This sort of thing used to annoy me in my youth. But there is a lot of good stuff in there. These are directions on how YOU should live your life, so strike out as appropriate. SQLite is great and if pondering these rules helped, only a fool would avoid pondering them out of spite.
But they could just strike all the ones that mention god and hell and not lost anything of value. I also think the morality only rings true if you were raised in a Christian dominated society. No one living in the real world can afford to love their enemies. That's what people in monasteries can say but not ones who are responsible for protecting people.
> No one living in the real world can afford to love their enemies.
I’m reminded of a passage in Great Expectations that helped me understand exactly just what this means:
> "so you're the blacksmith, are you? Then I'm sorry to say, I've eat your pie."
> "God knows you're welcome to it, so far as it was ever mine," […] "We don't know what you have done, but we wouldn't have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.”
Here’s a guy, an escaped convict, who stole from them, and yet, he’s still being treated decently, and with respect.
I might be way off base, but I feel like that’s what it’s about.
Charity and compassion are one thing, but sometimes you need to fight your enemies in the interests of justice. People in need or people who have made mistakes aren't necessarily your enemies. I thinking more like lying down in the face of unchecked aggression. I don't believe there will be justice in any sort of afterlife, so we have to deal with it now or never. I mean, what would St Benedict say about the Trolley Problem?
Well, it would lose the value of being nominally attributable to a 1500yo monastic document. This might not make a difference to you if you don't acknowledge the the provenance (nor, heck, if you think the provenance is shot in translation), but on net it probably matters a lot more that the small number of people agreeing to the document, presumably none of whom are you, do.
