From Tiny Sect, Weighty Issue for Justices -Grove Park City, Utah (The Summums vs the Mormons)

[Are_grits_groceries]

PLEASANT GROVE CITY, Utah — Across the street from City Hall here sits a small park with about a dozen donated buildings and objects — a wishing well, a millstone from the city’s first flour mill and an imposing red granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments.
Thirty miles to the north, in Salt Lake City, adherents of a religion called Summum gather in a wood and metal pyramid hard by Interstate 15 to meditate on their Seven Aphorisms, fortified by an alcoholic sacramental nectar they produce and surrounded by mummified animals.
In 2003, the president of the Summum church wrote to the mayor here with a proposal: the church wanted to erect a monument inscribed with the Seven Aphorisms in the city park, “similar in size and nature” to the one devoted to the Ten Commandments.
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Inside the pyramid, sitting on a comfortable white couch near a mummified Doberman named Butch, Ron Temu, a Summum counselor, said the two monuments would complement each other.
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The city, supported by more than 20 cities and states, along with the federal government, has told the Supreme Court that the upshot of affirming the appeals court decision would be to clutter public parks across the nation with offensive nonsense.
<snip>
Followers of Summum believe that Moses received two sets of tablets on Mount Sinai and that the Ten Commandments were on the second set. The aphorisms were on the first one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/washington/11sect.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=us&pagewanted=all

The Seven Aphorisms
1. SUMMUM is MIND, thought; the universe is a mental creation.

2. As above, so below; as below, so above.

3. Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.

4. Everything is dual; everything has an opposing point; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes bond; all truths are but partial truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.

5. Everything flows out and in; everything has its season; all things rise and fall; the pendulum swing expresses itself in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.

6. Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is just a name for Law not recognized; there are many fields of causation, but nothing escapes the Law of Destiny.

7. Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; Gender manifests on all levels.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/31/AR2008033102359_pf.html

You need to read the article to get the whole flavor. I kind of like the Summums.
I hope they prevail even though they don't have magic underwear.
Nobody should ever crack on the South again about religion. Plenty of weird company elsewhere.

[Are_grits_groceries]

1. I bet Summums don't care about Prop 8. nt

[Winterblues]

2. Try 22-7ths on for size

It has a beginning but no ending...

[customerserviceguy]

3. They might be goofy

but if they hack the Mormons off in their home territory, they're all right with me!

[Are_grits_groceries]

4. I'm rooting for them - Butch and all! nt

[juno jones]

5. The Summum stuff

is tres Hermes Trimestigus. But Moses didn't bring down the emerald tablet from the mountain. Seems to me he would have known it originated in Egypt and all way before his time.