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Character development in real life rule
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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What has he done to reconcile all the lives he's ruined
That is the cool thing about propaganda. It keeps ruining lives long after you changed your opinion.
A monk decided to meditate alone, away from his monastery.
He took his boat out to the middle of the lake, moored it there, closed his eyes and began meditating. After a few hours of undisturbed silence, he suddenly felt the bump of another boat colliding with his own.
With his eyes still closed, he felt his anger rising, and by the time he opened his eyes, he was ready to scream at the boatman who had so carelessly disturbed his meditation. But when he opened his eyes, he was surprised to find that it was an empty boat that had struck his own. It had probably gotten untethered and floated to the middle of the lake.
At that moment, the monk had a great realization.
bumped into your comment and found it delightfull.
that he was gonna have to go launch a whole investigation to find out who the boat belonged to and who didn't tie it up securely so that he could yell at the correct person?
He realized that new interns were starting next month and he should have them build an island in the middle of the lake for him to meditate on, big enough that a bit of flotsam bouncing against the shore would not disturb his meditation.
Also see: brother comment.
This is my new favorite way to say "Google it lmao"
Most internet summations don't include the realization I read elsewhere, so I just left it as an the exercise for the reader.
Basically, it's this: You know how sometimes you have a bad day and are being a jerk? It's not "you" exactly, it's just all the shit you have to deal with. You just have to shift those bad days to your childhood, and have a lot more of them, and they have to be worse, and you have a person who is permanently a jerk. But, in the metaphor the boat, is that person any more an empty boat than you are on a bad day?
We're all, to a large degree, empty boats bumping into each other, pushed together by the many different currents of reality, so don't take so many things personally.
In this case, the priest is just a result of how he was raised, or whatever influences pushed him into this horrible life of gay conversion; and the good thing, of getting out, was also probably a result of influences pulling him away from it. So, also, don't get hopped up on people's ability to control their lives from some objective moral vantage point that does not exist.
See, I took the metaphor as: don't get irked by every event (boat bump) that affects you if you don't understand where it came from. Don't assume a human is controlling it when it could be an accident if you would just open your eyes and investigate. In this case I was assuming that maybe the pastor had atoned for his past by donating to or starting a charity or something.
So this interpretation of the empty boat being a metaphor for people in general is fine. It's an exercise in an aspect of stoicism (don't worry about people you can't control, you don't know what someone has been through etc.)
But to extend it to moral subjectivity is bizarre. I think you hide behind metaphor but the clear implications in the context of this discussion is that a closeted gay pastor who abused children can't be held morally accountable for their past because they had too many bad days in their childhood. What it boils down to is a platitude (I.e. that almost everyone is a good person in their own personal story), but the guy harmed other human beings.
I hope I don't have to spell out why it's heinous to imagine a world where everyone walks around not judging actions because they think all morality is subjective. It gives license to atrocious behavior.
You still can hold people accountable for their actions even if those actions were inevitable given their history.
But people obsessed with punishment like things to be simple. Bad people are born to bad things, etc.
I would say demonstrating he was wrong publicly every day for the last 12 years is a fucking solid service to society