A Boat of Twenty People

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

Dr. Colin Turner wrote, “Imagine a boat with twenty people in it, and one of them is a murderer.  Now imagine how horrifically unjust it would be if, in order to punish the murderer, we were to sink the whole boat and kill all twenty passengers.  Now imagine a man with nineteen good character traits and one bad one.  Imagine how unjust it would be to dismiss this man completely, just because of that one negative character trait.  But this is what we do all the time.  We focus on a person’s negatives and disregard all the positives.  This is particularly unjust when we reject everything a scholar says, simply on account of one misguided word of his, or one opinion of his that we disagree with. 

We need to take care not to ‘sink’ a person’s boat, just because of one bad character trait out of twenty.  And even if there were nineteen bad traits, and just one good trait, sinking the boat of that person's being would still be unjust.”



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