words, in 2001 China was capable of turning any soldiers, sailors, or pilots sent to Japan, Korea, the Philippines, or Taiwan into grounds meat. Chinese political and military leaders are not he least bit afraid that nuclear war would follow. They’ve leaked the word to Reuters that, to quote an unnamed “source close to China’s military”: “Americans can’t tolerate death.”
Says this Asian Deep Throat: China’s generals “look at your yellow ribbons for these servicemen and your casualty-free Kosovo and they think you don’t have the will.”
A 1999 document from China’s office of the Central Military Commission backs this up. “Our principle,” it states, “is (one of being) ‘willing to sustain major losses of our armed forces to defend even just one square inch of land.’ If the U.S. forces lose thousands or hundreds of men under our powerful strikes, the anti-war sentiment within their country will force the U.S. government to take the same path as they did in Vietnam.”
All through the 1990s and the first years of the 21st Century, the Chinese slowly and patiently intensified demands that Taiwan be returned to their control. China has also declared sovereignty over virtually everything in the South China Sea, an area rich in natural gas and oil…and an area dotted with landmasses six other countries call their own. The Chinese have bragged in their military documents that they have “conquering-all operational capacity.” With the Sunburn missile, they have the magic bullet with which to take what they want. But that is not the Chinese way. They are likely to advance on their prey with the same patience they showed in swallowing Hong Kong back in 1997 and Macau in 1999.
Weaponry is just one sign that China is increasing its potential for hegemony – its readiness for a global sway that sidelines the United States. China is eating America’s socks economically, too. According to some analysts—like those at the Japan Times—China’s economy is already the second largest in the world…and it’ sprinting fast to catch up with the U.S.’s China’s officially-reported Gross Domestic Product is almost twice that of the third-place runner-up, Japan. While the U.S> ran a trade deficit of more than $360 billion in the year 2000 alone, China pocketed an annual $84 billion surplus with the U.S> and another $24.9 billion surplus with Japan.
In other words, China has become an economic vacuum cleaner emptying the wallets of America and its allies. We’ve known for a long time that you could pick any shopping mall, discount store or local chain store in America and find evidence of our major dependency on Chinese goods. A staggering percentage of clothing, toys, and electronic devices on sale originate in China. Take away all items that say “made in China,” and the average America would be helpless.
But that’ just the beginning. China has made huge profits on export goods by doing what social theorists Jane Jacobs calls “import replacement” – cranking out items once made by Americans, Japanese, Korean, or Thai workers at a price no American, Japanese, Korean, or Thai can meat. The next step, as the People’s Daily says, is to “intensify the content of high-technology.”
Which means the Chinese want to out-sprint the U.S. in the race toward 22nd Century innovations.
The nation that holds the innovative high ground is usually the one that rules the world.
But what are China’s chances of actually outpacing Bill Gates and America’s other techno-leaders in the race toward next-generation wonders? Very good, indeed.
Green parties stoking fears of “Frankenfoods” and other new agricultural technologies are trying to drag Europe and the U.S. into the agro-past. Meanwhile, China has jumped enthusiastically into genetically modified seed use. A million Chinese farmers now grow genetically-modified cotton, saving $100 billion on pesticides and losses to insects and rodents, and giving china –th former land of famine—an increasingly potent agricultu5al export industry…one capable, in the words of Japan’s Agricultural Ministry, of “flooding” Japan with cheap vegetable imports.
The there’s optoelectronics—a $10-bilion business for the Chinese as of 2001, and growing at the rate of 50percent a year. And computer education—a million Chinese a year are learning to use Microsoft software and consumer software creation. Microsoft, which very seldom plants research and development operations on foreign soil, established a software R&D center in Beijing way back in 1998. Not to mention artificial intelligence—where one investor feels Guangzhou’s Hua Ling Group “is a step ahead of foreign scientists.”
Beginning in 2003 China began to capture the world’s semiconductor business. This allowed it to suck up foreign expertise in military and civilian semiconductor development and fabrication, then imitate, borrow and outpace it. Once the bait was laid out, the number of those who happily stumbled into the trap was remarkable. Motorola, which as of November 2000 had already seeded China with eight semiconductor design houses and at least one mobile-handset plant, announced that it would spend close to $2 billion on a new Chinese chip production complex. Japan’s NEC, the world’s fourth- largest chipmaker, built a $1.2 million chip plant in China’s Zhangjiang High-Tech Industrial Park. Meantime, investors from Taiwan and a variety of other international locations were building a $1.6 billion chip foundry in the same park.
In the early 1990s, 70 percent of foreign direct investment in the Asian nations went to Southeast Asian tigers and only 30 percent to China. By 2001, the tigers had been declawed and defanged by their Chinese neighbor, which swallowed 70 percent of foreign investment funds. Further dollars and high-tech investment will continue to flow in. One reason –the Chinese are graduating more students with information technology training than any other low-cost-labor nation.
“Their mathematics background is excellent. It’s disciplined and thorough in a way that you often can’t find in the west,” says Microsoft’s head of research in China, American-born Kai-fu Lee (one of many highly skilled Asians the Chinese have lured back to fuel the high tech climb of their homeland). But education and intelligence are not the only Chinese edge. By 2000, Intel had a $400-million flash memory assembly plant up and running in Shanghai and a research and development center near Beijing. Then when the world economy crashed in 2001, Intel defied logic and invested an additional $302 million. The money was used to expand a Shanghai-based Intel plant dedicated to the manufacture of Intel 845 chipsets for the Pentium 4 processor. The move was not so daft as it may have seemed.
While consumers in the rest of the world were up to their ears in computers and were snapping their purses shut, China’s then 1.2 billion buyers were expected to increase their purchase of PCs by 20 percent a year. In the long run, Intel, NEC, Microsoft, and the others rushing to build plants and other facilities in China may regret their eagerness. China steals the technologies of outsiders, and then becomes the outside-firm’s most ferocious competitor. The U.S. did this in the 19th Century when it sent industrial spies to England to ferret out the secrets of Britain’s top-secret industrial devices—mechanized weaving machines. Though it was illegal to take drawings or plans of these machines out of the U.K., Americans smuggled sketches and blueprints to New England and built their own mass-production textile mills. From the 1950s to the 1980s the Japanese did the same to the U.S.—gutting the consumer electronics industry and pummeling auto companies into a sorry state.
Now it’s China’s turn. The Chinese already show signs of turning the tables on America in forward-looking fields. Take robotics, for instance. In 1988, the Shenyang Institute of Automation paid a firm called Perry Tritech in Florida a million dollars for an unusual package deal: a deep-sea robot, spare parts, and training in robot technology. By 1991, the Chinese had upgraded the undersea rover—a device that comes in handy for inspections of floating oilrigs and dams. In fact, they’d improved its qualities and lowered its price so much that they were able to sell their new version of the ROV (remote-operated vehicle) to several American companies. Intel China President Wee Theng Tan was extremely open about this form of techno-theft when he said proudly: “We (Intel) will continue to bring our leading edge technical and manufacturing expertise to China to help the country develop a leadership role in high-end value-added manufacturing technologies.”
But the real crunch will come when China takes advantage of its people’s ingenuity and respect for education by out-innovating the U.S. China—the nation that created the word’s first modern paper, first encyclopedias, first magnetic compass, first gun powder, and first cannon—held the high ground in technology from roughly 200 BC until 1600 AD. Now the Chinese are working hard to get back to the leading edge and beyond, moving into such fields as nanotechnology. A team of four scientists at Jiaotong University in Shanghai announced in 2001 that they’d created a micro-motor a quarter the size of a sesame seed. The device, they said, was smaller and lighter than any developed in the U.S., Europe, or Japan. It was exactly the sort of thing the medical equipment industry was looking for. In another area, telecommunications, Dr. Wei Chen—an American-born Chinese—started a company in china to manufacture and sell his pioneering wireless local-loop equipment. And the institute of Developmental Biology in Beijing is working on beyond-the-envelope genetic engineering.
Boast the writer of one 1999 Chinese document from the Office of the Central Military commission: “In the five thousand years of outstanding civilization, our country has commanded a predominant position in the whole world.” And they’re right. To the Chinese, dominance of the world’s economy would simply mean a return to the way things used to be. Balance of payments deficits between China and the West go back at least 2,000 years, to the days when the Romans nearly depleted the product of their Laurium and Pangaeum silver mines to pay for Chinese silk. Eighteen hundred years later, the Chinese delusion began—the notion that one could make vast sums of money by selling goods to China’s masses. This was a dream, a fantasy. China sold goods the world wanted—silk, porcelain (called “China” because it became a necessity in Western homes), and tea) another daily necessity in the British lifestyle). But the West had nothing the Chinese needed.
The balance of trade deficits threatened to drain the coffers of Britain and America until the puritanical Empire of Queen Victoria began an official policy of breaking Chinese law by selling and promoting opium from England’s Indian territories. Leading American families—from the Forbes to the Delanos—made millions smuggling illicit drugs into the Chinese market. When the Chinese, under Lin Tse-hsu, Yeh Ming-ch’en, and Hsu Kuang-chin, mounted several potentially successful internal wars on the drug trade, the West responded with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856. To be specific, Europeans and Americans used steam-powered gunboats to shove opiates down China’s throat.
To get an idea of how this felt to the Chinese, imagine what would happen if Colombia, impatient with America’s resistance to its export trade in cocaine and heroin, mounted a war against he U.S., won, forced America to legalize narcotics, then went on a mass-marketing campaign to put an addict in every home, a line of coke up every nostril, and a needle in every American teenager’s arm.
Despite this experience, the delusion that one could make millions selling legitimate goods and services to the Chinese continued. Douglas MacArthur’s father was dazzled by it in the 19th Century. MacArthur himself continued with it. What American automakers and other who made huge investments in Chinese joint ventures failed to realize was China’s new economic strategy fort he 20th and 21st centuries: Let the foreign barbarians build their plants; make sure those factories are under the control of Chinese co-owners; study the manufacturing machinery, organizational techniques, and patented technologies the Western investors so graciously provide; imitate them, improve on them, steal those under patent or licensing protection; then undercut the American and U.S. industries that had been foolish enough to offer themselves on the altar of sacrifice to the new China.
A lucrative practice. But the more significant payoff will come on the geopolitical side of the equation.
Chinas former President Jiang Zemin took a six-nation trip to the strategic backyard of the United States—Latin America—in April 2001,calling on Latin Americans to work with China toward building, to use his catchphrase, a “new international order” (the six nations were Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, and Venezuela). Jiang found enormous eagerness in anti-American Venezuela (where Chinese have invested $530 million and have interests in two oil fields), in Chile, in Argentina, and in Cuba, to which the Chinese are lending $400 million.
Meanwhile, Chinese power showed itself in many another international nuance. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi put improving relations with China at the top of his international agenda when he rose to power in May 2001. Mexican President Vicente Fox visited Jiang in China that June. Fox was wary of the impact of cheap Chinese imports on Mexican industry. (In just two months –January and February 2001—China sold $465 million in products to Mexico but bought only $32 million worth of Mexican products.) Yet Fox felt it necessary to make a pilgrimage to Beijing.
By July 2008, the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, would conclude that the United States lost 2.3 million jobs to China between 2001 and 2007. Moreover, the report concluded that it’s almost impossible for American manufacturers to compete because of China’s “unfair trade practices.”
These include inadequate health and safety regulations for production workers, manufacturing subsidies from the Chinese government, child labor, an artificially low value for the Chinese currency, the yuan, and lax environmental rules that permit pollution far beyond what the United States demands of industrial companies.
Now you know why the Olympic cyclists found particulate matter in the air so severe some had to drop out of competition. Others donned face masks. Everyone’s lungs were being sacrificed for Chinese export profits. It’s just cheaper to pollute.
Now the Chinese are exploiting Africa as a market. The Chinese have built Africa’s biggest supermarket in Johannesburg, a power-generating equipment plant in Nigeria, and methane tanks in Uganda before moving on to solar and hydro power projects.
Cambodia’s Hun Sen has urged other nations to follow an anti-Taiwan, one-China policy to keep Beijing happy and deliver Taiwan into China’s hands. Only July 15, 2001, Jiang Zemin headed for Moscow, where he signed a friendship treaty. The Bush administration said it was not afraid of this agreement because China still needs the U.S. for investment and technology—meaning George W. Bush doesn’t see how this is letting China such America dry.
Meanwhile the Russians and Chinese entered a new era of energy cooperation in 2006 when they signed the Sino-Russian Good Neighborly Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation. In 2006.
Zemin also took his message of a new world order and “peace” led by China to the ASEAN states: Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia, repeating that this was to counter the politics of some big world powers.
China has frequently railed against what it calls “encirclement,” but its diplomatic maneuverings seem carefully designed to encircle Europe and the U.S. Take China’s Islamic connection.
In 1999, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Zemin signed an agreement establishing strategic cooperation. Reported China’s government mouthpiece People’s Daily, the Egyptian ambassador to China said Egypt “opposes certain countries which use the human rights issue to interfere in the internal affairs of China and other countries” and “supports China’s just struggle against power politics and hegemonism.” Meanwhile, the Chinese and Egyptian news media—both noted for their lack of free expression--engaged in active exchanges.
China is building “a special economic zone” in the northwest Suez. And China has close ties with the Palestinians. Far more important, China makes a considerable amount of money selling high-tech weapons—including nuclear and missile parts and instructions—to “rogue nations” like Iran and Iraq. China also had a hand in helping Pakistan build “the Islamic bomb.”
In one sense, this is reassuring. It shows that the Chinese can be as shortsighted as the U.S. From 1980 onward, the CIA and the People’s Liberation Army backed the Taliban in Afghanistan. China cooperated with the U.S> and Saudi Arabia in arming and training 50,000 militant Muslims from 30 countries for this “freedom-fighting” Jihad.
The Chinese joined America in giving Osama Bin Laden his troops, and sent 300 officers to train the mujahideen in the use of sophisticated weapons—like Chinese-made anti0tank missiles.
When the Taliban took over in 1995, support for it had been a bipartisan affair in the U.S., beginning in the carter Administration and continuing under Reagan and Bush. The U.S. helped build the very force that would come back to strike it on September 11, 2001. The resulting worldwide war of the U.S. and its allied against “terrorism” could theoretically weaken both the West and the Islamic militants and help hand world domination over to the Chinese.
Once the smoke of battle between Islamic wackos and the West has cleared, however, a bin Laden-style blowback could prove equally dangerous to Beijing. There is an extremely active jihad—Islamic holy war—taking place in China’s “wild west” province, Xinjiang. It is part of a widespread military and ideological campaign to take all Central Asia—including Xinjiang, Chechnya, Dagestan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kashmir, and Uzbekistan—thus “liberating” this enormous sweep of territory to be part of dar el Islam –the Islamic world.
The holy warriors’ fervor to make the entire world Islamic could easily go further than China’s border provinces and strike at the Chinese heart. China, with one fifth of the world’s population as a whole, also has the second-largest Islamic population in the world. The Islamic mujahideen that the U.S. and China trained and armed are idealists of the highest degree. They cannot rest until (their view of) justice and purity have been given as a gift to all the citizens of this world and that can only be done by imposing Islamic law—sharia.
Purity and propriety are only possible, they say, when a people has been freed from false idols and taught to worship the one and only god (Allah) and his one and only prophet (Mohammed). China, too, should be ruled by the laws of the Koran, they feel.
The jostling for position between China, Islam, and the U.S. is part of a standard hierarchical game that dates back to the dawn of life 3.5 billion years ago. It has involved in all forms of beings, from microbes to mammals. If an animal or social group doesn’t see an opportunity to move up, it lets the top dog rule without challenge. But if things change, if the alpha male begins to slip, weakened by age or battle, or if the underdog goes form puny adolescent to a muscular adult, or grows stronger by discovering a new source of energy or food, the inferior seizes the opportunity to knock the head honcho out of his number one slot.
The most overly belligerent underdog in today’s world is fundamentalist Islam. But China is working stealthily on the sidelines, perhaps waiting for its chance when Islam and the U.S. and its allies exhaust themselves in the battle.
Zemin summed up China’s goals this way: “The world is far from being tranquil. Hegemonism and power politics still exist and have even developed in the international political, economic, and security fields. The new “gunboat policy” and the economic neo-colonialism pursued by some big powers has severely undermined the sovereign independence and development interest of small and medium-sized countries and has threatened world peace and international security. China firmly opposes hegemonism and power politics and will never seek hegemony—that is a solemn commitment that the Chinese government and the people have made to the whole world.”
Any nation that buys that line is at risk.
###
Lifestyle features that are filling the airwaves during lulls in Olympic coverage from Beijing have reported a fascinating fact: Chinese families that fled totalitarian rule and came to the United States are finding their children reversing the trend. Yes, some Chinese-Americans are returning to their homeland. They’re betting this will be the Chinese Century.
In the 19th Century, Britannia ruled the waves, presided over an empire on which the sun never set, and held the world in the grip of an uneasy peace. In the early 20th Century, starting after World War I and unmistakably after WWII, it was America’s turn to spread its influence and police many an international mess. In the words of Time/Life publisher Henry Luce, it was the “American Century.”
It is becoming increasing clear that the scepter is slipping form America’s hands. If we haven’t heard it hit the pavement yet, overextension of U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, worldwide opprobrium, and daunting debt hint strongly that the clink is coming.
Which nation, if any, will pick it up? As this is written, Russia is stepping up it militarism against the former Soviet state of Georgia. Islamic people scattered across the globe, and out-reproducing the people of liberal western democracies, believe Allah is top god—and they don’t separate religion and politics. India grows in population and economic clout. China? Well no one is about to tell this nation of 1.3 billion to tear down its wall.
True, the Chinese do not enjoy democracy or personal rights as we know them in the west. But they have the freedom to make money now and that is fueling their enormous growth. If they are still restricted in many ways, their prison is so huge it almost doesn’t matter to them. We can’t expect them to overthrow their government. They are charging ahead as an unprecedented economic force.
Moreover, they may soon be staring down at us from the moon.
In 2006, China unveiled sweeping plans for lofting Earth orbiting satellites for a multitude of duties, expanding its human space flight abilities, and carrying out a multi-step program for lunar exploration
Future historians may have a laugh reporting that the US-Russian space race was won by the Chinese! For those who scorn such exploration for exploration’s sake, there’s the military advantage of the high ground to consider.
In fact, China nominated itself for world leader back in the 1990s. China called for “a new world order,” a new “peace” over which it would presumably preside.
Periods of peace imposed by a single superpower have often produced substantial benefits to nations roped into the sphere of influence of the overlord. Conquered, cowed, or allied countries have been able to take down their fortress walls, open up their societies, and concentrate on productivity instead of defense and warfare.
But there have also been considerable disadvantages for those who are squashed under the thumb of a megapower. The nation running the world gets to influence – or dictate – how its vassals think, govern, eat and speak. It has the privilege of sending troops into lesser lands at the slightest excuse – even a trumped up one if it needs what they have.
Life in those places can be quite cheap. The Athens of ultimate democracy – that of Pericles’ Golden Age – annihilated populations of entire city-states and razed their buildings to the ground when Athens’ leader felt such punishment was necessary to make a point. Cities in the Athenian League were allegedly independent allies, but woe be unto the ally that got out of line.
Rome in the golden days of the Pax Romana crucified 6,000 rebellious slaves alongside one of its greatest highways, the Appian Way. The victims acted as writing, moaning billboards advertising the penalties of civic unrest.
Russia, when it imposed its version of peace on a good part of Europe and Asia in the 20th century, did without Rome’s theatrical flair. It systematically starved the Ukraine into submission, sent tanks into the streets of Prague, invented the Gulag for political dissidents and writers and artists and anyone else inconveniently vocal.
Even the United States, probably one of the most benevolent hegemons of all time, trampled on weaker nations and propped up vile dictators as long as they were against communism. It wreaked havoc in the Philippines, Cuba, and snatched territory from Mexico and Spain. Increasingly it has been hard to deny the adventure in Iraq was for anything other than oil and profiteering.
The lesson of these histories is simple. The tight grip of a monolithic superpower frequently allows average folks to go about their daily business without fear that they will be hauled off to unrevealed prisons for undisclosed treatment without legal representation -- or that any random vehicle or mode of public transport may explode at any time.
Islamic extremists have been trying to put an end to such security, but by and large we still have them in this country.
If we want to keep them, we need the central superpower to be us.
China disagrees.
The Chinese are calling for an end to “hegemonism” –the Chinese and Soviet codeword for domination of the world by a single power. Yet all the signs are that China is positioning itself to be the next great hegemon. China has been recruiting nations in South America, the Middle East, and Asia for what it has specifically told each of them will be the “new world order,” one that will put an end to the “gunboat diplomacy,” neo-colonialism,” and the “hegemonism” of an unnamed rival power.
That unnamed power is the United States.
What the nature of a Chinese-run global peace would be, we will have to see. Odds are it won’t involve peace and freedom for Tibet or Taiwan. It probably won’t make Japan or South Korea feel comfortable to be in the neighborhood. It won’t allow a parent to protest the construction quality of a death-tap school or a monk to worship freely.
Here’s what China is laboring on:
They have put big bucks into more than Olympic venues and displays. According to Jane’s Information Group, the world’s top gatherer of military hardware data, they are funding “leapfrog” military technologies.
The Chinese have long had a large nuclear arsenal mounted on some of the world’s most powerful Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and packaged in sophisticated MIRVed warheads (MIRV stands for “multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicle” – a device that allows one rocket to carry a cluster of nuclear bombs, each aimed at a different city). But the Chinese count on this nuclear arsenal as a deterrent – a way of keeping the U.S.’s nuclear forces a bay.
In other words, they can afford to smile and nod while President Bush scolds them about human rights.
In reality, the Chinese know that America’s military ability to operate overseas is totally dependent on just about a dozen aircraft carriers: The Kitty Hawk retires this year. That leaves the Dwight D. Enterprise, Nimitz, Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman and the Ronald Reagan. The George H.W. Bush is to be commissioned in 2009; the Gerald Ford is planned for 2012, as are two unnamed carriers, for 2019 and 2023 respectively.
But they could all be dust at China’s whim.
China’s ace is a missile designed to destroy every single one of these floating flight decks.
An expert at Jane’s Information Group says China’s ship obliterating cruise missile –code named SS-N-22, “the “Sunburn” – wa a dangerous aircraft killer in its Soviet version, capable of flying at supersonic speed just over the water’s surface and evading detection by following an unpredictable zigzag course while carrying a nuclear warhead.
With modifications made by the Chinese – whose experience in manufacturing consumer semiconductor devices has put them far ahead of the Russians in microelectronics –the missile goes into what the Jane’s experts call a “gray” category, That means it’s nearly impossible to detect and destroy.
China originally purchased at least 16 of the missiles from cash-hungry Russian sellers. Each is capable of delivering an explosive punch six times more powerful than the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.
We do not know how many additional Sunburns the Chinese have manufactured, and we do not know what sort of upgrades the Chinese have made. We do know, however, that the Chinese started their own cruise missile program in 1977, reverse engineered the US Tomahawk missile in the 1990s, and had nuclear-tipped cruise missiles by 1995.
We also know the Chinese created one of the most advanced anti-ship missiles of the late 20th Century, the Silkworm (referred to by China as the Hai Ying-2), were working on a cruise missile with an astonishing 1,500-mile range in the year 2000, and at that point had long since perfected mass production of the devices, cranking them out in sufficient abundance to allow for high-quality exports to other nations.
No wonder Chinese military documents proudly announce that “the strategic superiority which can be claimed by the US is close to zero. It does not even enjoy a sure advantage in terms of foreseeable scale of war and the high-tech content which can be applied to combat.”
The Chinese initially installed their Sunburn strike weapons on two new Russian-built, Sovremenny-class guided-missile destroyers. Their next plan was rumored to be one of greater simplicity –building vessels roughly the size of a PT boat capable of carrying one Sunburn missile each.
Here’s where the Tom Clancy stuff comes in. By skimming the water and using violent end maneuvers that throw off defenses, Sunburn missiles have the capacity to put the U.S. military totally out of business in the western pacific. AT it’s current detection capability, the Navy would have to plot a response in 2.5 seconds. Impossible.
If it’s on which swimmer’s fingers touch the pool wall a fraction of a second before another’s, the eyes of the world are watching the wrong clock.
In other words, in 2001 China was capable of turning any soldiers, sailors, or pilots sent to Japan, Korea, the Philippines, or Taiwan into grounds meat. Chinese political and military leaders are not he least bit afraid that nuclear war would follow. They’ve leaked the word to Reuters that, to quote an unnamed “source close to China’s military”: “Americans can’t tolerate death.”
Says this Asian Deep Throat: China’s generals “look at your yellow ribbons for these servicemen and your casualty-free Kosovo and they think you don’t have the will.”
A 1999 document from China’s office of the Central Military Commission backs this up. “Our principle,” it states, “is (one of being) ‘willing to sustain major losses of our armed forces to defend even just one square inch of land.’ If the U.S. forces lose thousands or hundreds of men under our powerful strikes, the anti-war sentiment within their country will force the U.S. government to take the same path as they did in Vietnam.”
All through the 1990s and the first years of the 21st Century, the Chinese slowly and patiently intensified demands that Taiwan be returned to their control. China has also declared sovereignty over virtually everything in the South China Sea, an area rich in natural gas and oil…and an area dotted with landmasses six other countries call their own. The Chinese have bragged in their military documents that they have “conquering-all operational capacity.” With the Sunburn missile, they have the magic bullet with which to take what they want. But that is not the Chinese way. They are likely to advance on their prey with the same patience they showed in swallowing Hong Kong back in 1997 and Macau in 1999.
Weaponry is just one sign that China is increasing its potential for hegemony – its readiness for a global sway that sidelines the United States. China is eating America’s socks economically, too. According to some analysts—like those at the Japan Times—China’s economy is already the second largest in the world…and it’ sprinting fast to catch up with the U.S.’s China’s officially-reported Gross Domestic Product is almost twice that of the third-place runner-up, Japan. While the U.S> ran a trade deficit of more than $360 billion in the year 2000 alone, China pocketed an annual $84 billion surplus with the U.S> and another $24.9 billion surplus with Japan.
In other words, China has become an economic vacuum cleaner emptying the wallets of America and its allies. We’ve known for a long time that you could pick any shopping mall, discount store or local chain store in America and find evidence of our major dependency on Chinese goods. A staggering percentage of clothing, toys, and electronic devices on sale originate in China. Take away all items that say “made in China,” and the average America would be helpless.
But that’ just the beginning. China has made huge profits on export goods by doing what social theorists Jane Jacobs calls “import replacement” – cranking out items once made by Americans, Japanese, Korean, or Thai workers at a price no American, Japanese, Korean, or Thai can meat. The next step, as the People’s Daily says, is to “intensify the content of high-technology.”
Which means the Chinese want to out-sprint the U.S. in the race toward 22nd Century innovations.
The nation that holds the innovative high ground is usually the one that rules the world.
But what are China’s chances of actually outpacing Bill Gates and America’s other techno-leaders in the race toward next-generation wonders? Very good, indeed.
Green parties stoking fears of “Frankenfoods” and other new agricultural technologies are trying to drag Europe and the U.S. into the agro-past. Meanwhile, China has jumped enthusiastically into genetically modified seed use. A million Chinese farmers now grow genetically-modified cotton, saving $100 billion on pesticides and losses to insects and rodents, and giving china –th former land of famine—an increasingly potent agricultu5al export industry…one capable, in the words of Japan’s Agricultural Ministry, of “flooding” Japan with cheap vegetable imports.
The there’s optoelectronics—a $10-bilion business for the Chinese as of 2001, and growing at the rate of 50percent a year. And computer education—a million Chinese a year are learning to use Microsoft software and consumer software creation. Microsoft, which very seldom plants research and development operations on foreign soil, established a software R&D center in Beijing way back in 1998. Not to mention artificial intelligence—where one investor feels Guangzhou’s Hua Ling Group “is a step ahead of foreign scientists.”
Beginning in 2003 China began to capture the world’s semiconductor business. This allowed it to suck up foreign expertise in military and civilian semiconductor development and fabrication, then imitate, borrow and outpace it. Once the bait was laid out, the number of those who happily stumbled into the trap was remarkable. Motorola, which as of November 2000 had already seeded China with eight semiconductor design houses and at least one mobile-handset plant, announced that it would spend close to $2 billion on a new Chinese chip production complex. Japan’s NEC, the world’s fourth- largest chipmaker, built a $1.2 million chip plant in China’s Zhangjiang High-Tech Industrial Park. Meantime, investors from Taiwan and a variety of other international locations were building a $1.6 billion chip foundry in the same park.
In the early 1990s, 70 percent of foreign direct investment in the Asian nations went to Southeast Asian tigers and only 30 percent to China. By 2001, the tigers had been declawed and defanged by their Chinese neighbor, which swallowed 70 percent of foreign investment funds. Further dollars and high-tech investment will continue to flow in. One reason –the Chinese are graduating more students with information technology training than any other low-cost-labor nation.
“Their mathematics background is excellent. It’s disciplined and thorough in a way that you often can’t find in the west,” says Microsoft’s head of research in China, American-born Kai-fu Lee (one of many highly skilled Asians the Chinese have lured back to fuel the high tech climb of their homeland). But education and intelligence are not the only Chinese edge. By 2000, Intel had a $400-million flash memory assembly plant up and running in Shanghai and a research and development center near Beijing. Then when the world economy crashed in 2001, Intel defied logic and invested an additional $302 million. The money was used to expand a Shanghai-based Intel plant dedicated to the manufacture of Intel 845 chipsets for the Pentium 4 processor. The move was not so daft as it may have seemed.
While consumers in the rest of the world were up to their ears in computers and were snapping their purses shut, China’s then 1.2 billion buyers were expected to increase their purchase of PCs by 20 percent a year. In the long run, Intel, NEC, Microsoft, and the others rushing to build plants and other facilities in China may regret their eagerness. China steals the technologies of outsiders, and then becomes the outside-firm’s most ferocious competitor. The U.S. did this in the 19th Century when it sent industrial spies to England to ferret out the secrets of Britain’s top-secret industrial devices—mechanized weaving machines. Though it was illegal to take drawings or plans of these machines out of the U.K., Americans smuggled sketches and blueprints to New England and built their own mass-production textile mills. From the 1950s to the 1980s the Japanese did the same to the U.S.—gutting the consumer electronics industry and pummeling auto companies into a sorry state.
Now it’s China’s turn. The Chinese already show signs of turning the tables on America in forward-looking fields. Take robotics, for instance. In 1988, the Shenyang Institute of Automation paid a firm called Perry Tritech in Florida a million dollars for an unusual package deal: a deep-sea robot, spare parts, and training in robot technology. By 1991, the Chinese had upgraded the undersea rover—a device that comes in handy for inspections of floating oilrigs and dams. In fact, they’d improved its qualities and lowered its price so much that they were able to sell their new version of the ROV (remote-operated vehicle) to several American companies. Intel China President Wee Theng Tan was extremely open about this form of techno-theft when he said proudly: “We (Intel) will continue to bring our leading edge technical and manufacturing expertise to China to help the country develop a leadership role in high-end value-added manufacturing technologies.”
But the real crunch will come when China takes advantage of its people’s ingenuity and respect for education by out-innovating the U.S. China—the nation that created the word’s first modern paper, first encyclopedias, first magnetic compass, first gun powder, and first cannon—held the high ground in technology from roughly 200 BC until 1600 AD. Now the Chinese are working hard to get back to the leading edge and beyond, moving into such fields as nanotechnology. A team of four scientists at Jiaotong University in Shanghai announced in 2001 that they’d created a micro-motor a quarter the size of a sesame seed. The device, they said, was smaller and lighter than any developed in the U.S., Europe, or Japan. It was exactly the sort of thing the medical equipment industry was looking for. In another area, telecommunications, Dr. Wei Chen—an American-born Chinese—started a company in china to manufacture and sell his pioneering wireless local-loop equipment. And the institute of Developmental Biology in Beijing is working on beyond-the-envelope genetic engineering.
Boast the writer of one 1999 Chinese document from the Office of the Central Military commission: “In the five thousand years of outstanding civilization, our country has commanded a predominant position in the whole world.” And they’re right. To the Chinese, dominance of the world’s economy would simply mean a return to the way things used to be. Balance of payments deficits between China and the West go back at least 2,000 years, to the days when the Romans nearly depleted the product of their Laurium and Pangaeum silver mines to pay for Chinese silk. Eighteen hundred years later, the Chinese delusion began—the notion that one could make vast sums of money by selling goods to China’s masses. This was a dream, a fantasy. China sold goods the world wanted—silk, porcelain (called “China” because it became a necessity in Western homes), and tea) another daily necessity in the British lifestyle). But the West had nothing the Chinese needed.
The balance of trade deficits threatened to drain the coffers of Britain and America until the puritanical Empire of Queen Victoria began an official policy of breaking Chinese law by selling and promoting opium from England’s Indian territories. Leading American families—from the Forbes to the Delanos—made millions smuggling illicit drugs into the Chinese market. When the Chinese, under Lin Tse-hsu, Yeh Ming-ch’en, and Hsu Kuang-chin, mounted several potentially successful internal wars on the drug trade, the West responded with the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856. To be specific, Europeans and Americans used steam-powered gunboats to shove opiates down China’s throat.
To get an idea of how this felt to the Chinese, imagine what would happen if Colombia, impatient with America’s resistance to its export trade in cocaine and heroin, mounted a war against he U.S., won, forced America to legalize narcotics, then went on a mass-marketing campaign to put an addict in every home, a line of coke up every nostril, and a needle in every American teenager’s arm.
Despite this experience, the delusion that one could make millions selling legitimate goods and services to the Chinese continued. Douglas MacArthur’s father was dazzled by it in the 19th Century. MacArthur himself continued with it. What American automakers and other who made huge investments in Chinese joint ventures failed to realize was China’s new economic strategy fort he 20th and 21st centuries: Let the foreign barbarians build their plants; make sure those factories are under the control of Chinese co-owners; study the manufacturing machinery, organizational techniques, and patented technologies the Western investors so graciously provide; imitate them, improve on them, steal those under patent or licensing protection; then undercut the American and U.S. industries that had been foolish enough to offer themselves on the altar of sacrifice to the new China.
A lucrative practice. But the more significant payoff will come on the geopolitical side of the equation.
Chinas former President Jiang Zemin took a six-nation trip to the strategic backyard of the United States—Latin America—in April 2001,calling on Latin Americans to work with China toward building, to use his catchphrase, a “new international order” (the six nations were Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, and Venezuela). Jiang found enormous eagerness in anti-American Venezuela (where Chinese have invested $530 million and have interests in two oil fields), in Chile, in Argentina, and in Cuba, to which the Chinese are lending $400 million.
Meanwhile, Chinese power showed itself in many another international nuance. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi put improving relations with China at the top of his international agenda when he rose to power in May 2001. Mexican President Vicente Fox visited Jiang in China that June. Fox was wary of the impact of cheap Chinese imports on Mexican industry. (In just two months –January and February 2001—China sold $465 million in products to Mexico but bought only $32 million worth of Mexican products.) Yet Fox felt it necessary to make a pilgrimage to Beijing.
By July 2008, the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, would conclude that the United States lost 2.3 million jobs to China between 2001 and 2007. Moreover, the report concluded that it’s almost impossible for American manufacturers to compete because of China’s “unfair trade practices.”
These include inadequate health and safety regulations for production workers, manufacturing subsidies from the Chinese government, child labor, an artificially low value for the Chinese currency, the yuan, and lax environmental rules that permit pollution far beyond what the United States demands of industrial companies.
Now you know why the Olympic cyclists found particulate matter in the air so severe some had to drop out of competition. Others donned face masks. Everyone’s lungs were being sacrificed for Chinese export profits. It’s just cheaper to pollute.
Now the Chinese are exploiting Africa as a market. The Chinese have built Africa’s biggest supermarket in Johannesburg, a power-generating equipment plant in Nigeria, and methane tanks in Uganda before moving on to solar and hydro power projects.
Cambodia’s Hun Sen has urged other nations to follow an anti-Taiwan, one-China policy to keep Beijing happy and deliver Taiwan into China’s hands. Only July 15, 2001, Jiang Zemin headed for Moscow, where he signed a friendship treaty. The Bush administration said it was not afraid of this agreement because China still needs the U.S. for investment and technology—meaning George W. Bush doesn’t see how this is letting China such America dry.
Meanwhile the Russians and Chinese entered a new era of energy cooperation in 2006 when they signed the Sino-Russian Good Neighborly Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation. In 2006.
Zemin also took his message of a new world order and “peace” led by China to the ASEAN states: Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia, repeating that this was to counter the politics of some big world powers.
China has frequently railed against what it calls “encirclement,” but its diplomatic maneuverings seem carefully designed to encircle Europe and the U.S. Take China’s Islamic connection.
In 1999, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Zemin signed an agreement establishing strategic cooperation. Reported China’s government mouthpiece People’s Daily, the Egyptian ambassador to China said Egypt “opposes certain countries which use the human rights issue to interfere in the internal affairs of China and other countries” and “supports China’s just struggle against power politics and hegemonism.” Meanwhile, the Chinese and Egyptian news media—both noted for their lack of free expression--engaged in active exchanges.
China is building “a special economic zone” in the northwest Suez. And China has close ties with the Palestinians. Far more important, China makes a considerable amount of money selling high-tech weapons—including nuclear and missile parts and instructions—to “rogue nations” like Iran and Iraq. China also had a hand in helping Pakistan build “the Islamic bomb.”
In one sense, this is reassuring. It shows that the Chinese can be as shortsighted as the U.S. From 1980 onward, the CIA and the People’s Liberation Army backed the Taliban in Afghanistan. China cooperated with the U.S> and Saudi Arabia in arming and training 50,000 militant Muslims from 30 countries for this “freedom-fighting” Jihad.
The Chinese joined America in giving Osama Bin Laden his troops, and sent 300 officers to train the mujahideen in the use of sophisticated weapons—like Chinese-made anti0tank missiles.
When the Taliban took over in 1995, support for it had been a bipartisan affair in the U.S., beginning in the carter Administration and continuing under Reagan and Bush. The U.S. helped build the very force that would come back to strike it on September 11, 2001. The resulting worldwide war of the U.S. and its allied against “terrorism” could theoretically weaken both the West and the Islamic militants and help hand world domination over to the Chinese.
Once the smoke of battle between Islamic wackos and the West has cleared, however, a bin Laden-style blowback could prove equally dangerous to Beijing. There is an extremely active jihad—Islamic holy war—taking place in China’s “wild west” province, Xinjiang. It is part of a widespread military and ideological campaign to take all Central Asia—including Xinjiang, Chechnya, Dagestan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kashmir, and Uzbekistan—thus “liberating” this enormous sweep of territory to be part of dar el Islam –the Islamic world.
The holy warriors’ fervor to make the entire world Islamic could easily go further than China’s border provinces and strike at the Chinese heart. China, with one fifth of the world’s population as a whole, also has the second-largest Islamic population in the world. The Islamic mujahideen that the U.S. and China trained and armed are idealists of the highest degree. They cannot rest until (their view of) justice and purity have been given as a gift to all the citizens of this world and that can only be done by imposing Islamic law—sharia.
Purity and propriety are only possible, they say, when a people has been freed from false idols and taught to worship the one and only god (Allah) and his one and only prophet (Mohammed). China, too, should be ruled by the laws of the Koran, they feel.
The jostling for position between China, Islam, and the U.S. is part of a standard hierarchical game that dates back to the dawn of life 3.5 billion years ago. It has involved in all forms of beings, from microbes to mammals. If an animal or social group doesn’t see an opportunity to move up, it lets the top dog rule without challenge. But if things change, if the alpha male begins to slip, weakened by age or battle, or if the underdog goes form puny adolescent to a muscular adult, or grows stronger by discovering a new source of energy or food, the inferior seizes the opportunity to knock the head honcho out of his number one slot.
The most overly belligerent underdog in today’s world is fundamentalist Islam. But China is working stealthily on the sidelines, perhaps waiting for its chance when Islam and the U.S. and its allies exhaust themselves in the battle.
Zemin summed up China’s goals this way: “The world is far from being tranquil. Hegemonism and power politics still exist and have even developed in the international political, economic, and security fields. The new “gunboat policy” and the economic neo-colonialism pursued by some big powers has severely undermined the sovereign independence and development interest of small and medium-sized countries and has threatened world peace and international security. China firmly opposes hegemonism and power politics and will never seek hegemony—that is a solemn commitment that the Chinese government and the people have made to the whole world.”
Any nation that buys that line is at risk.
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Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Sex and the Circumcised
(the following article appeared in the book Everything You Know About Sex is Wrong, 2004)
By Diane Petryk-Bloom
Want her to TOTALLY want it, TOTALLY need it and TOTALLY love it? Want to have her thinking of you instead of thinking of England? Men who want more sex, listen up. She needs to like it better and she'll like it better if you realize what's missing – your foreskin.
As you read this, at least 100,000 men (1) across America are taping, tying and tugging their penises to stretch new foreskin. Most lost their foreskins in infancy when they were circumcised, but somewhere along the line they discovered sex without a foreskin just isn't what nature intended.
In the uncircumcised man, the sexually aroused penis peeks from foreskin, then bursts full-out, sending ripples of skin back on the shaft. Those waves of stretching and retreating foreskin give the male one the most exquisite sensations in all sexual experience. That's because foreskin is the most important sensory tissue of thepenis. (2) Pleasurable sensations provided by a foreskin are "so incredibly great," in fact, that "no man should miss out on them," says author Jeffrey O'Hara, a circumcised-but-restored – as far as can be -- male.
That, in itself, isn't enough to motivate most men to worry about developing new foreskin. Here's what is: she needs it. It's the key to pleasuring your woman. Get it, get her more often.
Here's why: Circumcised men have lost considerable sensory tissue. Important nerve endings – gone. Some hate the idea. But many still say they have all the pleasure they can stand, so what's the problem? They have perfectly serviceable erections. They have orgasms and ejaculations. The problem is how they get there.
Researchers have recently discovered that the mechanism of arousal and intercourse is entirely different for the circumcised man and the foreskin-intact man. Whether or not a circumcised male has any problems, recent anatomical studies show his partner probably will.
In 1996, Dr. John Taylor and colleagues in the pathology department at the University of Manitoba, decided to assess the type and amount of tissue missing from the adult circumcised penis. (Incredibly, humans have been trimming penises since 2000-something B.C. (3) and no one had yet assessed the damage!)
THE RIDGED BAND
Taylor found an elastic-like band of mucosal tissue at the tip of the foreskin. He called it the ridged band (4). It teems with specialized nerve endings – similar to those on the fingers and lips.
The head of the penis, or glans, by contrast, and contrary to popular belief, is fairly insensitive. When the penis is relaxed, the ridged band narrows over its tip like a drawn duffle bag. Sexual arousal dilates the band, sliding it back past the glans and onto the shaft, where it rolls up and down during intercourse. The rolling and stretching stimulates the erogenous nerves in the band to fire off sensations of pleasure. (5)
From an evolutionary perspective, the object of sexual stimulation in the male is to build up contractions in the genital musculature. Kristen O'Hara, with her husband Jeff O'Hara, explains in her 2001 book, Sex As Nature Intended It, that it is these alternate tensing and relaxing actions that lead to orgasm and ejaculation of sperm.
They point out that Josephine Lowndes Sevely's seven-year study comparing male and female genitalia revealed highly erogenous tissue equivalent to the female clitoris is located in the core of the penis through the entire length of the shaft. Only the foreskin is positioned to stimulate it by natural massaging action. The circumcised man has to reach for equivalent stimulation in an awkward, unnatural way. Sometimes he has difficulty reaching orgasm. Other times he may not be able to extend intercourse more than a few seconds. In either case, his female partner suffers.
"It is important to understand how muscular contractions can bring on orgasm because the intact (natural) man and the circumcised man induce them differently," the O'Haras write. "… the means they use to create these contractions affect their thrusting movements and rhythms.
"The design of the natural penis indicates that nature intended for pleasure and orgasm to be induced by actions taking place mostly in the upper area of the penis. However, for the circumcised penis, the upper penis mechanisms and responses have been drastically altered and do not function the way nature intended. Consequently, the circumcised male is left to improvise alternative or supplementary means to attain orgasm. It is use of these odd varieties or orgasm-building (pleasure seeking) techniques that causes him to thrust much differently from the intact man, and which his female partner finds frustrating and disrupting to her pleasuring needs." And sometimes downright painful.
Marsha Goudreau (name disguised), a Michigan woman whose late husband of more than 20 years was uncircumcised, who later experienced sex with circumcised men, said she now knows her husband's foreskin was a blessing for both of them.
"The nice thing that happens is that the gliding back and forth stimulates the head of the penis without irritating it," she said. (6) "The shaft moves in and out of that glove, which pleasures the woman without painful friction. And if you're not having intercourse for some reason, the foreskin makes a hand job a lot easier."
In technical terms: "Mucosal surfaces of the glans and foreskin move back and forth across the mucosal surfaces of the labia and vagina, providing nontraumantic sexual stimulation for both male and female."
'BEST THING THIS LIFETIME'
This mucous membrane-to-mucous membrane contact provides natural lubrication necessary for sexual relations and prevents both the dryness responsible for painful intercourse and the chafing and abrasions which allow entry of sexually transmitted diseases, both viral and bacterial." (7)
Yet couples with a circumcised man need not despair. Foreskin restoration offers reparations. Recovered glans will soften again. Jeff O'Hara's message for circumcised men: "Restoring your foreskin is the best thing that's going to happen to you in this lifetime." Kristen's message: "From the woman's sexual perspective, the restored penis is virtually equivalent to the natural penis in every respect."
There are surgical and non-surgical methods of restoration. O'Hara opted for a graft of skin from his scrotum. It has the advantage of having muscle tissue able to provide that thrill of stretch upon erection. Non-surgical restoration involves pulling what is left of flaccid skin at the base of the penis when it is not erect, and exerting a tugging force to stretch it. Several simple devices have been invented for this purpose. (8)
One is simply taping drawn up skin with a clip applied to the end of the tape and tugging force applied by an elastic band around the waist. "It's cheap and works well enough," said David Steinburg (name disguised) from his home in the midwest. "While there's still a ways to go, there is no question that the regrowth of some skin has made a real difference in feeling," he said, "and I can only imagine what it must be like for those fortunate enough to have avoided circumcision in the first place."
Ron Low of Chicago thought taping lacked something in elegance, so he invented a cone-shaped attachment that pulls naturally after skin is inserted. Obversion, the tendency of skin to roll back, keeps it in place. Low said one can expect to add about one inch per year if the tugger is worn 12 hours a day. His progress with his TLCTugger is documented on his website TLCTugger.com).
Low said he's sold more than 2,000 with "nothing but positive feedback."
The Joy of Uncircumcising by James Bigelow, 1995, is the complete guide. (9)
Whatever method, the object is to restore enough skin to cover the head of the relaxed penis, or glans, such as happens naturally when the penis is uncircumcised. Complete coverage, which the O'Haras advise, allows the penis to maintain its naturally moist, softly-stiff characteristic. (The glans of the circumcised penis are continually exposed, and as a result, can become hardened or keratinized.)
While foreskin restoration can replace this protective covering, merely stretching the skin cannot restore the special orgasmic triggers and glands that were cut and eliminated. Especially the very sensitive frenulum. The frenulum is the connecting tissue of the foreskin and shaft. Structurally, it is similar to the frenulum that connects the tongue to the base of the mouth. In the same way that frenulum controls the tongue, researchers envison the penile frenulum controls thrusting. It's on the underside of the shaft, or on top of an erect penis when a man is lying on his back. It, too, is highly enervated, erogenous tissue.
"Often only a remnant of the frenulum is left after circumcision, if it is not also removed," says anti-circumcision crusader Marilyn Milos. "Many circumcised men consider it their 'G-spot,' but only because their 'G-area,' the ridged band and frenular delta, has been removed." (10)
During sex, there is a way to compensate for that loss, Jeff O'Hara found. "The ridged band of the foreskin and the skin of the nipples are comprised of the same specialized nerve tissue called 'rete ridges.' Nipple skin abounds with Meissner's corpuscles (erotically responsive touch-sensitive nerves), like those found in the foreskin and frenulum.
"When you have your partner twiddle your nipples during intercourse, combined with the increased pleasure experienced after restoration, I reckon that it heightens your sexual feelings to those experienced by the genitally intact man when his penis alone is stimulated during intercourse…During this activity, the levels of ecstasy are so magnificent, I don't feel cheated in any way, even though I'm missing the nerves of the ridged ban."
Sex as Nature Intended It came about after Kristen O'Hara experienced both natural and circumcised sex and tried to make sense of the difference. While happily married to Jeff, she came to realize that foreskin is what's missing millions of bedrooms across America -- bedrooms where sex is unfulfilling, uncomfortable and/or avoided. Her personal experience (11) and comparisons led to attempts to discover if she was alone in her feelings. She wasn't!
Surveys of about 138 women showed almost all women preferred the natural sex. It was the difference between not being able to get enough and "There, that'll hold you for a few days." Sitcoms spend a lot of time on male jokes about pursuing sex in the face of expected feminine refusal because it reflects the situation in the real world, she said. Women in their 20s are often gung ho, regardless; in their 30s, it's okay, she said, but much beyond that age their interest falls off with their lessening vaginal lubrication and the built-up resentment of sex that's been too often uncomfortable and unsatisfying.
Female partners of circumcised men become aroused, crave the sensation of penetration and enjoy orgasm just as much as partners of intact men. But they express dissatisfaction with the overall experience of sexual relations. Kristen was no different. She loved her husband and they were compatible, but their relationship wasn't good sexually.
"Our love lacked depth," she writes, "the kind of depth that exists when a couple has a deeply satisfying, exquisitely delicious, sensuous, sexual interconnectedness." Because sex with Jeff was annoying, even though desired, Kristen drifted back into her uncircumcised lover's bed. "During our rendezvous, I couldn't help but notice that his penis felt much more sensuous inside me; it felt infinitely better, deliciously better, indescribably better.
A PERFECT UNION
"In characterizing the differences… I would say the circumcised experience is like being repeatedly penetrated in an annoying way, even though simultaneously there is pleasure. And the penis feels too hard, almost foreign-like – you want it, but don't want it, at the same time, driven onward only in hopes of achieving orgasm, the sooner the better. Whereas, with natural, the vagina totally surrenders to the soft sensuousness of lingering ecstasy, as it hungrily caresses and lovingly responds to the erotic movements of the softly-stiff penis, and the penis adores and gently strokes the vagina in return.
"Like two halves of a perfect whole, each organ swoons and sighs to a passionate intermingling… "With no holding back, you TOTALLY want it, you TOTALLY need it, and you TOTALLY love it."
One explanation: Since the natural penis tends to stay more deeply embedded in the vagina using short strokes, it brings the man's pubic area in frequent contact with the woman's clitoral mound, allowing her clitoris to be pressure-pleasured more often, and at a consistent rhythmical rate throughout much of the intercourse experience. Not only does the circumcised man make longer strokes to stimulate his pleasure areas, he needs to pause, often outside the vagina, to let the nerve endings recharge.
The natural man's penis retreats into its foreskin, not having to withdraw from the vagina. Jeff O'Hara said you can witness the longer strokes and withdrawals in x-rated videos with circumcised men. In fact, he said, he watched a video made of John Bobbitt performing sex. Bobbitt is the man whose wife cut off his penis in a fit of rage. Doctors reattached the organ, but Bobbitt lost nerve connections.
He performs just like a circumcised man must, O'Hara said, "Pull out, rest, come in fast. Like pile-driving with punishing blows." Even if the woman can tolerate it, that technique precludes rhythmic build-up for the clitoris.
In her best-selling book, How to Have An Orgasm…As Often as You Want, Rachel Swift says a lack of consistent rhythm is one of the chief causes of a woman's failure to climax.
"If the pace is broken, so's the ascent to orgasm." Why do SO MANY women fake orgasm? Because SO MANY men are circumcised.
Women know they're not going to climax the way he's doing it…and they're taking a battering. They might just as well fake it and hope he gets it over with soon. Often the best you can do with circumcised sex is pleasure the man and woman separately, in succession, rather than simultaneously.
"It was like we were using each other's body to masturbate against," Jeff said of his marital sex before he restored, "which is not the same as making love. Lovers totally abandon their individual egos, their individual awareness, and become a union of pleasuring."
Here's a sampling of comments from Kristen O'Hara's survey respondents:
My circumcised husband was totally engrossed in satisfying his own sexual needs; therefore, he pounded and banged as if he were having intercourse with a non-feeling person.
"It feels so good to have the feeling of a man's foreskin in my vagina…it glides easily.
Once a natural penis is in your vagina, you wish it could stay forever.
My natural partner kept more constant pressure in my whole genital area during intercourse. I felt like he was in sync with me… I had more time to relax, and I would always orgasm before it was over, so afterwards I felt content.
My sexual experiences with three natural men were extraordinary in the gentleness, sensuality and mutuality.
Natural men have a more laid-back approach. They don't seem to feel as rushed or pressed to achieve orgasm. They seem to enjoy the act rather than the resulting orgasm.
There is definitely more clitoral stimulation with natural. Sometimes it's (circumcised sex) too much work for too little reward. When it's over I think to myself, "thank God he finally came."
I have noticed that the vagina is much more accepting of the natural penis Once the head of the natural penis is at the opening of the vagina, it just kind of naturally slides in. I've often said to myself after one of these circumcised encounters: I would have been better off masturbating. With my natural man, I always glow after intercourse, but with circumcised men, I couldn't wait to get dressed and get away from them. I never glowed.
The visual effect of seeing an impending erection just starting to peek out of its foreskin is just so much sexier.
I never made the connection between this feeling of hostility and circumcised sex until now.
O'Hara's research was first published in the British Journal of Urology in 1999. Best-selling author Dr. Christiane Northrup (12) credits the O'Hara's research for helping her fully understand the reasons for the design of the penis and foreskin.
"I always felt that the male foreskin, one of the most richly enervated and hyperelastic pieces of tissue in the male body, is there for a reason, she wrote in an article for her newsletter, Health Wisdom for Women (10) Volume 8, No. 6, June 2001 "Until recently, I didn't know exactly what that reason was. But now thanks to Kristen O'Hara's well-researched book…I finally understand the reasons for the design of the penis and foreskin and how this design ensures optimal penile function, including the organ's ability to satisfy the female sexually."
"O'Hara makes a compelling argument that circumcised intercourse may frustrate the primordial subconscious that seems to know 'real sex ain't this way.'" Northrup writes. "She also suggested that each circumcised experience has the potential to build-up negative memory imprints so that over time, repeated sexual encounters with the same partner may lead to , negative feeling between the two that carry over into everyday life."
As an obstetrician-gynecologist, Northrup said, she performed hundreds of circumcisions. While she stops short of saying she regrets doing them, she does say it's past time to re-think the practice. She reported elsewhere that when she would tell parents at hospital-based childbirth classes that circumcision need not be done, her invitations to such classes were withdrawn. She quotes obstetrics colleague Dr. George Denniston, co-author of Doctor's Reexamine Circumcision:
"Circumcision violates the first tenet of medical practice: 'first, do no harm.' According to modern medical ethics, parents do not have the right to consent to a procedure that is not in their son's best interest. The removal of normal, important part of the male sexual organ is not in their son's best interest."
Jews, Muslims and a few other groups circumcise as part of their religious practice. But, as a nation, we do not allow parents to impose their religious practice on children to the extent that it does physical harm. Blood transfusions, for instance, are often imposed by court-order for children whose parents do not approve for religious reasons. Should genital mutilation (13) be any different?
From a world-wide perspective, the non-circumcised state is the norm for males. Most Europeans and Orientals do not circumcise.
Wrongful circumcision attorney David Lewellyn said he attended a conference in Padua, Italy last fall and told a 35-year-old Italian pediatrician that Americans circumcise about 65 percent of all boys. "You're kidding!" she said.
Although circumcision rates are dropping here, it is estimated that about 60 percent of all newborn males in America are still being cut. If you're an American male between age 25 and 45, the probability is very high that you were circumcised. Newborn circumcision rates in the U.S. climbed after World War II and peaked at about 80-90 percent somewhere between 1970 and 1980.
If you are older or younger, chances are still good that if you were in an American nursery you lost your foreskin. In our cultural acceptance of circumcising males, we keep company with countries like Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Somalia and the Congo. Some circumcise newborns, most do it at older ages, as part of religious practice. The United States is the only circumcising country that, generally, has no religious pretense. Circumcisions are usually performed on newborns in hospitals for aesthetic preference, hygienic theory or for nor reason at all.
Many parents simply acquiesce to circumcision when the physician offers it, without asking questions. "If it's offered, it must be recommended," seems to be the prevailing view. It's familiar. It's the accepted norm. Several groups, such as NORM (National Organization of Restoring Men), NOHARMM (National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males) and NOCIRC have formed to fight the practice, but it is entrenched. For many it's a matter of "like father, like son." Males who cannot accept that they are less than perfect, perpetuate the practice. "Recognizing male circumcision as a mistake reflects on circumcised males." (14) Others, doctors and mothers, may be in denial as well.
American's willingness to conform and disinclination to inquire deeply is another. Parents are usually unaware of the extent of the surgery. The amount of skin amputated results in the loss of about one third or more of the penile shaft skin system. Adult foreskin is about two and a half inches long. It's double layered, so when unfolded would be about the size of a 3 x 5 card, enough skin to hold millions of cells and nerves.
The often described "snip of skin" is considered a major amputaton by some. It is usually done without anesthesia. Milos, who first witnessed circumcision as a student nurse, went on to make a video of the operation and show it to expecting parents. She was told it was too much for parents to see. "Perhaps then," Milos responded, "its too much for the baby to endure." "We didn't learn anything about foreskins or circumcision in medical school," said Dr. Paul Fliess. (16) "I watched one, that was it." They were taught infants do not feel pain, he said, which has been shown to be an absurd notion.
Taylor and colleagues who discovered the Ridged Band, have also noted "the current tendency to eliminate the prepuce from anatomy textbooks."
How it became thus is no mystery. Circumcision got its first big jump-start in this country in the late 19th century when doctors decided masturbation was harmful. A boy with foreskin would have to retract it to urinate, so, they reasoned, he would be more likely to learn to give himself pleasure by self-manipulation. Cutting the foreskin off as a remedy became the rage. In 1888, John Kellogg, of corn flakes fame, wrote a book blaming masturbation for 31 ailments, and identified as symptoms of masturbation things like shyness and insomnia.
Soon, circumcision was advocated for infants to prevent, rather than cure, masturbation.Here are excerpts from medical journals of the late 1800's: There can be no doubt of (masturbation's) injurious effect, and of the proneness to practice it on the part of children with defective brains. Circumcision should always be practiced. It may be necessary to make the genitals so sore by blistering fluids that pain results from attempts to rub the parts (17)
In consequence of circumcision the epithelial covering of the glans becomes dry, hard…the sensibility of the glans is diminished, but not sufficiently to interfere with the copulative function of the organ or to constitute an objection... It is well authenticated that the foreskin...is a fruitful cause of the habit of masturbation in children... I conclude that the foreskin is detrimental to health, and that circumcision is a wise measure of hygiene. (18)
Great Britain joined in the masturbation hysteria, as did Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Those countries have since rejected arguments for circumcision as fallacious. Dr. Benjamin Spock advocated circumcision in 1946. He reversed himself in 1976. (19)
The British circumcision rate peaked at something more than 30 percent, then, by the 1950s, it fell dramatically. By the time Princess Diana gave birth to Prince William, it was less than 1 percent. Prince Charles was circumcised, but Diana insisted the young princes be left intact (20).
In her case, the fact that the National Health Service dropped coverage of the procedure probably wasn't a deciding factor. For the majority of the Brits, it may have been the biggest one.
By the 1930s, even those who ate corn flakes accepted that masturbation wasn't harmful, but by then circumcision was going strong.
Since Jews circumcised for religious reasons, some Jews promoted it for health reasons, too, applying to all, so Jews wouldn't be singled out by the practice.
Doctors latched onto the next promulgated theory: circumcision was more hygienic. After awhile claims were made for its cure or prevention of a host of diseases from epilepsy to insomnia. These arguments were debunked one by one, but circumcision still has its proponents. They often tout penile cancer and cervical cancer prevention as benefits of circumcision.
Penile cancer is exceedingly rare and preventing it is not a reason for depriving millions of their bodily integrity and sexual birthright.
Women with uncircumcised partners do not get more cervical cancer. Studies that have shown such links have been seriously flawed. (21)
Recently AIDS prevention has been suggested as justification for circumcision. This flies in the face of facts. The United States and certain African countries that circumcise have the highest rates of HIV infection.
Some wonder, might it not all come down to an innate human compulsion to mutilate, especially the sexual organs? Or a drive to control others' sexual behavior. Coleman reports on one American woman's suspicion that her inconceivable genital mutilation at the hands doctor might be linked to circumcision. Retribution?
Circumcision is known to harm the bond between mother and son. Does the circumcision approving parent ever think ahead to the day when the boy is seven or eight and wants to know what was done to him, and why? (22) Does the rise in circumcision in this country correlate with its rise in crime? These questions are being asked. It seems that we've gone through a century and a half of searching for a justifications for circumcision, seeing them debunked one by one, creating new ones and seeing those debunked.
Now we are waking up to the fact that circumcising has been damaging sexual organs, sexual performance and sexual relationships. But, in fact, this is something that has been known from antiquity. We just forgot it. In Marked in Your Flesh – Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern American, author Leonard Glick painstaking recounts the history of circumcision. It begins with Chapter 17 of Genesis. God makes promises to Abraham and puts forth the inexplicable requirement that "every male among you shall be circumcised." "You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin. And that shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you. And throughout the generations, every male among you shall be circumcised at the age of eight days." Why? No one knows. No one single author wrote the Torah. The Bible includes the essential feature of the Genesis 17 narrative, but eliminates mention of circumcision.
Historically, one function of circumcision, for Jews, was that it identified with whom a Jewess may have sexual intercourse and therefore it served to preserve national identity. (23) Jews in the Roman Empire knew that others looked down on circumcision. Some did not have their sons circumcised and some tried foreskin stretching to restore themselves even back then.
The ancient Greeks and their Hellenistic successors considered the "ideal" prepuce to be long, tapered and well proportioned. Removing it was mutilation. (24) Philo of Alexandria wrote in the first century that circumcision served to excise "pleasures that bewitch the mind." He may have been the first to state that circumcision decreases sexual sensation, Glick suggests.
Later, in the 12th Century, Moses Maimonides, Jewish physician and community leader, wrote, with regard to circumcision: "One of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question…The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure in indubitable."
He adds: "The Sages, may their memory be blessed, have explicitly stated: 'it is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him.' In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision. "…because his foreskin has been removed from him, and the power of his member has been diminished, he has no strength to lie with many lewd women. "Women who have had an opportunity to make comparisons, know quite well the difference between circumcised and intact lovers. But it's all for the best, since Jewish men don't waste time and energy trying to satisfy women sexually." Maimonides understood that the foreskin is a highly sensitive source of sexual pleasure. His words could be slid in between the comments of women responding to O'Hara's survey and no one would spot the 800-year gulf between them. Maimonides wrote:
"An attractive woman will court the man who is uncircumcised...and lie against his breast with great passion, for he thrusts inside her a long time because of the foreskin, which is a barrier against ejaculation in intercourse. Thus she feels pleasure and reaches orgasm first. When an uncircumcised man sleeps with her and then resolves to return home, she brazenly grasps him and says to him 'Come back, make love to me.' This is because of the pleasure that she finds in intercourse with him, from the sinews of his testicles – sinew of iron – and from his ejaculation –that of a horse – which he shoots like an arrow into her womb. They are united without separating, and he makes love twice and three times in one night, yet the appetite is not filled…
"But when a circumcised man desires the beauty of a woman, and cleaves to his wife, or another woman comely in appearance, he will find himself performing his task quickly, emitting his seed as soon as he inserts his crown…He has an orgasm first…She has no pleasure from him…and it would be better for her if he had not known her and not drawn near to her, for he arouses her passion to no avail, and she remains in a state of desire for her husband, ashamed and confounded, while the seed is still in her reservoir. She does not have an orgasm once a year…." (25)
Pro-circumcision pediatrician Dr. Edgar Schoen, Clinical Professor in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, (26) has lamented that some Jewish boys are now intact thanks to "some ill-advised back-to-nature movements." Foreskin might have been useful in pre-historic times, he says, when men where running naked through thorn bushes and brambles" but now is no more useful than an appendix or wisdom teeth. Compelling medical data much of it accumulated in the past two decades, he says, have "conclusively" shown that a boy circumcised as a newborn has multiple lifetime health advantages compared to one with an "intact" foreskin.
Even if the various health benefits touted by Schoen were true, and they are debated, medical ethicist Margaret Somerville says that wouldn't justify circumcision.
"A common error made by those who want to justify infant male circumcision on the basis of medical benefits," she writes, "is that they believe that as long as some such benefits are present, circumcision can be justified as therapeutic, in the sense of preventive health care. This is not correct.
"A medical-benefits or 'therapeutic' justification requires that overall the medical benefits should outweigh the risks and harms of the procedure required to obtain them, that this procedure is the only reasonable way to obtain these benefits, and that these benefits are necessary to the well-being of the child.
"None of these conditions is fulfilled for routine infant male circumcision. If we view a child's foreskin as having a valid function, we are no more justified in amputating it than any other part of the child's body unless the operation is medically required treatment and the least harmful way to provide that treatment. "(27)
Somerville said she once accepted circumcision without a second thought. After studying it, she came to the conclusion it is "technically criminal assault." "Once you decide that circumcision is not medically necessary, you take away the therapeutic intent. Take away therapeutic intent, and circumcision becomes an unjustified wounding."
Dr. Leo Sorger told ObGYN News readers circumcision, "removing normal healthy functioning tissue" violates the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 5) and the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (Article 13). Schoen, unsurprisingly, also denies foreskin contributes to sexual pleasure.
What would he make of Maimonides?
JEWISH AUTHORS CITE HARM
Northrup: "I am not Jewish, (or Muslim), but I can assure you that many Jews are rethinking circumcision (I do not have any information about Muslims). As a matter of fact, two of the most well-researched and eloquent books on the harmful nature of circumcision have been written by Jewish men. I urge you to read Circumcision: The Hidden Trauma by Ronald Goldman Ph.D., (Vanguard, 1997) and Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy by Edward Wallenstein (Springer Publishing, 1980)."
Ronald Goldman can be reached at www.circumcision.org.info.htm
Restoring male David Steinburg is Jewish and despite his unhappiness with having been circumcised, he said he's not sure he could combat it for a newborn son in the face of family pressure.
"Many of the rituals of the Jewish community were developed as reminders of "separateness" and don't have any rationale otherthan ritual -- which is fine," he said. "I do think it would be healthy –but probably impossible -- for society to have something of a discussion about why keeping a foreskin is a good idea. But let's face it -- how do you get Americans to talk about sexual pleasure within the context of a newborn? It ties in too many things even open-minded people are squeamish about: parents don't want to think about their child's sexuality, especially that early on (if ever).
"And since it's too late for the (Jewish) father making the decision, there must be a reluctance to come to grips with the fact that his own experience may have been diminished by something his parents did before he had any consciousness at all."
"Someone must start," Jeff O'Hara asserts. As for Muslims – circumcision is not mentioned in the Koran. According to Islamic websites, "there is no compulsion to circumcision." (28) But Sami Aldeeb found otherwise. A Muslim lawyer based in Switzerland, Aldeeb would certainly call the circumcision he underwent at age 11 compulsive. Note his discussion of anger, terror, and thoughts of suicide:
"One of the issues rarely discussed in the topic of circumcision is the relation between its damage and the age at which it is done," he writes. "I was circumcised at the age of 11, during the summer break after 5th grade. "Growing through my childhood uncircumcised, gave me the opportunity to discover myself while intact," Aldeeb writes. "I was curious about my body and the changes that were happening at that age; so I became very conscious about my foreskin. I knew what circumcision was from an incident where a neighbor's kid (aged 10) ran from his circumciser, his brother who witnessed the circumcision through a window was terrified about how they tied his brother with a robe to the bed and about all the screams and blood.
"I asked about the circumciser, how he looked, I wanted to run away if he ever showed up at our door. I remember once my father jokingly telling me I will be circumcised, and my mother asking me why I did not want to have it done. I thought the subject would be brought up in front of me one day.
"The dreadful day came when my father told me I had to go with him for some tests at the hospital. I did not know what tests, but went along to acrowded local hospital. …Here a male janitor-nurse pulled open my hospital robe and made a quick mark on my penis. I was then given a shot and carried by that person to the operating table. The last I remember was a nurse arranging "things" on a tray. I never saw the face of the doctor as it took few seconds for me to go under full anesthesia.
"I woke up in a bed with my father beside me, he asked me if I knew whathappened, I pulled the blanket because I could feel the dry bandage againstmy raw glans. … I realized what had happened. …I felt stunned. I could not say a thing. Right then I thought about suicide.
"After I came back home I "surveyed the damage" and counted 10 stitches. My feeling was: now I am just like all of them.
"Years have passed and by the age of 16, I was having painful erections. The tension in the shaft skin used to make my erections very noticeable to me to the degree they cannot be ignored. They give me the sense that they have to be relieved or soothed. I confused the excessive tension on my frenulum with an urge for pleasure. At the age of 17 I severed my frenulum with a blade to relieve that tension. The tension was reduced, but the damage of the mutilation has become more noticeable.
"To show you how angry I was, I remember the day when my mutilator (doctor) died from a heart attack at the age of 44, on a nice summer day few years later.
"At the age of 33, I started to read about the subject on the Internet. I learned about foreskin restoration and tried a technique that worked for me. It was not the aesthetic results that I was looking for, it was the functionality, and that eliminated the premature ejaculation problem I had, just by having some loose skin during erection.
"Physiologically, the experience left me feeling mutilated, for no reason or benefit. It damaged the relation I had with my father, and affected myattitude toward my parents. It also affected my religious beliefs. The effort and pains thinking about the subject, reading literature, andattempting the restoration could have been better spent, if this has notbeen done. "
A few words about Islamic religion and circumcision. My understanding is that God created the human body in best image; why mutilate it? Islam prohibited practices that cause body harm, like tattoos; and prophet Muhammad himself did not undergo circumcision. At this day and age where we laugh at witch-doctors and feel sorry for children who were blinded at childhood to become good masseuse, we still give a wink about this topic." (29)
LAW GETS INVOLVED
In September 1996 the United States passed a law against female genital mutilation. Opponents of male circumcision are asking for the same. There is some tension with those who crusade against female mutilation, some of them believing male circumcision is much less harmful and fighting it less urgent. But circumcision opponents say all involuntary genital surgery is mutilation that should be stopped.
For now, we can expect that if legal prohibition comes, it will come first in Canada. Canadians are already being warned. In 1996 the Canadian Medical Association approved a code of ethics that instructs doctors to "refuse to participate in or support practices that violate basic human rights."
This suggests, Mark Jenkins writes, "that in the case of circumcision, parental preference should not override the child's physical rights to his body."(30) Canada's National Post newspaper, in February, 2001, reported the Association for Genital Integrity's preparations to challenge the ban on female genital mutilation in Canada's Criminal Code as being discriminatory against males, who are not given similar protection.
"Every day in this country a quarter of the boys that are born are having this procedure performed on them without their consent and without any medical need. We don't see why half of our society should be protected by a law and not the other half," said Dr. Arif Bhimji, a Newmarket emergency room physician.
In February, 2002, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan warned physicians against routine circumcision of newborn male infants and, among many words, essentially told doctor who will perform the surgeon based solely on parental preference, to consult their lawyers! (31) In her book The Ethical Canary, Somerville, a Canadian, argues physicians who undertake infant male circumcision could be legally liable for medical malpractice (civil liability in battery or negligence), which can result in an award of damages simply for carrying out the circumcision, even if it was competently performed (and many are botched with resulting horror stories of physical damage and death.) They could also, as explained, be charged with criminal liability for assault.
In both ethics and law, a physician has a primary obligation of personal care to the patient (not the parent). In France, journalist Michel Orcel has pointed out the absurdity of arguing over Muslim head-scarf law when "ritual circumcision is still an elective amputation done on a subject who cannot resist mentally or physically."
He says Article 16-3 of the French Civil Code is perfectly clear: "The physical integrity of a person cannot be violated except in cases of medical necessity. The consent of the person must be obtained beforehand except in cases where the person's condition necessitates a therapeutic intervention to which the person is incapable of giving consent..." In this country, attorney J. Steven Svoboda, a former Human RightsFellow at Harvard Law School, recently founded Attorneys for the Rights of the Child. "Our position is that circumcision is medical malpractice," he explains.
"The medical profession, which has perpetuated this tragicdisfigurement of baby boys' genitals, will now be challenged by anorganization of legal professionals." The courts are considering many cases. Samples: On July 22, 1995, a jury in Montgomery, Alabama, found Jackson Hospital and Clinic guilty of negligence in a case where a newborn was mistakenly circumcised against his mother's wishes. The minor plaintiff was awarded $65,000.
More recently a Suffolk County New York teen won an undisclosed settlement from a hospital and the doctor who circumcised him . He sued because his mother's permission was obtained while she was debilitated by the effects of a Caesarian section and painkillers – a common scenario.
"Never again can someone say that a young man who is dissatisfied with his circumcision as an infant is being frivolous when he objects to his mutilation and brings suit to obtain justice," said Llewellyn, his attorney.
Based in Georgia, Llewellyn's firm specializes "wrongful circumcision" and has handled about 20 cases, such as where the mother opposes a father's desire to have a son circumcised. "Doctors need to be sued," he said. "The only thing people seem to understand is lawsuits and money."
He believes it is women who need to take up this issue and defend their sons, he said.
"Fathers aren't going to do it because they won't acknowledge the wrong that has been done to them."
And the only way circumcision rate will be reversed, Kristen O'Hara contends, is to make people aware that women are the primary victims, since they are the ones who enduring discomfort, punishing blows, and lack of orgasm.
"The man suffers too, of course, because when women loseinterest in sex, men are deprived. And when it ultimately affects the love bond, and can lead to divorce, it's a tragedy for everyone."
Endnotes:
1. A conservative figure according to restoration activist Ron Low, Chicago.
2. Taylor, John, The Ridged Band website (http://research.cirp.org/abstr1.html)
3. The oldest documentary evidence for circumcision comes fromEgypt. Tomb artwork from the Sixth Dynasty (2345 - 2181 BC)shows men with circumcised penises……The examination of Egyptian mummies has found both circumcised and uncircumcised men. http://www.wikipedia.com/
4. Taylor, John, Lockwood, A.P., Taylor, A.J. "The prepuce: specialized mucosa of the penis and its loss to circumcision," British Journal of Urology, 1996, Vol. 77, pp. 291-295
5. O'Hara, Kristen and Jeffrey. Sex As Nature Intended It. Turning Point Publications, (Hudson, Mass.) 2002, p. 141.
6. See how the foreskin works in animation: http://www.circumstitions.com/Works.html
7. Human Sexuality: an Encyclopedia edited by Vern L Bullough and Bonnie Bullough New York: Garland Pub., 1994 p. 119-122.
8. Simple tape – a man stretches his shaft skin then tapes it in place and applies tension with a strap or string; devices such as the TugAhoy ( http://www.tugahoy.com/); RECAP method (recap_ez@hotmail.com) or (TLCTugger@Juno.com) Other options, surf
www.NORM-socal.org.
9. The full title is The Joy of Uncircumcising! Exploring History, Myths, Psychology, Restoration, Sexual Pleasure and Human Rights, 2nd Ed., by Jim Bigelow, Ph.D. Hourglass/pprbk. 1995.
10. She went on to found NOCIRC, the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers.
11. For more details see sexasnatureintendedit.com
12. Northrup is author of Women's Bodies, Women's Choices, 1998, The Wisdom of Menopause, 2003 and Mother-Daughter Wisdom, 2005.
13. O'Hara and others defend describing male circumcision as genital mutilation.
14. Goldman, Ron, Circumcision, The Hidden Trauma, How an American Cultural Practice Affects Infants and Ultimately Us All, Vanguard Publications, 1997, p 73.
15. For a complete discussion see Say No to Circumcision! 40 Compelling Reasons, by Thomas J. Ritter, MD, and George C. Denniston, MD. Second Edition. Hourglass Book Publishing, 1996)
16. Fleiss, with Frederick Hodges, has written "Nontherapeutic Circumcision Should Not Be Performed," American Medical News, vol. 38, no. 26 (July 17, 1995)
17. Angel, Money. Treatment Of Disease In Children. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston. 1887.
18. Jefferson C. Crossland, MD, "The Hygiene of Circumcision," New York Medical Journal, 1891. 19. Coleman, page 60. 20. Coleman, page 293.21. http://www.circumstitions.com/22. Coleman discusses the long-term psychological effects of circumcision on children and adults, p82-123.23. Glick, Leonard. Marked in Your Flesh, -Circumcision From Ancient Judea to Modern America, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 29.24. Glick, p. 3125. Glick, p. 6726. Schoen's pro-circumcision website is www.medicirc.org
27. Somerville, Margaret A. The Ethical Canary Science, Society and the Human Spirit, Viking/Penguin Canada, Toronto, hardcover, 344 pages (chapter 8, pp. 202-219); or www.intact.ca/canary.htm.
28. http://www.islamonline.net/askaboutislam
29. Aldeeb's homepage: http://go.to/nonviolence
30. Jenkins, Mark. "Separated at Birth - Did Circumcision Ruin Your Sex Life?" Men's Health July/August 1998.
31. For more legal cases see http://www.circumstitions.com/Law.html
The following related essay is by Deane Jordan, author of 1,001 Facts Somebody Screwed Up and 1,001 More facts Somebody Screwed Up, Longstreet Press)
By Deane Jordan
Parents sometimes do to children things which if they did to adults would be crimes.
If one strapped down an adult, and then without anesthesia or his permission, cut off his foreskin, one would have committed several crimes: False imprisonment, sexual assault, and sexual battery are at least three. You also would have diminished his sexual pleasure for life, a damage he and his mate could sue over in civil court.
Yet when this same injury is done to an infant we not only ignore the violation of his rights and the permanent loss, we also make the false claim that it is good for him. It is as good as cutting off an eyelid, and as painful as skinning his finger alive and cutting off the fingernail. It is as rational and justified as cutting off a baby girl's nipples.
If medical benefits were the reason for involuntary circumcision it would have ended decades ago because years of research have shown it provides is no significant benefit to him or his sexual partner. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Thus, the most common medical assault in the United States is also the least justified.
It is difficult to find an argument for involuntary circumcision other than the only way to perpetuate the mutilation is to force it upon those who cannot say no. Indeed, given circumcision's persistence through history, it is rather clear that urge to mutilate is the one constant element whereas the unfounded justifications change with time.
Doctors used to claim it cured epilepsy. Now they say it is hygienic. Both claims are false. There is also the issue of denial.
Circumcising others is a way to deny ones own injury or the injury one has allowed to be done to infants. It is passing on the pain.
Of course, in the modern era, many parents allowed this amputation based upon the poor advice of their doctor. It is difficult to accuse parents with good intentions with this child abuse thus the real problem lies with the medical profession, which literally makes billions off this injury not only in the cutting but the selling the ill-gotten flesh for commercial research.
Financially, infant circumcision is a lose-lose situation. Very few actual complications arise from foreskins compared to the number of circumcisions done. Treating those few instances over a lifetime costs society far less than the millions spent on involuntary circumcisions year after year.
Morally, involuntary circumcision is reprehensible.
It is forcing onto someone something quite unnecessary and what he would most likely not choose for himself if he had any say.
Adult males rarely want to be circumcised, and most men on earth are happily intact. Ethically, circumcision is a violation of the doctor's oath to do no harm. The foreskin of an infant is not damaged, diseased nor life-threatening. Indeed, foreskins do not kill infants - millions healthily keep them ever year—but many infants die from circumcision every year.
Others have the ends of their penis damaged more than usual or have it completely cut off. This sometimes leads to total genital amputation and raising the child as a girl, but this has proven to be rather unsuccessful. These "girls" act like boys only without penises, such as urinating standing up and a strong dislike of things feminine.
Medically, little benefit is to be gained by involuntary circumcision.
The Victorian notion that the penis is dirty is the most often given reason for involuntary circumcision. Yet the fact of the matter is it is the circumcised penis that is more dirty. The foreskin-protected glans is soft and supple, kept that way by emollients secreted by the foreskin, emollients that also have anti-bacterial and viral components.
The soft protected glans forms a resilient barrier to invading germs. The circumcised penis however is not only unprotected but keratinized, giving it a gray, wrinkled look not found in the natural penis. Keratinzation leads to drying and cracking, creating places to harbor sexually transmitted diseases, and in fact circumcised men have higher STD rates.
There also may be a correlation between circumcision and cancer of the penis, but the opposite from what is often touted. The penile cancer is high in Israel where circumcision is almost universal because of the religion. It is low in Scandinavia where circumcision is extremely rare.
Further, foreskins have estrogen receptors and one cannot help but wonder if research will show if foreskins pick up estrogen from intercourse and if that benefits intact men.
Sexually, circumcision is the unkindest cut of all. It not only permanently removes some 20,000 nerve endings but also a ring of specialized pleasure cells where the inner and out fold of the foreskin meet. It also reduces blood flow through the penis often requiring corrective surgery.
The trauma of denuding -- removing a third or more of the penile skin—and the resulting keratinization-- forces more layers of dead skin on the circumcised glans, burying what nerve receptors that are left under more layers of skin. That lessens or deadens tactile sensations.
Day-to-day friction on the circumcised penis further reduces its sensitivity. The circumcised penis is numb compared to the natural one. And it may be this fact which accounts for the overwhelming dislike among circumcised men to use condoms. A desensitized penis wrapped in latex feels little, like kissing through a screen. It is more than ironic that an injury perpetuated by doctors under the guise of prevention is actually causing more disease. Rarely discussed but also important is how circumcision affects a man's sexual partner. The most comprehensive study to date shows circumcised men engage in more non-mainstream sexual activity than do their uncut brethren. They engage in more homosexual and heterosexual anal sex and in more homosexual oral sex. The theory given is that the desensitized penis leads them to engage in rougher sex to achieve physical stimulation, or said another way, so they can actually feel something.
During heterosexual sex the lack of a foreskin also changes how the penis pleasures her. Without the foreskin it is but direction friction in the vagina whereas the natural penis provides friction and moving pressure. The desensitized penis also reduces her ability to please him during fellatio.
Fortunately, the circumcision rate is dropping in the United States, mainly because of reports in the popular press rather than medical publications. It has gone from a high of some 90 percent in 1990 to under 60 percent today, one third on the West Coast. The tide has turned and in a generation or two the rates could be fairly low and confined to religious marking.
Interestingly, most women inherently know that infant circumcision is wrong, but it is often the misinformed circumcised father who demands the amputation. Fully informed parents rarely circumcise.
In fact, one group of nurses who began to inform parents of the detrimental aspects of circumcision -- including pictures of the procedure and wound—were forced to stop by doctors who complained they were frightening parents-to-be. They preferred parents be fed circumcision fiction.
Research also shows infant circumcision not only affects the mother child bonding but nursing habits as well. It also makes the infant more sensitive to pain. Circumcised boys have a lower threshold of pain than girls or intact boys.
Research shows the brain does not forget the intense pain of circumcision - many children lapse into shock while being skinned— so there may be long term neural behavioral implications among the circumcised.
While there has always been rape, research might show the circumcised rape more than the unmutilated.
There is little to be said for involuntary circumcision other than it is common. And no doubt those who are psychologically motivated to mutilate - not misinformed parents but advocates—will continue to invent spurious reasons to pass on the pain. And therein lies the truth.
Circumcision really has nothing to do with sex or hygiene. It is a willingness to injure a hapless infant, a willingness to force upon him what he most certainly would not choose himself, a willingness abrogate his rights and rob him of a say and choice over his own body.
Infant circumcision is primitive aggression perpetuating itself on the most defenseless among us.
Doctors have a duty, an obligation to protect their youngest patients from this injury. Unfortunately, many a doctor sill cuts for a buck then sells the flesh. That is fundamentally wrong. It is immoral. Circumcision is a mistake that lasts a lifetime.
(Deane Jordan is the author of 1,001 Facts Somebody Screwed Up and 1,001 More facts Somebody Screwed Up, Longstreet Press) ###
By Diane Petryk-Bloom
Want her to TOTALLY want it, TOTALLY need it and TOTALLY love it? Want to have her thinking of you instead of thinking of England? Men who want more sex, listen up. She needs to like it better and she'll like it better if you realize what's missing – your foreskin.
As you read this, at least 100,000 men (1) across America are taping, tying and tugging their penises to stretch new foreskin. Most lost their foreskins in infancy when they were circumcised, but somewhere along the line they discovered sex without a foreskin just isn't what nature intended.
In the uncircumcised man, the sexually aroused penis peeks from foreskin, then bursts full-out, sending ripples of skin back on the shaft. Those waves of stretching and retreating foreskin give the male one the most exquisite sensations in all sexual experience. That's because foreskin is the most important sensory tissue of thepenis. (2) Pleasurable sensations provided by a foreskin are "so incredibly great," in fact, that "no man should miss out on them," says author Jeffrey O'Hara, a circumcised-but-restored – as far as can be -- male.
That, in itself, isn't enough to motivate most men to worry about developing new foreskin. Here's what is: she needs it. It's the key to pleasuring your woman. Get it, get her more often.
Here's why: Circumcised men have lost considerable sensory tissue. Important nerve endings – gone. Some hate the idea. But many still say they have all the pleasure they can stand, so what's the problem? They have perfectly serviceable erections. They have orgasms and ejaculations. The problem is how they get there.
Researchers have recently discovered that the mechanism of arousal and intercourse is entirely different for the circumcised man and the foreskin-intact man. Whether or not a circumcised male has any problems, recent anatomical studies show his partner probably will.
In 1996, Dr. John Taylor and colleagues in the pathology department at the University of Manitoba, decided to assess the type and amount of tissue missing from the adult circumcised penis. (Incredibly, humans have been trimming penises since 2000-something B.C. (3) and no one had yet assessed the damage!)
THE RIDGED BAND
Taylor found an elastic-like band of mucosal tissue at the tip of the foreskin. He called it the ridged band (4). It teems with specialized nerve endings – similar to those on the fingers and lips.
The head of the penis, or glans, by contrast, and contrary to popular belief, is fairly insensitive. When the penis is relaxed, the ridged band narrows over its tip like a drawn duffle bag. Sexual arousal dilates the band, sliding it back past the glans and onto the shaft, where it rolls up and down during intercourse. The rolling and stretching stimulates the erogenous nerves in the band to fire off sensations of pleasure. (5)
From an evolutionary perspective, the object of sexual stimulation in the male is to build up contractions in the genital musculature. Kristen O'Hara, with her husband Jeff O'Hara, explains in her 2001 book, Sex As Nature Intended It, that it is these alternate tensing and relaxing actions that lead to orgasm and ejaculation of sperm.
They point out that Josephine Lowndes Sevely's seven-year study comparing male and female genitalia revealed highly erogenous tissue equivalent to the female clitoris is located in the core of the penis through the entire length of the shaft. Only the foreskin is positioned to stimulate it by natural massaging action. The circumcised man has to reach for equivalent stimulation in an awkward, unnatural way. Sometimes he has difficulty reaching orgasm. Other times he may not be able to extend intercourse more than a few seconds. In either case, his female partner suffers.
"It is important to understand how muscular contractions can bring on orgasm because the intact (natural) man and the circumcised man induce them differently," the O'Haras write. "… the means they use to create these contractions affect their thrusting movements and rhythms.
"The design of the natural penis indicates that nature intended for pleasure and orgasm to be induced by actions taking place mostly in the upper area of the penis. However, for the circumcised penis, the upper penis mechanisms and responses have been drastically altered and do not function the way nature intended. Consequently, the circumcised male is left to improvise alternative or supplementary means to attain orgasm. It is use of these odd varieties or orgasm-building (pleasure seeking) techniques that causes him to thrust much differently from the intact man, and which his female partner finds frustrating and disrupting to her pleasuring needs." And sometimes downright painful.
Marsha Goudreau (name disguised), a Michigan woman whose late husband of more than 20 years was uncircumcised, who later experienced sex with circumcised men, said she now knows her husband's foreskin was a blessing for both of them.
"The nice thing that happens is that the gliding back and forth stimulates the head of the penis without irritating it," she said. (6) "The shaft moves in and out of that glove, which pleasures the woman without painful friction. And if you're not having intercourse for some reason, the foreskin makes a hand job a lot easier."
In technical terms: "Mucosal surfaces of the glans and foreskin move back and forth across the mucosal surfaces of the labia and vagina, providing nontraumantic sexual stimulation for both male and female."
'BEST THING THIS LIFETIME'
This mucous membrane-to-mucous membrane contact provides natural lubrication necessary for sexual relations and prevents both the dryness responsible for painful intercourse and the chafing and abrasions which allow entry of sexually transmitted diseases, both viral and bacterial." (7)
Yet couples with a circumcised man need not despair. Foreskin restoration offers reparations. Recovered glans will soften again. Jeff O'Hara's message for circumcised men: "Restoring your foreskin is the best thing that's going to happen to you in this lifetime." Kristen's message: "From the woman's sexual perspective, the restored penis is virtually equivalent to the natural penis in every respect."
There are surgical and non-surgical methods of restoration. O'Hara opted for a graft of skin from his scrotum. It has the advantage of having muscle tissue able to provide that thrill of stretch upon erection. Non-surgical restoration involves pulling what is left of flaccid skin at the base of the penis when it is not erect, and exerting a tugging force to stretch it. Several simple devices have been invented for this purpose. (8)
One is simply taping drawn up skin with a clip applied to the end of the tape and tugging force applied by an elastic band around the waist. "It's cheap and works well enough," said David Steinburg (name disguised) from his home in the midwest. "While there's still a ways to go, there is no question that the regrowth of some skin has made a real difference in feeling," he said, "and I can only imagine what it must be like for those fortunate enough to have avoided circumcision in the first place."
Ron Low of Chicago thought taping lacked something in elegance, so he invented a cone-shaped attachment that pulls naturally after skin is inserted. Obversion, the tendency of skin to roll back, keeps it in place. Low said one can expect to add about one inch per year if the tugger is worn 12 hours a day. His progress with his TLCTugger is documented on his website TLCTugger.com).
Low said he's sold more than 2,000 with "nothing but positive feedback."
The Joy of Uncircumcising by James Bigelow, 1995, is the complete guide. (9)
Whatever method, the object is to restore enough skin to cover the head of the relaxed penis, or glans, such as happens naturally when the penis is uncircumcised. Complete coverage, which the O'Haras advise, allows the penis to maintain its naturally moist, softly-stiff characteristic. (The glans of the circumcised penis are continually exposed, and as a result, can become hardened or keratinized.)
While foreskin restoration can replace this protective covering, merely stretching the skin cannot restore the special orgasmic triggers and glands that were cut and eliminated. Especially the very sensitive frenulum. The frenulum is the connecting tissue of the foreskin and shaft. Structurally, it is similar to the frenulum that connects the tongue to the base of the mouth. In the same way that frenulum controls the tongue, researchers envison the penile frenulum controls thrusting. It's on the underside of the shaft, or on top of an erect penis when a man is lying on his back. It, too, is highly enervated, erogenous tissue.
"Often only a remnant of the frenulum is left after circumcision, if it is not also removed," says anti-circumcision crusader Marilyn Milos. "Many circumcised men consider it their 'G-spot,' but only because their 'G-area,' the ridged band and frenular delta, has been removed." (10)
During sex, there is a way to compensate for that loss, Jeff O'Hara found. "The ridged band of the foreskin and the skin of the nipples are comprised of the same specialized nerve tissue called 'rete ridges.' Nipple skin abounds with Meissner's corpuscles (erotically responsive touch-sensitive nerves), like those found in the foreskin and frenulum.
"When you have your partner twiddle your nipples during intercourse, combined with the increased pleasure experienced after restoration, I reckon that it heightens your sexual feelings to those experienced by the genitally intact man when his penis alone is stimulated during intercourse…During this activity, the levels of ecstasy are so magnificent, I don't feel cheated in any way, even though I'm missing the nerves of the ridged ban."
Sex as Nature Intended It came about after Kristen O'Hara experienced both natural and circumcised sex and tried to make sense of the difference. While happily married to Jeff, she came to realize that foreskin is what's missing millions of bedrooms across America -- bedrooms where sex is unfulfilling, uncomfortable and/or avoided. Her personal experience (11) and comparisons led to attempts to discover if she was alone in her feelings. She wasn't!
Surveys of about 138 women showed almost all women preferred the natural sex. It was the difference between not being able to get enough and "There, that'll hold you for a few days." Sitcoms spend a lot of time on male jokes about pursuing sex in the face of expected feminine refusal because it reflects the situation in the real world, she said. Women in their 20s are often gung ho, regardless; in their 30s, it's okay, she said, but much beyond that age their interest falls off with their lessening vaginal lubrication and the built-up resentment of sex that's been too often uncomfortable and unsatisfying.
Female partners of circumcised men become aroused, crave the sensation of penetration and enjoy orgasm just as much as partners of intact men. But they express dissatisfaction with the overall experience of sexual relations. Kristen was no different. She loved her husband and they were compatible, but their relationship wasn't good sexually.
"Our love lacked depth," she writes, "the kind of depth that exists when a couple has a deeply satisfying, exquisitely delicious, sensuous, sexual interconnectedness." Because sex with Jeff was annoying, even though desired, Kristen drifted back into her uncircumcised lover's bed. "During our rendezvous, I couldn't help but notice that his penis felt much more sensuous inside me; it felt infinitely better, deliciously better, indescribably better.
A PERFECT UNION
"In characterizing the differences… I would say the circumcised experience is like being repeatedly penetrated in an annoying way, even though simultaneously there is pleasure. And the penis feels too hard, almost foreign-like – you want it, but don't want it, at the same time, driven onward only in hopes of achieving orgasm, the sooner the better. Whereas, with natural, the vagina totally surrenders to the soft sensuousness of lingering ecstasy, as it hungrily caresses and lovingly responds to the erotic movements of the softly-stiff penis, and the penis adores and gently strokes the vagina in return.
"Like two halves of a perfect whole, each organ swoons and sighs to a passionate intermingling… "With no holding back, you TOTALLY want it, you TOTALLY need it, and you TOTALLY love it."
One explanation: Since the natural penis tends to stay more deeply embedded in the vagina using short strokes, it brings the man's pubic area in frequent contact with the woman's clitoral mound, allowing her clitoris to be pressure-pleasured more often, and at a consistent rhythmical rate throughout much of the intercourse experience. Not only does the circumcised man make longer strokes to stimulate his pleasure areas, he needs to pause, often outside the vagina, to let the nerve endings recharge.
The natural man's penis retreats into its foreskin, not having to withdraw from the vagina. Jeff O'Hara said you can witness the longer strokes and withdrawals in x-rated videos with circumcised men. In fact, he said, he watched a video made of John Bobbitt performing sex. Bobbitt is the man whose wife cut off his penis in a fit of rage. Doctors reattached the organ, but Bobbitt lost nerve connections.
He performs just like a circumcised man must, O'Hara said, "Pull out, rest, come in fast. Like pile-driving with punishing blows." Even if the woman can tolerate it, that technique precludes rhythmic build-up for the clitoris.
In her best-selling book, How to Have An Orgasm…As Often as You Want, Rachel Swift says a lack of consistent rhythm is one of the chief causes of a woman's failure to climax.
"If the pace is broken, so's the ascent to orgasm." Why do SO MANY women fake orgasm? Because SO MANY men are circumcised.
Women know they're not going to climax the way he's doing it…and they're taking a battering. They might just as well fake it and hope he gets it over with soon. Often the best you can do with circumcised sex is pleasure the man and woman separately, in succession, rather than simultaneously.
"It was like we were using each other's body to masturbate against," Jeff said of his marital sex before he restored, "which is not the same as making love. Lovers totally abandon their individual egos, their individual awareness, and become a union of pleasuring."
Here's a sampling of comments from Kristen O'Hara's survey respondents:
My circumcised husband was totally engrossed in satisfying his own sexual needs; therefore, he pounded and banged as if he were having intercourse with a non-feeling person.
"It feels so good to have the feeling of a man's foreskin in my vagina…it glides easily.
Once a natural penis is in your vagina, you wish it could stay forever.
My natural partner kept more constant pressure in my whole genital area during intercourse. I felt like he was in sync with me… I had more time to relax, and I would always orgasm before it was over, so afterwards I felt content.
My sexual experiences with three natural men were extraordinary in the gentleness, sensuality and mutuality.
Natural men have a more laid-back approach. They don't seem to feel as rushed or pressed to achieve orgasm. They seem to enjoy the act rather than the resulting orgasm.
There is definitely more clitoral stimulation with natural. Sometimes it's (circumcised sex) too much work for too little reward. When it's over I think to myself, "thank God he finally came."
I have noticed that the vagina is much more accepting of the natural penis Once the head of the natural penis is at the opening of the vagina, it just kind of naturally slides in. I've often said to myself after one of these circumcised encounters: I would have been better off masturbating. With my natural man, I always glow after intercourse, but with circumcised men, I couldn't wait to get dressed and get away from them. I never glowed.
The visual effect of seeing an impending erection just starting to peek out of its foreskin is just so much sexier.
I never made the connection between this feeling of hostility and circumcised sex until now.
O'Hara's research was first published in the British Journal of Urology in 1999. Best-selling author Dr. Christiane Northrup (12) credits the O'Hara's research for helping her fully understand the reasons for the design of the penis and foreskin.
"I always felt that the male foreskin, one of the most richly enervated and hyperelastic pieces of tissue in the male body, is there for a reason, she wrote in an article for her newsletter, Health Wisdom for Women (10) Volume 8, No. 6, June 2001 "Until recently, I didn't know exactly what that reason was. But now thanks to Kristen O'Hara's well-researched book…I finally understand the reasons for the design of the penis and foreskin and how this design ensures optimal penile function, including the organ's ability to satisfy the female sexually."
"O'Hara makes a compelling argument that circumcised intercourse may frustrate the primordial subconscious that seems to know 'real sex ain't this way.'" Northrup writes. "She also suggested that each circumcised experience has the potential to build-up negative memory imprints so that over time, repeated sexual encounters with the same partner may lead to , negative feeling between the two that carry over into everyday life."
As an obstetrician-gynecologist, Northrup said, she performed hundreds of circumcisions. While she stops short of saying she regrets doing them, she does say it's past time to re-think the practice. She reported elsewhere that when she would tell parents at hospital-based childbirth classes that circumcision need not be done, her invitations to such classes were withdrawn. She quotes obstetrics colleague Dr. George Denniston, co-author of Doctor's Reexamine Circumcision:
"Circumcision violates the first tenet of medical practice: 'first, do no harm.' According to modern medical ethics, parents do not have the right to consent to a procedure that is not in their son's best interest. The removal of normal, important part of the male sexual organ is not in their son's best interest."
Jews, Muslims and a few other groups circumcise as part of their religious practice. But, as a nation, we do not allow parents to impose their religious practice on children to the extent that it does physical harm. Blood transfusions, for instance, are often imposed by court-order for children whose parents do not approve for religious reasons. Should genital mutilation (13) be any different?
From a world-wide perspective, the non-circumcised state is the norm for males. Most Europeans and Orientals do not circumcise.
Wrongful circumcision attorney David Lewellyn said he attended a conference in Padua, Italy last fall and told a 35-year-old Italian pediatrician that Americans circumcise about 65 percent of all boys. "You're kidding!" she said.
Although circumcision rates are dropping here, it is estimated that about 60 percent of all newborn males in America are still being cut. If you're an American male between age 25 and 45, the probability is very high that you were circumcised. Newborn circumcision rates in the U.S. climbed after World War II and peaked at about 80-90 percent somewhere between 1970 and 1980.
If you are older or younger, chances are still good that if you were in an American nursery you lost your foreskin. In our cultural acceptance of circumcising males, we keep company with countries like Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Somalia and the Congo. Some circumcise newborns, most do it at older ages, as part of religious practice. The United States is the only circumcising country that, generally, has no religious pretense. Circumcisions are usually performed on newborns in hospitals for aesthetic preference, hygienic theory or for nor reason at all.
Many parents simply acquiesce to circumcision when the physician offers it, without asking questions. "If it's offered, it must be recommended," seems to be the prevailing view. It's familiar. It's the accepted norm. Several groups, such as NORM (National Organization of Restoring Men), NOHARMM (National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males) and NOCIRC have formed to fight the practice, but it is entrenched. For many it's a matter of "like father, like son." Males who cannot accept that they are less than perfect, perpetuate the practice. "Recognizing male circumcision as a mistake reflects on circumcised males." (14) Others, doctors and mothers, may be in denial as well.
American's willingness to conform and disinclination to inquire deeply is another. Parents are usually unaware of the extent of the surgery. The amount of skin amputated results in the loss of about one third or more of the penile shaft skin system. Adult foreskin is about two and a half inches long. It's double layered, so when unfolded would be about the size of a 3 x 5 card, enough skin to hold millions of cells and nerves.
The often described "snip of skin" is considered a major amputaton by some. It is usually done without anesthesia. Milos, who first witnessed circumcision as a student nurse, went on to make a video of the operation and show it to expecting parents. She was told it was too much for parents to see. "Perhaps then," Milos responded, "its too much for the baby to endure." "We didn't learn anything about foreskins or circumcision in medical school," said Dr. Paul Fliess. (16) "I watched one, that was it." They were taught infants do not feel pain, he said, which has been shown to be an absurd notion.
Taylor and colleagues who discovered the Ridged Band, have also noted "the current tendency to eliminate the prepuce from anatomy textbooks."
How it became thus is no mystery. Circumcision got its first big jump-start in this country in the late 19th century when doctors decided masturbation was harmful. A boy with foreskin would have to retract it to urinate, so, they reasoned, he would be more likely to learn to give himself pleasure by self-manipulation. Cutting the foreskin off as a remedy became the rage. In 1888, John Kellogg, of corn flakes fame, wrote a book blaming masturbation for 31 ailments, and identified as symptoms of masturbation things like shyness and insomnia.
Soon, circumcision was advocated for infants to prevent, rather than cure, masturbation.Here are excerpts from medical journals of the late 1800's: There can be no doubt of (masturbation's) injurious effect, and of the proneness to practice it on the part of children with defective brains. Circumcision should always be practiced. It may be necessary to make the genitals so sore by blistering fluids that pain results from attempts to rub the parts (17)
In consequence of circumcision the epithelial covering of the glans becomes dry, hard…the sensibility of the glans is diminished, but not sufficiently to interfere with the copulative function of the organ or to constitute an objection... It is well authenticated that the foreskin...is a fruitful cause of the habit of masturbation in children... I conclude that the foreskin is detrimental to health, and that circumcision is a wise measure of hygiene. (18)
Great Britain joined in the masturbation hysteria, as did Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Those countries have since rejected arguments for circumcision as fallacious. Dr. Benjamin Spock advocated circumcision in 1946. He reversed himself in 1976. (19)
The British circumcision rate peaked at something more than 30 percent, then, by the 1950s, it fell dramatically. By the time Princess Diana gave birth to Prince William, it was less than 1 percent. Prince Charles was circumcised, but Diana insisted the young princes be left intact (20).
In her case, the fact that the National Health Service dropped coverage of the procedure probably wasn't a deciding factor. For the majority of the Brits, it may have been the biggest one.
By the 1930s, even those who ate corn flakes accepted that masturbation wasn't harmful, but by then circumcision was going strong.
Since Jews circumcised for religious reasons, some Jews promoted it for health reasons, too, applying to all, so Jews wouldn't be singled out by the practice.
Doctors latched onto the next promulgated theory: circumcision was more hygienic. After awhile claims were made for its cure or prevention of a host of diseases from epilepsy to insomnia. These arguments were debunked one by one, but circumcision still has its proponents. They often tout penile cancer and cervical cancer prevention as benefits of circumcision.
Penile cancer is exceedingly rare and preventing it is not a reason for depriving millions of their bodily integrity and sexual birthright.
Women with uncircumcised partners do not get more cervical cancer. Studies that have shown such links have been seriously flawed. (21)
Recently AIDS prevention has been suggested as justification for circumcision. This flies in the face of facts. The United States and certain African countries that circumcise have the highest rates of HIV infection.
Some wonder, might it not all come down to an innate human compulsion to mutilate, especially the sexual organs? Or a drive to control others' sexual behavior. Coleman reports on one American woman's suspicion that her inconceivable genital mutilation at the hands doctor might be linked to circumcision. Retribution?
Circumcision is known to harm the bond between mother and son. Does the circumcision approving parent ever think ahead to the day when the boy is seven or eight and wants to know what was done to him, and why? (22) Does the rise in circumcision in this country correlate with its rise in crime? These questions are being asked. It seems that we've gone through a century and a half of searching for a justifications for circumcision, seeing them debunked one by one, creating new ones and seeing those debunked.
Now we are waking up to the fact that circumcising has been damaging sexual organs, sexual performance and sexual relationships. But, in fact, this is something that has been known from antiquity. We just forgot it. In Marked in Your Flesh – Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern American, author Leonard Glick painstaking recounts the history of circumcision. It begins with Chapter 17 of Genesis. God makes promises to Abraham and puts forth the inexplicable requirement that "every male among you shall be circumcised." "You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin. And that shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you. And throughout the generations, every male among you shall be circumcised at the age of eight days." Why? No one knows. No one single author wrote the Torah. The Bible includes the essential feature of the Genesis 17 narrative, but eliminates mention of circumcision.
Historically, one function of circumcision, for Jews, was that it identified with whom a Jewess may have sexual intercourse and therefore it served to preserve national identity. (23) Jews in the Roman Empire knew that others looked down on circumcision. Some did not have their sons circumcised and some tried foreskin stretching to restore themselves even back then.
The ancient Greeks and their Hellenistic successors considered the "ideal" prepuce to be long, tapered and well proportioned. Removing it was mutilation. (24) Philo of Alexandria wrote in the first century that circumcision served to excise "pleasures that bewitch the mind." He may have been the first to state that circumcision decreases sexual sensation, Glick suggests.
Later, in the 12th Century, Moses Maimonides, Jewish physician and community leader, wrote, with regard to circumcision: "One of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question…The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure in indubitable."
He adds: "The Sages, may their memory be blessed, have explicitly stated: 'it is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him.' In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision. "…because his foreskin has been removed from him, and the power of his member has been diminished, he has no strength to lie with many lewd women. "Women who have had an opportunity to make comparisons, know quite well the difference between circumcised and intact lovers. But it's all for the best, since Jewish men don't waste time and energy trying to satisfy women sexually." Maimonides understood that the foreskin is a highly sensitive source of sexual pleasure. His words could be slid in between the comments of women responding to O'Hara's survey and no one would spot the 800-year gulf between them. Maimonides wrote:
"An attractive woman will court the man who is uncircumcised...and lie against his breast with great passion, for he thrusts inside her a long time because of the foreskin, which is a barrier against ejaculation in intercourse. Thus she feels pleasure and reaches orgasm first. When an uncircumcised man sleeps with her and then resolves to return home, she brazenly grasps him and says to him 'Come back, make love to me.' This is because of the pleasure that she finds in intercourse with him, from the sinews of his testicles – sinew of iron – and from his ejaculation –that of a horse – which he shoots like an arrow into her womb. They are united without separating, and he makes love twice and three times in one night, yet the appetite is not filled…
"But when a circumcised man desires the beauty of a woman, and cleaves to his wife, or another woman comely in appearance, he will find himself performing his task quickly, emitting his seed as soon as he inserts his crown…He has an orgasm first…She has no pleasure from him…and it would be better for her if he had not known her and not drawn near to her, for he arouses her passion to no avail, and she remains in a state of desire for her husband, ashamed and confounded, while the seed is still in her reservoir. She does not have an orgasm once a year…." (25)
Pro-circumcision pediatrician Dr. Edgar Schoen, Clinical Professor in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, (26) has lamented that some Jewish boys are now intact thanks to "some ill-advised back-to-nature movements." Foreskin might have been useful in pre-historic times, he says, when men where running naked through thorn bushes and brambles" but now is no more useful than an appendix or wisdom teeth. Compelling medical data much of it accumulated in the past two decades, he says, have "conclusively" shown that a boy circumcised as a newborn has multiple lifetime health advantages compared to one with an "intact" foreskin.
Even if the various health benefits touted by Schoen were true, and they are debated, medical ethicist Margaret Somerville says that wouldn't justify circumcision.
"A common error made by those who want to justify infant male circumcision on the basis of medical benefits," she writes, "is that they believe that as long as some such benefits are present, circumcision can be justified as therapeutic, in the sense of preventive health care. This is not correct.
"A medical-benefits or 'therapeutic' justification requires that overall the medical benefits should outweigh the risks and harms of the procedure required to obtain them, that this procedure is the only reasonable way to obtain these benefits, and that these benefits are necessary to the well-being of the child.
"None of these conditions is fulfilled for routine infant male circumcision. If we view a child's foreskin as having a valid function, we are no more justified in amputating it than any other part of the child's body unless the operation is medically required treatment and the least harmful way to provide that treatment. "(27)
Somerville said she once accepted circumcision without a second thought. After studying it, she came to the conclusion it is "technically criminal assault." "Once you decide that circumcision is not medically necessary, you take away the therapeutic intent. Take away therapeutic intent, and circumcision becomes an unjustified wounding."
Dr. Leo Sorger told ObGYN News readers circumcision, "removing normal healthy functioning tissue" violates the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 5) and the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (Article 13). Schoen, unsurprisingly, also denies foreskin contributes to sexual pleasure.
What would he make of Maimonides?
JEWISH AUTHORS CITE HARM
Northrup: "I am not Jewish, (or Muslim), but I can assure you that many Jews are rethinking circumcision (I do not have any information about Muslims). As a matter of fact, two of the most well-researched and eloquent books on the harmful nature of circumcision have been written by Jewish men. I urge you to read Circumcision: The Hidden Trauma by Ronald Goldman Ph.D., (Vanguard, 1997) and Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy by Edward Wallenstein (Springer Publishing, 1980)."
Ronald Goldman can be reached at www.circumcision.org.info.htm
Restoring male David Steinburg is Jewish and despite his unhappiness with having been circumcised, he said he's not sure he could combat it for a newborn son in the face of family pressure.
"Many of the rituals of the Jewish community were developed as reminders of "separateness" and don't have any rationale otherthan ritual -- which is fine," he said. "I do think it would be healthy –but probably impossible -- for society to have something of a discussion about why keeping a foreskin is a good idea. But let's face it -- how do you get Americans to talk about sexual pleasure within the context of a newborn? It ties in too many things even open-minded people are squeamish about: parents don't want to think about their child's sexuality, especially that early on (if ever).
"And since it's too late for the (Jewish) father making the decision, there must be a reluctance to come to grips with the fact that his own experience may have been diminished by something his parents did before he had any consciousness at all."
"Someone must start," Jeff O'Hara asserts. As for Muslims – circumcision is not mentioned in the Koran. According to Islamic websites, "there is no compulsion to circumcision." (28) But Sami Aldeeb found otherwise. A Muslim lawyer based in Switzerland, Aldeeb would certainly call the circumcision he underwent at age 11 compulsive. Note his discussion of anger, terror, and thoughts of suicide:
"One of the issues rarely discussed in the topic of circumcision is the relation between its damage and the age at which it is done," he writes. "I was circumcised at the age of 11, during the summer break after 5th grade. "Growing through my childhood uncircumcised, gave me the opportunity to discover myself while intact," Aldeeb writes. "I was curious about my body and the changes that were happening at that age; so I became very conscious about my foreskin. I knew what circumcision was from an incident where a neighbor's kid (aged 10) ran from his circumciser, his brother who witnessed the circumcision through a window was terrified about how they tied his brother with a robe to the bed and about all the screams and blood.
"I asked about the circumciser, how he looked, I wanted to run away if he ever showed up at our door. I remember once my father jokingly telling me I will be circumcised, and my mother asking me why I did not want to have it done. I thought the subject would be brought up in front of me one day.
"The dreadful day came when my father told me I had to go with him for some tests at the hospital. I did not know what tests, but went along to acrowded local hospital. …Here a male janitor-nurse pulled open my hospital robe and made a quick mark on my penis. I was then given a shot and carried by that person to the operating table. The last I remember was a nurse arranging "things" on a tray. I never saw the face of the doctor as it took few seconds for me to go under full anesthesia.
"I woke up in a bed with my father beside me, he asked me if I knew whathappened, I pulled the blanket because I could feel the dry bandage againstmy raw glans. … I realized what had happened. …I felt stunned. I could not say a thing. Right then I thought about suicide.
"After I came back home I "surveyed the damage" and counted 10 stitches. My feeling was: now I am just like all of them.
"Years have passed and by the age of 16, I was having painful erections. The tension in the shaft skin used to make my erections very noticeable to me to the degree they cannot be ignored. They give me the sense that they have to be relieved or soothed. I confused the excessive tension on my frenulum with an urge for pleasure. At the age of 17 I severed my frenulum with a blade to relieve that tension. The tension was reduced, but the damage of the mutilation has become more noticeable.
"To show you how angry I was, I remember the day when my mutilator (doctor) died from a heart attack at the age of 44, on a nice summer day few years later.
"At the age of 33, I started to read about the subject on the Internet. I learned about foreskin restoration and tried a technique that worked for me. It was not the aesthetic results that I was looking for, it was the functionality, and that eliminated the premature ejaculation problem I had, just by having some loose skin during erection.
"Physiologically, the experience left me feeling mutilated, for no reason or benefit. It damaged the relation I had with my father, and affected myattitude toward my parents. It also affected my religious beliefs. The effort and pains thinking about the subject, reading literature, andattempting the restoration could have been better spent, if this has notbeen done. "
A few words about Islamic religion and circumcision. My understanding is that God created the human body in best image; why mutilate it? Islam prohibited practices that cause body harm, like tattoos; and prophet Muhammad himself did not undergo circumcision. At this day and age where we laugh at witch-doctors and feel sorry for children who were blinded at childhood to become good masseuse, we still give a wink about this topic." (29)
LAW GETS INVOLVED
In September 1996 the United States passed a law against female genital mutilation. Opponents of male circumcision are asking for the same. There is some tension with those who crusade against female mutilation, some of them believing male circumcision is much less harmful and fighting it less urgent. But circumcision opponents say all involuntary genital surgery is mutilation that should be stopped.
For now, we can expect that if legal prohibition comes, it will come first in Canada. Canadians are already being warned. In 1996 the Canadian Medical Association approved a code of ethics that instructs doctors to "refuse to participate in or support practices that violate basic human rights."
This suggests, Mark Jenkins writes, "that in the case of circumcision, parental preference should not override the child's physical rights to his body."(30) Canada's National Post newspaper, in February, 2001, reported the Association for Genital Integrity's preparations to challenge the ban on female genital mutilation in Canada's Criminal Code as being discriminatory against males, who are not given similar protection.
"Every day in this country a quarter of the boys that are born are having this procedure performed on them without their consent and without any medical need. We don't see why half of our society should be protected by a law and not the other half," said Dr. Arif Bhimji, a Newmarket emergency room physician.
In February, 2002, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan warned physicians against routine circumcision of newborn male infants and, among many words, essentially told doctor who will perform the surgeon based solely on parental preference, to consult their lawyers! (31) In her book The Ethical Canary, Somerville, a Canadian, argues physicians who undertake infant male circumcision could be legally liable for medical malpractice (civil liability in battery or negligence), which can result in an award of damages simply for carrying out the circumcision, even if it was competently performed (and many are botched with resulting horror stories of physical damage and death.) They could also, as explained, be charged with criminal liability for assault.
In both ethics and law, a physician has a primary obligation of personal care to the patient (not the parent). In France, journalist Michel Orcel has pointed out the absurdity of arguing over Muslim head-scarf law when "ritual circumcision is still an elective amputation done on a subject who cannot resist mentally or physically."
He says Article 16-3 of the French Civil Code is perfectly clear: "The physical integrity of a person cannot be violated except in cases of medical necessity. The consent of the person must be obtained beforehand except in cases where the person's condition necessitates a therapeutic intervention to which the person is incapable of giving consent..." In this country, attorney J. Steven Svoboda, a former Human RightsFellow at Harvard Law School, recently founded Attorneys for the Rights of the Child. "Our position is that circumcision is medical malpractice," he explains.
"The medical profession, which has perpetuated this tragicdisfigurement of baby boys' genitals, will now be challenged by anorganization of legal professionals." The courts are considering many cases. Samples: On July 22, 1995, a jury in Montgomery, Alabama, found Jackson Hospital and Clinic guilty of negligence in a case where a newborn was mistakenly circumcised against his mother's wishes. The minor plaintiff was awarded $65,000.
More recently a Suffolk County New York teen won an undisclosed settlement from a hospital and the doctor who circumcised him . He sued because his mother's permission was obtained while she was debilitated by the effects of a Caesarian section and painkillers – a common scenario.
"Never again can someone say that a young man who is dissatisfied with his circumcision as an infant is being frivolous when he objects to his mutilation and brings suit to obtain justice," said Llewellyn, his attorney.
Based in Georgia, Llewellyn's firm specializes "wrongful circumcision" and has handled about 20 cases, such as where the mother opposes a father's desire to have a son circumcised. "Doctors need to be sued," he said. "The only thing people seem to understand is lawsuits and money."
He believes it is women who need to take up this issue and defend their sons, he said.
"Fathers aren't going to do it because they won't acknowledge the wrong that has been done to them."
And the only way circumcision rate will be reversed, Kristen O'Hara contends, is to make people aware that women are the primary victims, since they are the ones who enduring discomfort, punishing blows, and lack of orgasm.
"The man suffers too, of course, because when women loseinterest in sex, men are deprived. And when it ultimately affects the love bond, and can lead to divorce, it's a tragedy for everyone."
Endnotes:
1. A conservative figure according to restoration activist Ron Low, Chicago.
2. Taylor, John, The Ridged Band website (http://research.cirp.org/abstr1.html)
3. The oldest documentary evidence for circumcision comes fromEgypt. Tomb artwork from the Sixth Dynasty (2345 - 2181 BC)shows men with circumcised penises……The examination of Egyptian mummies has found both circumcised and uncircumcised men. http://www.wikipedia.com/
4. Taylor, John, Lockwood, A.P., Taylor, A.J. "The prepuce: specialized mucosa of the penis and its loss to circumcision," British Journal of Urology, 1996, Vol. 77, pp. 291-295
5. O'Hara, Kristen and Jeffrey. Sex As Nature Intended It. Turning Point Publications, (Hudson, Mass.) 2002, p. 141.
6. See how the foreskin works in animation: http://www.circumstitions.com/Works.html
7. Human Sexuality: an Encyclopedia edited by Vern L Bullough and Bonnie Bullough New York: Garland Pub., 1994 p. 119-122.
8. Simple tape – a man stretches his shaft skin then tapes it in place and applies tension with a strap or string; devices such as the TugAhoy ( http://www.tugahoy.com/); RECAP method (recap_ez@hotmail.com) or (TLCTugger@Juno.com) Other options, surf
www.NORM-socal.org.
9. The full title is The Joy of Uncircumcising! Exploring History, Myths, Psychology, Restoration, Sexual Pleasure and Human Rights, 2nd Ed., by Jim Bigelow, Ph.D. Hourglass/pprbk. 1995.
10. She went on to found NOCIRC, the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers.
11. For more details see sexasnatureintendedit.com
12. Northrup is author of Women's Bodies, Women's Choices, 1998, The Wisdom of Menopause, 2003 and Mother-Daughter Wisdom, 2005.
13. O'Hara and others defend describing male circumcision as genital mutilation.
14. Goldman, Ron, Circumcision, The Hidden Trauma, How an American Cultural Practice Affects Infants and Ultimately Us All, Vanguard Publications, 1997, p 73.
15. For a complete discussion see Say No to Circumcision! 40 Compelling Reasons, by Thomas J. Ritter, MD, and George C. Denniston, MD. Second Edition. Hourglass Book Publishing, 1996)
16. Fleiss, with Frederick Hodges, has written "Nontherapeutic Circumcision Should Not Be Performed," American Medical News, vol. 38, no. 26 (July 17, 1995)
17. Angel, Money. Treatment Of Disease In Children. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston. 1887.
18. Jefferson C. Crossland, MD, "The Hygiene of Circumcision," New York Medical Journal, 1891. 19. Coleman, page 60. 20. Coleman, page 293.21. http://www.circumstitions.com/22. Coleman discusses the long-term psychological effects of circumcision on children and adults, p82-123.23. Glick, Leonard. Marked in Your Flesh, -Circumcision From Ancient Judea to Modern America, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 29.24. Glick, p. 3125. Glick, p. 6726. Schoen's pro-circumcision website is www.medicirc.org
27. Somerville, Margaret A. The Ethical Canary Science, Society and the Human Spirit, Viking/Penguin Canada, Toronto, hardcover, 344 pages (chapter 8, pp. 202-219); or www.intact.ca/canary.htm.
28. http://www.islamonline.net/askaboutislam
29. Aldeeb's homepage: http://go.to/nonviolence
30. Jenkins, Mark. "Separated at Birth - Did Circumcision Ruin Your Sex Life?" Men's Health July/August 1998.
31. For more legal cases see http://www.circumstitions.com/Law.html
The following related essay is by Deane Jordan, author of 1,001 Facts Somebody Screwed Up and 1,001 More facts Somebody Screwed Up, Longstreet Press)
By Deane Jordan
Parents sometimes do to children things which if they did to adults would be crimes.
If one strapped down an adult, and then without anesthesia or his permission, cut off his foreskin, one would have committed several crimes: False imprisonment, sexual assault, and sexual battery are at least three. You also would have diminished his sexual pleasure for life, a damage he and his mate could sue over in civil court.
Yet when this same injury is done to an infant we not only ignore the violation of his rights and the permanent loss, we also make the false claim that it is good for him. It is as good as cutting off an eyelid, and as painful as skinning his finger alive and cutting off the fingernail. It is as rational and justified as cutting off a baby girl's nipples.
If medical benefits were the reason for involuntary circumcision it would have ended decades ago because years of research have shown it provides is no significant benefit to him or his sexual partner. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Thus, the most common medical assault in the United States is also the least justified.
It is difficult to find an argument for involuntary circumcision other than the only way to perpetuate the mutilation is to force it upon those who cannot say no. Indeed, given circumcision's persistence through history, it is rather clear that urge to mutilate is the one constant element whereas the unfounded justifications change with time.
Doctors used to claim it cured epilepsy. Now they say it is hygienic. Both claims are false. There is also the issue of denial.
Circumcising others is a way to deny ones own injury or the injury one has allowed to be done to infants. It is passing on the pain.
Of course, in the modern era, many parents allowed this amputation based upon the poor advice of their doctor. It is difficult to accuse parents with good intentions with this child abuse thus the real problem lies with the medical profession, which literally makes billions off this injury not only in the cutting but the selling the ill-gotten flesh for commercial research.
Financially, infant circumcision is a lose-lose situation. Very few actual complications arise from foreskins compared to the number of circumcisions done. Treating those few instances over a lifetime costs society far less than the millions spent on involuntary circumcisions year after year.
Morally, involuntary circumcision is reprehensible.
It is forcing onto someone something quite unnecessary and what he would most likely not choose for himself if he had any say.
Adult males rarely want to be circumcised, and most men on earth are happily intact. Ethically, circumcision is a violation of the doctor's oath to do no harm. The foreskin of an infant is not damaged, diseased nor life-threatening. Indeed, foreskins do not kill infants - millions healthily keep them ever year—but many infants die from circumcision every year.
Others have the ends of their penis damaged more than usual or have it completely cut off. This sometimes leads to total genital amputation and raising the child as a girl, but this has proven to be rather unsuccessful. These "girls" act like boys only without penises, such as urinating standing up and a strong dislike of things feminine.
Medically, little benefit is to be gained by involuntary circumcision.
The Victorian notion that the penis is dirty is the most often given reason for involuntary circumcision. Yet the fact of the matter is it is the circumcised penis that is more dirty. The foreskin-protected glans is soft and supple, kept that way by emollients secreted by the foreskin, emollients that also have anti-bacterial and viral components.
The soft protected glans forms a resilient barrier to invading germs. The circumcised penis however is not only unprotected but keratinized, giving it a gray, wrinkled look not found in the natural penis. Keratinzation leads to drying and cracking, creating places to harbor sexually transmitted diseases, and in fact circumcised men have higher STD rates.
There also may be a correlation between circumcision and cancer of the penis, but the opposite from what is often touted. The penile cancer is high in Israel where circumcision is almost universal because of the religion. It is low in Scandinavia where circumcision is extremely rare.
Further, foreskins have estrogen receptors and one cannot help but wonder if research will show if foreskins pick up estrogen from intercourse and if that benefits intact men.
Sexually, circumcision is the unkindest cut of all. It not only permanently removes some 20,000 nerve endings but also a ring of specialized pleasure cells where the inner and out fold of the foreskin meet. It also reduces blood flow through the penis often requiring corrective surgery.
The trauma of denuding -- removing a third or more of the penile skin—and the resulting keratinization-- forces more layers of dead skin on the circumcised glans, burying what nerve receptors that are left under more layers of skin. That lessens or deadens tactile sensations.
Day-to-day friction on the circumcised penis further reduces its sensitivity. The circumcised penis is numb compared to the natural one. And it may be this fact which accounts for the overwhelming dislike among circumcised men to use condoms. A desensitized penis wrapped in latex feels little, like kissing through a screen. It is more than ironic that an injury perpetuated by doctors under the guise of prevention is actually causing more disease. Rarely discussed but also important is how circumcision affects a man's sexual partner. The most comprehensive study to date shows circumcised men engage in more non-mainstream sexual activity than do their uncut brethren. They engage in more homosexual and heterosexual anal sex and in more homosexual oral sex. The theory given is that the desensitized penis leads them to engage in rougher sex to achieve physical stimulation, or said another way, so they can actually feel something.
During heterosexual sex the lack of a foreskin also changes how the penis pleasures her. Without the foreskin it is but direction friction in the vagina whereas the natural penis provides friction and moving pressure. The desensitized penis also reduces her ability to please him during fellatio.
Fortunately, the circumcision rate is dropping in the United States, mainly because of reports in the popular press rather than medical publications. It has gone from a high of some 90 percent in 1990 to under 60 percent today, one third on the West Coast. The tide has turned and in a generation or two the rates could be fairly low and confined to religious marking.
Interestingly, most women inherently know that infant circumcision is wrong, but it is often the misinformed circumcised father who demands the amputation. Fully informed parents rarely circumcise.
In fact, one group of nurses who began to inform parents of the detrimental aspects of circumcision -- including pictures of the procedure and wound—were forced to stop by doctors who complained they were frightening parents-to-be. They preferred parents be fed circumcision fiction.
Research also shows infant circumcision not only affects the mother child bonding but nursing habits as well. It also makes the infant more sensitive to pain. Circumcised boys have a lower threshold of pain than girls or intact boys.
Research shows the brain does not forget the intense pain of circumcision - many children lapse into shock while being skinned— so there may be long term neural behavioral implications among the circumcised.
While there has always been rape, research might show the circumcised rape more than the unmutilated.
There is little to be said for involuntary circumcision other than it is common. And no doubt those who are psychologically motivated to mutilate - not misinformed parents but advocates—will continue to invent spurious reasons to pass on the pain. And therein lies the truth.
Circumcision really has nothing to do with sex or hygiene. It is a willingness to injure a hapless infant, a willingness to force upon him what he most certainly would not choose himself, a willingness abrogate his rights and rob him of a say and choice over his own body.
Infant circumcision is primitive aggression perpetuating itself on the most defenseless among us.
Doctors have a duty, an obligation to protect their youngest patients from this injury. Unfortunately, many a doctor sill cuts for a buck then sells the flesh. That is fundamentally wrong. It is immoral. Circumcision is a mistake that lasts a lifetime.
(Deane Jordan is the author of 1,001 Facts Somebody Screwed Up and 1,001 More facts Somebody Screwed Up, Longstreet Press) ###
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Goodness Not From God
“The greatest tragedy
in mankind’s entire history
may be the hijacking
of morality by religion.”
--Arthur C. Clarke
By Diane Petryk-Bloom
Religion makes us good, kind, and morally pure.
Without religion, society would become chaotic and depraved.
Children being properly raised go to church.
This is what you “know” about God that is wrong.
Hard evidence shows that the more godless a society, the more healthy it is by all sociological measures. (We’ll get to the specifics.)
Yet to believe the contrary is as universal as American opinions come.
Even those who doubt the existence of a supernatural being, think we ought to hang on to the idea of a potentially punishing god -- just to keep us all in line.
To be openly atheist is socially – sometimes even physically -- risky. Your neighbors might prefer to live next to a born-again sex-offender. (cartoon) You have better chance being elected to public office openly gay than openly skeptical. You cannot be a pariah faster in this age of diversity, than to blurt out, “I’m an atheist.”
“But you look so nice,” they tell Florida humanist Jennifer Hancock when she reveals her godless state.
“Then you must smoke,” a teacher responds to the high school student who confides she has no religious belief.
“Ask Sally out, you’ll get lucky. She doesn’t believe in God…”
The social worker deciding on a recommendation in a child custody suit gives more points to the parent who attends church regularly.
That an atheist would automatically not be “nice” or automatically break school rules or be more likely to be promiscuous or a bad parent, is the prevailing American view.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported in early 2006 that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians, and other minority groups when asked to share their vision of American society.
The atheists were not selected for rejection by any small margin of the 2,000 households responding, said one of the researchers, Assistant Professor Joseph Gerteis, and when it came to the possibility of their children marrying into a minority group, respondents wanted them to steer clear of atheists above all.
The study’s lead researcher, Associate Sociology Professor Penny Edgell, said she believes a fear of moral decline and resulting social disorder is behind the findings.
Ten years earlier, in The Last Taboo, Radcliff’s Wendy Kaminer had already observed that intolerance of atheism surpassed that of homosexuality and wrote: “Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles.”
“Who in her right mind would want to be an atheist in America today?” wrote New York Times science writer Natalie Angier in 2001, “a place where presidential candidates compete for the honor of divining “what Jesus would do” and where Senator Joseph Lieberman can declare that we shouldn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that our constitutional “freedom of religion” means ‘freedom from religion,’ or ‘indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”
We might add, where this country’s top law enforcement officer can say: “Civilized individuals,” which he limits to Christians, Jews and Muslims, “all understand the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.” That was then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002.
The sense that someone who does not actively believe in God is a morally unreliable or untrustworthy is pervasive in America, confirms James Turner, professor of history and the philosophy of science at Notre Dame University.
To be fair, George W. Bush did say atheists could be as patriotic as religious folks, but he might have been advised to say so against his own personal view after some objection was raised to his father’s 1987 campaign trail comment: “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens,” George H. Bush said, “nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.”
The Culture of Disbelief, by Yale Professor Stephen L. Carter, pointed out in 1993 that many devout parents see evil -- equally -- in “sex, drugs and secular humanism.”
That’s because, Tufts University Philosophy Professor Daniel C. Dennett said on C-Spann’s Book TV in early 2006, the idea has been “hammered” into us by defenders of the faith.
Even the unabridged Webster’s Dictionary gives, as its second definition of atheist, “… one who lives immorally as if disbelieving in God,” points out University of Pittsburgh’s Adolf Grunbaum. We can be sure “moral atheism” is heavily oxymoronic in America. Yet atheists say they know in their hearts they are just as moral as most believers and more so than many of them.
When we probe these ideas, we encounter Dostoyevsky in every book, article and Google:
“If there is no God, everything is permissible.”
The quote is usually attributed to the 19th century Russian novelist directly, but seems pieced together from the dialog of his fictional characters in Crime and Punishment and, most particularly, The Brothers Karamazov, wherein the question of the existence of God is the overriding theme. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) seems to have gone from socialist revolutionary to religious convert, but it is unclear whether he believed religion begets morality or a deep human need for a moral system leads to the founding of religions. His character’s opinions do not answer for him, any more than one could say Sir Arthur Conan Doyle approved of crime because his Professor Moriarity did.
A lot of people like the Dostoyevsky quote, however misattributed, believing it neatly explains the necessity of religion.
Dr. Laura Schlessinger, whose radio talk show once topped national ratings and still has claims a weekly audience of 18 million, believes it takes God holding hell and damnation over our heads to make any of us eschew sin.
It’s a cheap view, according to Skeptic magazine’s founding publisher Michael Shermer, author of the The Science of Good and Evil. It says, “in effect, that people are naturally mean and nasty to each other…”
Author Mark I. Vuletic can’t picture everyone abandoning their children even if it were proved that God does not exist. “Christians seem to believe it is wrong to abandon their children only if God exists. Atheists believe it is wrong to abandon one’s children whether or not God exists, and that gives the atheist a much stronger moral foundation than the Christian.”
Schlessinger, nevertheless, sees nothing wrong in letting the Bible be her guide. She said she knows homosexuality is an abomination because it says so in Leviticus, third book of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. Her comment inspired an open letter to her, anonymous but well-reproduced on the World Wide Web, which facetiously asks, then, how much to charge for a daughter one wants to sell into slavery, who should be obligated to stone the person to death who works on the Sabbath, and how to kill friends who get their hair trimmed…. all among the stipulations in Leviticus. No answer from Schlessinger has surfaced.
C.S. Lewis, (1898-1963) best known as author of the Chronicles of Narnia fantasy novels, was similarly unequivocal: “It has always seemed ridiculous to me for people to think that you can still have ‘morality,’ particularly Christian morality, without God.”
In a 1972 speech on morality, the Rev. Billy Graham, who has preached to more people than anyone in the history of religion, stopped short of saying atheists are immoral. But he did say: “Our freedom is based on law and this law has been rooted in a faith and universal moral law given by almighty God.”
“Morality begins with the character of God. There is no other foundation for it,” says Anglican clergyman and Cambridge theology graduate Dick Tripp of New Zealand. “He is holy, perfect in his love, in his justice, in his faithfulness, and any other ‘good’ quality you can think of.”
Some would disagree. Eminent English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806 -1873) revealed in his autobiography in the mid 19th century, that his father thought religion was the greatest enemy of morality for the explicit reason that the character of God was not good or just.
Mill said his father thought religion vitiated the standard of morals by making them consist of doing the will of a being, “on whom it lavishes all the phrases of adulation, but whom, in sober truth, it depicts an eminently hateful.”
Eminent philosophers John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776) came even earlier to the conclusion that morality derives from human experience and God does not implant morality. The pious man, Hume came to believe, would invariably turn out to be “a rascal.”
In The Impossibility of God, Michael Martin explains that God is called good while his behavior is undeniably bad. “That is, having purposes and acting on motives which in all ordinary circumstances we would recognize as bad. He is depicted as behaving in some respects as a malevolent demon, in others like a petulant tyrant, and in others like a mischievous and thoughtless child.”
Likewise, Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist at Harvard and author of The Blank Slate, says he’s still surprised at the morality/religion link because history suggests otherwise.
“The Bible contains several injunctions from God to the Israelites to slay the occupants of the towns they covet,” Pinker writes in his essay “Evolution and Ethics” in the anthology Intelligent Thought. “…except for the young women, who they are to take as unwilling wives. Since then religions have given the world stonings, witch burnings, crusades, inquisitions, holy wars, jihads, fatwahs, suicide bombers, gay bashers, abortion-clinic gunmen, child molesters, and mothers who drown their children so they can happily be reunited in Heaven.”
C.S. Lewis once wrote that witch burnings were not inconsistent with morality because, at the time, the witch hunters really believed in witchcraft and believed they were doing the right thing.
This would indicate that reasoning is okay, when it comes to figuring out what’s moral and what isn’t. But much of what we read about why religion is essential to morality is that its morality is absolute and handed down from above. No reasoning required.
That’s just the problem, Dennett wrote in his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell “Those who have unquestioning faith …if they themselves haven’t conscientiously considered, on their own, whether their pastors or priests of rabbis or imams are worthy of this delegated authority over their own lives, then they are in fact taking a personally immoral stand.”
Any “Good Book” followers who think, maybe, Mill, Martin, Pinker, and Dennett are full of it, can easily check out Bible tales, moral models and contradictions within at “Notes on Bible Problems” by Richard Packham at http://home.teleport.com/packham/bible.htm Take Moses for one example. Everyone knows and many honor Moses for handing down God’s Ten Commandments.
“The character of Moses is the most horrid….” writes religion scholar William Edelman. “Moses said (according to the Bible) ‘Kill every male among the little ones…and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him…but of all the women who have not known a man…keep alive for yourselves.” Were the women expected to have any right to object to being kidnapped and raped? The Bible doesn’t consider that a moral problem. Today, most of us would. Our laws so indicate.
Was the wretchedness of Moses an isolated case? Consider Abraham, whose marrying his sister and seducing her handmaid were his lesser crimes. Abraham drove one child and its mother into the desert to starve, drove out his other children and their mothers, and was willing to butcher his other child to please God.
Packham breaks it down for you by Bible characters or subjects, such as human sacrifice; animal sacrifice; war; genocide and slaughter; cruelty, barbarity and violence; deceit and treachery; lying; incest; extortion; cannibalism; slavery; drunkenness; religious intolerance and closed minds; polygamy and concubinage; prostitution; abuse of women and women’s inferiority; abandonment of wife, children and family; hypocrisy; homosexuality; and obscene, offensive and erotic passages.
It’s all in there.
God will punish David (II Sam 12:11-12) by giving his wives to another to enjoy in public view. What would Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority think of that spectacle? (Not to mention the morality of punishing the wife who hadn’t irked God in her own right.)
But, throughout the Bible God likes to punish people for the sins of others.
He likes to kill children.
In Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion and Morality, Allen points out that God says, while making his commandments, “in what is supposed to be the moment of his most supremely important communication with the children of earth…that if a man does not happen to bow down before a religious picture he will not only punish that man, but also his children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren!”
“It is nonsense for the Deity to describe that man or woman and perhaps hundreds of innocent offspring as “those who hate me.” Humans who make such statements are usually identified as suffering from severe paranoia. Why a god is supposed to be admired for so speaking is unclear.”
Atheists are atheists because they see no evidence for God. But they are buttressed in their views by the inconsistency, irrationality, and brutality of the Bible.
Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, who thinks teaching children that there is a hell in which they might suffer eternal punishment is worse child abuse than a bit of fondling by a priest, despises the Catholic church’s “extraordinarily retrogressive stand on everything to do with reproduction. Any sort of new technology which makes life easier for women without causing any suffering is likely to be opposed by the Catholic Church.”
Philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), in Why I Am Not A Christian, complained about the immorality of forcing women to bear child after child until they die worn out rather than approve contraceptives and birth control information. He saw the churches as retarding progress, mitigation of racial discrimination and slavery and “every moral progress there has been in the world.”
Allen wondered why the Catholic church never censured the Mafia or denied its members a Christian burial.
“I’ve known very few atheists,” Allen wrote, but, without exception they have been men and women or principle and admirable as citizens. Of the few truly despicable human beings I have encountered, I regret to report that almost every one of them was at least a nominal believer in one religion or another.
Oft-quoted early 20th century columnist H.L. Meneken (1880-1956) said religion is “so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.”
Harris is impatient for the view to spread: “Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.”
Science/science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), author of more than 500 books, said Bible believers ignore all the patient findings of thinking minds throughout the centuries since the Bible was written. “And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all…”
On the flip side, claiming super intelligence for atheists may be a stretch – for all except Dennett. Dennett has started a movement aimed at a new moniker for atheists – brights. Because they are ‘bright,” he thinks, atheists are living better lives.
“About the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights,” Dennett writes.
Of course, Dennett considers himself a bright and tells those offended by his elitism that they need to adjust their perspective.
What do the facts show?
There are many, examples of atheists living moral lives – honest, generous, law-abiding, compassionate -- but individual examples don’t prove anything –except that perhaps religious zealots should give a non-believer the benefit of the doubt. Rather, those who think Christianity or other religions, exclusively, deliver our morals, dismiss the good citizen atheists and moral humanists as isolated cases of people who will behave well for a short time, but only because they have absorbed the attitudes of a religion-saturated society.
They are wrong.
Not only are some good, moral atheists not rendered good and moral from living among believers, they are better.
And societies are better the more atheists they have!
What?
Social scientists using data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup, and other research bodies concluded, in general, “higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, sexually transmitted disease infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”
Also:
“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
It is the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates are still high; with “uniquely high” teen abortion and syphilis, and adolescent gonorrhea 300 times higher than in less devout countries.
The report was authored by Gregory Paul and reported in the Journal of Religion and Society, an American academic journal.
Paul said evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggests that religion might actually contribute to social ills.
Falwell can say, “If you’re not a born-again Christian you’re a failure as a human being,” but born again Christians have a slightly higher divorce rates than non-Christians and find few atheists to room with in prisons.
Researcher George Bara, himself a born-again Christian, said Bible Belt Americans have the highest divorce rate and atheists and agnostics the lowest of all – although that may be due to other factors than religion, such as economic status. And don’t think those divorces happened then the couples sought religion. Bara said 90 percent of the divorces among born again come after the individuals in the marriages had their spiritual rebirths, not before. (religioustolerance.org)
Of course, marriage in the Bible does not impede a man’s right to take concubines. It is valid only if the wife is a virgin (and if not she must be killed). And a man must marry his brother’s widow. Stipulations that we don’t think the Moral Majority has in mind when it considers the sanctity of marriage.
Meanwhile, statistics show more atheists than God-fearers obey the Ten Commandments –at least the sensible ones – and the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
At a time when slave holders were pointing out that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible, Abraham Lincoln said, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” This is reasoning along the lines of the Golden Rule, which appears many millennia before Christianity. Most religions encorporate an ethic of reciprocity, but monotheistic ones, like Christianity and Judaism, teach that God’s whim trumps the Golden Rule.
Angier: “In one classic study, sociologists at the University of Washington compared students who were part of the “Jesus people” movement with a comparable group of professed atheists and found atheists were no more likely to cheat on tests that were Christians and no less likely to volunteer at a hospital for the mentally disabled.”
As this was being written, sociologist Phil Zuckerman was in Demark finishing up research for his upcoming book, Society Without Religion. As the title suggests, Zuckerman has looked at countries where atheism dominates.
His findings support Gregory Paul’s report.
“High degrees of non-belief clearly do not result in societal ruin, and vice versa,” Zuckerman said in a telephone interview.
Demark and Sweden in Europe and Vietnam and Japan in the Far East, have the lowest levels of religious belief in the world, Zuckerman said. They also have the lowest homicide, infant mortality, poverty, illiteracy, and the highest wealth, life expectancy, educational attainment, and gender equality.
“I’m not saying atheism brings on societal health,’ Zuckerman said. “Societal health causes widespread atheism. Social insecurity equates with a widespread belief in God.
“From Muslim fundamentalism in Iran to Christian fundamentalism in Indiana, the argument is loudly trumpeted that belief in God is good for society and rejection of God is bad. That thesis is badly incorrect.”
Zuckerman is the author of An Invitation to the Sociology of Religion (2003) and teaches at Pitzer College in California
Organic atheism, that is, atheism not state-imposed and enforced, is highest, he said, in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Vietnam and Taiwan. Atheism is virtually non-existent in Africa, South America, the Middle East and much of Asia.
Scandinavia doesn’t have high suicide or alcoholism, is lower on all the other indicators of societal pathology. Religion proponents will point to problems in atheist Russia, Zuckerman said, but there non-belief was imposed. “Totalitarian nations are always a nightmare,” he said, “regardless of religious faith or non-faith.”
If you ask someone in Denmark where the got their moral values, they will point to ancestral Christianity, Zuckerman said. But even at that, he said, they were pagan longer than they were Christian. Christianity came very late.
Zuckerman said he was surprised at the citizens’ “absolute indifference” to religion, even the possibility of a human soul. He asked doctors operating on a cadaver if they thought the deceased had a soul and they simply said they never thought about it.
His over-all finding: “In Scandinavia, people were committed to helping others, there was a general belief in being a good person. Society without strong religion is not only possible, but quite pleasant.”
If atheists have morals but they aren’t derived from Christian, Jewish or Muslim teachings, from who or what do they derive?
The answer will not please fundamentalist believers: Evolution.
The relatively new science of evolutionary psychology says we get our morals from our animal ancestors.
“Profoundly, neurology tells us that we are born with an ability to be moral thanks to evolution,” wrote Dorion Sagan and John Skoyles in Up From Dragons. “We have not just a sense or right and wrong but, as important, a concern with ethics….We did not evolve from animals that were solitary and met only for mating, disappearing for the rest of the year from each other’s sight. We evolved from apes that had to find a way to live together. We thus need to share socially predictable ways of doing things. This, of course does not mean we cannot be self-oriented in our actions. We are out to get the best for ourselves; behind social cooperation is social competition. But we do this like other apes, against a background of finding ways to live and work together in our social group….a world governed by ‘oughts.’”
In The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, Richard Wright says the evolutionary mandate that created morality was the need to get our genes into the next generation.p 325 A mother who takes good care of her children is more likely to have them survive. Thus, good mothers get their genes passed on.
“What is in our genes’ interests is what seems “right” – morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order. Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the very sense of justice, the sense that doers of good serve reward and doers of evil deserve punishment – all these can now be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet.”
Emperor Penguins, for instance, huddle together during the worst weather. Those on the outer edge of the huddle, exposed to the worst blasts of icy artic air, are rotated into the middle of the group periodically, so the burden of the outer edge is shared. All in the group survive, and that is better for all.
Empathy seems to increase as organisms become more intelligent, as one can see in the behavior of higher mammals, says New Age writer Barbara Marx Hubbard, who many regard as heir to visionary Buckminster Fuller. The process of evolution began and proceeded for million of years without organized religion, she said, and will continue beyond any organized religion into the ever-evolving future. Only now, man has progressed to the point where he can effect the direction of his change, she writes in her book, Conscious Evolution. “Humans are bringing more humaneness into the process.”
But that, too, may be just evolution at work. The more we learn about what causes human behavior, says psychiatrist Armando Favazza, the more we diminish the concept of free will and the concept of sin depends on free will. Favazza is the author of PsychoBible: Behavior, Religion and the Holy Book.
Once humans began to write, they wrote about morality. Plato and Socrates, certainly, discussed morality.
Religion, says author Salman Rushdie, was a way of codifying morality already established before humans gave up multiple gods and myths.
Rushdie, who knows how dangerous religious “morals” can be, having had to live about 10 years of his life in hiding due to an Islamic fatwah issued against him for ostensibly insulting the faith in his book The Satanic Verses, said morality is independent of religion.
But what is it, really?
If morality isn’t “what God wants,” how do we define morality?
Humanist Jennifer Hancock says secular humanist define it as acting with compassion toward others. Oh, sure, honesty and responsibility are often mentioned as elements of morality, she says. “But if you say honest and responsible, you’ve described Hitler,” Hancock says. “Compassion is the essential element.”
Moslems complain that the Scandinavians are promiscuous, but by the standard of compassion, sex between the consenting doesn’t rank as immoral. Beheading foreigners does.
Humanistic ethics considers choices regarding shared human interests, wants, needs and values, writes American Humanist Association founder Paul Kurtz. “We judge them by their consequences for human happiness and social justice.” Humanists agree to support: the dignity and autonomy of individuals; self-determination and freedom exercised responsibly; pursuit of excellence; carrying out responsibilities and duties to others; exercising empathy and caring; providing moral education for the young; use of reasoning in framing ethical judgments; willingness to modify ethical principles in the light of reality and new discovery; and respect for principles – the end does not justify the means. (see The Humanist Manifesto 2000)
It might surprise many to find out that Mother Teresa, who was made a Saint for her supposed selfless care of others, believed that suffering was a good thing and did not go out of her way to alleviate pain. She collected vast sums in donations, according to journalist Christopher Hitchens, and did not spend it on the poor and medically needy. Her care facilities were grotesquely primitive, platforms for proselytizing not healing, Hitchens wrote in his 1995 book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens also criticized Mother Teresa for helping tyrannical dictatorships like that of the Duvaliers in Haiti, taking money from swindler Charles Keating, and maintaining a double standard on divorce – no good for the Irish, but okay for her friend Princess Diana. And when she needed medical care she took herself to fancy clinics in California.
Matt Cherry of the Council for Secular Humanism, said Mother Teresa compares unfavorably with an atheist doctor Indumati Parikh, who sold her home in a middle class are of Bombay to open a clinic in a slum area and lived and worked among the poor for the next forty years. She brought not only medical care but education to the poor, and brought down the birth rate by improving the infant mortality. Mother Teresa took care of her image, Cherry said, Dr. Parikh took care of people. In convincing us that religious people own morality, religion has performed an amazing sleight of hand, Cherry said.
Schermer defines morality as “right and wrong thoughts and behaviors in the context of the rules of the social group.”
But what happens when divergent social groups cross paths? In Mogadishu, Somalia, today a judge will impose a death sentence on anyone who doesn’t pray daily. Moral for them; immoral to us.
“Morality is simply the avoidance of unnecessary harm,’ says ex-preacher Dan Barker, now a staff member of the Freedom From Relgion Foundation. “If we minimize pain and enhance the quality of life, we are moral,” Barker said. To be moral, atheists have access to the simple tools of reason and kindness. There is no cosmic code book directing our actions,”
Rushdie said morality is that which is intrinsic within us which wishes to distinguish right from wrong. It’s hardwired in us. “Religion is one of the answers,” he said, “but it’s perfectly possible for me to say we can create codes to live by. One is democracy. We continue to argue what’s okay and what’s not. Slavery at one point was okay. It’s not anymore. Women were not allowed to own property, now they are.”
Times change, technology develops and so we evolve. And so does morality. This is one of the big problems with trying to impose a morality with codes written thousands of years ago, even if they were not internally contradictory. Could the Bible address the problem of how to decide the fate of frozen embryos whose parents have died? Does the Koran say women shouldn’t drive, or, more importantly, should be denied modern medical care because the doctor is a male? Could any ancient religious text say if separating Siamese twins who share a heart is taking a life or allowing one? If we should colonize Mars?
The only way to look at these issues is from the standpoint of the greatest good for the greatest number.
Sometimes it isn’t easy. Moral dilemmas abound. It was easier when we lived in more homogenous, socially isolated groups. But we are a global society now. If we look to religion for our morals, we will have only conflict, because religions don’t agree.
If one religion says it is necessary to stone someone to death for kissing on a beach, and we take the position of honoring all religions, then we must allow that. But reasoning individuals will see that normal human activity is not criminal, and even criminality may not deserve the death penalty.
No one wants “everything” to be permissible. We want to be secure in our homes, free from fear of violence. We do not want to be enslaved, we want to be able to accumulate possessions without concern they will be stolen. We recognize the need for laws and a justice system.
But, as Pinker says, neither scientists nor defender of religion should accept the premise that morality belongs in the province of religion. In practice, religions have sanctioned vile acts throughout human history. In principle, there is no reason to believe religious edicts are inherently moral or that they foster morality, and some reason to believe they have the opposite effect…the recurrence of atrocities committed in the name of God shows that they are not random perversions.”
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“Moral progress over the millennia,” Pinker adds, is explainable in terms of circumstances that encourage people to project themselves into the lives of others and hence expand the circle of empathy.”
We will see this circle grow beyond other cultures. We already have expanded it to the animal kingdom to the credit of the animal rights movement. A hundred or two years hence we may find we are more akin to the Star Trek universe envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, with empathy for alien life forms, androids, humanistic holograms, and a even a ship showing budding sentience. And as Arthur C. Clarke was fond of reminding us, what we can imagine is probably already on the way. There will be things we haven’t imagined that will strike from out of the blue.
Only knowledge can prepare us.
“The way to be moral is to learn what causes harm and how to avoid it,” Barker says. This means investigating nature: who we are and what we need, where we live, how we function, and why we behave the way we do. This gives an objective basis to morality, even though the values themselves are not objective things.
As we know, one of religions’ claims is to have “objective” morality. This claim is nonsense. Even “thou shalt not kill” has its myriad of exceptions, under religion, not the least of them the edict to kill non-believers, former believers, and those who believe in other religions or even sects of the same religion.
There is no objective morality, Dr. Laura. There never has been and never can be standards that remain true no matter what the circumstances. The criticism of “relativism” or “situational ethics,” therefore, is not legitimate. You would tell a lie not to hurt someone’s feelings, steal food to save a starving child, shoot down a killer before he kills more, etc. Those are the easy ones. Think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did the atomic bomb drops on Japan at ending the World War II in the Pacific save more or kill more? Would you be here today if your father or grandfather had been needed for a foot-soldier invasion of Japan? Would your Japanese daughter-in-law? Are all lives equal? Should we consider a brain surgeon worth more than a rock musician? An athlete more valuable than a stay-at-home mom? How about a seeing-eye dog compared to an unemployed drifter? Irradicating a pest that destroys food crops against causing an environmental imbalance?
Some times, discerning the compassionate act, or the right action, is terribly, terribly difficult.
Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle, says no one should be killed –ever. But we live in a world of dangerous forces. “I hate to think of the idea of preemptive war,” Bloom says, “but we are forced to think of it.”
The best hope for answering the moral questions we face now and in the future comes from science, That’s why the current trend of disdaining science in America is disturbing.
Eminent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, who was raised a creationist, writes that there is “something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternate view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.”
###
in mankind’s entire history
may be the hijacking
of morality by religion.”
--Arthur C. Clarke
By Diane Petryk-Bloom
Religion makes us good, kind, and morally pure.
Without religion, society would become chaotic and depraved.
Children being properly raised go to church.
This is what you “know” about God that is wrong.
Hard evidence shows that the more godless a society, the more healthy it is by all sociological measures. (We’ll get to the specifics.)
Yet to believe the contrary is as universal as American opinions come.
Even those who doubt the existence of a supernatural being, think we ought to hang on to the idea of a potentially punishing god -- just to keep us all in line.
To be openly atheist is socially – sometimes even physically -- risky. Your neighbors might prefer to live next to a born-again sex-offender. (cartoon) You have better chance being elected to public office openly gay than openly skeptical. You cannot be a pariah faster in this age of diversity, than to blurt out, “I’m an atheist.”
“But you look so nice,” they tell Florida humanist Jennifer Hancock when she reveals her godless state.
“Then you must smoke,” a teacher responds to the high school student who confides she has no religious belief.
“Ask Sally out, you’ll get lucky. She doesn’t believe in God…”
The social worker deciding on a recommendation in a child custody suit gives more points to the parent who attends church regularly.
That an atheist would automatically not be “nice” or automatically break school rules or be more likely to be promiscuous or a bad parent, is the prevailing American view.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported in early 2006 that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians, and other minority groups when asked to share their vision of American society.
The atheists were not selected for rejection by any small margin of the 2,000 households responding, said one of the researchers, Assistant Professor Joseph Gerteis, and when it came to the possibility of their children marrying into a minority group, respondents wanted them to steer clear of atheists above all.
The study’s lead researcher, Associate Sociology Professor Penny Edgell, said she believes a fear of moral decline and resulting social disorder is behind the findings.
Ten years earlier, in The Last Taboo, Radcliff’s Wendy Kaminer had already observed that intolerance of atheism surpassed that of homosexuality and wrote: “Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles.”
“Who in her right mind would want to be an atheist in America today?” wrote New York Times science writer Natalie Angier in 2001, “a place where presidential candidates compete for the honor of divining “what Jesus would do” and where Senator Joseph Lieberman can declare that we shouldn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that our constitutional “freedom of religion” means ‘freedom from religion,’ or ‘indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”
We might add, where this country’s top law enforcement officer can say: “Civilized individuals,” which he limits to Christians, Jews and Muslims, “all understand the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.” That was then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002.
The sense that someone who does not actively believe in God is a morally unreliable or untrustworthy is pervasive in America, confirms James Turner, professor of history and the philosophy of science at Notre Dame University.
To be fair, George W. Bush did say atheists could be as patriotic as religious folks, but he might have been advised to say so against his own personal view after some objection was raised to his father’s 1987 campaign trail comment: “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens,” George H. Bush said, “nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.”
The Culture of Disbelief, by Yale Professor Stephen L. Carter, pointed out in 1993 that many devout parents see evil -- equally -- in “sex, drugs and secular humanism.”
That’s because, Tufts University Philosophy Professor Daniel C. Dennett said on C-Spann’s Book TV in early 2006, the idea has been “hammered” into us by defenders of the faith.
Even the unabridged Webster’s Dictionary gives, as its second definition of atheist, “… one who lives immorally as if disbelieving in God,” points out University of Pittsburgh’s Adolf Grunbaum. We can be sure “moral atheism” is heavily oxymoronic in America. Yet atheists say they know in their hearts they are just as moral as most believers and more so than many of them.
When we probe these ideas, we encounter Dostoyevsky in every book, article and Google:
“If there is no God, everything is permissible.”
The quote is usually attributed to the 19th century Russian novelist directly, but seems pieced together from the dialog of his fictional characters in Crime and Punishment and, most particularly, The Brothers Karamazov, wherein the question of the existence of God is the overriding theme. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) seems to have gone from socialist revolutionary to religious convert, but it is unclear whether he believed religion begets morality or a deep human need for a moral system leads to the founding of religions. His character’s opinions do not answer for him, any more than one could say Sir Arthur Conan Doyle approved of crime because his Professor Moriarity did.
A lot of people like the Dostoyevsky quote, however misattributed, believing it neatly explains the necessity of religion.
Dr. Laura Schlessinger, whose radio talk show once topped national ratings and still has claims a weekly audience of 18 million, believes it takes God holding hell and damnation over our heads to make any of us eschew sin.
It’s a cheap view, according to Skeptic magazine’s founding publisher Michael Shermer, author of the The Science of Good and Evil. It says, “in effect, that people are naturally mean and nasty to each other…”
Author Mark I. Vuletic can’t picture everyone abandoning their children even if it were proved that God does not exist. “Christians seem to believe it is wrong to abandon their children only if God exists. Atheists believe it is wrong to abandon one’s children whether or not God exists, and that gives the atheist a much stronger moral foundation than the Christian.”
Schlessinger, nevertheless, sees nothing wrong in letting the Bible be her guide. She said she knows homosexuality is an abomination because it says so in Leviticus, third book of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. Her comment inspired an open letter to her, anonymous but well-reproduced on the World Wide Web, which facetiously asks, then, how much to charge for a daughter one wants to sell into slavery, who should be obligated to stone the person to death who works on the Sabbath, and how to kill friends who get their hair trimmed…. all among the stipulations in Leviticus. No answer from Schlessinger has surfaced.
C.S. Lewis, (1898-1963) best known as author of the Chronicles of Narnia fantasy novels, was similarly unequivocal: “It has always seemed ridiculous to me for people to think that you can still have ‘morality,’ particularly Christian morality, without God.”
In a 1972 speech on morality, the Rev. Billy Graham, who has preached to more people than anyone in the history of religion, stopped short of saying atheists are immoral. But he did say: “Our freedom is based on law and this law has been rooted in a faith and universal moral law given by almighty God.”
“Morality begins with the character of God. There is no other foundation for it,” says Anglican clergyman and Cambridge theology graduate Dick Tripp of New Zealand. “He is holy, perfect in his love, in his justice, in his faithfulness, and any other ‘good’ quality you can think of.”
Some would disagree. Eminent English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806 -1873) revealed in his autobiography in the mid 19th century, that his father thought religion was the greatest enemy of morality for the explicit reason that the character of God was not good or just.
Mill said his father thought religion vitiated the standard of morals by making them consist of doing the will of a being, “on whom it lavishes all the phrases of adulation, but whom, in sober truth, it depicts an eminently hateful.”
Eminent philosophers John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776) came even earlier to the conclusion that morality derives from human experience and God does not implant morality. The pious man, Hume came to believe, would invariably turn out to be “a rascal.”
In The Impossibility of God, Michael Martin explains that God is called good while his behavior is undeniably bad. “That is, having purposes and acting on motives which in all ordinary circumstances we would recognize as bad. He is depicted as behaving in some respects as a malevolent demon, in others like a petulant tyrant, and in others like a mischievous and thoughtless child.”
Likewise, Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist at Harvard and author of The Blank Slate, says he’s still surprised at the morality/religion link because history suggests otherwise.
“The Bible contains several injunctions from God to the Israelites to slay the occupants of the towns they covet,” Pinker writes in his essay “Evolution and Ethics” in the anthology Intelligent Thought. “…except for the young women, who they are to take as unwilling wives. Since then religions have given the world stonings, witch burnings, crusades, inquisitions, holy wars, jihads, fatwahs, suicide bombers, gay bashers, abortion-clinic gunmen, child molesters, and mothers who drown their children so they can happily be reunited in Heaven.”
C.S. Lewis once wrote that witch burnings were not inconsistent with morality because, at the time, the witch hunters really believed in witchcraft and believed they were doing the right thing.
This would indicate that reasoning is okay, when it comes to figuring out what’s moral and what isn’t. But much of what we read about why religion is essential to morality is that its morality is absolute and handed down from above. No reasoning required.
That’s just the problem, Dennett wrote in his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell “Those who have unquestioning faith …if they themselves haven’t conscientiously considered, on their own, whether their pastors or priests of rabbis or imams are worthy of this delegated authority over their own lives, then they are in fact taking a personally immoral stand.”
Any “Good Book” followers who think, maybe, Mill, Martin, Pinker, and Dennett are full of it, can easily check out Bible tales, moral models and contradictions within at “Notes on Bible Problems” by Richard Packham at http://home.teleport.com/packham/bible.htm Take Moses for one example. Everyone knows and many honor Moses for handing down God’s Ten Commandments.
“The character of Moses is the most horrid….” writes religion scholar William Edelman. “Moses said (according to the Bible) ‘Kill every male among the little ones…and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him…but of all the women who have not known a man…keep alive for yourselves.” Were the women expected to have any right to object to being kidnapped and raped? The Bible doesn’t consider that a moral problem. Today, most of us would. Our laws so indicate.
Was the wretchedness of Moses an isolated case? Consider Abraham, whose marrying his sister and seducing her handmaid were his lesser crimes. Abraham drove one child and its mother into the desert to starve, drove out his other children and their mothers, and was willing to butcher his other child to please God.
Packham breaks it down for you by Bible characters or subjects, such as human sacrifice; animal sacrifice; war; genocide and slaughter; cruelty, barbarity and violence; deceit and treachery; lying; incest; extortion; cannibalism; slavery; drunkenness; religious intolerance and closed minds; polygamy and concubinage; prostitution; abuse of women and women’s inferiority; abandonment of wife, children and family; hypocrisy; homosexuality; and obscene, offensive and erotic passages.
It’s all in there.
God will punish David (II Sam 12:11-12) by giving his wives to another to enjoy in public view. What would Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority think of that spectacle? (Not to mention the morality of punishing the wife who hadn’t irked God in her own right.)
But, throughout the Bible God likes to punish people for the sins of others.
He likes to kill children.
In Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion and Morality, Allen points out that God says, while making his commandments, “in what is supposed to be the moment of his most supremely important communication with the children of earth…that if a man does not happen to bow down before a religious picture he will not only punish that man, but also his children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren!”
“It is nonsense for the Deity to describe that man or woman and perhaps hundreds of innocent offspring as “those who hate me.” Humans who make such statements are usually identified as suffering from severe paranoia. Why a god is supposed to be admired for so speaking is unclear.”
Atheists are atheists because they see no evidence for God. But they are buttressed in their views by the inconsistency, irrationality, and brutality of the Bible.
Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, who thinks teaching children that there is a hell in which they might suffer eternal punishment is worse child abuse than a bit of fondling by a priest, despises the Catholic church’s “extraordinarily retrogressive stand on everything to do with reproduction. Any sort of new technology which makes life easier for women without causing any suffering is likely to be opposed by the Catholic Church.”
Philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), in Why I Am Not A Christian, complained about the immorality of forcing women to bear child after child until they die worn out rather than approve contraceptives and birth control information. He saw the churches as retarding progress, mitigation of racial discrimination and slavery and “every moral progress there has been in the world.”
Allen wondered why the Catholic church never censured the Mafia or denied its members a Christian burial.
“I’ve known very few atheists,” Allen wrote, but, without exception they have been men and women or principle and admirable as citizens. Of the few truly despicable human beings I have encountered, I regret to report that almost every one of them was at least a nominal believer in one religion or another.
Oft-quoted early 20th century columnist H.L. Meneken (1880-1956) said religion is “so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.”
Harris is impatient for the view to spread: “Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.”
Science/science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), author of more than 500 books, said Bible believers ignore all the patient findings of thinking minds throughout the centuries since the Bible was written. “And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all…”
On the flip side, claiming super intelligence for atheists may be a stretch – for all except Dennett. Dennett has started a movement aimed at a new moniker for atheists – brights. Because they are ‘bright,” he thinks, atheists are living better lives.
“About the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights,” Dennett writes.
Of course, Dennett considers himself a bright and tells those offended by his elitism that they need to adjust their perspective.
What do the facts show?
There are many, examples of atheists living moral lives – honest, generous, law-abiding, compassionate -- but individual examples don’t prove anything –except that perhaps religious zealots should give a non-believer the benefit of the doubt. Rather, those who think Christianity or other religions, exclusively, deliver our morals, dismiss the good citizen atheists and moral humanists as isolated cases of people who will behave well for a short time, but only because they have absorbed the attitudes of a religion-saturated society.
They are wrong.
Not only are some good, moral atheists not rendered good and moral from living among believers, they are better.
And societies are better the more atheists they have!
What?
Social scientists using data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup, and other research bodies concluded, in general, “higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, sexually transmitted disease infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”
Also:
“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
It is the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates are still high; with “uniquely high” teen abortion and syphilis, and adolescent gonorrhea 300 times higher than in less devout countries.
The report was authored by Gregory Paul and reported in the Journal of Religion and Society, an American academic journal.
Paul said evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggests that religion might actually contribute to social ills.
Falwell can say, “If you’re not a born-again Christian you’re a failure as a human being,” but born again Christians have a slightly higher divorce rates than non-Christians and find few atheists to room with in prisons.
Researcher George Bara, himself a born-again Christian, said Bible Belt Americans have the highest divorce rate and atheists and agnostics the lowest of all – although that may be due to other factors than religion, such as economic status. And don’t think those divorces happened then the couples sought religion. Bara said 90 percent of the divorces among born again come after the individuals in the marriages had their spiritual rebirths, not before. (religioustolerance.org)
Of course, marriage in the Bible does not impede a man’s right to take concubines. It is valid only if the wife is a virgin (and if not she must be killed). And a man must marry his brother’s widow. Stipulations that we don’t think the Moral Majority has in mind when it considers the sanctity of marriage.
Meanwhile, statistics show more atheists than God-fearers obey the Ten Commandments –at least the sensible ones – and the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
At a time when slave holders were pointing out that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible, Abraham Lincoln said, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” This is reasoning along the lines of the Golden Rule, which appears many millennia before Christianity. Most religions encorporate an ethic of reciprocity, but monotheistic ones, like Christianity and Judaism, teach that God’s whim trumps the Golden Rule.
Angier: “In one classic study, sociologists at the University of Washington compared students who were part of the “Jesus people” movement with a comparable group of professed atheists and found atheists were no more likely to cheat on tests that were Christians and no less likely to volunteer at a hospital for the mentally disabled.”
As this was being written, sociologist Phil Zuckerman was in Demark finishing up research for his upcoming book, Society Without Religion. As the title suggests, Zuckerman has looked at countries where atheism dominates.
His findings support Gregory Paul’s report.
“High degrees of non-belief clearly do not result in societal ruin, and vice versa,” Zuckerman said in a telephone interview.
Demark and Sweden in Europe and Vietnam and Japan in the Far East, have the lowest levels of religious belief in the world, Zuckerman said. They also have the lowest homicide, infant mortality, poverty, illiteracy, and the highest wealth, life expectancy, educational attainment, and gender equality.
“I’m not saying atheism brings on societal health,’ Zuckerman said. “Societal health causes widespread atheism. Social insecurity equates with a widespread belief in God.
“From Muslim fundamentalism in Iran to Christian fundamentalism in Indiana, the argument is loudly trumpeted that belief in God is good for society and rejection of God is bad. That thesis is badly incorrect.”
Zuckerman is the author of An Invitation to the Sociology of Religion (2003) and teaches at Pitzer College in California
Organic atheism, that is, atheism not state-imposed and enforced, is highest, he said, in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Vietnam and Taiwan. Atheism is virtually non-existent in Africa, South America, the Middle East and much of Asia.
Scandinavia doesn’t have high suicide or alcoholism, is lower on all the other indicators of societal pathology. Religion proponents will point to problems in atheist Russia, Zuckerman said, but there non-belief was imposed. “Totalitarian nations are always a nightmare,” he said, “regardless of religious faith or non-faith.”
If you ask someone in Denmark where the got their moral values, they will point to ancestral Christianity, Zuckerman said. But even at that, he said, they were pagan longer than they were Christian. Christianity came very late.
Zuckerman said he was surprised at the citizens’ “absolute indifference” to religion, even the possibility of a human soul. He asked doctors operating on a cadaver if they thought the deceased had a soul and they simply said they never thought about it.
His over-all finding: “In Scandinavia, people were committed to helping others, there was a general belief in being a good person. Society without strong religion is not only possible, but quite pleasant.”
If atheists have morals but they aren’t derived from Christian, Jewish or Muslim teachings, from who or what do they derive?
The answer will not please fundamentalist believers: Evolution.
The relatively new science of evolutionary psychology says we get our morals from our animal ancestors.
“Profoundly, neurology tells us that we are born with an ability to be moral thanks to evolution,” wrote Dorion Sagan and John Skoyles in Up From Dragons. “We have not just a sense or right and wrong but, as important, a concern with ethics….We did not evolve from animals that were solitary and met only for mating, disappearing for the rest of the year from each other’s sight. We evolved from apes that had to find a way to live together. We thus need to share socially predictable ways of doing things. This, of course does not mean we cannot be self-oriented in our actions. We are out to get the best for ourselves; behind social cooperation is social competition. But we do this like other apes, against a background of finding ways to live and work together in our social group….a world governed by ‘oughts.’”
In The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, Richard Wright says the evolutionary mandate that created morality was the need to get our genes into the next generation.p 325 A mother who takes good care of her children is more likely to have them survive. Thus, good mothers get their genes passed on.
“What is in our genes’ interests is what seems “right” – morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order. Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the very sense of justice, the sense that doers of good serve reward and doers of evil deserve punishment – all these can now be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet.”
Emperor Penguins, for instance, huddle together during the worst weather. Those on the outer edge of the huddle, exposed to the worst blasts of icy artic air, are rotated into the middle of the group periodically, so the burden of the outer edge is shared. All in the group survive, and that is better for all.
Empathy seems to increase as organisms become more intelligent, as one can see in the behavior of higher mammals, says New Age writer Barbara Marx Hubbard, who many regard as heir to visionary Buckminster Fuller. The process of evolution began and proceeded for million of years without organized religion, she said, and will continue beyond any organized religion into the ever-evolving future. Only now, man has progressed to the point where he can effect the direction of his change, she writes in her book, Conscious Evolution. “Humans are bringing more humaneness into the process.”
But that, too, may be just evolution at work. The more we learn about what causes human behavior, says psychiatrist Armando Favazza, the more we diminish the concept of free will and the concept of sin depends on free will. Favazza is the author of PsychoBible: Behavior, Religion and the Holy Book.
Once humans began to write, they wrote about morality. Plato and Socrates, certainly, discussed morality.
Religion, says author Salman Rushdie, was a way of codifying morality already established before humans gave up multiple gods and myths.
Rushdie, who knows how dangerous religious “morals” can be, having had to live about 10 years of his life in hiding due to an Islamic fatwah issued against him for ostensibly insulting the faith in his book The Satanic Verses, said morality is independent of religion.
But what is it, really?
If morality isn’t “what God wants,” how do we define morality?
Humanist Jennifer Hancock says secular humanist define it as acting with compassion toward others. Oh, sure, honesty and responsibility are often mentioned as elements of morality, she says. “But if you say honest and responsible, you’ve described Hitler,” Hancock says. “Compassion is the essential element.”
Moslems complain that the Scandinavians are promiscuous, but by the standard of compassion, sex between the consenting doesn’t rank as immoral. Beheading foreigners does.
Humanistic ethics considers choices regarding shared human interests, wants, needs and values, writes American Humanist Association founder Paul Kurtz. “We judge them by their consequences for human happiness and social justice.” Humanists agree to support: the dignity and autonomy of individuals; self-determination and freedom exercised responsibly; pursuit of excellence; carrying out responsibilities and duties to others; exercising empathy and caring; providing moral education for the young; use of reasoning in framing ethical judgments; willingness to modify ethical principles in the light of reality and new discovery; and respect for principles – the end does not justify the means. (see The Humanist Manifesto 2000)
It might surprise many to find out that Mother Teresa, who was made a Saint for her supposed selfless care of others, believed that suffering was a good thing and did not go out of her way to alleviate pain. She collected vast sums in donations, according to journalist Christopher Hitchens, and did not spend it on the poor and medically needy. Her care facilities were grotesquely primitive, platforms for proselytizing not healing, Hitchens wrote in his 1995 book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens also criticized Mother Teresa for helping tyrannical dictatorships like that of the Duvaliers in Haiti, taking money from swindler Charles Keating, and maintaining a double standard on divorce – no good for the Irish, but okay for her friend Princess Diana. And when she needed medical care she took herself to fancy clinics in California.
Matt Cherry of the Council for Secular Humanism, said Mother Teresa compares unfavorably with an atheist doctor Indumati Parikh, who sold her home in a middle class are of Bombay to open a clinic in a slum area and lived and worked among the poor for the next forty years. She brought not only medical care but education to the poor, and brought down the birth rate by improving the infant mortality. Mother Teresa took care of her image, Cherry said, Dr. Parikh took care of people. In convincing us that religious people own morality, religion has performed an amazing sleight of hand, Cherry said.
Schermer defines morality as “right and wrong thoughts and behaviors in the context of the rules of the social group.”
But what happens when divergent social groups cross paths? In Mogadishu, Somalia, today a judge will impose a death sentence on anyone who doesn’t pray daily. Moral for them; immoral to us.
“Morality is simply the avoidance of unnecessary harm,’ says ex-preacher Dan Barker, now a staff member of the Freedom From Relgion Foundation. “If we minimize pain and enhance the quality of life, we are moral,” Barker said. To be moral, atheists have access to the simple tools of reason and kindness. There is no cosmic code book directing our actions,”
Rushdie said morality is that which is intrinsic within us which wishes to distinguish right from wrong. It’s hardwired in us. “Religion is one of the answers,” he said, “but it’s perfectly possible for me to say we can create codes to live by. One is democracy. We continue to argue what’s okay and what’s not. Slavery at one point was okay. It’s not anymore. Women were not allowed to own property, now they are.”
Times change, technology develops and so we evolve. And so does morality. This is one of the big problems with trying to impose a morality with codes written thousands of years ago, even if they were not internally contradictory. Could the Bible address the problem of how to decide the fate of frozen embryos whose parents have died? Does the Koran say women shouldn’t drive, or, more importantly, should be denied modern medical care because the doctor is a male? Could any ancient religious text say if separating Siamese twins who share a heart is taking a life or allowing one? If we should colonize Mars?
The only way to look at these issues is from the standpoint of the greatest good for the greatest number.
Sometimes it isn’t easy. Moral dilemmas abound. It was easier when we lived in more homogenous, socially isolated groups. But we are a global society now. If we look to religion for our morals, we will have only conflict, because religions don’t agree.
If one religion says it is necessary to stone someone to death for kissing on a beach, and we take the position of honoring all religions, then we must allow that. But reasoning individuals will see that normal human activity is not criminal, and even criminality may not deserve the death penalty.
No one wants “everything” to be permissible. We want to be secure in our homes, free from fear of violence. We do not want to be enslaved, we want to be able to accumulate possessions without concern they will be stolen. We recognize the need for laws and a justice system.
But, as Pinker says, neither scientists nor defender of religion should accept the premise that morality belongs in the province of religion. In practice, religions have sanctioned vile acts throughout human history. In principle, there is no reason to believe religious edicts are inherently moral or that they foster morality, and some reason to believe they have the opposite effect…the recurrence of atrocities committed in the name of God shows that they are not random perversions.”
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“Moral progress over the millennia,” Pinker adds, is explainable in terms of circumstances that encourage people to project themselves into the lives of others and hence expand the circle of empathy.”
We will see this circle grow beyond other cultures. We already have expanded it to the animal kingdom to the credit of the animal rights movement. A hundred or two years hence we may find we are more akin to the Star Trek universe envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, with empathy for alien life forms, androids, humanistic holograms, and a even a ship showing budding sentience. And as Arthur C. Clarke was fond of reminding us, what we can imagine is probably already on the way. There will be things we haven’t imagined that will strike from out of the blue.
Only knowledge can prepare us.
“The way to be moral is to learn what causes harm and how to avoid it,” Barker says. This means investigating nature: who we are and what we need, where we live, how we function, and why we behave the way we do. This gives an objective basis to morality, even though the values themselves are not objective things.
As we know, one of religions’ claims is to have “objective” morality. This claim is nonsense. Even “thou shalt not kill” has its myriad of exceptions, under religion, not the least of them the edict to kill non-believers, former believers, and those who believe in other religions or even sects of the same religion.
There is no objective morality, Dr. Laura. There never has been and never can be standards that remain true no matter what the circumstances. The criticism of “relativism” or “situational ethics,” therefore, is not legitimate. You would tell a lie not to hurt someone’s feelings, steal food to save a starving child, shoot down a killer before he kills more, etc. Those are the easy ones. Think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did the atomic bomb drops on Japan at ending the World War II in the Pacific save more or kill more? Would you be here today if your father or grandfather had been needed for a foot-soldier invasion of Japan? Would your Japanese daughter-in-law? Are all lives equal? Should we consider a brain surgeon worth more than a rock musician? An athlete more valuable than a stay-at-home mom? How about a seeing-eye dog compared to an unemployed drifter? Irradicating a pest that destroys food crops against causing an environmental imbalance?
Some times, discerning the compassionate act, or the right action, is terribly, terribly difficult.
Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle, says no one should be killed –ever. But we live in a world of dangerous forces. “I hate to think of the idea of preemptive war,” Bloom says, “but we are forced to think of it.”
The best hope for answering the moral questions we face now and in the future comes from science, That’s why the current trend of disdaining science in America is disturbing.
Eminent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, who was raised a creationist, writes that there is “something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternate view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.”
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