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Profound Ideas's avatar

Always choose right over easy. This one hit deep.

I always found jiu jitsu to be taxing on my mind in many ways; but I made it a non-negotiable. Now I’m nearly at purple belt.

Great advice.

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Gibbons Burke's avatar

The ΣΑΕ fraternity to which I belonged in college required its pledges to memorize and adhere to the “Credo” of the society, expressed in a poem by John Walter Weyland called “The True Gentleman”. It seems to me that these are essentially, inherently, Christian virtues, but for a secular, masonic society such as these fraternities mostly are, any reverence to the source of these values is eliminated. But these are values our culture inherited from the courtly manners of Christendom, with its emphasis on self-sacrificing agape love, hope, and faith:

The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds

from good will and an acute sense of propriety

and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies;

who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty,

the obscure man of his obscurity,

or any man of his inferiority or deformity;

who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another;

who does not flatter wealth,

cringe before power,

or boast of his own possessions or achievements;

who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy;

whose deed follows his word;

who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than his own;

and who appears well in any company;

a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.”

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