We can only pray that there will be someone, somewhere on this Planet to pick up the Torch and try to replace Hitchens  :blownose: [image: 1781650631228-50b24af2e461.jpg]

Waking up this thread because I miss Agis sexy tenor voice and because, ahem I found this hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcGXBo8HP8 the point being "why is there ambiguity in the written texts of religions about morality, one time being said do this or suffer that, the other being do what you want."

This Homophobic Bakery will Cater Dog Weddings but Not Gay Civil Unions the Atlantic Wire ~ By Alexander Abad-Santos On May 1, Colorado took a step toward civil-rights progress when it began recognizing same-sex civil unions. There was joy. There was acceptance. And it was a big move for a state that's had a contentious history with gay rights and that, just seven years ago, saw its voters approve a ban on gay marriage in the state's constitution. And in 1992, Coloradans approved Amendment 2, a law that would have prohibited gays and lesbians from being a protected class — until it was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1996. RELATED: This Is What Colorado's First Same-Sex Civil Unions Look Like hXXp://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/05/colorados-civil-unions-photos/64755/ The civil unions have also helped businesses, as the Colorado Springs Gazette reports. But there remain some small-business owners like Christian baker Jack Phillips (above at right), owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in the town of Lakewood, who took one big step backward. Phillips refuses to make wedding cakes for gay weddings, and he's now the subject of a formal complaint sitting at the Colorado Attorney General's Office. You can find the formal complaint (courtesy of the ACLU) , but here's the key part: The law cited in the complaint says that business owners can't just refuse to serve someone based on who the person is. The law has a specific discrimination clause: It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful for a person, directly or indirectly, to refuse, withhold from, or deny to an individual or a group, because of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry, the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation … Note that the law applies to "a person." Phillips, the baker, makes cakes for dog weddings, just not gay-person weddings. Stephanie Schmalz and her partner, Jeanine, wanted to get some cupcakes to celebrate their commitment ceremony, the ACLU reports, and like several gay couples before them, they were refused. So Schmalz called up Phillips, telling him she was planning a wedding for her dog: "She told him that the dog wedding cake would need to feed 20 people and should be decorated with the names 'Roscoe' and 'Buffy,'" the ACLU writes. "Without hesitation, Phillips quoted her a price and asked how soon she needed it." The policy at Masterpiece Cakeshop isn't new, or reacting to the new Colorado legislation per se. Phillips has actually been telling people since last July that he wouldn't be supplying baked goods for same-sex celebrations. "Phillips said he isn't a homophobe, and that he would gladly serve any other baked good to a gay couple — just not a wedding cake," Fox Denver reported at the time. "I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, so you could say this is a religious belief," Phillips told them. We're assuming the dog wedding of Roscoe and Buffy was a heterosexual wedding, and thus approved — doggy-sex be damned. Phillips's hearing won't arrive until September, but it hasn't taken long for the fallout to reach the social-media sphere. Though Phillips said business was booming ever since he announced that he wasn't serving gay wedding cakes, Yelp says otherwise: And only some of those negative reviews are due to his anti-gay cake policy.

@pastol: You selected a great "teacher" in Ray Bradbury. I love that man and his writings. Your post was moving and enjoyable. The English was nearly perfect. One note: stay away from slang. Your writing is better than that. (thingies, fellas, wanna) Use the proper words (things, fellows, want to) your writing deserves it. Thank you pastol. Let alone the contents Ray writes in a very Italian way. Concerning slang I was trying to remember but, as far as I can dig back, you must be the first to ask me for that. After all it could be the generation gap indeed. I'm 52.

I understand your problems pastol and I'm not sure there are ready made soutions.  :- It seems to me one should work at the level of the mind activity but I must admit I don't feel to have  (yet) a method to suggest. Only, for now, sorta socratic research attempts which, as such, cannot be individual practices. 

@leatherbear: [image: 1781650631040-59f15ae5a59a.jpg] Think Progress' Zack Ford had this to say about the new campaign: [T]hese improvements over blatant ostracization and condemnation could very well save the lives of many young people and help keep families together. However, with this approach, the Mormon Church has essentially only caught up to the “hate the sin, not the sinner” approaches of the Catholic Church and many evangelical Christians, which are still incredibly problematic. Agreed with Zack bears  ^-^ The mormon church like other monocratic god book churches carries out strong proselytism activities and, in doing that, collides with competitors which has to compare to someway. From a general socio/philosophical point of view it has been noticed that a religion which is not  totalitarian doesn't/shouldn't create a church so it could seem easier to  think this partucular concession stems more from  a clash of powers than anything else. Nothing to be worried about I'd say though. A bit of competition between opposed totalitarianisms can prove useful every now and then for some profitable side effects it might get or did you believe by chance the main reason for the Secession War was black people freedom and equality? 

OK Jonathan  I could follow your line!   ^-^ But, every time  a new word is proposed as it has happened now, it seems to me  there should be an agreement based on a good/thorough explanation (age quod agis   ) made by the proposer followed or less by a sufficient acceptance within a social group. Even if you/I/we all gave good explanations as we have done here, this doesn't seem to grant an acceptance in itself though cause words like farnhamality or agis could be rejected for some reasons: the already accepted existence of other words or circumlocutions up to come to the same point or an unavailablity of the group to share the goal/mind operation denoted by the new term for instance. Especially in the case when a word is proposed and accepted without an apparent quid to point to, in any case, a thorough explanation should make possible to understand to everyone what has been made/done and, in principle, to unmake/undo or remake/redo it. So the challenge of Joker - the apparent contradiction/ambiguity  of a straight sex in a gay forum - could be fixed specifying the original mind operations and the conditions/reasons of an undo-unmake/redo-remake. Couldn't it? Changing topic I was reading  one of those very ancient agises writing about a mole named agis who was the XVI of a series. That blind animal was really dumb go  figure!   :blink:  He couldn't understand why in the  human languages both the terms pointing and not pointing to something are denoted with similar sounds and/or writings. Don't ask why they lost their time making such queer questions; I dunno.  :afr2:  And anyway since that agis was very ancient and incomplete the answer got lost too in the past fogs   :cry2:

Sure LBC we look for and find the values and maybe, if we happened to be a little pissed off, even the… "disvalues" . So one could even emit the hypothesis that we put more than find these thingies somewhere. Back in topic though, the lesson Bayazid felt to give us may be seen as interesting and useful but, at a given point, since  all the mystics coming from different religions (the sufism was and is an islamic form of mysticism) end with resembling each other, the most interesting lesson we could get from the all of them is about a vision of a "god" who speaks for my/your/oursingularselves common denominator. Mysticim was seen in fact as the purely individual art of penetrating the "secret", the mystery (mystikòs) hiding in the nature of the things through not conventional instruments: neither the words, nor the writings, nor even the thought. Its instrument was the breath: breathing first the air, then the environment, the beings populating it and, in the end, god. So, like the apophatic god, not an authoritative god but a god who cannot lend her/him/itself to a human, too human will to power. Including the power of bashing some other than ourselves ones: gays, jews, niggas, women…

Glad to know you agree LBC   BTW, following your argument, I had forgotten to say that the monks of Hadrumetum were not exactly a bunch of idiots run away from a mental hospital but a western ramification of a kind of theological thought which was named "apophatic".  Nothing to be worried about I'd say since those dudes simply thought that the thing/things you can say  about god is/are

I kind of got the idea from modern society about Jesus being a drag queen. All 12 MEN that he was always with always had the white robes and the long hair, and after all, didn't he sleep out with all 12 of them while camping if memory from grade school serves me correctly? I thought I was the only one to think such things.