RickD wrote:Because I think it's morally wrong for a man to vigorously suck a baby's penis, first of all. And second, the procedure isn't sanitary.
The "it's cultural so it's not wrong" factor doesn't fly with me. Perhaps you also would go along with the cultural custom of Bacha Bazi? Maybe you'd just say "Meh" and "ick" to that too.
There are things that I believe are wrong because they are wrong. A man vigorously sucking a baby boy's penis, definitely falls into that category. Whether or not it has any sexual meaning. And if sucking baby penises doesn't infuriate you in itself, surely men with herpes sucking on baby penises should elicit more than a "Meh".
I've already commented on the sanitation issue. That
does have ethical ramifications. I'm talking about the ritual itself. If a man does not have herpes, what makes the act of a man sucking on a baby's penis unethical
in and of itself? If there is no sexual connotation, then to what do you point that makes it wrong?
So you say, "It's wrong because it's wrong." But that doesn't fly. Nothing else is in that category. That's not what "objective morality" means. Murder is wrong. Why? We dont' say, "It's wrong because it's wrong." There are
reasons murder is wrong, not the least of which is because it violates a persons' fundamental right to life. More than that, it is uncharitable in the highest degree possible. And why is it wrong to be uncharitable? Not because it "just is," but because the essence of goodness is charity. That which lacks charity lacks goodness, and since goodness is a real thing, to the degree something lacks goodness, it has been deprived of the essence of what it ought to be. Thus, it is
objectively evil.
You can go through everything morally wrong and so analyze it. Are you saying that for a man to such a baby's penis is uncharitable? On what basis? Maybe you are right, but you have to do more than just assert it.
Now, BW makes an interesting case, but he is taking a very different approach. He says it is wrong because it violates the very Scriptures they are trying to uphold. So, in a similar manner, we might say that some supposedly Christian practices are, in fact, immoral (plenty of Christians, for instance, believe that they ought to send their last time to the TV evangelist). Of course, even granting they are wrong about their interpretation of the Torah, the argument only holds if the Torah's
ritual law is still prescriptive. Thus, it is not unethical to eat pork because we are no longer under the Law. In fact, we could argue that the ritual is immoral because it attempts to keep the Law in the first place. So Byblos can tell you that, on Catholic theology, keeping the passover meal in a
religious sense is a sin (and on Catholic theology, a grave sin indeed!), because it fundamentally denies the fact that Christ has come. And so, we could say that the ritual itself is evil because it attempts to uphold the Law. But, of course, on that argument, we may as well say that
all Torah-rituals are unethical in that sense, and that doesn't strike me as the kind of problem you have with this. You seem to be objecting to the ritual on a
general basis, not on a
special basis. So I think BW's special argument is defensible. I've not seen a defense for your general argument.
I'm not saying you don't have one. I'm saying that, as bizarre as the ritual is, I haven't seen anything presented to show it is intrinsically unethical. You don't get to just assert it. If stupid atheist arguments asserted without evidence can and should be dismissed without evidence, then we don't get to make claims without evidence, either.
