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Comment by antongribok | Hacker News Reader

I agree with everything you said, except your last centence:

"You don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening."

At some point in my youth I visited a monastery on weekends, because I was friends with some seminarians studying there. People knew how to have fun. Perhaps not every day, only on some days of the week, but you certainly could hang out with friends. There was at least one or two people in the group with a car, and there were favorite spots people liked to go to.

I'm sure there are a lot stricter places, but for what it's worth, I know more than one person from this group (class?) that went on to become priests, working at churches today.

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Priest and monk are operate under two massively different rule sets. The "you don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening" is something I got from reading rules of various monasteries (both male and female).

First, having friend, as in favorite person you spend more time with and prioritize, was literally against the rules. You are not supposed to do that. Second, evening was not free recreation time. You eat dinner, you pray, you have chores, you study etc.

> something I got from reading rules

You read some books but you want to argue with someone who literally socialized with a monk? How about this: I was a monk. What you're saying is wrong. You do get evenings off at times. Yes, there are some orders that are very strict and isolated, but there are also mendicant and missionary orders.

I know it's tempting to feel we are smart thus we can speak to things of which we have only read, but (and I'm assuming you're in software development because you're here) if a consultant with no actual experience came along and told you how to do your job because "these are best practices", wouldn't you be a bit skeptical?

They say they read some rulebooks that sounded extremely strict, you say there are some monasteries that are extremely strict; you're both agreeing with the language of disagreement.

Except that GP asserted that reading the rulebooks was a substitute for, you know, actually having been there and that people who had were wrong.

I didn’t see where they asserted it was a substitute.

Would be interesting to hear what countries you all are talking about. I mean, what "Catholic" means in Italy, Ireland, Mexico and the Philippines varies to some degree, for instance.

In my case, this was in New York.

This was a Christian monastery, but not Catholic.

I argued with someone who socialized with people in seminars. Those are not monks. Priests are not monks either. There is also difference between monk and brother, nun and sister.

What you are saying is that cloistered somehow don't count. Maybe you was in freest order there is, but the rest of them count too.

You also argue absurdly aggressive and arrogant way for a monk.

You are not the only ex-monk out there and in fact, ex-monks or those who gave that up during formation do talk about these rules.

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