HERE I GO AGAIN...

by Old_Ponter , Saturday, May 19, 2012, 16:14 @ Jiggs

Maybe I should just change my handle to "troll," 'cause I have a real problem with karma.

The doctrine of karma, like the doctrine of sin, creates more problems than it solves. ALL religion is mind-control. To me, "cause-and-effect" has nothing to do with religion or spirituality, so-called. If "cause-and-effect" is "spiritual," so is gravity.

There's more to karma than cause-and-effect. Like sin, karma is a control system. I once heard the top Krishna dude -- Krishnamurti? -- say that the reason the poor are poor is because of their karma. In other words, the poor are poor and the rich are rich because they earned it.

Jesus said the poor will always be with us. Which means the rich will always be with us. Religion reinforces the socio-economic status quo, and warns against taking the law into our own hands (personal emancipation, political revolution). On a not-so subtle level, sacred texts are nothing more than high-sounding, moralistic political tracts meant to keep us in our place. Written by the educated, ruling class, at a time of virtually universal illiteracy. We've been dumbed down for millennia. Karma justifies the caste system, after all.

So, let me see if I get this right: David Rockefeller (rich) was born to wealth, because he earned it in a previous life, according to the Krishna dude. The fact that all great fortunes are built on crimes against humanity -- robbing the poor of the fruits of their labors -- doesn't seem to fit into this equation. We're supposed to believe that when he dies (if he ever dies, the old lizard) all the bad karma he's created in this life will catch up to him, and he'll "rebirth" accordingly, perhaps as a little black baby in the Sudan. This is an over-simplification, but not by much. Why should we believe a word of this nonsense?

In other words, karma is just another word for cause-and-effect, but brings with it a lot of unnecessary and harmful bunk. The word should be struck from our vocabularies. If we mean cause-and-effect, we should say so, without trying to dress it up with ideas whose sole purpose is to control and retard human progress.

The truth is not "out there." It's "in here." As I alluded to in another thread, if we need a cookie-cutter moral code to tell us what's right and wrong in all situations, with do's and don'ts and paybacks, maybe we're not as "spiritual" as we thought. We can only advance by doing the right thing for the right reasons. Not because we're following a to-do list, and not because we're conditioned to believe in the threat of "the law" catching up to us. That sounds more like the theology of a slave.

Greetings, Troll:

To me "karma" is the run of the mill "what goes around comes around." If a person treats people like "dirt" others will pick up on that and may either treat that person like dirt or simply avoid that person. If one spends all his time and energy pursueing a career, the neglect of wife/children family may very well end up in divorce, karma.

A poor person may be poor due to "karma" I know a case where a very intelligent youth quit school, got a part time job in a restaurant and ended up with no place to lay his head. He ended up sleeping on his grandmother's couch in a one-bedroom apartment, for many years. The grandmother did not have the heart to tell him to leave. He would sit on the couch, would watch TV or play video games from morning to night not doing anything to improve his situation. In todays' society there are jobs available, there are many fields that are crying for people, skilled/technical trades, but with few qualified applicants.

I disagree with your assessment of karma being used as a means of controlling people, but then your understanding of karma is probably different than mine.