Pretty much.


Or how about just a moral objection to having someone work at your business who discriminates against homosexuals. I cant fire them even though having them work for me and act in that way would go against my moral convictions. Its mucked up.

I think I can make the point a different way as well:

If there were clear morality associated with lawn mowing, this would be different. But since there is no morality associated with lawns, mowing lawns, or things that mowing lawns support, this is not seen as a negative spiritual act (so that it is neutral or positive), and so there's no problem.

It's not that lawns are "commonplace" or something like that. It's that it has no particular moral bearing.

It has nothing to do with the frequency or level of intentionality of the act (as you stated, "a common task is a frequently repeated act which - while spiritual by definition - is one where people are not actively "trying to please God" via choosing a "positive spiritual task" and that even on contemplation doesn't appear to have a significant importance to our larger doctrine), but with the nature of the act itself and the nature of that which the act supports.

I think lawns can be immoral.

I got this guy up the street who has about a four acre field. Ive seen people on it once in ten years. The amount of gas and pollution to keep up an unused field is pretty wasteful. Just saying.

Are I think you should be free to not have one, or to not take care of it as a result of your beliefs.

Not taking care of it hurts my resale value tho'.

Unless you belong to an HOA that has established rules for how your neighbors keep their lawns, there's little you can do about it.

Many cities also have ordinances that mandate the maximum height of grass you can have on your property.

Well, that's true. Bring it up with them.

My pushback to Lemonzest was because he made a completely general comment (ALL acts are spiritual!) which needed some further distinctions to be meaningful to our situation of making a decision between two different acts. I'm not at all married to any particular distinction from that point onwards, although you seemed to roughly mirror the presentation I made at one point labelling them "positive spiritual acts" vs "negative spiritual acts".

I do think there is a meaningful measure of centrality or however one wants to term it to the wedding. Taken to an extreme, I don't think it is the case that the farmer who grows the wheat to be milled into flower to sell to a baker who might use it in a gay wedding puts thought into their action. Yes his action indirectly supported a gay wedding. But he is undoubtably not going to stop to think about the spiritual consequences of his actions. The priest is so central to it he undoubtably will. So what about somewhere in the middle of these extremes? Something like this:
Ya if the baker IS actively thinking about his action, if he IS actively trying to please God with his action or nonaction, and determines one is preferable, then so be it! I suspect bakers are quite a bit more likely than priests to find their task to be a spiritually insignificant task. And then Farmers are orders of magnitude less likely to find their farming for the wheat in the gay wedding wake spiritually significant. Hence why I support explicit exemptions in marriage equality bills for priests and the like, but don't support a blank cheque bill to discriminate against homosexuals in any instance ever. However, a particular person somewhere in the "central to non central" spectrum (loose as that concept may be) is welcome to object and undoubtably one can find some that do object.

Indeed, but for the common place things one is much less likely to stop and thinking about the particular moral bearing. If someone does and finds the act to be spirtually negative, so be it, but for the common acts like mowing the lawn one usually doesn't even bother thinking about it.

With regards to the Arizona law, the "problem" with the spiritual tasks vs common ones is its a kind of Christian secular vs religious distinction that's arbitrary where the rule of you can discriminate whenever your "religious sentiment" is concerned. There are other religions where seemingly common tasks have a religious hue or other times a religion may have a broad prescription that could be taken as a totalistic prohibition in all circumstances where it doesn't matter what the task could be it's prohibited to do it for a certain type of person.

It's not a matter of "potential usage." That's the sort of argument that leads to weird culpability situations, like whether someone can sue a gun manufacturer because their brand of gun was used in a criminal act.

Okay. But this really doesn't resemble the argument being put forward. If someone goes to a florist and says "I want to buy these flowers for a gay wedding" then the culpability of the florist for supporting the gay wedding is significantly different from the situation where someone walks in and says "I want to buy these flowers" and those flowers end up being used in a gay wedding.

Edit: The reason why culpability matters is because this is basically a "conscience" argument. A person can actively choose not to support something. But if that person ends up providing a service that ends up supporting something they don't want to support, and that person did not have the ability to know that this is what would happen, the culpability is significantly lessened, and the burden of conscience isn't there.

You seem stuck on the idea that someone has to be thinking about it. I don't know how to get you to release that other than to keep repeating myself.

At least for my perspective, I don't really see this as being a problem.

How about Nazi doctors refusing to treat Jewish patients? Or is that different, are religious freedoms different from other ideologies? What would happen if a Christian refused to allow a women into church within a couple of months of her giving birth to a daughter?

I was making a similar point in my OP.

America, land of the free to discriminate, and the homophobes brave.

I was talking more about the intersection of the Arizona bill that says that companies can refuse service based on "religious sentiment" and the idea that we could parse between religious and non religious acts in terms of what we'd allow The law isn't a law with a narrow religious exemption for some things, it makes religious exemption the law in everything. In that sense I think we agree.

I thinks Aaron's comments here sum up my point of view well:

I feel like (UM and Aaron) you guys have hammered this discussion back and forth pretty well I dunno how much there is for me to add.

I am kind of sick today so my head is not really clear. If there was something specific you thought I should respond to let me know UM. I appreciate your thoughtful responses.

The point was just to illustrate how one can get increasingly far from a wedding and be increasingly less worried and I took a ridiculously far away extreme to illustrate that point. You have sort of tried to push back at the ludicrousness of an extreme example designed to be ludicrous. It isn't like a farmer is actually going to stop farming for worry that their wheat may end up in a gay wedding cake, and one doesn't need to get bogged down in trying to evaluate the role that incomplete information on the consequences of ones actions has. Perhaps there are homophobes so sever they won't sell their flower or whatever to a baker known to sell cakes for gay weddings. But it seems rather likely they are much less common than a priest who wouldn't want to given the relative importance of the two in the wedding.

It just isn't an issue if the person isn't thinking of it. If the cake baker or anyone else isn't worried about the spirtual reprecussions there just isn't a conversation to be had here. Remember, LZ was specifically talking about "trying to please God"...I suppose I am using "thinking" instead of "trying" but this seems very minor.

I certainly agree (emphatically! and am not quite sure I implied otherwise) with all but the first of the sentences in his quote.

My criticism of you was specifically that your objection to "common action" was a bad one. Namely, you asserted that ALL acts are spiritual. The problem was we needed a distinguishing characteristic of some sort to weed out "positive" and "negative" and possibly "neutral" spiritual acts to know if cake baking for a gay weddings was good or bad. At the same time, however, you talked about "trying to please God", but surely the acts where one is trying to please God is a subset of the spiritual acts (which are all acts). For instance, mowing the lawn is more about pleasing your wife than your god. So I maintain that while of course anyone can attempt to please god and consider the spiritual ramifications of any given action, there are many acts (such as mowing a lawn) where one doesn't bother making such considerations. I'd call them "common" but am hardly married to that term if you don't like it.

While he of course argues with me at every turn, Aaron likewise seemed to agree (and proposed a distinction mirroring my own) that demonstrated the need for more specificity than just "all acts are spiritual". I suppose to consider the point "won" I'd like the same from you.

This is just weird. It's like you're intent on... intent. That somehow, intention must be strictly enforced for some reason. It's just weird. Worrying about how things could "potentially" have consequences or whatever and being culpable for that is not anything that anyone is talking about.

Okay. But then why are you so focused on framing actions as "thinking" about them. When I'm driving on the right side of the road, it's not because I'm somehow "worried about the repercussions" of driving on the left side of the road. This doesn't mean that there aren't repercussions if I drive on the left side of the road, but that's not my active thought process.

In a similar sort of way, someone who has chosen a particular profession or project "to make his family proud" doesn't need to have his thoughts revolving around "making his family proud" in order for it to have that result.

So again, I don't really understand why you're trying to force things through this extremely narrow lens. I think if you just read your definition, you'll see how forced it is to try to frame things like that:

This is just a wrong-minded approach to the question.

I'm pretty sure you've completely misread the original statement, placing an emphasis on something you shouldn't. This is causing you to chase yourself off into some strange tangent that has little bearing on anything that anyone other than you is putting forth. Here it is the original statement:

Your focus on the bolded statement highlights the fact that you don't understand the sentence preceding it. You want to make a distinction in a particular way, and that way is not meaningful. Your choice of language ("common") and insistence on your interpretation of that statement is simply further evidence of how far you've misunderstood the distinction.

I've underlined another sentence, because it seems to apply to you.

One sec, we are talking about someone making a conscious choice between different acts right? To bake a cake or not back a cake? A choice they are making trying to please god? I know you are the master of finding inane hairs to split just for the sake of hair splitting, but you seem to be suggesting that I shouldn't imply one is thinking about the choice they are making! If the cake baker is just driving along a metaphorical road not thinking about the spiritual consequences of this action then there is just nothing to talk about and he clearly isn't going to protest to prospective gay buyers since he hasn't even thought about what that means.

So sure, Lemonzest wants every action to be considered spiritual. Fine. But if we want to make an actual choice of how to act, we have to consider the spiritual ramifications, whether they are positive or negative in your view. If you can think of a way to do this without thinking then be my guess. Until then, I'll presume you are just doing vintage Aaron.

Eh? There is a "conscious" choice, I guess. I mean, I guess you can say "consciously" choose to drive on the right side of the road. But your position seems to be going further in the sense of actively thinking about the action and its consequences while performing it. This is why you need to make a distinction between "common" actions and other actions.

You seem really caught up on this. It's not so confusing. Edit: It's not significantly different from considering all decisions to have a moral bearing (whether positive, negative, or neutral).

The point is that you seem to be placing an active consideration as the relevant feature. Again, I'll quote you:

I don't actively think about being on the right side of the road when I drive, yet there are clearly consequences to it. Even if it's "commonplace" for me to behave that way, and I don't really think about it, this does not negate the relevance of that decision. So this extra emphasis seems severely misplaced.

My goodness. We are talking about a baker choosing between refusing service to a gay couple or making them a cake. This isn't an autopilot driving along the road. This is a decision where they are thinking about the spiritual ramifications and trying to please god with the right decision. And you are going to push back on the idea that the baker is thinking about their decision? Wat.

I mean seriously, if the baker is only barely conscious not even thinking about whether to bake the cake or not for the gay couple, why on earth would it be a subject of discussion? The whole point is that they don't think it is just a spiritual action - like every action is - but one they have determined to be violating their religious convictions. That is why they are objecting! What possible baker objects to baking a cake for a gay couple but doesn't think about whether it is objectionable?

I know you like to find some desperate way to split hairs and find something to criticize about here but my goodness, get a grip.

I'm completely lost at this point as to what your thesis is. You started off by trying to make a distinction about "common tasks":

Here, you seem to be saying that some tasks are more important than others (which I accept to be true), so that those doing a more "common task" should not have the same type of standing to object as someone else (which I do not accept to be true).

When I LZ raised this same objection, you raised an objection about conscious-thinking:

I raised the objection that this is not the right distinction:

You came up with a fairly vacuous objection:

And a new definition of "common task":

I noted that frequency and active contemplation are not sufficient.

And I more specifically noted the problem with this active contemplation:

And up to this point, you have not cleared the table on what you really mean by any of this. I've challenged you on the intentionality when you brought up the hyperbolic example of farmers making wheat that *might* be used in a cake (I must admit I still don't understand the underlying point you wish to make there) and am pointing out that level of thought is irrelevant under the "all acts are spiritual" framework, so that automatic actions like driving a car are still consequential, making it even more apparent that something like baking a cake will be consequential.

So I don't even know at this point what position you think you're arguing or defending or attacking.

Groan. Yes, everyone agrees that if all acts are spiritual then all acts are indeed spiritual, whether one thinks about it or not. However, this doesn't help us one iota if we are trying to make a decision between two acts. Namely, if a baker is trying to decide between baking and not baking a gay wedding cake, then there is a decision - ie it takes thinking - to make. At this stage you and I agreed - amazing as that may be - that a further distinction needed to be made and roughly agreed what that distinction was, namely positive, negative and possibly neutral spiritual acts.

As it happens, people typically do NOT bother to stop and think about the spiritual consequences of many of their actions (although to repeat lest you get confused again by our "all acts are spiritual" definition they still have them). It is rare for someone to sit and pray about the spirituality of mowing the lawn or driving their car. You are calling them "automatic actions" like driving a car I used "common actions" but its the same idea. So we seem to agree that a further distinction beyond "all acts are spiritual" does exist and one uses that distinction to choose between different actions, but there are nonetheless various "automatic acts" that people do without such considerations.

Returning to the beginning, which has a substantially different flavour from the post LZ stuff (since that was discussing the issue of "all acts are spiritual" and the limitations of such a claim):
I here too agree with the bolded but not the underlined. I used "central" but you are using "important"...either way it was the idea that some tasks have more importance than others and in particular I was suggesting this was the case that a priest officiating a wedding was more important than baking a cake or growing the wheat for the cake. But note that this is how *I* see the issue - even though I suspect many others do too - and I explicitly added "for me at least" when I said it. If someone disagrees, that is, if someone finds that baking a cake has the same level of importance to them as officiating a wedding, then so be it. I wasn't doing anything close to ruling out the possibility that people couldn't object or that they necessarily have less standing if they do. Heck, we were talking about deontology vs utilitarianism earlier in the thread and so there is a loose analogy here where the relative importance of an action might matter a lot to a utilitarian but not at all to a deontologist who finds that any action no matter how distantly related and seemingly benign that breaks a particular rule can't be accepted. So sure, if I was a Christian who interpreted the bible as God being against gay marriages I might say something like "for me at least the relative importance of officiating vs cake baking is sufficient for me to reject participating in the former but not the latter". But this, like the analogue before hand, wasn't trying to imply something like the underlined where other people with other arguments had no standing or something.

So noting that we don't seem to disagree with that last (seemingly new) objection, it seems like we have been pretty much in agreement but Aaron being Aaron you need to find some hair to split here or there to make it appear like we are world's apart.

Refusing service or offering poorer service due to skin color or some such could be the result of implicit (not to be confused with subconscious) biases and stereotyping, and not necessarily a highly conscious act.

However sexuality is rarely very visible as a first impression so this seems unlikely in regards to discrimination based on sexuality, which is something a person in much greater regard would have to actively research and act on.