This thread makes me happy. I feel like I was able to do something good today, to really help someone, and I haven’t really at all felt like I’ve been doing anything good or helpful to others in a while. (I’ll whine about this later, after I’ve slept some more.) But, I have to admit that while I think I ‘did good’ in the thread, I didn’t start off with the best frame of mind about it. Originally, I read the thread and I thought “oh geeez, another person making stupid leaps when they don’t know WHAT they’re talking about” and I went to look at my AIM window for a friend I usually paste thread links to when it’s people being religiously dumb, so we could laugh over the dumbness.
And although I had that reaction and still went on to post in the thread, I am ashamed of that reaction. It wasn’t terribly generous of me, and as the development of conversation shows, it was really inaccurate. Not that the accuracy really matters. Ungracious behaviour is ungracious behaviour, no matter the reasoning behind it.
The second of the eightfold path is right thought, and I very much was not practicing that this evening while reading the LJ Buddhist community. The irony of that, and the subject matter of that particular thread, is not lost on me.