Karma, Have you really thought about it? Options

I personally don't believe in karma for varying reasons which will be pointed out in the duration of your stay. I hope to get a clearer picture of the generalized belief being Karma, hopefully you can enlighten me.

Karma is a strange thing, have you thought about it? Let us first address this: we get "bad karma" or 'punished' by thoughts or actions. Now I feel this is a reasonable response to a bad action, but I am one of those who have a vested interest in ethics: so let's pick this apart. Bad actions. Do we get punished for harming animals? Generalized occult studies, basic animism, and modern science, all agree we are no different than another species of animal on this planet; but we're harvesting them for food, we cause global suffering for the worldwide animal population and most of us don't even realize half the extent of it. Now if we do get punished for harming animals, if it is an ethical 'wrong' then how far does it go? Do we get bad karma for killing a cockroach? Technically speaking this cockroach has basically the same right to life as you do, so you're intrinsically killing a being equal to that of yourself. So how far do we go? Do we take it to the microbial level? Do we get bad karma for fighting off a disease, "Sir, our antibodies killed thousands today. I'd suggest you donate to that starving-children in africa foundation" Or does our bodily karma have a sort of just war theory behind it? Now if karma exists on a universal scale: I very much doubt bad karma comes out of fighting and/or killing: not all animals always kill for food, nor do the harvest/use all of their kill. So either karma exists for all animals or it exists for humans only. This is a weird concept, why would it exist for humans only?

Maybe humans have a sort of psychic law enforcement behind all actions and things. Wow that's a bit eerie to think about. If this is true then karma would largely function on the cultural influence around it, it might not be karmatically wrong to eat beef in texas but if you even think about it in India you're fucked royal. Maybe it's even intrinsically wrong to not be racist in the south; bad things will happen to you if you do not submit to the surrounding cultural beliefs/taboos. This makes karma sound a bit like a perpetuation of an anthropological word "ethnocentrism."

The only time I've heard the word "karma" used is when someone doesn't get what they want from someone else, and it's a term used in a cursing fashion. "that karma will get to em, you wait and see. What goes around comes around." So this is closer to calling the furies on someone than anything else.

How about cultural gaps, is it wrong for a man to take up several wives? Is it intrinsically wrong to practice polyamory? How about consent age, it's 16 in the Netherlands.

Do we get punished for spending money on a shirt from a big brand-name clothing superstore who obviously gets their products from Indonesian sweatshops?

I could go on with examples but I think you get my point, karma is closer to a curse than anything else. Something like evoking the furies, or using the evil eye only in the guise of justice, quite possibly closer to evoking the rune Tyr.

I am not a scholar of Eastern religions, but from what I do understand of "karma," the effect includes much more than retribution for crimes or rewards for good behavior.

Take a step or two back from this discussion for the sake of perspective on this. The Eastern religions, including hundreds of "Hindu" sects and most forms of Buddhism, insist upon a spiritual existence that surpasses bodily existence in importance. Those religions treat bodily existence the way we might treat a video game: it absorbs our attention, and we participate under conscious control, but the game has little bearing on our real lives which possess vastly greater degrees of endurance and complexity.

Perhaps you have played an interactive game wherein a player purposely caused trouble for the others who played the game. The game experience diminishes for everyone, but beyond that the perpetrator might live a decent and respectful life. On the flipside, one who gains within the game might have nothing in his real life, and I know a few obese, jobless, 30-year old men who live in Warcraft land in their parents' basements who could testify to this.

Without recourse to a clumsy analogy, it should suffice to recognize that the concept of karma involves a bigger picture than simple rewards and punishments.

It should not surprise you to recognize that our experience of this world reflects only those parts which our sensory organs and their equivalent processing mechanisms in the brain can support. We cannot see germs, for example, but they exist all the same, as well as the better portion of light wavelengths and innumerable other things. We live in a world of fictional scenery in which we must trust that our brains represent everything accurately. The Eastern religions expand on this idea, with the entire physical world considered as a vast illusion with the true or spiritual reality entirely apart from it.

The karma of a person results from interaction with this false world, and confines the consciousness to it and obscuring the true reality of existence. Reason and activities that mingle the consciousness in causative processes bind the spiritual awareness to a set of material conditions, and the yogis call this karma. They also generally agree that karma passes from one incarnation to another, and that one should not seek rewards or punishments but rather freedom from karma altogether and a participation in the absolute reality.

With that said, I do agree that the concept has received the wrong sort of attention, tending to function as a polite way of saying "go to hell" when annoyed with other people, or as justification for noble but materially fruitless actions. I also think that the majority of Western students of karma, despite earnest intentions, have not succeeded in getting beyond the foreign terms involved and thus have no applicable knowledge of the subject. I believe you had unwittingly argued against a straw-man erected by a lazy and superficial majority opinion, and perhaps this will give you something more substantial to debate.