Karma Police

[Rorysm]

I figured I'd open the board to complaints over how SG portrayed Karma.
I'm not a big believer in it or anything, but from what I've studied, to reach their religion's goal of Nirvanna, don't you have to live your life without gaining ANY karma, good or bad?

MY NAME IS EARL however is an excellent show that satires everything from white trash to the social elites. Great show, we need more like it and less cop drama's, Crime Scene investigations, reality crap, and news satires that feature jokes about how dumb President Bush is from people who aren't original to write a new joke.

[bartl]

I figured I'd open the board to complaints over how SG portrayed Karma.
I'm not a big believer in it or anything, but from what I've studied, to reach their religion's goal of Nirvanna, don't you have to live your life without gaining ANY karma, good or bad?
I'm certain that Steven is aware of that interpretation.

St. Augustine wrote of three levels of religion, which can be summariazed as the stories, the lessons of the stories, and the underlying principles behind the stories. The "My Name is Earl" view of karma is the lowest one; a recurring joke is that when anybody tries to explain to him how karma is supposed to work, they see how it somehow alters to work the way he thinks it does (nothing new; in the early Disney Goofy cartoons, the major joke was that reality would alter itself to fit his concept of it, but it wouldn't work for any of the other characters, notably Donald Duck). Of course, rulers took advantage of the "do good and good things happen, do bad and bad things happen", ESPECIALLY combined with reincarnation, to justify oppression of the people ("if you were born an untouchable, you must have done something really bad in a past life, so you deserve being treated as an untouchable").

Even those on the second level think of "good karma" and "bad karma"; one phrase I've heard, though, is if you are wearing chains of iron or chains of gold, you are still wearing chains. At its most basic level, karma is the law of cause and effect, and the basic mistake is thinking that causing something to happen is the same thing as DESERVING it to happen, while the former is basically a matter of physics, and the latter exists only in human minds.

A few weeks ago, a couple lost control of their car in a zone with no cell phone service, and the car ended up just out of sight. Although they had a working cell phone, they didn't get help for several days, and one of them died. Does that mean that there is a death penalty for driving in an area with no cell phone service? Does it mean that the man deserved to die? It was not justice in any human sense, but it WAS karma.

The final thing to understand is that even the same karma can come in several forms. For example, if you are going somewhere in the rain, you can sprint from shelter to shelter, and stay relatively dry, or you can just say to hell with it, and get soaked. You still get to the same place in the rain; you just get hit harder one way than the other. Which means that those who deliver the karma still have to face their own karmic consequences. In the New Testament, it is strongly implied that Jesus was SUPPOSED to be crucified, but Judas is still damned for betraying him. Too bad the 19th slaveholders who used Biblical justification for their slaveholding (as opposed to the abolitionists, who ALSO used Biblical justification for their opposition to slavery) didn't learn from the lesson; even if one assumes that the enslaved people deserved it (with no proof whatsoever), that STILL does not justify being the enslaver.

[Steven Grant]

But saying all those things are karma is like looking at the night sky and saying that set of stars over there constitutes a constellation. In reality, those stars are utterly disconnected but since from our viewpoint they're "closer together" than other stars, or more visible than them, we consider them a coherent unit, a constellation. Obviously, we see constellations, and learn to see constellations. That still doesn't mean constellations actually exist anywhere but in our interpretation of things.

- Grant

[bartl]

But saying all those things are karma is like looking at the night sky and saying that set of stars over there constitutes a constellation. In reality, those stars are utterly disconnected but since from our viewpoint they're "closer together" than other stars, or more visible than them, we consider them a coherent unit, a constellation. Obviously, we see constellations, and learn to see constellations. That still doesn't mean constellations actually exist anywhere but in our interpretation of things.
"Karma", in Sanskrit, means "action". Karma is cause and effect. The examples I gave were more to illustrate the difference between natural consequence and human justice, where karma is considered to be the former rather than the latter, which is the major misconception about karma. Now, as far as combining the idea of karma with the idea of reincarnation, well, that's a different aspect; I was trying to show, however, that reincarnation is not necessary for karma.