Evolution has so fucked up the human mind that we believe that boys need some kind of bloody initiation ceremony to become adult men. South Africa has "initiation schools" where a fail pass means death. A boy died on Thursday in Matatiele, in the southern Drakensberg, and another in Bizana, in the Wild Coast region of the Eastern Cape, on Wednesday. A 21-year-old man died at an initiation school on a farm in Rietkruil, Leeudoringstad, on Monday. On Wednesday, an initiation school was closed down in Letlhogoring in Mafikeng. Fifty-six of the initiates had sustained serious injuries when they were circumcised. Organized religions have domesticated this initiation madness: We Jews have our bar-mitzvah and Catholics have their First Communion, that are much watered down versions of their sanguinary former selves. The best argument for the Jewish religion (which contains not a few absurdities) is to compare it with the absense of religion or the alternatives.
4 comments:
I think you need to send a highly-skilled circumcision squad from Israel to South Africa, a a good will gesture in return for all the kindness from Durban II.
Anon.
I wondered what those people in the blankets was doing doubled up on the soil. Adult converts to Judaism are not circumcised but a symbolic puncture is done to draw a drop a blood.
Au contraire, they are circumcised-the drop of blood is for adult converts who were circumcised as children in a non-Jewish way.
Circumcision is Judaism's primitive blood ritual. I've read that the oldest extant evidence for circumcision is found in ancient Egyptian sources, and it may have been practiced even earlier in sub-Saharan Africa (although not documented). Perhaps the ancient Hebrews picked up the practice from the Egyptians. The important innovation was to transfer it to infancy rather than adolescence or adulthood.
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