"Honor thy father and mother"
From
Ilya Shambat@21:1/5 to
All on Fri Jan 6 22:13:15 2023
When I was 18, my father asked me how can I consider myself spiritual when I am not obeying my father. I think that this is a common problem that needs to be addressed.
Nobody wants their children to become spiritual or to become artists. They want them to live comfortable bourgeois lives. When Buddha was born, the prophecy was that he was either going to become a great king or the founder of a major religion. His
parents wanted him to become a king, so they did what they could to keep him from developing spiritual sensibilities. However spiritual reality found him anyway, and he gave up all his comforts and all his advantages to found Buddhism.
Most artistic types are highly spiritual. Which means of course that they will be taking religion seriously. The correct advice to these people is to think things through. “Honor thy father and mother” does not mean “buy into the errors of thy
father and mother.” You can honor your parents without practicing the wrong things that they believe.
In a Russian movie “Bolshoi,” a woman tells her daughter, who is a ballerina, that she is selfish. No, she is a star. By being a ballerina she brings much more pride and fame to her family than she would have done if she had pursued a more
conventional career. Her mother benefits from this as well. She has a family member being a star, which is not a common thing to have happen.
My father has turned around and now likes my translations and my writings. He says that he is proud of me. I do not dishonor him at all. I took the lead to do something valuable. And now even he supports what I do.
Usually parents aren’t evil; but many have wrong beliefs. It is necessary to separate the valid from the invalid. Honor thy father and mother; do not buy into their errors. Instead do what would actually give pride and joy to them. And in so doing end
up doing what’s right both by God and by the world.
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From
Ilya Shambat@21:1/5 to
All on Wed Nov 1 02:42:22 2023
One of the ten commandments is “Honor thy father and mother.” I would like to clarify what that means.
There are many parents who use this commandment to do things that are wrong. Specifically they use it to dictate to their children their life choices and to do as had themselves. This has shown historically to be erroneous. Where would we be if Isaac
Newton, Thomas Jefferson or Bill Gates did as their fathers had done? And how much is the West ahead of places like Confucianist China, where people did just that?
The correct meaning of honoring one’s parents is having respect for them and treating them rightly. It does not mean perpetuating their mistakes. I had a terrible relationship with my father, but now we get along well and he is proud of me. That is the
case even though I took on projects that he thought to be useless.
Sometimes wrong beliefs are a killer. I have seen even the best people become cruel and oppressive when they believed wrong things. That most beliefs are wrong is an obvious fact. People around the world live under mutually incompatible beliefs; which
means that, even if one of these groups is right, everyone else is wrong. And that means: majority of the world’s population is wrong.
So if a parent has wrong beliefs, through which he interferes in one’s life, honoring them does not mean sharing along with their misperceptions. It means correcting them. That being done, parents and children can have meaningful interaction. There
can be both family and freedom. And that is the optimal solution to such situations.
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