Bront's Forums

Karma, sometimes by a different name runs through most the eastern religions.  So in Hindu if you worship the right god ( I can't remember which one) it will give you some positive karma which you can use up.   Balance is a western adaptation.  Karma is like a cosmic accountant, and we should be building up good Karma to reach some goal.  Balancing your account is not as bad as going into debt, but the goal should to build good karma.   Karma itself doesn't care, just like the dollars in your bank account don't care if you are hopelessly in debt or have a million dollars stashed away. 

Let me break for a moment.  If one believes in God (the Judeo/Christian/Muslim God) then Karma is null and void.  Works can never build a big enough balance to get you to heaven.  That's up to a Judge, depending on which of the three systems is valid.  Talking about karma, to be clear, is just a mental exercise in understanding another culture.  It is an attempt to be fully informed, and so as to not feel confused, or not be misled.  To be more specific I believe our accounts are wiped clean by our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ.  My appoligies if I sound preachy, that's not my intent.  I simply think it's important to be clear there is no karma.  If you are building good works it should only be out of Love and Gratitude, to the Glory of our Creator.   

back to Karma...  and Bugs...  If I step on a bug, I get negative Karma, killing stuff is negative karma.  If the religion includes reincarnation, or not, might affect the degree of negative karma, but my account goes down when I cause death.   To me bugs don't count, I set aside the current Morphological categories that make them living 'animals', and measure them as not meeting the Biblical requirements for 'animal'.  It leaves them, IMO, as self reproducing food sources, plant pollinators, and waste management mini bots.   This is evidence to me that Karma is incorrect; death of 'bad' bug is perfectly ok.  Killing tomato bugs, which would be negative Karma, is in reality a good thing so I can grown tomatoes in my garden. 

I'm concerned about anyone who tries to keep a positive Karma balance.  Karma, if the concept is correct, is impersonal.  It is not a guide.  It has no justice.  It's like being caught in a rip tide, and if it pulls you further than you can swim, game over, next life or not.  Trying to fit your life to it, makes no sense.  I know a Buddist who basically makes his life into nothing, so nothing can disturb him.  It comes from this karma concept.  But that's not life, life is messy, we fall short, we don't have the control karma implies.  We get mad, sad, happy, and etc... and these are not bad things if we get mad or sad for the right reasons. 

Little old ladies should be safe because karma doesn't require balance, and pushing an old lady into traffic would be a larger debt than helping her across the street anyway.

Are we in agreement that Karma is more of a judgment then the guiding force behind our pile of chemicals?

Lath I was hoping you were leading somewhere with that question. 

I'll move on to polytheism/animism (I don't know why I wrote animalism earlier).  Animism is basicly believing everything has a spirit, or at a minimum everything living has a spirit.  Some of the polytheistic religions are animaistic, like many native american belief systems.  This one also qualifies as supporting the concept of free will.   It doesn't explain the 'why' of it so much as the 'why not?'  It takes the supernatural as natural, and doesn't worry about what science can't prove.  Without the artificial constraints of so called science, Animists have a world view which includes observations beyond a physical (pile of chemicals) body.   IMO, they've made good observations but don't have revelation to put 'the spirit world' together correctly.  So, although they see edvidence of the unseen, they don't put it together correctly.   

Yeah, poly - theism is literally  'many' - 'gods' ism.  I lumped the two because animism often includes a number of Gods, as well as ordinary spirits.  If I understand correctly, the spirits are more like a life force.  Sometimes in a body, sometimes not.  Many of the stories I've read have people seeking spirit guides, but these aren't always kind or helpful.   Most people just write this off as superstition, but I believe there is something to it.  I just don't play with the spirit world cause Chirstians aren't suppose to, and frankly I think it's a dangerous hobby if you are gifted in the discernment of spirits.  or a useless waste of time if you can't descern spirits.

Yep, most of us can relate to the common native american stories.  Animism is all over the world though. 

I think I should say a few words about pluralism and we can move on to comparing the world views.  To see what stands out, what fits obervation, and how/why can we have free will.  Or do we just fill in what we don't know with a bunch of mystic folk lore? 


Pluralism, according to webster is "a theory that there are more than one or more than two kinds of ultimate reality."  I differ with Mr Webster, in that Pluralist I've read say we precieve ultimate reality in many different ways.  Like looking at the same thing through different windows, or the blind men discribing an elephant as a wall, a tree trunk, a snake, a fan, a rope, etc... depending on what part of the elephant they come in contact with.  So not that there could be 'two kinds of ultimate reality'  but that we view ultimate reality in different ways.   This philosophy sounds appealing at first but without any solid guildlines humans manage to twist it up into illogical excuses to justify themselves.  The concept that we don't know everything, quickly morphs into an excuse to throw out logic.  If we know something feels like a wall to one person, and a tree trunk to another, we can't simply say for me it's a flying carpet.  Let me try one more analogy.  There are many ways to loose weight.  Just because there are many ways, doesn't mean the ice cream diet is a way to loose weight.  The problem is amplified once one considers the world religions and logically discerns they can't be paths to the same place.

Yeah, real Atheists are scary, and fervent about thier beliefs.  Most Atheists though just use their 'religion' as an excuse to not think.  Unfortunatly most Christians also use their religion as an excuse to not think, so it's hard to tell the difference at times.

I wish we had a real Atheist in the thread, the conversation gets interesting.  They seem to prefer oblivion over the 'threat' of hell.  They are intelligent enough to grasp their religion has no point, leaves no meaning for life, that they have no real basis for ethics, but that seems better than the lie they preceive 'mystic' religions to be.