Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 April 21

= April 21 =

Circumcision
What is the real reason the Jewish people adopted the practice of circumcision of male baies? Was it to prevent the boys from obtaining easy sexual gratificatin in accordance with old biblical laws?--31.55.123.188 (talk) 00:03, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Have you read circumcision? Evan (talk&#124;contribs) 00:06, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * There's our coverage on the Jewish reasons for circumcision. 00:13, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Are there Biblical laws against sexual gratification? Does circumcision prevent sexual gratification? (You will find that the answers to both are "no" but you may not have thought to ask.) Adam Bishop (talk) 02:08, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * The reason I'd always heard was a visual way to distinguish themselves from non-Jews. StuRat (talk) 04:58, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * That's a somewhat anachronistic way of looking at it, popularized by Christians a bit more than by Jews. Justin Martyr was fond of the idea that God had ordained circumcision (c. 1200 BCE, or so the story goes) as a sign to make the persecution of Jews following the Bar Kochba revolt (135 CE) easier. "...that you and only you might suffer the afflictions that are now justly yours; that only your land be desolate, and your cities ruined by fire; that the fruits of your land be eaten by strangers before your very eyes; that not one of you be permitted to enter your city of Jerusalem."
 * That said, circumcision is called a "sign" in the Torah, but so is the rainbow. The idea seems to be that it served as a visual reminder (for Jews? for God? for both?) of the covenant God originally made with Abraham. Lest ye forget... and all that.
 * Circumcision has historically been one of those things that makes Jews weird compared to the general population. During the Hellenistic period, it made it particularly difficult to visit the gymnasium without getting dirty looks, and some Jews took to primitive (and, I have to imagine, incredibly unpleasant) forms of foreskin restoration surgery. This culminated in the 160s BCE when Antiochus IV Epiphanes outlawed circumcision (among some of those other weird things Jews do), which made some people rather upset. Evan (talk&#124;contribs) 06:36, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * According to this page, it wasn't always surgery but a leather thong called a kynodesme which looks more inconvenient than painful. The same page also discusses other stretching methods used in classical times. According to this page, in "about 140 C.E., the Jewish authorities modified circumcision procedure to make it impossible for a Jew to appear to be an uncircumcised Greek. A radical new procedure called peri'ah was introduced by the priests and rabbis". Alansplodge (talk) 15:13, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * That second source is truly horrible, not least because the Hellenic period never occurred outside Greece (and the Hellenistic period, which I assume is what the author meant, ended about 220 years before the given date of 140 CE). Priests weren't calling the shots in 140, anyway. Evan (talk&#124;contribs) 22:06, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well maybe, but the same information is in our article Brit milah: "David Gollaher has written that the rabbis added the procedure of priah to discourage men from trying to restore their foreskins". The source quoted is David Gollaher (2000), Circumcision: A History of The World’s Most Controversial Surgery, Basic Books (p. 17). Alansplodge (talk) 01:07, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Preventing sexual gratification (e.g. masturbation) was the reason that the Americans and British started circumcising boys in large numbers, according to our article, with citations therein -
 * "British and American doctors began recommending [circumcision] primarily as a deterrent to masturbation". SemanticMantis (talk) 15:55, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * It didn't work. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  19:28, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Very few British males are circumcised (unless they are Muslim or Jewish), it's much more of an American thing. DuncanHill (talk) 22:14, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Maybe an obsession with cleanliness? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:37, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Also note that male genital mutilation is luckily not common at all in Britain these days, obviously excepting in the relevant religious groups. Fgf10 (talk) 20:52, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Circumcision is not genital mutilation. -- Jayron  32  20:54, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Is that your opinion, or the opinion of the babies who are too young to consent? If a parent cut off any other body part from a baby without a clear medical reason, I guarantee that everybody, including you, would call it mutilation.  --Bowlhover (talk) 21:04, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * The genitals are still completely functional after, the only stress the kids encounter by the time they can remember anything is bigots telling them they've been mutilated. At the worst, it is a cosmetic procedure, and if you actually read our article on circumcision, you'll see plenty of medical benefits from the procedure (including reduced risk of STDs and UTIs).  I've seen parents get their kids ears pierced before they were too young to make the decision for themselves, because that was part of their parents' culture.  Would you tell their kids that their ears were mutilated?  Ian.thomson (talk) 21:09, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, I would (well, not to the kids' faces). But calling people bigots for preferring to have their bodies left the way they were made seems somewhat POV.  On that basis, how about we routinely remove kids' appendices to preempt appendicitis, peritonitis etc, which have killed many people.  It's not as if the appendix has any known function.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:17, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * It helps to not use loaded terms like "mutilation". Scientifically, we can all agree that circumcision of male infants involves the irreversible removal of genital tissue. In most jurisdictions, infants cannot legally consent. So we have a non-consensual and irreversible removal of genital tissue going on. Whether or not anyone thinks that's ok is not a matter for the science reference desk. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:25, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words, as I had no intention whatsoever of starting a debate, but yes, preforming an completely unnecessary medical procure on a non-consenting infant is obviously mutilation. This is why it has been the subject of numerous court cases and legislative debates in many countries worldwide, so far the adoption of prohibitive legislation has only been stopped by the religious lobbies. Calling caring and 21st century parents bigots is ridiculous and insulting. Fgf10 (talk) 21:32, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * If removing the appendix didn't involve invasive surgery, why not remove it? Jack, you're citing POV in this discussion, like it's an article? Like this isn't inherently a matter of POV? Don't want to get circumcised? Fine. But don't tell people who are that they're mutilated, because, when it's done as a baby, they don't have a problem with it except bigots who tell them they're mutilated. It's not like circumcised people are crawling into people's house at night to steal foreskins, so it is bigoted to react to circumcised people not having a problem with having been circumcised by saying they've been mutilated. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:33, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * If removing the appendix didn't involve invasive surgery, why not remove it? Jack, you're citing POV in this discussion, like it's an article? Like this isn't inherently a matter of POV? Don't want to get circumcised? Fine. But don't tell people who are that they're mutilated, because, when it's done as a baby, they don't have a problem with it except bigots who tell them they're mutilated. It's not like circumcised people are crawling into people's house at night to steal foreskins, so it is bigoted to react to circumcised people not having a problem with having been circumcised by saying they've been mutilated. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:33, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Guys, please stick to the question. Your opinions on who is bigoted and what constitutes mutilation are not was has been asked here. ---Sluzzelin talk  21:37, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Need help finding a short story
I'm trying to find a short story I read a long time ago. The details in my mind are really hazy, but as best as I can remember it's about two boys who spend their time shoplifting and spraying graffiti. By the end of the story the boy who is the main character sort of "sees the light" and starts taking an interest in learning. The story starts out with the two boys going out to spray graffiti (the name the other boy signs is "weezul"), then there's a flashback to where they were both in a store shoplifting, and the narrator recalls the other boy telling him "don't look at him" (the store owner) before they went in. In the last scene the boy is reciting all these things he's read about to his teacher just out of eagerness to share them with someone else. Those are the only details I remember. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.254.5.219 (talk) 09:13, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Mongoose and Weasel the Taggers in the collection The Library Card by Jerry Spinelli. OttawaAC (talk) 12:13, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Where does confiscated money go?
You sometimes here in news after some police raids, that reasonable amount of money as result from illegal business has been confiscated. My question is, where does the police send the money then after investigations were concluded? I always wondered. 112.198.79.233 (talk) 15:03, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * See asset forfeiture. In the US, it's supposed to be used "for law enforcement purposes".--Shantavira|feed me 16:32, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * In some places, other seized assets are also used "for law enforcement purposes", e.g. D.A.R.E._Car. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:20, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Civil forfeiture is not without controversy, for at least two reasons: 1) conflict of interest on the part of law enforcement agencies, and 2) violation of constitutional guarantees against seizure of property without due process and trial. —Nelson Ricardo (talk) 00:07, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * It says only "without due process of law". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:52, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks to the transparency of the Bitcoin block chain, you can actually see what happens to the FBI Bit-seizure of coin from Silk Road accounts. JustAnotherUploader (talk) 23:01, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

The FBI said loosely, 'we've nothing against Bitcoins generally; we're just seizing them because they're criminal proceeds from the Silk Road the same way we'd seize cars, freeze bank accounts and so on.' Leicester Police, UK just flog them on ebay  - so would a lot of people. You have something you don't need, you know it's worth something, but don't know how much. Ebay, auction only no reserve. Some police services donate to charity, but the biggest laughing stock is the Jewish chief priests in the Bible, Matthew 27:7. They made trumped up charges of blasphemy/incitement to tax evasion/treason against Jesus and bribed Judas Iscariot '30 pieces of silver' (approximately a slave's price) to identify who to arrest. Afterwards, Judas was apologetic and tried to hand back the bribe. In v4, they told him that was his own problem. After he threw the coins into the Temple (?) and took his own life, the priests then decided that although it was OK to bribe, where it had already been meant it couldn't go back into the Temple's account. Astonishing. --81.145.165.2 (talk) 11:17, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

Paid editing
What is wikipedia's formal stand on paid editing? --EditorMakingEdits (talk) 16:33, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * It's frowned upon, because anyone editing for money is liable to have an agenda. However, editing that conforms to Wikipedia standards is the first priority. Look in Conflict of interest under "Paid editing". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:37, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * These recent articles from The Signpost do a good job of explaining and contextualizing the recent trends in broader community perspectives (and the WMF's stances) on the issue. Many more can be found via the paper's archives.  Needless to say, the issue has gotten around many different Wikipedia administrative pages -- here's a lengthy, but dated, discussion from Central Discussion.  If you wish to see yet more discussions on the subject, the archives for WP:RfC and WP:Village pump will supply plenty, with a significant portion being from the last couple of years in particular, during which this issue has grown significantly in relevance and exposure.  Snow (talk) 03:39, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

"Law and Gospel" and 16th Century Western European Christianity
Martin Luther made a distinction between the Law and Gospel, when discussing the Old and New Testaments. Was there such a concept in the Roman Catholic Church at that time? What was the Roman Catholic opinion of the Old and New Testaments? 140.254.227.103 (talk) 17:35, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * See Christian_views_on_the_old_covenant. -- Jayron  32  18:05, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

poetry
I am looking for the correct wording (along with the title and author) of an old poem that goes something like-- Out of the moon and the stars and the flowers out of the....... out of the..... came mothers, the live giving(or God given?)thing — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:8:9200:520:C43D:F00B:1278:65E4 (talk) 23:16, 21 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I've done quite a thorough Google search without finding anything. In my experience, you don't need to get many of the words wrong to make it very difficult indeed. Perhaps somebody else will have better luck. Alansplodge (talk) 12:50, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I am not having any luck either. Do you remember where you first heard/saw the poem? Any other clues?--146.163.159.12 (talk) 21:36, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I couldn't find anything either. Do you know if you were reading a translated poem? OttawaAC (talk) 23:27, 22 April 2014 (UTC)