No. I did not define it as you did. I OBJECTED to your definition.

I've explicitly given reasons for why this should be rejected. It's not a new thing, I rejected from the outset. The frequency of an act and the intentionality while engaging in it are not relevant.

I just don't know how you can read what I've written and get the impression that I've endorsed your definition. You will notice that I've never *DEFINED* the distinction between positive and negative spiritual acts. I did give an example and an analogy with morality to help you to understand:

So let me restate my position:

1) I reject your definition of "common task." I find that frequency is irrelevant and that the active contemplation of the activity is unnecessary.
2) I'm not rejecting that people must be "think about the task" at some point if they are to find a reason to object to performing the task. But that is different from the active contemplation of that aspect of the task as it is being performed. So I reject your lawn-mowing example as an example of something that is "common" for the reason you have stated: "As in, when someone goes to mow the lawn, I doubt they are even thinking of God or spirituality or anything like this, they are just doing a common chore."
3) There *IS* a distinction between tasks, but that distinction is not related to the commonality of it, but rather a judgment of the nature of the task itself, including what the actions may support.

Completely off topic: so if making a gay wedding cake is a sin or whatever moral bad thing, does that mean that any baker who mistakenly put two men's names on a cake (by misreading or by not paying attention) went to confession to seek god's forgiveness for inadvertently supporting gay marriage?

Should people be able to discriminate against blacks because of the 'curse of Ham' belief?

If Christians want to deny services to gays and lesbians based on their religious beliefs at least they should be consistent or else be called hypocrites.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...ge-debate.html

I only skimmed the article, but it appears to be mostly based on a misrepresentation of the position. The underlying claim is not to refuse to support a gay marriage because the people are sinners. And the rejection of participating in a gay marriage ceremony is not speculative in the sense that one is "guessing" about the nature of the activity that one is involving themselves with:

I understand the perspective that the author is coming from, but it just appears to be groundless ranting. (And yes, I recognize that the author is a Christian. That doesn't automatically mean that his portrayal of the opposing position is correct.) This is not dissimilar to uke's exaggerated flour mill example:

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Yea it is a disadvantage that homosexual couples wear their gender on their sleeves as opposed to adulterers and fornicators. Makes it easier for Christians to discriminate. Maybe we should do something with adulterers, make them wear something of some kind.

You're still making the same error. There's the issue of conscience and culpability.

Let's say a man rolls up to a hotel with three children in tow. Is there a sufficient reason to withhold access to the facility? But as it turns out, the man is actually kidnapping the three children. Is the hotel manager morally culpable for providing housing for the kidnapper? No.

Now let's say we have the same situation, except the man when he comes in tells the front desk that he's kidnapping the children. If the front desk does not act on this information, then the hotel becomes culpable.

This is the exact same presentation as I gave before:

If a group of people came to a hotel and stated that they were going to do something that the hotel owner felt was immoral, I would grant the hotel owner the authority to deny them access (under the same conditions I stated earlier, namely the accessibility of similar accommodations). I know that this isn't the current law in most places.

We are saying the same thing. You grant the property owner the right to discriminate at his leisure. Some attributes of the discriminated groups are easier to hide than others, so the discrimination is based on convenience, not on some presumption of innocence. A cake maker could ask for anything before making a cake for a wedding; an affidavit certifying no fornication has occurred, that a divorce was made according to some religious law, but they usually don't because of convenience. Gay marriage is just easier to discriminate against because their 'culpability' is easily seen.

Also what about the 'curse of Ham'? should a religious believe about the inferiority of blacks be enforced? It would seem rather easy to presume all blacks were culpable of that particular belief based on their skin color.

Sure. It's harder to hide some things than others. But if you're having a ceremony about something, it's quite clear that you're not trying to hide it.

Also, the presumption of innocence exists until there's a reason for it not to exist, such as putting two male or two female names on a cake.

Sure, the baker can ask anything they want. And there is a sense in which there is a convenience factor. But it's their business, and they can choose to engage in such behaviors or not engage in such behaviors.

It is true that some people believe the curse of Ham is dark skin, but that's a minority viewpoint (and I believe minority by a huge margin).

Also, it's not at all clear that there's some moral culpability passed down from generation to generation, even if the markings of skin color are passed down. I just don't know of anyone (in today's world) who thinks moral culpability is passed along like that.

But if someone believed these two things, I think they should be free to deny service. And I think that people who disagree with that company should be free to not be patrons of that company.

I just noticed you changed your post. The culpability is with regards to the baker, not the gay couple. So this sentence does not make sense in the context of the argument being presented.

What do you think should happen if a black person sat at the lunch counter of a place that refused service to blacks based on the 'curse of Ham'? For convenience sake let's say it's call it Woolworth's

I don't think there's anything that "should" happen. That is, I don't think there's a clear prescription for how this should be approached or addressed in the abstract. If it's the only lunch counter in the area, it's definitely a problem. (See the principles I laid out earlier.) If there's another lunch counter across the street, then I think a reasonable thing to do is for that the person to go across the street to each lunch, and support a business that will take their money.

I have to admit that I have no idea what you're referring to.

I changed it to make it clearer. No you're saying the baker should give their patrons a 'presumption of innocence' with regards to breaking whatever their perception of Biblical law is including fornication and adultery but because homosexual marriages can't hide their 'culpability' like a fornicator can they are always found 'culpable'. Meanwhile fornicators and adulters are serviced because the baker is too lazy to investigate. The end result is an uneven enforcement of this person's perceived Biblical law. F*ck all you want just don't tell the baker, you'll get a cake, marry the same sex, no cake for you.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/...truggle-2.html

.http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins

It's a fine ideal until you realize that without preceding history of legislative acts against discrimination such businesses have a tendency to burn down or have their permits revoked.

You mean the non believers in the 'Curse of Ham' side of town aka the black side of town?

I know the black side of town has historically supported black patrons, the white side of town? Not so much.

Bolded is clearly false. First I offer a distinction without the labels positive & negative. Then you introduce the labels of positive and negative spiritual acts and elaborate on how those are to be understood. I follow up by endorsing your labels and exposition of them and noting that it closely followed mine. How on earth is this an objection, they seem nearly identical?
Notice that the positive vs negative distinction is not - and never was - meant to be equivalent to a distinction between common and important tasks. I think perhaps you have gotten the two distinctions confused and thought perhaps these were the same distinction? That I was trying to imply that positive and important were synonymous and common and negative, or something like this? Remember the context of this positive/negative distinction we both agree on was to point out to LZ that "all acts are spiritual" is useless for making active choices, we need a further distinction of this nature.


On frequency, you have blown a relatively insignificant part way out of portion. That it is frequent only speaks to the idea that people are unlikely to stop and think about it. We don't think about the morality of driving down the road every day because its something we do all the time. But the buck stops there, obviously that doesn't imply the common thing is or is not spiritually positive or anything like that and I wouldn't suggest otherwise. I threw it into the definition because without it the word "common" wouldn't make any sense, but its importance is pretty limited outside of just identifying that people are less likely to stop every time and think about it due to its commonality.

As for the bolded, this is either true or false depending on what you mean. It is undoubtably true that whether one thinks about it doesn't change its moral nature. I have repeatedly pointed out that I am not in the least denying it but you keep seeming to think I am. However, when it comes to the task at hand which is actively deciding between two options obviously considering its morality is necessary to being able to make a spiritual choice. If someone doesn't stop to think about it - perhaps because it is so common - then they don't make a spiritual choice.


Okay...so you want to include people that don't think about the spiritual ramifications of the cake as they are actually making it, but at some other time they do think about its spiritual ramifications? Sure, that is fine, I care not when the thinking happens, I was just noting its necessity when making a spiritual decision since you seemed to strongly object to my use of the word "think" for this decision.






I've explicitly given reasons for why this should be rejected. It's not a new thing, I rejected from the outset. The frequency of an act and the intentionality while engaging in it are not relevant.[/QUOTE]

Obviously. Again, it seems like you are trying really hard to find some way to object but most of the time it is by explicitly or implicitly strawmaning me. I suspect that people are much more likely to judge cake baking as not being sufficiently central to the wedding to render a negative judgement on it...in fact I suspect many might not even stop to think about it. Of course some people have and will continue to find a negative judgement against it, c'est la vie.

I can see why you're confused. The baker is making a decision based on his or her own culpability in supporting activities that he or she is choosing to support. It's true that it requires some judgment of the customer's activities ("Do I support this or not?"). But the appropriate language for that is closer to "guilty/not guilty" (or "innocent/not innocent") than "culpable/not culpable."

First, it's not a matter of "enforcing" Biblical law. That is, by not baking the cake, the baker is not playing any sort of "enforcement role." Again, this error probably stems from your misunderstanding of the position rather than an error in the position itself.

Second, nobody said that it's the baker's responsibility to investigate these things. As I already stated, the baker can treat everyone with the presumption of innocence until there's something to indicate otherwise. That means that there are things that can happen without the baker's knowledge and the baker won't be culpable. I'll requote my position because you seem to have not followed it:

And I'll even requote an explicit example I gave just before stating that principle:

Huh? At this point, I don't even know if you're responding to the content of what I'm writing or just venting.

Do you believe that these would be problems in the present tense if people were given the freedom to operate their businesses as I've described? That is, if discrimination laws were suddenly off the books, that we would immediately fall back into a segregated society with the same level of racial tension as the past?

Are you actually proposing elimination of laws against discrimination? If so, then yes, without such laws we would see a gradual shift to a more segregated and discriminatory society.

You don't check out the politics forum much but I'm taking your libertarian ideas of discrimination to their logical conclusion, which is a regression to the Jim Crow Era of the South.