For some in Western civilization, piercing an infant’s ears is considered acceptable. For Jews and Muslims, they feel they are commanded by God to circumcise. Of course, circumcision does have medical benefits and doctors are performing circumcisions on people for those benefits. So, to say that it’s horrendous and extreme is just ridiculous.

The problem is that it deals with the sex organ. People have a lot of hangups when it comes to their sex organs and circumcision is no different. If you listen to grown men talking about how their parents “mutilated” their penis, etc. it really touches home that something deeply psychological is affecting these people. They are entirely too fixated on something that really doesn’t matter that much and should not be affecting them 30 years down the road. Instead of being told to see a mental health professional, people are listening to them and giving them a platform. It neither helps them nor the issue at hand.

I think we both agree on the overall gist of it though – gender stereotypes do not work.

That said, neurological genders (which is what is reversed in trans* people) and social genders can differ by a lot. You can’t argue that since we associate something with a particular gender, that’s biological. Example: we associate blue with masculinity and pink with femininity, but only a century or so ago, that association was reversed.

Another example: Lots of people naively wonder why some cultures have fashions for men that we count as feminine. Well, because fashion is a social convention.

Second, no male is 100% masculine, and no female is 100% feminine. Expecting that we be is not just ridiculous, it’s oppressive.

If that’s too far, what if a religion required sex with minors? I can’t think of an actual religion that has, but an entire culture — the ancient Greeks — thought pederasty was good for both the child and the pederast.

Or what about…?

You see where I’m going with this?

That said, those who argue from individual rights against circumcision often fail to see that you can’t specify individual rights in a vacuum. It’s just about the flaw in the concept of liberal neutrality: trying to be religiously-neutral quickly devolves into assuming all (other) religions are false.

I’ve come to see the issue as an unsolvable problem. We either have to give up pretenses religious-neutrality (and step in one political cow pie) or give excessive leeway to abusive practices (and step in another cow pie), or let different communities make their own rulings and draw their own lines (and step in a third cow pie).

I tend to favor the last one. It’s still shit but it seems like it’ll make the best fertilizer.

It goes on to say, that if the fools did not laugh at the Tao, then the Tao would not be the Tao.

I think a study of Evola’s Revolt against the modern world and Men among ruins, With a grain of salt for his racialism, could help to understand the problem. A result of spiritual degeneration has made materialist decadence the ideal of the people. This is also the theme in Nietzsche’s works with the it’s crisis in modernism and his solution of the eternal re-occurrence, the transvaluation of values and the overman. The purpose of the A.’.A.’. can be considered the refining of the overmen out of the rabble. The O.T.O was meant to create a social frame work like that of Rabelais, from which the best A.’.A.’. candidates would be chosen.

The problem is that the times are so degenerate, that post-modern relativism and “progressivism” have joined with industrialism to destroy all notions of values that are not money based. Now everyone is equal, and there is no desire to be self controlled, skilled, artistic, intellectual, unless you dedicate that to the degenerate purpose of making money.

Progressivism counters the cyclical time (eternal return) with linear time line Creation to Eschaton. The notion of democracy puts quantity of people to replace quality, it is now more meaningful to have a bunch of degenerate friends than to make something of yourself. Nobility holds no power, only money and herd force. Then on top of that you have the post-modern notion that Nothing is true or that you “Create your own reality”, which leads to rampant hedonism and self delusion to deny science and sense as “Just another religion” and do deny all Religions as an outside force trying to shape how the individual creates his own reality.

All of this is nonsense, and trying to twist Thelema to suit hedonism and democracy or stretch thelemic perspective to cover absolute subjective omnipotents, are abuses than result from a misunderstanding of the Comment, to mean Liber AL and Thelema means anything you want it to.
This will take some work to fix. But if we at least understand the problems, we can work on restoring the Noble virtues and Spiritual foundation for the feudal stratification which O.T.O was designed to establish.