Do you believe in Karma?

[disillusioned]

19 hours ago, hyperferion said:

Yes! I knew this awesome dude once, who said this.

 

"Why do good thing's happen to bad people?"

 

I think this is a misconceived question. It presupposes that there is an ultimate reason that things happen. I have an easier time making sense of what I observe and experience if I don't take this view. 

[Karna]

19 hours ago, LogicalFallacy said:

Lets think of this another way. In order to believe in Karma (Or a loving God) you have to reconcile the fact that innocent children die of cancer.

 

In the case of Karma the very general idea is good deeds are rewarded justly, and bad deeds are punished. How the hell did a 4 year old deserve the 'karma' of dying of cancer? Any explanation I've heard leads inherently to taking a position that is immoral. (E.g. her parents were bad and this is their punishment.) If Karma is a thing, and its punishing the 'sins' of the parent by killing children then it's no better than the genocidal child killer in the bible that kills King David's child because he cheated and got his commander killed.

 

The concept of Karma most probably originates in the Eastern philosophies. These philosophies also adhere to the concept of reincarnation.

I will probably get a lot of flak on this website for this. But the concept of karma jives with the concept of reincarnation.

 

Like LogicalFallacy rightly said - a 4 year old dying of cancer hardly makes any sense since it has not lived much to create a karma that deserves a painful death due to cancer. This is where the theory of reincarnation may come into play. One could now say that the past lives of that 'consciousness, soul, or whatever' registers positive and negative events and undergoes situations in the present life. This cycle goes on until all negative karmas are nullified and the soul is liberated.

Now you will ask me if there is any proof for this happening. I don't have any proof. I read this in the eastern scriptures. I also read similar ideas that were prevalent in ancient Africa and native America. Also, Greeks like Plato, Socrates, were knowledgeable about this. Infact, reincarnation was well accepted until Christianity came along and deemed it heretic (because there would be no eternal heaven or hell and need for salvation through Jeebus if reincarnation was present).

Agreed, these are all old scriptures and theories. But for giggles you can go through the works of Dr Ian Stevenson, Dr James Tucker from University of Virginia and see if that opens your mind to this theory.

 

Another possibility is the theory suggested by Dr Michael Newton and others who hypnotized people and studied thousands of cases that said that the 'soul' selects these lives in order to learn. Harder the life, harder are the lessons learnt and closer you are to 'liberation'.

 

I am an agnostic. As in, I do not believe in the god of xianity or any religion. Basically, I hold the view that god is not something that interferes in my life. Out of the four theories - eternal hell/heaven (Abrahamic religions), turning to nothing after death (most atheists), theories of Michael Newton and et al (I like to call it New Age), and karma and reincarnation (Eastern philosophies) - I personally think the last three make sense; with the last two making more sense that the 'turning to nothing'.

 

 

[JohnnyWishbone]

9 minutes ago, disillusioned said:

 

I think this is a misconceived question. It presupposes that there is an ultimate reason that things happen. I have an easier time making sense of what I observe and experience if I don't take this view. 

In a world of people who think they know good & evil, bad shit's gonna go down. 

 

Good & evil are just refractions of each other.

[disillusioned]

1 minute ago, hyperferion said:

In a world of people who think they know good & evil, bad shit's gonna go down. 

 

Good & evil are just refractions of each other.

 

Good and evil are human notions.  Nature neither knows nor cares. 

[JohnnyWishbone]

2 minutes ago, disillusioned said:

 

Good and evil are human notions.  Nature neither knows nor cares. 

True they are that, however. It takes a positive thought to create an illusion of goodness, and it takes a negative thought to create an illusion of evil.

[florduh]

Karma is a lot like Jesus. It means different things to different people today. The original idea has been perverted and legalized. It simply means "your doing" or action. In the original idea karma fits into the Hindu view of life being a play with all parts played by God. There are no perpetrators or victims as we are all, in ultimate form, the same thing, that is, everything.

 

I hear people every day talking about karma as some sort of magical justice or retribution. "What goes around comes around" is the popular and nonsensical phrase that describes it. That view requires that we assign roles of good guys and bad guys, not realizing that both are the same thing as the opposite poles of a magnet are one magnet. It also requires belief in a supernatural arbiter who sets things aright.

 

[disillusioned]

13 minutes ago, hyperferion said:

True they are that, however. It takes a positive thought to create an illusion of goodness, and it takes a negative thought to create an illusion of evil.

 

Positive and negative are human notions as well.

[Karna]

7 minutes ago, florduh said:

Karma is a lot like Jesus. It means different things to different people today. The original idea has been perverted and legalized. It simply means "your doing" or action. In the original idea karma fits into the Hindu view of life being a play with all parts played by God. There are no perpetrators or victims as we are all, in ultimate form, the same thing, that is, everything.

 

I hear people every day talking about karma as some sort of magical justice or retribution. "What goes around comes around" is the popular and nonsensical phrase that describes it. That view requires that we assign roles of good guys and bad guys, not realizing that both are the same thing as the opposite poles of a magnet are one magnet. It also requires belief in a supernatural arbiter who sets things aright.

 

 

Yes, I agree. It means different things to different people. Also, as someone else said - Good and Bad are human notions. They virtually mean nothing.

But again, when you personally commit something wrong (again, 'wrong' is a wrong term here)...and I should say - when you commit something AGAINST your conscience, I think, it may be termed as a negative karma. When you do something 'right' (or something that aligns with your conscience) it might still be a negative karma IF  done with an idea of expecting something good out of it.

 

So basically, any act of selfishness could be bad karma. Any act of selflessness will be good karma.

 

My understanding after reading eastern philosophy is - at the time of death, if you have bad karma (your mind/consciousness regretting something, or expecting something, or longing for something), then your consciousness will reincarnate to experience those things in the next life. But when you genuinely act selflessly, then you do not expect anything or regret anything. So your mind/soul will be clear without any longings at the time of death and you will be liberated with no next life!

 

 

[JohnnyWishbone]

11 minutes ago, disillusioned said:

 

Positive and negative are human notions as well.

As in real electrical currents in the brain? 

[disillusioned]

15 minutes ago, hyperferion said:

As in real electrical currents in the brain? 

 

Yes, but the interpretation of a particular electric current as "positive" or "negative" is a human endeavor. There are positive and negative currents in my TV right now.  But the TV doesn't label them as such.

[JohnnyWishbone]

11 minutes ago, disillusioned said:

 

Yes, but the interpretation of a particular electric current as "positive" or "negative" is a human endeavor. There are positive and negative currents in my TV right now.  But the TV doesn't label them as such.

There's literally + & - everywhere.

 

As for your TV analogy, TV's don't think, they don't feel, and their not self aware.

[disillusioned]

9 minutes ago, hyperferion said:

There's literally + & - everywhere.

 

As for your TV analogy, TV's don't think, they don't feel, and their not self aware.

 

Agreed, and that was mainly my point.

 

The +/- labelling is a result of human thought. In nature,  these are just things. 

[JohnnyWishbone]

31 minutes ago, disillusioned said:

 

Agreed, and that was mainly my point.

 

The +/- labelling is a result of human thought. In nature,  these are just things. 

Yeah right they are, but those things morph into moral concepts of good & evil when we tag what we perceive as a positive thing or negative thing.

 

You know what I mean?