God gets a blog to discuss stuff He hates

This supposedly sayeth the Lord:

Of the many human body parts I intensely dislike, there is none I hate more than the foreskin. I believe this small stretch of penile tissue is responsible for turning more men away from Me, the Almighty Lord your God, than anything Lucifer has ever done.

See, back when I was designing the first man, I decided to just make him look exactly like Me. Perfect in every way. I sat naked in the Heavenly Hall of Mirrors for a couple of hours and sculpted Adam’s body to look just like Mine.

And so I gave Adam a huge penis. With some balls. And a foreskin.

And as you all know, that accursed foreskin made sex such a wondrous experience for Adam that he turned away from Me for that dirty-slut-whore Eve.

I blame Eve, but I mostly blame the foreskin, with its thousands upon thousands of pleasure-inducing nerve-endings. Damn you foreskin!

Despite all My best efforts, of the total number of penises worldwide today, 87% still have foreskins. This is a travesty!

I consider every male attached to those foreskins My forsworn enemy! I also consider any woman who has sex with an uncircumcised man equally culpable! As Myself as My witness, they will all burn with Eve in the fiery pits of hell!

These are the alleged ruminations of the Almighty on His new blog dedicated to Stuff God Hates. It's not very believable, what with the pettiness and f-bombs. I did, however, enjoy the post about cats.

A little while back, my editor suggested such a gimmick might be a cool addition to The God Blog -- a regular feature called God's Blog, in which I would speak as the Lord on the big news of the day. I liked the idea, and still might try it, but when I thought about how to make it work, I realized my voice would likely be either dull or melodramatic.

Stuff God Hates opts for the latter. The tone might not work, but the blog has the exact same design, and even object-noun-verb domain, as Stuff White People Like, and that has certainly been successful. It's not clear, but I'm going to gander that they're written by the same Christian Lander of Culver City. Lander launched that blog in January, which has had 28 million hits (that's ridiculous), and by March signed a book deal for their musings on white people. Example:

Plain and simple, white people don’t just like Apple, they love and need Apple to operate.

On the surface, you would ask yourself, how is that white people love a multi-billion dollar company with manufacturing plants in China, mass production, and that contributes to global pollution through the manufacture of consumer electronic devices?

Simple answer: Apple products tell the world you are creative and unique. They are an exclusive product line only used by every white college student, designer, writer, English teacher, and hipster on the planet.

The writing as God doesn't work as well. Instead of being sharp it sounds silly and mean (when is the last time I packaged those two words together?).

Asia is a huge waste of space and I despise every last country, animal* and heathen-commie-bastard living there. However, I don’t hate the topography. Unlike Africa - which I am deeply, deeply ashamed of – I’m actually kind of satisfied with the land I made in Asia (with the exception of the Russian, Mongol and Kazakhstani areas).

No, it’s strictly the people and the governments of Asia I loathe. Why you ask? Because they don’t Worship Me! I mean, for f--ks-sake! I’m only the Flawless Creator of the Entire Universe, but do they care? No!

This was posted May 14, right after the cyclone death toll in Burma had passed 30,000 and at least 10,000 Chinese had died in a massive earthquake. Heaven help us if a book publisher wants to ink this too.

Tribal Affairs: Boxing's Golden Boy was Jewish

There is a long history of Jewish fighters who embraced Irish names and boxing as vehicles out of the LES ghetto. Art Aragon wasn't one of them, at least not until later in life.

Boxing's "Golden Boy" -- a sports celebrity on par with Joe Namath, though never a world champ -- was raised Catholic in East L.A. But his second wife was Jewish, and Aragon converted so he could marry her (and presumably his third wife, who also was Jewish; his fourth, however, was not). From a short appreciation I wrote about Aragon for this week's paper:

"My grandfather wouldn't let my mother marry him because he was a real swinger," Aragon's son, Brad, recalled recently. "So he offered him $100,000 to just leave. And my dad said, 'I can't be bought.' Then my grandfather said, 'Well, Irene, he's not Jewish.' So he converted."

Aragon, who died last month at his Northridge home after suffering a stroke, was buried at Mt. Sinai Memorial Park, a worthy resting place for someone who shrank his conversion certificate so he could be a "card-carrying Jew." He was 80 when he was buried on April Fools' Day.

"Everybody expected, because he was such a joker, him to wink his eye and say, 'Just kidding,'" Brad Aragon said.

Julian Eget, the EVP of the World Boxing Hall of Fame, which inducted Aragon in 1990, told me that the Golden Boy might not have been an observant Jew, except for enjoying the food, but he was certainly a proud one.

"It was incredible for me," Eget said. "It just doesn't happen; most of the time it goes the other way, people changing their names and trying to hide from being Jewish."

Aragon was so proud of his heritage that Eget believed had made the rare Abrahamic decision to receive an adult circumcision.

"No. That's not true," Aragon's son assured me, offering some details I left out of the story. "My dad had his sh-- clipped when he was a kid."

Forced circumcision in Kenya

LIMURU, KENYA — When men with machetes and axes chased Paul Otieno from his home here, they wanted more than his belongings. They wanted to cut off his foreskin.

"They were shouting, 'If we don't kill you, we'll cut your private parts,' " Otieno, a 25-year-old mechanic, said of the attack Sunday. "They were just shouting, 'Kill! Chop them all!' "

In Kenya, circumcision is a rite of passage for male members of most tribes. The Luos, however, do not practice it. In the recent tribal violence triggered by a disputed Dec. 27 election, circumcision checks have been conducted by roaming gangs of killers hunting for Luos. And the threat of forced circumcision has been used to terrify Luo men.

The number of such assaults so far appears small. The hospital here in Limuru, 30 miles northwest of Nairobi, confirmed that two cases of forced circumcision were treated after Sunday's violence, which saw members of the larger Kikuyu tribe evict hundreds of Luos from their homes. One case involved an adult, the other a 4-month-old.

But rumors of men being circumcised by gangs from rival tribes have cast a shadow of fear over Luos, who feel their manhood and cultural practices are under threat.

First off, circumcision doesn't remove your manhood, just your foreskin. (Though I know this was of great concern on an episode of "South Park.") But does this story from the LA Times remind anyone else of this story from 1 Samuel? To me, David's act of slaying Goliath pales in comparison to his ability to collect for God the foreskins of 200 Philistines. I can only wonder why this was necessary.

Holy adult circumcision, Abraham!

At your typical bris, the guest of honor arrives on a white pillow. He's not exactly in fighting condition: 8 days old, spreadeagled, diaperless, still adjusting to non-liquid environments.

He cries throughout the procedure -- cries as he’s prayed over, cries as he’s spritzed by the disinfectant, keeps crying as he’s cut by the mohel -- and then, bandaged, balmed and resting on his stomach, he suddenly stops crying and goes to sleep.

Dmitry’s is not your typical bris. First off, no tears. Also, no relatives, no diaper, no white pillow. His parents don’t even know he’s here. Dmitry is laid out on a table, hands resting behind his head, shorts at his ankles, talking about life in Soviet Ukraine while Rabbi A. Romi Cohn prepares to slice away his foreskin. With a 1.5-inch needle pricking the base of his penis and a shot of lidocaine diffusing into the vicinity of his dorsal penile nerve, Dmitri, 33, stares up at the ceiling and says to no one in particular, “I’ve wanted to do this for the longest time. To be a Jew, you know, you have to go through with it.”

This snippet is from Heeb. Read on to learn about the anti-circumcision movement in Judaism, and to see what would provoke a grown men to go under the knife. (In Dmitry's case, it's a firm belief in Torah and a childhood in the Soviet Union.)

Under Stalin, parents could be arrested, their children placed in foster homes and mohels sentenced to labor camps for trying to arrange one in secret—and to this day most Jewish men born into the former U.S.S.R. don’t get cut. According to Biblical law, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew, but an uncircumcised male stands outside the Hebrew nation’s covenant with God—a covenant sealed when Abraham, at the age of 99, cut off his own foreskin and that of every male member of his household.

“There is no greater commandment in Torah,” says Rabbi A. Romi Cohn, chief mohel for the Jewish outreach program Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe (F.R.E.E.). “Six hundred and thirteen commandments and that is the most important one.”

Joshua also was obedient in this way, making a flint knife and re-circumcising the Israelites before they entered Caanan. In the United States, circumcision was once almost a given for centuries. But in 2004, not even 60 percent of American baby boys went sans foreskin. There have been all kinds of conflicting reports about circumcision's health value or lack there of.

'The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses'

The list from Cracked.com (Parental advisory: explicit lyrics) begins with the passage in Exodus in which Moses kills an Egyptian:

You can almost picture the scene: An Egyptian soldier is wailing on a hapless Hebrew when Moses, clothed in head-to- toe black, drops down from the ceiling. Moving with cat-like grace, he sneaks up behind the soldier and, taking his head in his hands, snaps the man's neck with one savage twist. As the lifeless body slumps to the ground, Moses lights up a cigar. "Well," he quips, "looks like someone bit off more than he could Jew."

The list also includes the stories of Ehud killing the king Eglon and of Samson slaying a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey. Not on the list? When Joshua re-circumcised the Israelites before they marched on Jericho.

What else is missing? Maybe Shadrach, Meshach and Abendego, David and Goliath, Sodom and Gomorrah?

(Hat tip: Bloggish)

'Circumcision accident' from JTA

Bloggish warns you not to click through to this story.

Really, you can try and find out what's behind that provocative headline on our home page nifty JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) Java [tm] news ticker, but why would you?

What's that about foreskin?

This is from The Forward's review of Shalom Auslander's memoir, "Foreskin's Lament":

Consider the poor foreskin: an object of desire for a few, a matter of indifference for many and anathema to the Jews. Like bacon and lobster, it serves as the very definition of treyf. Its rejection is the primordial sign of the Covenant.

Well, I can tell you what I'll never be eating again. (Please, no stomach-turning, painfully obvious jokes.)

The circumcision decision

As I noted last month, the story about how fewer American parents -- even among the covenant people -- are having their sons circumcised keeps popping up. Yesterday, CNN.com took a not-so-fresh scalpel to the ultimate evergreen story. This lede, however, deserves repeating:

On the eighth day of her son's life, Julia Query welcomed friends and family to celebrate his birth and honor their Jewish heritage.

But there was no crying, no scalpel, no blood, no "mohel" -- the person who traditionally performs ritual circumcisions in the Jewish faith. In fact, Elijah Rose's "bris" differed markedly from the ceremony long used to initiate Jewish boys into a covenant with God: There was no circumcision.

"I knew before I was even pregnant that I would not circumcise," said Query, 39, a San Francisco, California, filmmaker whose son was born in 2002. "It's not like you're just cutting a piece of paper off a pad -- there's no 'cut here' line. It's not made to be cut off, and I would never, ever do that to my baby."

Jewish parents decide to not circumcise

This story has been going around for a while. Today it creeps up in the Chicago Tribune, under the headline "Some Jewish parents break ranks over circumcision."

When Leo Grossinger was 8 days old, his parents invited their relatives and friends to a ceremony welcoming him into their midst, as Jewish families have done for thousands of years.

They recited Hebrew blessings, lit candles, shared wine and challah, a braided bread. A rabbi conferred Leo's Hebrew name, Asiel, which means "created by God." When the ceremony was over, the guests ate bagels and lox.

All in all, the event looked a lot like any other bris, or ritual circumcision. The only difference was that Leo never had to shed his diaper.

"I wanted to feel that connection with tradition," said Leo's mother, Erica Wandner. And it was important to her that the baby be given a Hebrew name in memory of Wandner's mother. But neither Wandner nor her husband, Robin Grossinger, wanted to inflict pain and trauma on their new baby for a surgical procedure doctors say is not medically necessary.

The couple, of Berkeley, Calif., are among a small but growing number of American Jews who are questioning what is arguably the most sacred rite in Judaism.

First off, I think some people believe that eating bagels and lox is the most sacred rite in Judaism.

Second, despite the fact that the "rate of U.S. babies being circumcised before leaving the hospital has gone from an estimated 85 percent in 1965 to 57 percent in 2004," it's not universally accepted that circumcision is without health benefits. In December, the National Institutes of Health reported that circumcision dramatically reduces the transmission of AIDS in Africa.

As for why Jews have traditionally circumcised their boys -- and, thank God, not their women, as some Muslim cultures promote -- stems from this conversation God had with a 99-year-old, soon-to-be-circumcised Abraham.

Aside from the certain pain of Joshua circumcising the adult Israelites before taking Jericho, the bris has at times caused deeper trauma, including, in 2004, an ultra-Orthodox New York mohel's infecting three babies with herpes, one of whom died.

(Here's what is being said in The Jewish Journal's reader forums.)