A passing thought

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 In the age of information overload it's less important to answer every question correctly, but more important to ask the right question.

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On Filial Piety

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I am mostly western-educated, and I have had the skepticism about filial piety that people like me tend to have. I once talked to a monk who talked about the debt of gratitude we owe our parents, and being an angsty teenager, I was immediately skeptical. I remember asking the monk directly "is it not possible for your parents to be such terrible people that they are not deserving of love and gratitude?". I didn't understand the answer very well, but I remember it was some form of "no". I still think it was a fair question. We often hear about parents who have committed unspeakable atrocities to their children, or raise them with such neglect that the children become a menace to the world. Do even those parents deserve gratitude? Today I think the answer is clear to me. If I could talk to my teenage self, I would offer the following corrections to his world view. Firstly, to be grateful to your parents does not always equate to being blindly obedient. It is to fo...
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