[Buddha-l] Is this guy an, er, budding bodhisattva of IT?

[Richard Hayes]

James Stroble wrote:

> I really think we should avoid 
> a distro war on buddha-l, as it can get worse than dharma battles.

James's apt comment brought back memories of when I descended into the
hell realms of news groups about ten years ago. There used to be (maybe
still is) a news group called talk.religion.buddhism. Being accustomed
to the civilized tone that has always prevailed on buddha-l, I was
unprepared for the breathtakingly nasty vituperation on
talk.religion.buddhism, where never was heard an encouraging word. I
showed a few messages from that group to a Japanese friend of mine, and
he said "Oh, that's very mild compared to Japanese-language Nichiren
news groups." I could hardly believe that anything was worse than what I
was seeing on t.b.r., but I took my friend's word for it. When
mentioning all this to yet another friend, he said "Oh, the viciousness
of Buddhist news groups is nothing compared to the raging insults and
character assassination on Linux news groups!" Not wanting to descend
into even deeper hells than I was already visiting, I never checked out
the Linux news groups. Instead I read Patricia Wallace's insightful book
on the psychology of the Internet.

While carefully avoiding Linux news groups, I did visit a vegetarian
news group for a few days. My goodness! All those gentle souls who
desist from eating animals save all their pent-up frustrations with the
world and express them in bombastically violent speech-acts hurled at
each other. For every cute bunny saved from the cooking pot, five vegans
are sacrificed by being subjected to excoriation that would make a
dungeon-keeper proud.

A couple of days ago there was at my university a day-long conference on
feminine spirituality. I attended the afternoon sessions, which were on
the topic of environmentalism and peace work and social justice. All the
panelists--a Muslim, two Catholics and a Protestant--had decades of
experience in these areas. The lone male speaker was a Franciscan named
Richard Rohr, who made the observation about religious fanaticism that
"Obsession with form arises in indirect proportion to experience of the
formless." Those who never find their way to their own inward light (not
his expression, but George Fox's--Rohr used the terms "God" and "the
formless") tend, he said, to cling to dogmas, rituals and laws and to
beat up on, and sometimes even kill, those who cling to different
dogmas, rituals and laws. That is pretty obviously true in the sad and
sorry realm of religion, and perhaps even more true in the equally scary
realm of Linux. (But I am perhaps being redundant; for many people,
Linux is their religion.) 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
Universiy of New Mexico