NY City Mayor de Blasio Puts Judaism Above Children

Our innate God-given reason and “revealed”/hearsay religions do NOT go together. There are many examples of this fact. One tragic example that is currently in the news (but not getting enough news coverage) is the Jewish circumcision ritual known as metzitzah b’peh which is practiced primarily by ultra-Orthodox Jews. In this religious ritual the rabbi/mohel, after cutting the infant’s foreskin off, uses their mouth to suck blood directly from the wounded infant’s bloody penis as pictured at right. This has caused in New York City alone at least 18 cases of infants being infected with herpes from the rabbi/mohel, two of whom died from their herpes infection and two who suffered brain damage. This repulsively unnatural, ungodly and deadly religious practice should be outlawed. However, it is not outlawed. In fact, the few and virtually meaningless restrictions New York City temporarily put on the practice of metzitzah b’peh have been removed by Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio. This makes clear New York City places a higher value on deadly religious superstitions than it does on the lives of innocent children.

Between January 2013 and December of last year the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene required rabbis/mohels to have parents who were going to have this barbaric religious ritual performed on their infant sons sign a consent form which warned the parents of the inherent dangers of the Jewish ritual. On the 9th of this month Mayor Bill de Blasio removed the consent form requirement. In the announcement of the lifting of the consent form requirement, de Blasio’s office also announced that in April another child fell victim to this disgusting religious practice. In all probability they hid the fact of this most recently reported infection in April as their announcement of doing away with the consent form requirement was upcoming.

What does the fact that an ungodly, disgusting and unnatural religious practice like metzitzah b’peh exists tell us?

Objectively looking at it, it shows just how ungodly the “revealed”/hearsay religions really are and what a terribly sick way it is in which they see The Supreme Intelligence/God. In Judaism, which all the other Abrahamic “revealed”/hearsay religions of Christianity, Islam, Baha’i and Mormonism are based upon, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament claims God told the 99-year-old Abraham that the circumcision of male babies who are eight-days-old is a requirement in order to show there is a covenant between God and the Jews (Genesis 17:1-13). This depicts The Supreme Intelligence/God as being cruel, superficial and showing favoritism in that God wants Jews to mutilate the penises of their eight-day-old male infants as a sign of a covenant which is exclusively between God and the Jews and relegates Gentiles as non-covenant/non-chosen people.

The Jewish religious practice of the rabbi/mohel using their mouth to suck blood from the infant’s circumcision wound is found at Mishnah Shabbat 19:2 which instructs, “One may do whatever is necessary for a circumcision on Shabbat. One may circumcise, and tear [the membrane], and suck [the blood], and put a bandage and cumin on it. If he did not grind it [the cumin] on Shabbat eve he may chew it with his teeth and put it on. If he did not mix wine and oil on Shabbat eve he may put this by itself and this by itself. One may not prepare a dressing [on Shabbat] but he may wrap a rag around it. If he did not prepare it on Shabbat eve he may wrap it round his finger and bring [it] – even from another courtyard.” What an insult to The Supreme Intelligence/God and to our gift from God of innate reason!

Judaism, like all the other “revealed”/hearsay religions, gets followers to accept foolish ideas such as, for just one example out of many, God making a woman out of Adam’s rib. Once people deaden their gift from The Supreme Intelligence/God of innate reason enough to believe or to ignore nonsensical ideas like this, they are then prepared to also kill another gift from God, their conscience, in order to perform cruel and painful religious rituals like circumcision on their own helpless infants. This religious cruelty spreads from there to the point of religious violence and war against people who have different religious beliefs. The outstanding Deist Voltaire made this very important point when he wrote, “Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust. If the God-given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world.”

Add to this horrific and superstition-based religious practice of metzitzah b’peh the superstition-based religious beliefs in faith-healing and exorcisms and we see three deadly religious threats to children. Helpless and innocent children die from sincere, but mislead, Christian parents who believe the false Bible promise of faith-healing as well as from mislead religious parents who believe in demons and exorcisms. We need to take action to correct these very real, and very deadly, religious problems.

These deadly nonsensical religious problems would not exist if we had taken the advice of the American founder and Deist Thomas Paine. In The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition on page 245 Paine wrote, “Nonsense ought to be treated as nonsense, wherever it be found; and had this been done in the rational manner it ought to be done, instead of intimating and mincing the matter, as has been too much the case, the nonsense and false doctrine of the Bible, with all the aid that priestcraft can give, could never have stood their ground against the divine reason that God has given to man.”

As Deists we have an obligation and an opportunity to use Deism to protect the helpless, enlighten everyone and to make a truly much better society and world. The more we get the word out about Deism, the more we accomplish these vitally important goals.

Bob Johnson

Bob Johnson is a freelance writer in the Tampa area of Florida. He was raised Roman Catholic, but after a stint in Marine Corps infantry and reading Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason he became a Deist.

In 1993 he founded the World Union of Deists, and in 1996 he launched the first website devoted to Deism. He is the author of God Gave Us Reason, Not Religion, Deism: A Revolution in Religion, A Revolution in You and An Answer to C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. He has also written the introduction to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition and Principles of Nature by Elihu Palmer.