anything. I know a bunch of things, understand a lot more than I know and am willing to consider other things.

As far as Karma, I understand it and think that it exists.

Is horseshit. So is any concept that depends on reincarnation as a method of information transmission. On the other hand, doing good deeds, ignoring the problem of unintended consequences, tends to make the world a better place.


* http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/karma.htm

Karma is damned near instant now.

It would be nice if the universe worked that way, but I have seen too many rotten b*sturds get away with "murder" (think Cheney), while decent, good-intentioned people suffer endlessly. There is no sense to it except that it is all random.

He may have gotten away with lots of things technically, but he may have little in the way of happiness.

But that could just be my fantasy.

He doesn't have emotions or empathy in the same way we do. He is doing fine as far as he's concerned. He may not have the same thing we call happiness, but he doesn't care, and will happily torture people to death in the meantime if that's how he gets what he wants.

but i think you are right about him.

a sociopath who has been betrayed and nearly killed by his own body. Does that count as karma?

Here's my opinion on what counts as karma:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1218&pid=186118

I think it's almost the opposite of karma here, because Cheney survived serious illness, that has killed many other people, not because he is better than the other people, but because he is richer and more influential than the other people. He was able to afford the best treatment for many years, including eventually a heart transplant at an older age than is sometimes considered eligible.

The poor, uninsured people who have died young of inadequately treated heart disease were not less moral than Cheney (which would of course be difficult!); they were less lucky. The thousands of people who were killed as a direct or indirect result of Cheney et al's actions were not less moral than Cheney; they were less lucky.

My "nearly killed by his own body" could be seen by karma supporters as the expected outcome of his actions. My opinion is that the stress engendered by Cheney's level of hatred takes an inevitable toll on the body.

Whether one calls it karma or "reaping what you sow" depends on the person.

His regrets are likely centered around the things that have been rolled back since he left office, and his failure to fully glass the middle east once and forever.

Overall, I bet he's pleased as punch.

I think if you treat others well, then good will come back at you. I also think that if you treat others poorly, you will receive bad in return.

But I don't believe in reincarnation.

One caveat - I do have parking karma. I have to be the one driving, though.

how badly did the women and children in the DRC who are raped and mutilated daily as a part of ongoing war treat others to deserve such a fate?

Or maybe the vulnerable populations (cognitively challenged, mentally ill, elderly, physically disabled, etc) who are brutally abused, neglected, and starved by those who are charged with caring for them (family members, group home, nursing home, etc), were really just shitheads who really deserved it, huh? I mean, otherwise, why would bad things happen to them? Like you said, they must've treated others poorly.

Thanks for clearing up that Karma stuff. Nice way to blame the victim "Oh, sorry you stepped on an abandoned land mine, 9 year old, but your legs only got blown off because you were a shit to others."

I ALWAYS say, "Thank you, parking gods," when I get my good space, which I always get. Friends are quite astonished to see how good a space they get when I'm along.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it. In crowded areas, passengers will say "Let's start looking", and I drive right up to wherever we are going and pretty much always get a space.

Clearly that's proof you deserve it. And the poor slobs who have to park a half mile away, well I guess they are just horrible people who get what's coming.

and as I drive up the ramp, someone pulls out, leaving a space open for me right next to the elevator.

I have no idea what I may have done in this life or another one to deserve this. But I will say that the Technology gods constantly fuck with me. Technology often does not work correctly when I'm around. I've been known to get a help desk on the line for some computer problem I'm having. They'll take control of my computer, and still can't fix what's wrong. Around that point I'll explain my theology -- that monotheism doesn't adequately cover everything, that there are multidudenous intelligences ( call them gods, lower case) that are in charge of various things, and the Technology gods do not like me. But the Parking gods ADORE me.

Actually, I can have a lot of fun with trying to figure out which god is responsible for what's going on.

Right now the feet gods are really messing with me, but the being surrounded by people I love is smiling broadly.

Hope you have a great weekend.

I think God is merciful and heaven is open to all.

...every single day...

Not so sure about the merciful thing either...you know, what with disease, famine, murder, crime etc etc...

I thought that the bible points out that heaven is most certainly not open "to all"...

And my point was about the afterlife.

I'm confused. I thought that was the "rule book" as it were... and that book is fairly specific about who does, and who doesn't get into heaven...?

As an Anglican/Episcopalian I am guided by the three legged stool of faith. Scripture, tradition, and human reason.

Counting those three legs:
1. faith
2. scripture
3. tradition
4. reason

5 - I give the fuck up.

with punctuation and capital letters.

"b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust "

Reason is not part of the process. It's offensive that you'd try to co-opt reason as part of your 'faith'.

the other three are the legs.

do not give up.

Very apt. Very much like stool.

I think you forgot article in your response.

Are you with me sofa?

a furniture joke

Because them's fighting words.

That's a real comfort to everybody out there who suffers and then dies. Because as far as many of us are concerned (and what strong evidence all but guarantees) we don't exist after that.

This is all we have. This is why it is so important to realize that now is all we have. We better do the best damn job we can while we're here, and for far too many people, "It all works out in the end" is an excuse. And that's sad as hell, because there's too much pain in this world as it is.

Scenario #1: Karma exists, you do tons of good, you get it back during life and then in the afterlife.
Scenario #2: Karma exists, you do tons of good, you get it back during life, but there's no afterlife.
Scenario #3: Karma does not exist, you do tons of good, you get little to nothing back, there's an afterlife.
Scenario #4: Karma does not exist, you do tons of good, you get little to nothing back, there's no afterlife.

#1 = a win if you believe in karma (best possible scenario) <~~~This is what I hope for.

#2 = at least your life was better and other people's was also, even with no afterlife.

#3= you get little to no reward during life, but God grants you your afterlife.

#4= others lives are better, yours is what it is. To me, #4 is the most dreary scenario. However, at least you helped improve other's lives, even if your own was not improved. There's no afterlife, oh well.

I'm not here to convince anyone of the existence of karma or of an afterlife. IMHO, that's a futile exercise. We all have our own values/beliefs/opinions, and I don't impinge on anyone else in any way. If you disagree with me 100%, that's cool. I'm a very liberal Christian. I live and let live, and don't interfere or impinge upon others. All of this helps me get through the harsh realities of life, and harms no one. I wish everyone well.

Well said and as it should be. I don't believe in karma or god or an afterlife. But that's me. What others believe is none of my business, unless they try to make their beliefs my law. Or "our" war. Etc.

Thanks for the post. Interesting. I like it!

I have a difficult time believing that anyone who has given the matter a second of serious thought would actually want it to be true.

If everyone gets what is coming to them, that means anyone suffering in even the slightest degree must have deserved it. Rape victims. The terminally ill. The poor. The list goes on.

It's victim-blaming codswallop, pure and fucking simple.

I don't think of it that way. I see it more as a "pay it forward" kind of thing.

That doesn't mean that bad things don't happen to good people or good things to bad people. Those are events that can't be controlled by being a good person.

I've seen a lot of people through the last days of their lives. Some were surrounded with love and comfort, some were not.

Not always, but sometimes that is a direct reflection of how they have behaved with other people.

I see it more as a Golden Rule kind of thing and not victim-blaming at all.

"Some were surrounded with love and comfort, some were not.

Not always, but sometimes that is a direct reflection of how they have behaved with other people"

Did you spend much time in a trauma ward? PACU? ER? ICU? MICU? NICU? any of those?

There were plenty of people who were, I'm sure, quite loved and would have given anything for comfort, but were instead crushed to death in their car. Or by someone else's car. Or who died in the OR. Or whose prolonged, protracted, painful death due to massive burns just happened at the wrong time when the family finally gave themselves 15 minutes for a shower and coffee.

For seeing people through their last days, you have an incredibly selfish and short-sighted view of the pain and turmoil that death and dying does to patients and their family members.

You know what---I've been around the last moments of people's lives too. Spending many years on a heart/lung/kidney floor ensured that I was more likely than not the last person the patient saw as they passed from this mortal plane to another. Rather than take that moment where they are scared, alone, where their death was unexpected and their sickness quick, when their family lived hundreds or thousands of miles away to think "gee, they're dying alone so this is a direct reflection of how they have behaved with other people," I realized that these people were at the most vulnerable point in their live since the moment of their birth.

I treated them with compassion, understanding how fucking hard it is for a child in the military serving an unending and unjust war in Iraq to make it back in time to be at the bedside of a dying parent. Hey, that parent must've been a shit or the kid would be there, right? Time zones and war-zones be damned.

Or shit...too bad 8 members of a family died in a multi-car accident, and the one dying in front of me is alone. Must've been a real bastard or else they'd be surrounded with love and comfort, instead of the slow suffocation that comes from drowning in your own blood filling your lungs from your crushed chest.

Real compassionate there, cbayer. Between blaming people for their own misery ("if you treat others poorly, you will receive bad in return&quot to this fucking turd nugget "Some were surrounded with love and comfort, some were not. Not always, but sometimes that is a direct reflection of how they have behaved with other people," I really hope for the sake of humanity that you do what you can to stay away from the sick and dying. They've got too much going on to deal with your self-righteous judgements at the moment of their death. Please tell me you are not a health-care worker....

Sitting in an ER will not make you believe in karma, because you exist, as tragic as it is, in a world of suffering that is a small subset of the millions of lives around you.

Speaking of bedside manner, you might want to act on your own.

because I'm not proudly standing in judgement of those during their moment of death.

I have come to realize that the pain and horror associated with death are *directly* caused by the manner of death. Peaceful deaths tend to be those where people are well medicated and sedated. Horrible deaths are those where sedation and pain control were not possible. Where suffocation is occurring. Where massive bleeding is occurring. Where limbs have been ripped off. Where body cavities have been ripped open.

I have seen infants...neonates...suffer horrible wound where the screams were still in their throats as they took their last breath. I have seen the profoundly elderly die with smiles on their faces. How can either manner of death do ANYTHING to determine the quality of life or worthiness of the human who just expired? It doesn't. Yet Cbayer is the great Kreskin of Death, and can tell if you're a good person or a bad person, if you were loved or not, based solely, by her own admission, on method of death and how many family members were there at the moment of death.

She was either incredibly lucky to have been given such prognostagatory skills, or to have only seen people who die with smiles on their faces as they're surrounded by their extended family, or she's being callous and unrealistic regarding the lives of the people who she saw die in front of her, and extrapolating correlation where there is none.

what cbayer said:

You don't. I don't. I suppose for infants and children there is the assumption that they're good...or at least not bad, or neutral, but for anyone else? How do you know it's a "bad thing to a good person"?

why can't we just see it as a 'thing to a person?" We become callous when we attach qualifiers to people and their personality, their lives, and how they lived based on when and how they died.

Death happens to us all. Good person or bad person. Old or young. At some point, our powerball will be called and I think it's highly arrogant to feel that anyone has a right to judge anyone else's quality of life, love, self happiness and happiness they provided to others based on the manner and cause of their death.

Frankly, beyond all that, it's ridiculous. It's like saying that people who die wearing green shirts, in my opinion, tend to like their steak medium rare. It's based on nothing but pure conjecture. However, basing someone's steak preference to shirt color at least doesn't give one a feeling of smug superiority of those who are dead and dying, which is what Cbayer was doing and what you're defending her doing

YOU CANNOT JUDGE THE WORTH OR QUALITY OF SOMEONE'S LIFE, THE HAPPINESS THEY FELT OR THE SUFFERING THEY CAUSED OTHERS BASED ON THE MANNER OF THEIR DEATH, THE AMOUNT OF SUFFERING BEFORE DEATH, OR THE MASS OR ABSENCE OF PEOPLE AT THEIR BEDSIDE AT THE TIME OF DEATH.

She said that how you die tends to reflect how you lived. She said it several times in this thread.
"I also think that if you treat others poorly, you will receive bad in return. "
"Some were surrounded with love and comfort, some were not. Not always, but sometimes that is a direct reflection of how they have behaved with other people. "

How is that not making a judgement about the person? Even with the qualifier "sometimes," it's still her personal approximation of "how they behaved with other people."

Based on what? ON NOTHING BUT HER ASSUMPTIONS.

It's not about good or bad. Painful or pleasant. It's death. It happens to all of us. Good or bad. Those that treated others well and those that didn't. Those that behaved well with other people and those that didn't.

Your dad died a long painful death. According to cbayer, that may have very well been because of how he lived his life. How he interacted with other people. Maybe if he was more pleasant his death would have been more pleasant. That's her own approximation of death and life based on HER OWN WORDS that I posted above.

Now, of course I don't believe in Karma. I think it's an feel-good way of victim-blaming that is couched in touchy-feely bullshit that people buy for some reason as being "compassionate." It's not compassionate. It's amongst one of the LEAST compassionate philosophies out there

Yes, it feels very nice to say "oh, that rapist...may karma get him!!" but what's karma if not a bad thing happening because you did a bad thing (in this example)? So when can you judge if it's Karma vs "a bad thing happening"? You can't. No one can. But they do.

Cbayer does. Bad people have bad deaths. Generally. In her experience. Good people have good deaths. Generally. In her experience.

It's bullshit. It's not selective. Karma is effective for EVERYONE or for NO ONE. A rapist getting Karma! Yeah! a 9 year old being raped...wait...is that karmic retribution for something....? a past life perhaps? With Karma, it doesn't matter. This life, past life, 983 lives ago. Every bad thing is for a reason. Good people don't have bad things happen to them because they have learned their lesson. That's what Karma is, like it or not.

I do not presume to judge someone's life at the moment of their death. Cbayer does, and seems pretty sure about herself doing it. And, for the record, this isn't the first time she's bragged about her deathbed life judgements. She's spoken of it before, and I"ve called her out on it before. It's a disgusting way to look at life and an inhumane way to view someone---ANYONE---in the moment of their death. I would much rather die alone than to die in the company of a sanctimonious jerk who feels that they can make a summation of ENTIRETY of my life based on the last seconds of it. Fuck that shit.

I've read it three times now, and it doesn't make sense.

...it was pretty clear to me

thank you so much for interjecting.

Passive sentences: 5%
Flesch Reading Ease: 75.8
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 6.3

So yeah, middle school reading difficulty.

.... but ymmv...

I read the comments, after all.

.. you were having on this public discussion board....

My apologies....

...I mean kwassawhatever..

I've yet to see you put up any argument at all.

on cbayer. More operatic than most, but no less meaningless.

Short, to the point, no wasting time on discussing the actual issue, no confusion about the message.

Now back to karma.

The essence of the belief, although it modulates through the various hindu sects and in buddhism, and over time, is:

An individual's present situation is thereby explained by reference to actions in his present or in previous lifetimes. - wiki on karma.

Within a deeply inequitable and rigidly stratified social structure, karma is a useful tool for explaining why everyone is right where they are, and for excusing extreme misery as just rewards for past misdeeds.

Evidence of reverse-karma I guess.

That could have an effect like this.
I also don't see bad things happening to bad people, I see many living the rewards of their bad behavior.
And then there is all the suffering of the innocent.

So, no.

If I approach you and punch you in the face, you are highly unlikely to be kind to me.

If I approach you and give you a pat on the back, You are much more likely to be kind to me.

The idea of Karma that the Universe balances things out.

I am wouldn't call what you said Karma. Though you are free to.
I don't think there is just one definition.

To be fully human means to live in relationship with others: being a jerk is rather like poking out your own eye

Whether it pays off or not is not the issue.

Cheney doesn't care in the slightest that people were tortured to death for his benefit. He does what he has to to get what he wants. Being a jerk is a meaningless idea applied to him. He also doesn't care about your definition of being fully human.

(Your idea of what constitutes being fully human is rather insulting to all those who don't need relationships, who often don't want much interaction with others. They are human; they are no less than you or I.)

And a wonderful point.
I agree it doesn't exist for sociopaths. Why? Because it's not real at all.

Same as saying someone has really good luck. They don't. Luck isn't a 'real' thing. It's our way of expressing our subjective interpretation of that person's success. It's meaningless beyond a form of shorthand that enables human communication and perception.

The interpretation of it is entirely subjective, and faulty based on how much or how little you know about that person.

Simply a label we assign to a condition we perceive.

I'm wondering why that seems be be happening

I don't really know, but here's a couple of articles on it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/technology/web-trolls-winning-as-incivility-increases.html

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/10/27/the-problems-with-anonymous-trolls-and-accountability-in-the-digital-age/

As well as individuals of other species who find it necessary to cross bridges.

Wow, this thread just lowered the bar.

I'm wondering more and more nowadays why that seems to be the case

Surely you have a dozen or so google links to explain it.

[font size=4 color=teal]We live in nigh crapsack world where people die struggling in vain for their ideals, and where sociopaths are exalted.

Karma is a seductive idea that plays to our wishful thinking.

It assumes that there is justice in the world. That the injustices we see will eventually be corrected and that the good will win out in the end. It is easy. It is reassuring. However, depending on how far one takes it, karma becomes nothing more than victim blaming. Everything we do we bring upon ourselves.

The woman disfigured in a car accident did something in a past life to deserve it.

The reality is, that there is no justice in this world except that for which we bring about ourselves.

If we want even a small measure of justice we have to sacrifice for it. We have to be just in our own actions, and we cannot afford to be apathetic to the injustice going on around us. It requires backbreaking work, endless effort, an indomitable mentality, and accepting the fact that we will fail and to keep going anyways.

The reality is not easy, not reassuring, and quite often painful. But it is the world we live in. [/font]

although in this thread "karma" has been willfully misinterpreted to mean "it is good to do good things" or some other pablum, rather than its actual meaning. The part they are willfully dispensing with is:

"An individual's present situation is thereby explained by reference to actions in his present or in previous lifetimes."
-wiki on karma

That is core to the concept of karma. It is a fucked concept.

This is just beautiful:

It might seem like it happens for some people, but there are far too many who never have the bad they do come back to them. There are also far too many people who do good and never have the good come back to them either. I wish karma really existed, because it a nice concept and all, but, I don't believe it really exists.

But being kind and considerate to people and animals goes a long way to making this brutal physical existence more palatable...

People are here to learn various lessons in their lifetimes. It plays out over hundreds, probably thousands of incarnations. So someone who has something truly terrible happen, has perhaps chosen ahead of this life to experience that. And the person who did the evil, may have intended to try to resist doing that evil, but wasn't able to in the end, but will still come out at the end of the life with some sort of spiritual growth.

I realize that for most people reading this, the whole notion simply doesn't make sense, and I'm not about to suggest that anyone who thinks this is nonsense should try to flip their belief system. But it makes a lot of sense for me.

is it caused by nature or nurture?

Cheney does present as a sociopath. He does not seem bound by rules of behavior or recognize the impact his actions have on others. But did he choose his lifestyle?

I don't know enough about the origins of socio/psychopathy to give you any reliable answer, but I'd hazard a guess it's almost entirely biological. I don't think you can choose to become a sociopath, in other words.

and they center around nature vs. nurture.

but the person who had the evil done to them did something to deserve it in a previous life? Are there just countless situations set up where evil might be done to someone who deserves it, but the person resists? Or is it something that just happens with no "Maybe this time" attached to it?

Does this mean there is a never ending cycle of harm because the previous evil doers have to be punished, but that punishment begets more punishment to the people doing the punishing? If your evil act is punishing someone for something they did to deserve it, then is it truly an evil act?

I can see how this system can lead to way worse abuse then the christian Forgiveness racket.

It's experiencing a human lifetime, choosing to be born into a particular situation, a specific family, a given time and place, and then just living that life. There is still plenty of free will, and too many people choose the wrong thing, which I'm sure you'll agree with, even if you utterly disagree with my take on everything else.

It's important to get rid of the punishment idea. Someone who has bad things happen isn't being punished, but is experiencing what it is like to be on the receiving end of such things. Again, while I believe this is how things work, I understand why many others reject this.

You seriously believe that we choose to be born and the circumstances of our life?

This is an ideology that was designed to justify the caste system, its vast and rigid inequality, and to justify misery and suffering.

find that impossible to believe. I'm not trying to convince or convert you here, just trying to explain what I believe.

Religion and religious belief are always used to justify bad things, including caste systems, slavery, the oppression of women, the slaughter of others not of the "right" religion.

I don't just shrug my shoulders at things, saying to myself, "Oh, well, that person deserves it, or that person chose it." I try in my own small way to make this planet a better place, which is all anyone can do.

I will say, that for me knowing that someone like Cheney will eventually answer for what he's done, is quite satisfying. Some here have expressed glee at the thought of him burning in a literal Hell, and while I don't see it that way, I share the hope that there will be justice eventually.

believe, as it is a comforting fairy tale that smooths over the realities of life. The fact that there is zero evidence to support a belief in reincarnation is of course irrelevant to this and all other faith based beliefs.

As with all ideologies that provide for some sort of post-existence cosmic justice - it provides excuses for the current order and justification for inaction. Cheney is not going to eventually answer for anything, he is just going to cease to exist, like the rest of us.

and our exchange shows it, is that people can have very different beliefs about various things, and still feel free to express that.

My belief in reincarnation is not something I share with a lot of people, and even though many here are making it clear they think I'm nuts to believe this, I am very comfortable sharing it here. Thanks for reading my posts, and thanks for replying, no matter how far apart we are on this issue.

It is simply two concepts, in the basic sense.

The first is action. That's the literal interpretation of the word, and we all act, or do. Now, there is an implication in the concept of karma that implies non-duality, but I won't go into that.

Secondly, it is a matter of cause and effect. We can easily observe cause and effect and see chains of them unfold in our own lives, so it is rather easy to be more of an observer and notice that it is factual in that sense.

So, action and cause and effect are demonstrable facts about a causal relationship.

I don't think it is necessary to do anything other than consider the implications of karma in a very basic, psychological sense when it comes to subjective experience. It might imply that the chain of cause and effect that we see in matter and our bodies has a psychological or mental continuity, but that can be considered more philosophical, ontological and speculative.

So, when you have habit patterns, (conditioning) since childhood that cause you to react, (rather than respond) to situations or exhibit certain behaviors, you could define that as your karma. This can and does have an impact on your experiences and good or bad fortune.

Now, when it comes to horrible events and some of the suffering that people experience that seem unfair to us, who really knows for sure? That is for the person who experiences it to decide and if there is no compassion that arises from one's understanding of karma, or the potential for liberation from misery-inducing patterns and habits, then karma is not of much value.

It is very possible that the causal aspect of karma is all-inclusive and precise if all things and events arise interdependently, but when you consider the myriad of variables involved, it certainly would be difficult for us to ascertain that and so, there seem to also be random events that don't seem to have any relationship to past actions at all--and there may be more randomness than we would care to consider, even. So, an example of that would be that you could probably trace every particle and reaction from the Big Bang until now if you knew the starting points and had the unlikely computing power to do that and see all these relationships and even predict the future, based on that. In that sense, physically, there would be "karma" as per the material world.

Well, the topic of karma is very deep and actually stimulating when you investigate it rather than simply believe in and attach all kinds of meanings and connections in ways that can be rather superficial or a form of magical or wishful thinking.

It exists as a pattern that we could see using heavy statistical analysis on a population over broad periods of time and would be due to a large number of highly complex variables.

It would not exist in and of itself, affecting people based on their actions. That idea is remarkably similar to the Force in Star Wars, where good actions and vigilance allow you to progress one way on the morality spectrum and bad actions the other. Except that karma also adds that physical events in the universe will change based on objective moral laws. Human morality is an idea, not something intrinsic to the universe.

A question for the people that do believe: do you think karma applies to animals, too?

that plays out in one lifetime, then you won't find any "proof" of it. But the underlying idea of karma is tightly tied to reincarnation, to the notion that over many lifetimes, what happens in one lifetime has consequences in another. If you simply don't believe in reincarnation, than the concept of karma is meaningless for you. That's okay. You may have strong beliefs of some other kind that make sense to you.

It is beyond obvious that a child who suffers terribly in some way is, in this lifetime, a blameless victim. There is nothing that small child could possibly have done to warrant the suffering. But if there's a connection to some other lifetime, to the path that soul is travelling, then it makes sense, at least to those who believe this.

I want very much to again say that those of you who totally reject the idea of reincarnation can (and probably should) reject what I've said. As much as I happen to believe this, I don't feel as if I need to persuade anyone else.

suffering. An evil belief, in my opinion.

it's a result of your actions, not anything magical

if you're constantly doing f***ed up things it will eventually catch up to you - it's just a matter of time

YES INDEED

I changed my OP.

YES INDEED

*bends over to get it over with*

what people THINK is karma is just action / result perception - there is noting unworldly going on

it takes us to dangerous places. We should never, EVER think that someone "deserves" the misfortune that befalls them.

I think that words and actions have effects that can go beyond ourselves.
Like ripples.



I don't believe in "karma" and I don't believe that "Everything happens for a reason".

Is another human made up notion.

It really is a Hindu thing that involves past and future lives as well as the one you are living now. So in that respect, it's unbelievable.

Informally it sorta means fate... determined by your actions (duh!).... but with a justice/reward/punishment element.

It's a judgement call made after the fact. You can string an edited series of events in a person's life together in many ways, and karmic is one of them. Of course there are always many more events in that person's life not included in that particular karmic one. You could possibly string a completely different selection of events from the same person's life (or even reinterpret the same ones) and come up with a completely different karma.

IOW, it's just a subjective judgement call layered onto the obvious.... that your actions effect you life.

It cannot be reduced to simple sentences on a pretend internet poll. Even the Buddhist site is cherry-picking.

A good novel to read about the Bardo is "The Years of Rice and Salt" which is written by a SF writer. The human equivalent of "good" is different from the Universe's concept of "good" and you don't know why you move up or down the evolutionary scale.


http://www.amazon.com/Years-Rice-Salt-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0553580078/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426275103&sr=8-1&keywords=year+of+salt+and+rice

My science fiction book club read it some years back, and interestingly enough, the person who most disliked the book also did not get that those people were reincarnating until towards the very end. Because it's s-f, the reader certainly does not have to believe in reincarnation to enjoy the book, but to miss the point that those characters (souls, really) are reincarnating, is to miss the entire point of the book.

It's certainly not a definitive treatise on the concept or reincarnation, but it's an amazing book for anyone, regardless of belief.

Unmitigated, purestrain, bullshit.

I do believe that actions have consequences, and that for example, people who have a tendency to treat others badly are likely to arouse more negative treatment from others than those who treat others well.

But 'karma' cannot explain babies and toddlers with serious congenital diseases; the randomness with which some people live long happy lives and some die young of cancer, devastating infections or senseless accidents; or the deprivation, hunger, abuse or violence experienced by people who just happened to be living in the wrong place at the wrong time.

God'll take care of it.

karma is the action of the universe, including your own. Your actions of consequences sometimes good, sometimes bad, actually neither good or bad in Buddhist parlance just consequences or rather more karma.

The teachings of karma are about acknowledging this fact of the universe, that intent, thoughts and actions have consequences which are just more actions. Acknowledge and atone, you atone for the good as well as the bad, you take responsibility for all the karma.

It isn't a magical judgement of the universe that causes good or bad to happen to somehow keep the scales balanced.

which is behavior that leads to unhappiness and comes from habits of both thought and deed. There is nothing mystical about this version of karma.

I don't believe the universe likes modern, liberal ethics and then rewards and punishes people, and no other animal, based upon our always moving ethical system.

There is a reaction of equal and opposite blah blah blah...

When we do good, we feel good.
When we do bad, we feel bad.

I was at a party a few weeks ago with a bunch of wealthy people, many made there money through active exploitation of others. The wealthier they were, the more unhappy they seemed.

(A lot of awful stuff happens to undeserving people, too.)