Amnon's Bad Example

There are two kinds of examples people can learn from: Good examples and bad examples. Good examples can teach us what we should be doing. Bad examples teach us what we should NOT be doing. Case in point, I recently wrote exactly 250 words about a guy named Amnon. He's this dude in the Old Testament who raped his half-sister and then got revenge-murdered by her brother, his half-brother. The moral of the story is that we shouldn't rape people like Amnon did. Not every person in The Bible is a saint that we should try to be like.

And that's okay. We can learn good morals from bad people. It just takes a bit more creativity sometimes. When we want to learn from good examples, all we have to do is identify what they did right and do our best to copy that. When we want to learn form bad examples, we have to identify what they did wrong, work out what they should have done instead, and do that. Alternatively, we can simply try not to do whatever the bad example did, and that might be enough, but we still have to do something instead, so figuring out what to do instead is still necessary. Fortunately, with a bad example like raping someone, figuring out what to do instead is very easy because literally almost any other choice one could make would be a better choice than that.

There are plenty of good role models, both in The Bible and elsewhere, and we should learn to be like them, but there are also plenty of bad examples, in The Bible and elsewhere, and we should learn to be different from them. Looking at their flaws and failings can help us learn how to avoid making the same bad choices that they did. In Amnon's case, how to do so is obvious. In other cases, the lesson to be learned is less obvious. But there's always a lesson we can learn from everyone, whether they're setting a good example or a bad one.