[Buddha-l] Anyone up for another year?

[Richard P. Hayes]

Dear denizens of buddha-l,

2005 was an important year for buddha-l in that for the first time since
the list was founded in the autumn of 1991, we migrated to a new server.
As some of you will recall, buddha-l started as a spin-off of a list
simply called Buddhist. Buddha-l was founded by Jim Cocks and me, and
was housed at University of Louisville from October 1991 until March
2005. When Louisville decided to stop hosting all e-mail discussion
groups not related to academic courses taught at University of
Louisville, our long-time subscriber Jim Peavler made arrangements to
set up buddha-l at a commercial site in Albuquerque. All of us who enjoy
participating, actively or passively, in discussions at the new site owe
Jim a big round of applause for financing this operation. Thank you,
Jim! On behalf of all subscribers, I wish you and your spunky spouse a
happy and healthy 2006.

As long as thanks are being given out, I'd like to express gratitude to
all of you who post messages to this list, and to all of you who just
read what the regular contributors write and who sometimes egg us on.
May the muse continue to tickle you writers from time to time so that
our subscribers continue having thought-provoking squibs to read.

For various reasons, my own muse has been on holiday for the past
several months. It's not that I can't think of anything to say. Rather,
it's that I realize I've already expressed every idea I've ever had at
least several hundred times. You all know what I think about just about
everything, and you have no need to hear it all again. (Wait a minute. I
think I might have failed to mention that I don't have a very high
opinion of George W. Bush. I might have forgotten to mention that I
regard him as easily the worst president in the history of the United
States and that I think we'll all be lucky to survive the last 1113 days
of his benighted leadership and that I pity everyone on earth for having
to share a planet with a country that is turning more dangerously
unwholesome with every passing day.) 

If some new thought about Buddhism occurs to me one of these days, I'll
probably say it. That's not very likely, I must say, because these days
almost everything I read is about Unitarians, Universalists, Quakers,
and Congregationalists. Despite the fact that I'm not doing much to stir
up new thoughts about Buddhism, I look forward to hearing what the rest
of you are thinking these days. 

Just our of curiosity, are any of your reading Sam Harris's book, The
End of Faith? It has pretty well convinced me that Judaism, Christianity
and Islam are all seriously diseased ways of being human and that the
survival of our species depends on putting those religions into the past
tense. My lifetime commitment to religious pluralism and to classical
liberalism is being deeply challenged by what Harris writes. I am
thinking of leaving of selling my books and moving to Mars.

I wish you all a meaningful year. I'd love to wish you all a happy year,
but it seems to me that anything but superficial and fleeting happiness
is unlikely as long as our planet remains in the grip of massive greed,
hatred and delusion. So settle for meaningfulness, eh? 

Of course I am aware that new years are purely human constructs, but I
figured that went without saying, so I didn't say it. 

Shanti, Salaam, Shalom, Paz, Paix and Peace be with you.

-- 
Richard Hayes
***
"Where the clear stream of reason 
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit...
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
                             --Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)