Eliyahu writes:
About 4000 years ago God told Abraham to circumcise himself and his male descendants. This practice is still done by Jews and Arabs, all descendants of Abraham, while also some others have adopted this practice.
Well, no. That's not how it happened.
You see, at some point in the past nobody did circumcisions at all. Most people wouldn't think of taking a knife to their own bits. It understandably seemed counterproductive by the common sense of the era.
Then, with no modern medicine, lots of deaths occurred. And many of those deaths were obviously caused by infection in the penis region. They could see this because of all the dead bodies with horrific looking, diseased penises (penii?).
So, then someone had the bright idea of cutting off the extra skin around the penis so that it wouldn't collect all the disease so easily. I think he did it on his little brother, first... but I could be mistaken.
Or, maybe someone had an accident that caused such a thing and it was discovered without forethought, even.
Kind of like how Svyatoslav Fyodorov discovered
radial keratotomy (eventually leading to laser eye surgery)
quote:
In 1974, Svyatoslav Fyodorov removed glass from the eye of a boy who had been in an accident. The boy, who required eyeglasses for correction of myopia caused by astigmatism, fell off his bicycle. His glasses shattered on impact, and glass particles lodged in both eyes. To save the boy's vision, Fyodorov performed an operation which consisted of making numerous radial incisions extending from the pupil to the periphery of the cornea in a radial pattern like the spokes of a wheel. After the glass was removed by this method and the cornea healed, Fyodorov found that the boy's visual acuity had improved significantly.
Eventually, it became obvious that cutting off the extra skin from the penis made it easier to stay healthy and away from disease.
Then, some folks wrote it down in a book and called it circumcision.
But, because it had been so many hundreds of years since they started the practice, they forgot how it all started.
To them, it seemed difficult to imagine that someone would hurt themselves in such a way on purpose... so they just said exactly what you're saying today: "God did it."
Made sense then... not so much now.