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Have you ever noticed anything you didn't like about someone or something that someone did and you told them about it and then all of a sudden that same thing happens to you?
I've been noticing it a lot lately and now I feel like a hypocrite. But maybe it's just a way for the universe to put you in that other persons shoes so we learn to stop judging.
What do you guys think?
I think it's a load of rubbish. Have a look at the countries with religions that follow karma - eg India, widespread rape including of children; dowry system that results in women being set alight by their inlaws if their families don't pay up; hundreds of thousands of people shitting in their "sacred" river the Ganges and then swimming in the water and dying of disease.
That's the sort of thing that can happen when people believe every thing will "level out" in the next lifetime so don't do anything to improve conditions in this one.
In short, it's a lazy cop out
Karma exists but I dont think necessarily in the way that religion seems to view it. In the scientific world the rule is called "Cause and effect". In real world "If you shit in the river and swim in it you might get a disease" vs "If you kill this man you will burn in hell when you die".So there is such a thing as Karma that we see but in religion its long term vs short term immediate.
I wasn't talking about religion I was just talking about Karma by itself. And I never said anything about the afterlife..
I'm talking about here in the real world.
I think ^ is a cop out. You'd still say Christianity is a farce because of the crusades or some shit. There's hypocrisy in everything. People choose wrong often, doesn't make the religion, or as I prefer ,faith, wrong as a whole.
My entire life I've done small acts of kindness and had the same returned to me. I don't feel like I deserve anything that comes my way and when I am a cunt to other people I tend to eat my words quite often enough. Feels like karmic justice to me.
But afterall, we do live in a fortunate society where politness and common kindness is expected and maybe its only then that we are free to make up whatever la-de-dah theories we like.
I would say christianity is a farce, but not for the reason you give and I do hate being misquoted! It's a farce because it requires turning off your brain and accepting impossible things on faith, which is true of all religions as far as I know. We have a brain for reason but there are far too many people in the world who don't turn it on when they get up in the morning.
We've all done acts of kindness, large and small, and received the same - how does that prove the existence of karma? That's just being a good person or being around good people, nothing to do with karma.
Why do you use "cunt" as a derogatory term? It's where we all emerge from (except in the case of caesarian sections) and should be honoured, not denigrated as an insult.
There's no justice in a belief system which promulgates blame the victim views, for example, that children who are sexually abused chose to be born into a situation where that would occur because karmically they had lessons to learn from it. It lets abusers, murderers and rapists off the hook, can't you see that?
I once had a fling (very brief because of the arguments about this crap) with a highly intelligent jewish woman who'd got herself into the clutches of the orange people and believed that her family members who'd perished in the gas ovens of the holocaust had chosen that fate in a previous lifetime. The fling didn't last long after I asked her if in that case, the jews should be thanking the nazi's for attempting to exterminate them and we should all thank those who oppress us because we must've chosen that before we were born?
Obviously there is such a thing as cause and effect but that's not karmic and it doesn't mean we choose to have bad things to happen to us before we're even born or that if bad things happen to us in this lifetime we've somehow paid off a debt and will have a better time next time around.
It's a very comforting belief system and sometimes I wish I could accept it but unfortunately I'm unable to turn off my intelligence.
So you're saying people who have a religion are stupid and don't have a brain?
That's pretty rude.
No I'm saying they choose to accept impossible things on faith rather than turning on their brains - not the same thing
"rather than turning on their brains"
that means you think people who have religions are stupid..
If you take the science route to it all. What would you say if there was another sense (hearing, smelling, tasting etc) that allowed you to feel something spiritual. Some people may have adapted and gained that sense and others may have not. And from a religious aspect we could say people who have not had a religious experience have not fully opened their mind. Science in itself has proved anything is possible. You are allowed to not be part of any religion but is wrong to put down others who practice any type of faith, and call them stupid. What you said is rude. And I'm not trying to be mean but just be careful how you word things because it will come off as offensive weather you mean it that way or not.
Karma is a bullshit idea people use to deny the inevitable fact that some people will get away with anything while others sacrifice everything to meet their own demise.
Like Ellenna said, it's an intellectually lazy way of understanding why the world works the way it does. The universe behaves naturalistically. It's up to us as humans to impose morality.
I feel like karma only hits those who worry and meditate on it. Lots of people who dont give a fuck get away with all sorts of shit. At the end of the day we should be kind for sincere reasons and not just to get it in return.
The concept of Karma all too often seems like a New Age cop out, an easy way to blame people for the problems they are experiencing in their life.
Usually along the lines of: "The reason that woman was raped was that she was a rapist in a previous life and she chose to pay off the Karmic debt in this life." I think it's a load of BS and is logically incoherent.
I don't believe in the whole "what happens to you here will affect your next life" thing, but I believe in a much more secular version of Karma which can pretty much be expressed as "what goes around comes around."
The way it works is that we do something wrong, something we know is wrong, and later on, something bad happens to us. Bad things happen to people (even good people) all the time, but when they happen to us (especially if we harbor guilt over something we have done in the past) we sometimes have a tendency to think that we are deserving of the bad things that happen to us, to such an extent that we believe that there are cosmic forces in the universe which are overseeing the distribution of justice in our world.
This also affects the way that we look at bad things happening to other people (especially bad people). Think of it this way: an unprincipled man comes to prominence (wealth, perhaps) through nefarious means. He treats others harshly, perhaps cheating them and stepping on them to reach higher places in society, and perhaps some of us want to see him fail. Down the line, the same things happen to him; a business partner maybe screws him out of a fortune, his business declines, his health has declined, so on and so forth. It may be tempting to say that this is some sort of cosmic or metaphysical force that has punished him for his deeds, if one is so inclined to believe in such abstractions, but it can easily be the result of his own actions which have led him to such a demise.
In one case, his greed may have so gotten the best of him that he was willing to work with other unprincipled men in order to further his material gains. In the end, this was his undoing, because he forgot that there are other people in society who don't play by the rules and that he is just as vulnerable as anyone else if he consorts with people much like himself. The onlooker, however, feels tempted to believe that 'Karma' or 'God' are responsible for his failures.
In another case, perhaps he screws so many people that absolutely nobody wants to consort with him any longer and because of this, he loses business. His business thus declines, and again, people feel as though some 'force' of justice is in the universe.
Perhaps further, his health has declined because he has spent so many years looking over his back, making sure that no one comes looking for revenge or is doing the same things to him that he does to others, that it leads to him becoming insane.
All in all, I feel that what goes around, comes around. That is what I mean by 'Karma'.