[ ARC forum 2 ]

Psychological Effects of Circumcision 2

Written by glider at 10 Jan 2003 12:55:20:

As an answer to: Psychological Effects of Circumcision 2 written by Robert Levy, MD, Phd at 10 Jan 2003 00:32:58:

1. What is your age?

My age is 37.


2. At what age were you circumcized?

I am intact.

3. Are you happy with the penis?

Yes, I am now. It needed a fair bit of exercise, though. Thanks I believe to the deleterious effects of the vogue for circumcision on traditional folk sexual knowledge, I didn't realise this until I was in my late 20s. I finally worked it out, however, and now the penis often makes me very happy indeed.


4. What is your relationship with God?

Dishonest. My "official" position - "official" is in quotes because I have no office in such matters - is that there is no God. God as personality, God as the judging, angry, but finally forgiving God of Christian and perhaps Judaic conscience does not exist at all. Like the epic, He is the perhaps inevitable fiction of early literary cultures. In later literature, things become more complex, and it is possible to take the position that God is in fact nothing other than the novel (see Milan Kundera, for instance). God is the relation to other people that the story-telling traditions of the novel have made possible. God, in other words, is love, in other words. He is our very best narrative relation to other people.

I am referring here to remarkable novels, such as The Bothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, The Master and Margerita, The Joke...

In relation to the person - the character, the individual - God (the novel) is our gold standard (though it is worth noting that in democracies the safe we keep this in is provided by the Law).

But it is difficult to forgo the conception of God as another person. In dark moments, I catch myself in prayer. This is why my relationship with God strikes me as dishonest. I try to think of this thing in a sophisticated, literary way, though in extremis, I find myself working with a picture of something that is not so very different from Santa Clause. Well, I say, it's bad luck to be superstitious, and that is all this is. I don't entirely believe myself when I say this, however.

Maybe it's like this: I had a close friend who died when we were 20. Sappy as this will sound, I still talk to him. I reckon anyone would. You can't remember a person without finding you have things to say to him.


5. Are you happy in life?

Yes. But I could be happier. There is one thing would make me very much happier, I think. If it works out, I will tell you what it was.


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