Should we respect all traditional, cultural and religious norms?

For some time now, circumcision has proven to be virtually the panacea for the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Apparently having a foreskin increases the likelihood of an infected male transmitting the disease to a partner by an entire order of magnitude. In places where the circumcision of adult men is being practiced widely, the incidence of new cases has fallen from the level of "an epidemic" to merely "a problem." There are regions in Africa where the majority of children are orphans because both their parents died of AIDS. This is no longer true in places where the circumcision campaign is successfully pursued. The men are so alarmed by the death rate that they're willing to undergo the procedure. (Yes, some of our members question this statistic, but I have seen no rebuttals that strike me as scientifically respectable.)

For the very good reason that no population has the right to declare what rights another population must have. That doesn't stop us Americans from meddling in the affairs of other countries, but our track record has not been exactly spectacular.

Remember the Law of Unintended Consequences: "You can never do just one thing."

We haven't tried that yet, but the things we have tried have not been rousing successes. The "enlightened" West has been trying for a century to bring health, education and prosperity to "darkest Africa," and in fact since the Colonial Era finally ended in the 1960s our efforts have for the most part been sincere and honorable. But what have they yielded?

No one realized that introducing the public health measures, vaccines and antibiotics which reduced the infant mortality rate in the West from 80% to less than 1%, was going to be a problem in a region in which it was an ingrained imperative to have as many children as possible in order to carry on the family name. All we did was change Africa's #1 problem from infant mortality to overpopulation. Instead of dying from influenza and malaria, they're dying of starvation.

You can never do just one thing!

But one culture sees "degradation and harm" differently than another. Duh? I'd estimate that approximately half the world's population regards the way women live in the west (divorce, single motherhood, skimpy clothing, sex out of wedlock, the need to take a job outside the home, being treated as the equals of men) is degrading and harmful to them.

My mother felt that way, and she was born here!

One Afro-American lady in the Washington DC region lost her job simply because she changed the screen-saver on her office workstation to a picture of a hoodie, and refused to change it back when her boss asked her to. It was reported in the Washington Post a few weeks ago, right after Zimmerman was acquitted.

In the USA, Protestant fundamentalism accounts for a sizable segment of our Christian community. They all read the Old Testament and devote considerable attention to it, particularly the bits that are not "nice." If you're an American, surely you've heard the phrase "fire and brimstone" applied to preachers and sermons. That's slang for the Old Testament.

I'm not sure how it got tied up with religion, except for the fact that the Jews practiced it when few of their neighboring tribes did, so it became associated with their religion.

Apparently the foreskin has a large bundle of nerve endings. It's been suggested that it increases the pleasure of intercourse. So far nobody's devised a way to test this hypothesis.

I don't understand why, since there is a small but identifiable population of men who have converted to Judaism as adults, requiring a ritual circumcision. Surely they could tell us, at least anecdotally if not with numbers, whether sex was more fun before.

Why? Religion is supposed to help us live our lives better. If it makes us cleaner and healthier, that certainly qualifies as a better life. The Black Plague killed perhaps one third of the Christian population of Europe, whereas in the Jewish shtetls it was more like 5-10%. The reason is that the Jews had a tradition of bathing, whereas the Christians believed that immersion in water was sinful.

Yes. But it's okay to feel that if the world could change a little bit in one direction, one would feel a little bit happier.

Wanting the world to change in its attitude toward you and others like you is a qualitatively different kind of change than wanting it to stop eating meat, burning fossil fuels or practicing genital mutilation.

We all would. I can't speak for all of us, but for me most of those crappy choices were made when I was very young and could not possibly have foreseen the consequences. Every adult lives with the consequences of the decisions some dumb kid made forty years ago.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Religion has arguably been the cause of most of the government-sponsored violence, or "wars," for the past half millennium. (Remember that communism is an offshoot of Christianity. "To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability" is Karl Marx's elaboration of his favorite passage in the Book of Acts, and this is the basis of the fairytale economic system in which what a man takes from civilization need not correlate with what he gives back.)

Religion is certainly the dagger being held over our heads today, as the Christians, Muslims and Jews seem poised to start a three-way Nuclear Holy War.

 

Exactly! If two cultures disagree on something, there is no way to decide that one is right and one is wrong. They must both be allowed to test their beliefs in the crucible of reality.

At this moment in human history, international law. Every nation is granted sovereignty, which means that it is allowed to go its own way regarding matters that are entirely internal. Specifically, the way its people treat each other.

Only when the stronger nations see treatment which we (by our own national moral standards!) define as so egregious and unfair as to conflict with principles which have become universal (among the stronger nations!) do we assert the right to intervene on the behalf of the citizens of those countries who are harmed or killed by such treatment. And always with the asserted justification that the nation in question is so far from a democracy that the treatment amounts to persecution of an unpopular segment of the population by a ruling class whose authority is justified entirely by reasons that we (in the stronger nations!) do not respect, such as despotism.

And we must be loth to intervene except in the clearest, most egregious cases, since our experience with the Law of Unintended Consequences reminds us that we are extremely likely to cause as much harm as good, and in many cases even more harm than good.