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Karma is watching you and your little dog too!
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So were they right, does shit simply happen, do bad things sometimes happen to good people, do random things just happen with no thought to who they're happening to? Or does everything happen for a reason, is my life and your life all being monitored and controlled by some higher power, are we mere pawns on some invisible chessboard? Is there a discernible intention behind everything or most things that happen to us humans? Is the good and bad that befall each of us the result, not of our current actions, but of our past behaviour? |
Recently I was watching a TV show where one of the characters, a Hindu, believed that a run of misfortune that had recently befallen him was due to what is known as karma. He explained that he had done something in the past that he now saw as being wrong, and he was now being punished for that moral error in judgement. He had accepted that punishment was justified, but was upset that his friends, family and colleagues were being impacted by his punishment and consequently also suffering. Is that what we might call collateral damage? Anyway, the heroes of the show tried to convince him that ... well, while they didn't use this phrase, the simple truth is that shit happens.
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What the hell is karma? So, are we free agents in what we think and do or is something watching us, ready to bring out the big stick if our actions don't match what it hoped we'd do? Christians, Jews and Muslims will of course answer that we are but bit players in God's master plan, and without doubt we'll be punished for behaviour that God doesn't like, and rewarded for behaviour he does approve of. I should note that these true believers are not talking about behaviour that's ethically right or wrong, but simply behaviour that their God likes or hates. For example, as an atheist I view slavery and persecution of homosexuals as wrong, but they're both right in God's view, and so he judges the behaviour of his followers accordingly. For persecuting homosexuals Christians will go to Heaven, while for not doing so I will go to Hell, or at least I would if those places were real, which, obviously, they're not. But in this case we're talking about a different religion, Hinduism, and its belief in karma. Buddhism is the other big religion that also pushes belief in karma. So what is karma? According to Wikipedia, karma is, 'the spiritual principle of cause and effect, often descriptively called the principle of karma, wherein intent and actions of an individual (cause) influence the future of that individual (effect): good intent andMy dictionary defines karma as, 'A basic concept common to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The doctrine holds that one's state in this life is the result of physical and mental actions in past incarnations and that present action can determine one's destiny in future incarnations. Karma is a natural, impersonal law of moral cause and effect; only those who have attained nirvana, or liberation from rebirth, can transcend karma.'In 'Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction', Damien Keown writes that, 'Morality is ... the foundation of the religious life. Moral development is a prerequisite for the cultivation of Meditation and Wisdom. To live a moral life is to live in accordance with Dharma. The term 'Dharma' has many meanings, but the underlying idea is of a universal law which governs both the physical and moral order of the universe. Dharma is neither caused by nor under the control of a supreme being, and the gods themselves are subject to its laws. Dharma may be translated as 'Natural Law', a term which captures both its main senses, namely as the principle of order and regularity seen in the behaviour of natural phenomena, and also the idea of a universal moral law whose requirements have been discovered by enlightened beings such as the Buddha. Every aspect of life is regulated by Dharma; the physical laws which regulate the rising of the sun, the succession of the seasons, the movement of the constellations. In the moral order, Dharma is manifest in the law of karma, which governs the way moral deeds affect individuals in present and future lives. Living in accordance with Dharma and implementing its requirements leads to happiness, fulfilment and salvation; neglecting or transgressing against it leads to endless suffering in the cycle of rebirth.'In Western culture many, regardless of their religious beliefs, casually understand karma to mean that if you do something bad, say you're often rude to someone, then eventually that bad behaviour will come back to haunt you. 'What goes around comes around' is a popular saying. Your bad behaviour may have been missed by the appropriate authorities, be they your parents or the police, but it has been noted by "the universe" and eventually justice will be dished out and you'll be punished, which usually means some misfortune will befall you. And it won't be accidental, it will be intentional misfortune, because the universe really does have it in for you. Those holding this casual view of karma are thus often motivated through irrational fear towards good behaviour, believing that while they may apparently get away with bad behaviour, karma never forgets, it really does hold a grudge, and will eventually get around to punishing them. Hence the popular saying, 'Karma is a bitch'. (I know, it's an offensive, misogynistic attitude, but I didn't coin it, I'm just the messenger.) Karma may take a while, years even, but knowledge of your wrong doing will fester away, and unable to let it go, karma will get you in the end, probably when you least expect it. Of course this is the simplistic Western view of karma, and on the surface probably does more good than harm. I've always viewed karma as supernatural nonsense, as silly and as impossible as all the other supernatural claims made in all the holy books of all the world's religions. But as we well know, people that sincerely believe and follow their holy books view the world differently, through a dense fog if you like, and by blindly following their silly beliefs often do great harm, usually to others. So while Western culture may view karma halfheartedly, does the more detailed view of karma held by Hindus and Buddhists cause harm, it being a core element of both their religions? Living in NZ and in Western culture most arguments critical of religion that one encounters are directed toward Christianity, and then Islam and Judaism, and almost nothing against other religions. Apparently we can ignore Hinduism and Buddhism as we ignore the ancient Egyptian and Greek religions. So while I was able to see that karma made no sense, I wasn't aware of any argument that said naïve belief in karma could cause real harm. It seemed to just be a silly belief that encouraged good behaviour. But then recently I read this comment, 'But is karma really so harmless a belief as to make it worthy of blind adherence? The Dalai Lama obviously thinks so, although this belief is hard to reconcile with the facts of the matter. True, belief in karma can inspire adherents to perform good works in the expectation that such actions will help free them from samsara, the cycle of earthly reincarnation, and allow them to achieve a state of nirvana, the highest happiness. But at the same time this concept — now preserved in Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh traditions — also acts to undermine feelings of compassion by promoting the view that all suffering is the product of prior misdeeds and is therefore self-inflicted. Not only does this provide a ready excuse to ignore the suffering of others, it also justifies discrimination against those born into lesser circumstances,That was written by Dennis R. Trumble in 'The Way of Science: Finding Truth and Meaning in a Scientific Worldview' (2013), his interesting book encouraging critical thinking and basic scientific literacy. I hadn't considered that point before, that the enormous harm that the Indian caste system has caused over the centuries and is still causing today is bolstered by a belief in karma, that the class of society that one finds themselves born into is the one they deserve. Like the person cleaning a sewer in the photo below, born into a class known as Dalit (or Untouchable), a class of human that is so low it doesn't even warrant an official mention in India's caste system. They are literally 'out of caste' or outcasts.
Even the more trivial version of karma found in Western popular culture encourages people to overlook the misfortune of others, I've heard people excuse their indifference by saying that those suffering likely brought it upon themselves by their poor choices in the past.
So clearly belief in karma does real harm when people take it seriously, and so we should work towards exposing this harm and relegate another silly belief to the rubbish bin. End of story. Unless of course karma is real. Maybe Hindus are right to ignore the suffering of the lower classes and disabled? After all, real things can cause harm, and convincing people to ignore a belief won't cause the harm to disappear if the background cause is real. Nuclear radiation causes harm, but we'd be foolish to argue that if we ignore it then that harm will go away. It will still be there harming us whether we believe in it or not. By that I mean we can ignore and laugh at the notion of karma, but if karma is actually real, it will still be causing us harm even though we dismiss it. So, just to be on the safe side, and open minded, is there any reason to believe that karma might be real? And if real, should we also start ignoring the suffering of others, as well as change our behaviour to please the gods? If real, I'm thinking yes. If some gods were actually real then, terrible as it sounds, that reality would justify us humans doing some really despicable things. For example, the Christian God demands that everyone kills homosexuals and outspoken atheists, and if we disobey his wishes he will torture us repeatedly for all eternity. So if I was absolutely certain that God was real and that his threats of punishment were real, as untold Christians claim they are, then I would kill homosexuals and atheists, utterly confident in the knowledge that any fleeting punishment I received from the police would be totally insignificant compared to the punishment I would now have avoided at God's hand. It's the same with karma, if I was convinced it was real and that India's lower castes deserved their lowly status because of past misdeeds, that they were undergoing divine punishment, then I certainly wouldn't upset karma by challenging their status and bring bad karma onto myself. As it is, I do challenge those Christians that persecute homosexuals and Hindus that mistreat the Untouchables, but that's only because I'm convinced my battle is with deluded and cruel humans, and that it's a battle (or argument) I can win, or at least stay safe and gain some headway. But if I believed any resistance on my part was against real gods that would kick the shit out of me, and that there was absolutely no hope of my ever winning, that my disobedience was only causing a long future of horror and terrible suffering for me, then I'd quickly get in line with how the gods wanted me to behave. That may sound like a defeatist and shameful attitude, but let's remember that humans only strive to do the right thing and not harm others because we believe we are in control of our own destiny, that we have free will and we are not mere slaves doing the bidding of powerful others. But if we discovered that our future is not ours to choose, that we were created to obey the will of the gods, to serve as their playthings and that they'll punish us horribly if we rebel, then I'd resignedly ignore the suffering of others if in exchange I received an eternity of relative peace. Remember, an eternity is a bloody long time to suffer for what, in comparison, would be a fleeting moment of futile rebellion. Of course, if everyone accepted the reality of the gods then no one would be foolish enough to misbehave and there would be no suffering to ignore. OK, that's not quite true, since the Christian god, for example, keeps creating humans with homosexual desires, so there would still be some that needed stoning in the town square, meaning still some visible suffering, but it would be much reduced, because unlike homosexuality, many of the things that this god forbids, like tattoos, eating shellfish and working on Saturday can be easily avoided if need be. Hell, in reality I already avoid those things and I still find life enjoyable. So challenging real gods would be foolish in the extreme, and while karma is certainly harmful to many, the rational point is that we should only fight against it if we're sure that it's not real, that it's utterly bogus. So is it? Yes, yes it is ... umm ... bogus I mean. But rather than just say it's bogus, I want to offer some thoughts as to why I think that. But just before I do that, perhaps you're wondering why I'm going to waste my time explaining this nonsense at length. Isn't it obvious that it's bullshit? Well, it should be, but apparently it's not obvious to all, not by a long stretch. There is over a billion and probably close to two billion people that sincerely believe in the nonsense that is karma, so clearly people aren't swayed by someone like me simply saying karma isn't real. To have even a slight chance of debunking a silly belief you need to be able to explain an argument in enough depth so that it compels (honest) believers to reconsider their view, to make them aware of something they hadn't thought of before. Most true believers hold their belief on the most superficial of reasons — God is real because the Bible says he is; aliens are real because I once saw a flying object I couldn't identify. Just as those reasons fail miserably in convincing me to believe in God or aliens, superficial responses to them equally fail to sway the conviction of true believers. Their silly beliefs will have been held for many years and continually reinforced by others, meaning no challenge that's merely a simple statement of denial or skepticism is likely to even scratch the surface. It's like when silly Christians think they've shaken my atheism by saying something like, 'God is real you know', or 'Repent or you'll burn in Hell'. They then quickly walk away smirking to themselves and I just marvel at their stupidity. No matter which side of a serious debate you're on, no one ever changes sides following a simplistic statement. To change part of your worldview requires the careful consideration of evidence and reasoned arguments. Simply being told you're wrong is never enough. People that believe in karma simply believe it's real, they have no idea how it might work, nor do they care. And they certainly don't worry about the major problems surrounding karma, since they don't have the slightest inkling that there are any. Ignorance reigns. There is no gathering of confirming evidence or thoughtful reflection involved, they blindly believe their religion is true because they've been told it is, and since karma is an integral part, then clearly karma must be true too. No need to get bogged down in the nitty gritty of how it might work, it's clearly way beyond us mere humans. Just as I don't have to understand how planes fly to believe that they do, those that accept karma as real feel that they can believe without understanding too. Of course the crucial difference is that I can offer objective evidence that planes really can fly, so my belief is justified, whereas karma believers have no supporting evidence, so their belief is merely wishful thinking. OK, so karma is bogus, but what are my reasons for thinking that? Trumble is quite right that regarding the silly claims made for karma (or gods in general), 'science cannot disprove them', but that doesn't mean that we should therefore act as if they might well be true, and that we should give believers in karma the benefit of the doubt. Science cannot disprove the existence of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, but no sane, informed adult argues that they exist. Just as we do for Santa and numerous other wacky claims, we must ask what the likelihood is of a claim being true, based on reason, the available evidence and the facts we know about the world. I've found that when you put a little thought into what some religious claim is stating, more thought than most any religious believer ever employs, then usually that claim is found to rest on fantasies, contradictions, errors and quite impossible notions. So might karma be something that could actually work? Are our intentions and actions being observed and judged and later used to grant us good or bad fortune? Is it likely that this is even possible? We all know who watches us to see which Xmas toy list — good or bad — we go on, it's Santa. We all know who spies on us in the shower to see if we masturbate, it's the Christian god. We all know who notices what colour we painted the kitchen and then disapproves, according to psychics it's the ghosts of our dead family members. But in the karma universe, who watches our actions and monitors our thoughts 24/7, and then decides whether a specific behaviour adds to good karma or bad karma, whether it warrants good fortune or bad in the future, and at what level it should be at?
Clearly some intelligence, and dare I say it, a fucking super smart intelligence, with extremely powerful surveillance tools, must be keeping track of what every person on the planet thinks and does, and continually inputs that data into some horribly complex algorithm that plots that person's future. Of course it's not just a matter of thinking that a certain person deserves How could karma ever work in a just way, how could one person be punished or rewarded without it impacting on everyone around him? There is no way these actions could be contained. It would be impossible, even if we were just considering one person. But karma must consider nearly eight billion people, not just one, and as ridiculously complex as the web of interactions is that one person has with those around him, imagine the complexity of eight billion people intermingling. An impossible task is just made more impossible. But wait, it gets worse. Karma isn't just interested in those nearly eight billion living people, it's interested in every human that has ever lived, and humans have been around for some 200,000 years. One estimate is that over that time just over 100 billion humans have been born and have died. They all required souls, and for most of history that was well less than one billion at any one time, since the human population didn't reach a billion until around 1800 CE. OK, even so, that's still a lot of souls to keep accurate records for, but complexity aside, you might be wondering what those old souls have to do with your soul and whether it's behaving well or not. It's important because your soul isn't as new as you assumed it was, it's not even second hand, in fact it's been around the clock many, many times. To say it's been well used and abused by several previous owners would be a gross understatement. Unlike the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions where God plonks a newly created soul into a human baby and on the death of that person sends the soul to an eternity in either Heaven or Hell, the karma universe is into recycling big time. Souls in the karma universe go round and round, from birth to death and back to birth again, pretty much forever for most souls. This is what Buddhists and Hindus refer to as reincarnation or rebirth, the silly belief that when your body dies your immortal and immaterial soul lives on and is reborn into a new body. (The soul is not a real thing by the way, not in any religion.) Of course no one, at least no one we need take seriously, can ever remember their previous lives, so for some undisclosed reason our past memories are somehow wiped by karma and we begin each new life as if it was our first. Used souls are given a quick clean, memories are reset and the soul is sent right back to work running a new body. There are no complaints of overwork or talk of a vacation since the souls no longer have any recollection of the struggles in their past lives. This makes perfect sense if "gods" are simply recycling souls and see this as a more efficient option than continually having to make new ones.
So your soul will have likely experienced numerous previous lives, although it will have no memory of them. And even though your soul could potentially be in possession of innumerable valuable life lessons, lessons which could stop you from making untold bad decisions, karma's memory reset is forcing your soul to run the gauntlet of life's many challenges with no help, yet again. Even though it was you, or at least your soul, that learnt these valuable lessons about right and wrong, and not karma, karma has stolen them from you and has decided that struggling in life is good for you. It's like that saying that 'adversity builds character', but even if true, whatever character your soul succeeds in building in this life will be stripped from it by karma as it moves to its next body. Clearly karma doesn't want you to advance and improve, since it keeps resetting your soul back to its default setting, as if you're fresh out of the box. So for the last 200,000 years karma has been observing human souls, looking for good and bad behaviour, and your soul will have lived many lives. It will have witnessed Paleolithic times, the last Ice Age, the dawn of civilisation, the Dark Ages and Middle Ages and forgotten all but now, its current life. Your soul may have been punished and rewarded numerous times for its behaviour during these past lives, but it's important to note that karma doesn't just look at the current behaviour of living people and then immediately punish or reward, it merely judges and then makes a note of that behaviour in a person's good or bad karma ledger. As to when karma will act on that ledger, and dish out a reward or punishment, is totally unknown. It could be tomorrow, next year, or in 500 or 5,000 years time. Likewise, when something happens that could be interpreted as a punishment or reward dished out by karma, it is quite impossible to know what past behaviour caused this outcome. It might be something you did last week or something you did 20,000 years ago during an Ice Age blizzard. Remember that it's the behaviour of your immortal soul that karma is acting upon, not your current physical body. Karma keeps forcing us to forget I'm continually amazed that believers in karma don't seem to have a problem with their past memories being erased on their rebirth, knowing full well that they will be punished or rewarded in their future lives for deeds committed in their past lives, deeds they have no memory of. They apparently accept full responsibility for their many bad decisions in previous lives, even though karma is the one ultimately responsible for those mistakes continually happening in each successive life. This is because karma keeps forcing a system reset, keeps forcing us to forget the lessons we learnt, keeps erasing what moral progress we may have achieved. How can this make sense, how can it be fair? It can't, so why are believers willing to be punished for karma's stupidity? Since people have difficulty in grasping this major flaw in the way karma manages and judges souls over successive lifetimes, let me try an analogy that deals with an ordinary human over a single lifetime, where there's no karma involved, it's all under human control. Imagine a young child that learns numerous lessons as he is growing up, ethical lessons such as it is good behaviour to share his toys and bad behaviour to laugh at his disabled cousin or to hit his siblings when they annoy him, and practical lessons like tying shoelaces, brushing his teeth and riding a bike. Then after a few years his guardian somehow (let's not worry about details) makes him forget the many lessons he has learnt over the previous years, and effectively forces him to learn the lessons required to live a good life within a community all over again. And every few years he repeats this cycle, erasing what has been learnt. We now essentially have the body of a teenager or adult suddenly being controlled by the mind of a baby. If someone did this, reset a person's memories and turned a high functioning adult into an ignorant baby, and once again sent him stumbling into the world to make untold mistakes, mistakes that might harm or even kill him, I'm sure everyone would condemn this action as inhumane, unjust and cruel. After all, this person had already struggled to learn the lessons needed to keep him safe and accepted by society, and had the promise of a progressive and positive future ahead of him, and this knowledge has now been stolen from him. Apart from needing to learn how to walk and talk again, this person has to again try and learn what behaviour is deemed good by society and what is bad. What could possibly be achieved by forcing this person to try and learn life's lessons over and over again? Especially since, regardless of whether they do well or poorly at these lessons, their memories will again be reset to zero in the not so distant future? What might be gained by this continual resetting of memory after lessons have been learnt? The person is oblivious to the fact that he is being forced to have the same experiences over and over again, and since what might have been learnt in those experiences is wiped at the end of each cycle, past experiences and lessons can never be built on to bring about improvement. Newly gained knowledge is lost as they are forced into a new cycle. As far as the person is concerned this is the only life they have ever lived, the only lessons they have ever learnt, and any talk of previous cycles and lessons would be meaningless, since things forgotten can have no impact whatsoever on their current cycle. But that's not strictly true. Even though this person is ignorant of their previous cycles, their guardian isn't, since he is seeing their many cycles unfold and is causing the memory resets. Now, if the guardian so chooses, what happened in one cycle can impact this person during a later cycle. Let's say the guardian's ward, when he was three, badly injured his brother when he refused to give up his favourite toy. Suffering remorse over his brother's pain, this person learnt that his actions were wrong, that you simply shouldn't take the belongings of others by force. Now this person is an adult, but his guardian has reset his memory and so he has forgotten that lesson. Interacting with others he again badly injures someone who refuses to relinquish their fancy smartphone. While he is now an adult, in reality his action is no worse now than it was as a three-year-old, because his guardian has wiped his earlier knowledge on how to behave regarding the belongings of others. But imagine now that the guardian is annoyed that this person has repeated the same harmful act, and so he decides to punish the adult for not remembering the lesson he learnt as a three-year-old. But surely this punishment is not fair nor just as the guardian's actions are the reason the person doesn't remember and therefore repeated the harmful act? The fault lies with the guardian, not the person under his control. Had the guardian not interfered in his ward's life, then the harm would likely not have happened the second time. And even if the person had an inkling that some current misfortune was punishment for some long forgotten deed, he'd have no idea what, and therefore no idea on how to rectify it, either to make amends or to avoid doing it again. Hopefully you'll concur that the actions of the guardian to manipulate his ward's life is not only wrong, in that his ward is denied his liberty, it also achieves nothing as far as the guardian is concerned, since each new cycle following a memory reset doesn't build on the positive aspects of the previous cycle. Not only does the person lose everything he might have gained, so too does the guardian, in the sense that his ward starts again from zero. The guardian will never see his ward improve beyond a single cycle, so if the guardian is hoping to breed a better person then his method is an abject failure. If this person was a moron or a psychopath to begin with, he will continue to be no matter how many times you reset him. It's like resetting an iPhone 6 and expecting it to reboot as an Android smartphone. It's not going to happen, you'll just keep getting an old iPhone 6. Just as this person keeps making the same mistakes throughout the span of their life, cycle after cycle, because he has been denied the opportunity to retain what he has learnt, so too does the guardian keep making the same mistake by continually resetting memories and hoping that things will turn out better next time. How could they? Even if a person makes the most perfect choices and leads an exemplary life, all is soon lost when his memories are wiped. Progress and improvement is impossible. The person in overall control is the guardian and his ward is a mere puppet, having what temporary gains he might achieve being repeatedly reset back to zero. How could the guardian be justified in punishing his ward for not showing any lasting improvement, when the ward's failure to advance is totally due to the guardian continually sabotaging his efforts? The guardian is the true villain in this story, his ward is the innocent pawn whom he keeps lobotomizing. How might society describe a person like this, someone who, by erasing lessons learnt, continually forces another person to repeat the same mistakes? Surely you're something of a sadist and a sociopath if you get gratification from orchestrating and observing the suffering of another? OK, so now think of karma as the villainous guardian and all of us as its wards that keep having our memories erased as soon as we make some progress. Just think of the experiences you could have learnt from if you were permitted to retain your memory of the last 20,000 years as you bounced from body to body. Consider our current advanced society, it's only possible because new knowledge was recorded (by humans) and didn't die with the person who discovered it. It didn't need to be rediscovered in every new generation. Our progress in matters of science and ethics is solely because advancements are remembered; while the bodies may die, their ideas live on. We understand that progress requires us building on what has come before. Karma doesn't seem to grasp that, rather than letting a soul remember its experiences and build on what has been learnt in previous lives, and become something better each time, it keeps starting each soul off from scratch and wonders why they keep making the same bloody mistakes. Frustrated at the lack of progress it thinks that maybe punishment (or random and nonsensical punishment as far as the soul is concerned) will make things better, but it's as futile as me yelling at my toaster. And if you think my example of the guardian and his ward unrealistic, then ask yourself if it would be right to punish someone with amnesia for a past misdeed? Or what about someone with Alzheimer's disease who doesn't even remember their own children? They don't remember doing anything wrong, so what purpose could any punishment serve except to try and satisfy some cruel desire for revenge on the part of the person doing the punishing? OK, if bodies did require a soul to operate (they don't), then the plan to simply reset and recycle them on the death of a body is plausible. It would be like a zoo bringing in a new lion when an old lion dies, they're just trying to maintain the lion enclosure as it was, they're not trying to have the lions evolve to where they understand morality. By its very nature karma's plan obviously couldn't include the intention of having humans better understand morality either, because if it did then any human soul that did somehow obtain a better grasp wouldn't be secretly whisked away to some underground lab, operated on and returned with a completely new identity, one having no memory of its earlier discoveries in the field of ethics. Karma seems bent on just maintaining humans as we were 200,000 years ago, any lessons our souls have learnt in the interim are erased before they're redeployed. But when we factor in karma's desire to judge and then reward or punish our behaviour, this is where the whole thing breaks down. If a reincarnated soul retained its memories and personality, if it remained the same "person" as it jumped from body to body, then karma could be justified in delaying punishment, since the same guilty person would be being punished and they would remember why they're being punished. But since karma wipes all memory on reincarnation, this means actions in one life can have no conscious connection and therefore no moral connection to actions in a previous or a future life. Besides having the same soul, a soul ignorant of the fact that it has lived previous lives, ignorant even of the fact that it is a soul and not merely a material mind that has but one life, means that there can be no moral dependence between these various lives the soul has experienced. It makes no sense for karma to judge our behaviour because that behaviour is forced upon us by having our souls all run the same version of morality software — v1.0. You can't judge someone for something they had no choice in. In a moral sense, we're compelled to keep reliving the same lives over and over again, making the same moral decisions over and over again. We're not getting any software updates, and any random changes (mutations) that might occur to our morality code during our short life is deleted on our death. Before reissue our soul is reset to default and rebooted with a clean copy of morality software v1.0. Morality wise, a soul reborn in the 21st century is no more advanced than it was 200,000 years ago, so clearly we will keep making basic mistakes, the same basic mistakes. Our lack of progress is being deliberately hampered by karma, meaning it's quite unjust that we should be punished for a problem of its own making. I can grasp the injustice in that, so clearly anything intelligent enough to design, create and maintain souls for 200,000 years wouldn't be that stupid to also punish them for doing what it had forced them to do. Well, unless karma was an evil intelligence that got off on watching humans suffer. That's possible I guess, since the Christians go down a similar path. They claim that their god has a master plan and nothing happens in their world, good or bad, without their god willing it, and that he built Hell as a place where his minions torture misbehaving humans and he watches their suffering. Of course in this world, just like in the karma world, humans only misbehave because God interferes in their life, he sets them up to fail. God creates homosexuals to desire their own sex, he creates atheists to be unable to believe in fairy tales, and he creates priests that invite little boys for sleepovers. All part of God's plan. Of course the argument is that no god and no intelligence is overseeing karma, and perhaps that's why what happens in the world often seems totally mysterious, quite senseless and totally unjust. No one is at the wheel, no one and no thing is controlling how our lives are going to unfold. Clearly this karma nonsense is all bullshit, made up long ago by people whose most treasured possessions were a couple of goats and a pointy stick. Wait ... mosquitos have souls too? But it gets worse still. Recall how I said that the complexity of the task of secretly monitoring and interfering in the lives of nearly eight billion people rather than just one was an impossible task made more impossible? Well, karma doesn't just monitor and interfere in the lives of humans across all time, it looks at all life across all time, from the current cats, hawks, eels and cockroaches to the now extinct trilobites, ichthyosaurs, dinosaurs and woolly mammoths, all of which required a soul to live. And souls are not species specific, there are not special souls for humans and smaller, less sophisticated souls for cockroaches. It seems one soul fits all. In reincarnation, when a body dies the immaterial soul is reborn into a new body, but that body can be any body, be it a human, reptile, insect or a fish. The soul may be departing a human body, but whether it goes into another human body or a dog or a cockroach is all dependent on that soul's ledger and what its karmic sum is. If the soul's behaviour in its previous life has been positive overall then it goes up what science would call the evolutionary ladder, say from cat to human, but if the sum of past behaviour has been negative, then it goes down, say from human to snake. If the soul behaves badly as a snake, then on death it goes further down the chain, say to an insect. As impossibly complex as it would be to monitor and judge the behaviour of billions of humans, try and imagine just how much worse (and silly) this all gets when the intelligence managing karma must also monitor and judge the behaviour of every mosquito and worm. Let me try and emphasise just how complex (and futile) this all gets. Scientists tell us that the enormous number of species in existence today is only a fraction of what has existed, that at least 98% of all species have gone extinct, dinosaurs for example. To put it another way, of all the animal species that have been born and died, only a measly 2% now remain, which is maybe around 10 million species. And of course each species is made up of untold individuals, each which requires a soul. To get the total number of lives that have been monitored and carefully recorded by karma throughout time, we need to multiply around half a billion different species by the billions or trillions of individuals making up each species. How many beetles do you think have ever lived? Just the one human species has seen some 110 billion lives, and there are some 300 species of beetle to account for. I hope you'll accept that the total number of lives that karma has been taking notes on for the past several billion years is without doubt a fucking huge number. And of course it wasn't just taking notes, it was also judging and then manipulating those untold lives based on a code of morals that none of those life forms, bar a handful of recent humans, had any conception of. Billions of years judging whether the likes of worms, jellyfish and Velociraptors were behaving morally. Of course science is of the view that lower life forms are incapable of making ethical choices, of knowing right from wrong, but apparently in the karma world even a mosquito can act in a way that adds or subtracts from it's karmic debt, although I struggle to guess what that might entail. But clearly karma has a scale on which to judge the morals of a mosquito.
As I've said, for it to work, my argument is that there would have to be an intelligence that is managing karma — a super, super intelligence. While the monitoring and the collection of this data could conceivably be performed by advanced technology, the analysis and decision making based on that data must be performed by something that is intelligent, whether that is a god, a highly advanced alien or computer with artificial intelligence (AI) or a being like Santa. Recall that my dictionary said that, 'Karma is a natural, impersonal law of moral cause and effect'. Let's look at that in two parts. Karma talks about operating by 'moral cause and effect', but when we think of cause-and-effect (or causality) we generally mean a physical cause-and-effect. Something in the material universe happens and it naturally causes some follow-on effect, eg high winds blow, a tree falls. The effect we see is a tree suddenly falling and that movement was caused by the pressure on it from the high winds. There is a direct physical link between the wind and the tree falling. One caused the other. But this is not how karma's 'moral cause and effect' operates. Imagine a soul in the body of a medieval peasant in 1021 CE who steals a loaf of bread. Karma saw him but does nothing except note the moral misdeed in the soul's ledger. Now let's look at the other part of that statement where karma is described as 'a natural, impersonal law'. While that could make sense, in the same way that a speed limit on our roads could be described as 'a natural, impersonal law', some intelligence must still be policing that law. Natural, impersonal laws can't pull you over for being a bad boy, they can only dictate to some intelligence how you should be punished. While that intelligence could be natural and impersonal, meaning it arose naturally in the universe and lacked any personality or emotion, clearly the work of karma couldn't be done by a mere law or even by my toaster. Something with intelligence is needed, a vast intelligence. Maybe not gods exactly, but something like gods. Hinduism has lots of gods at its disposal, so maybe they could be the ones that are judging us, but I haven't seen it mentioned where a specific Hindu god or many of them acting as a group are responsible for karma. Even in Hinduism it's implied that karma is a natural thing distinct from the work of the gods. While Buddhism does have some gods, unlike Hinduism and other religions their gods are not important and are not running the show, they're not in charge. But clearly something intelligent along the lines of an all-powerful, all-knowing god must be running karma, however Buddhism makes no mention of what or who this vast intelligence is. Both Buddhism and Hinduism seem to go with the vague notion that the natural universe somehow observes and decides, that karma knows all. Wait ... what? It's like the lyrics to that song, 'Now I've got to get used to not living next door to Alice ... Alice, who the fuck is Alice?' Just replace the name Alice with karma and you'll see my problem. Seriously, who the fuck is karma? I laugh when religious idiots say their god is watching me, but at least that claim, as false as it is, makes logical sense. Gods, if they were real, would be intelligent beings capable of watching me, but karma sidesteps gods and claims that the observation and moral judgement of all life is just some natural part of the material world. Can rocks see us, do oxygen molecules listen to our thoughts, do clouds get together to discuss our behaviour and then judge us as we sleep? But seriously, there is no evidence whatsoever that the universe is watching me, or is even remotely capable of watching me, and even if it was, has the intelligence to judge me, or more unlikely still, would even have the interest and desire to judge me were it able to do so. Just imagine you could be anywhere in the universe, observe anyone or anything in the universe, would you choose to watch me for every second of my life, or worse still watch the life of a cockroach? Anything as intelligent and as powerful as karma would have innumerable better things to do and would lose interest in humanity in a heartbeat. This is a primitive arrogance of humans, that we think we are the most important and amazing thing in the universe. Believing that a powerful god would want to watch us live our lives non-stop would be as foolish as some earthworm deep in the Amazon jungle thinking that I would desire to spend my days and energy watching it dig its burrows and making judgements on its sex life. Think about that, why would I, a human capable of greatly enjoying human sexuality, reject that sensuous experience and instead develop a neurotic fixation with the sex life of a worm? Likewise, why would a god fixate on human sexuality, the notion is as ridiculous as humans being turned on by worms. Even if some super intelligence could covertly watch us and interfere in the lives of every single one of us, why the hell would it want to? You may have deluded yourself into thinking that you're a fascinating person to watch, but that's all it is, a delusion. You are that earthworm thinking you're important and that the entire world is fixated on your every move, whereas most don't even know you exist, and those that do don't care. Karma isn't real, but if such an intelligence did exist, it almost certainly wouldn't care either. Humans may be interested in the behaviour of other humans, but we need to stop fooling ourselves that some unseen higher power is equally besotted by humans, and furthermore has the ability and desire to modify our behaviour. I believe I can say with some confidence that karma doesn't give a fuck about you or me. Clearly an intelligence of the level required to secretly monitor, judge and manipulate all life on the planet almost certainly doesn't exist, and even if it did, it is totally implausible that such an intelligence would waste its time and intellect watching the likes of a mosquito, well, billions and billions of mosquitoes actually. And taking careful notes. As I've said, some humans are fascinated by the actions of other humans, but almost without exception this fascination always goes in one direction. Humans watch other humans that are doing more interesting things or are wealthier or leading more exciting lives, like scientists driving a rover on Mars or the antics of the British Royal family or the exploits of famous athletes, celebrities or Artic explorers. No one is interested in watching a homeless person sleep in a doorway or hearing about the work an accountant did on my tax return. Everyone is interested in people that have lives that seem bigger and better and more stimulating than their own, no one is interested in the lives of those below them, of those inferior to them, unless it is to make fun of them. And even then they quickly get bored with that and return to seeking out something more interesting. Think of scientists or philosophers or talented musicians, they all seek to socialise with like minded folk, people who they find interesting and who will challenge them in their work, they don't spend their lives with people who don't understand science or philosophy or the joy of music. And yet we're asked to believe that some super intelligence does just the opposite, able to do intellectual and physical things we can't even conceive of, this being chooses to waste an eternity watching mosquitoes. Not discussing interesting things with them, just watching them. What arrogance many humans exhibit by believing that as amazing as the life of a god must be, and what potential endeavours must be on offer when you have an entire universe at your disposal, this god is instead absolutely captivated by how I spend my day. Even though I spend a third of it sleeping, he's still there watching me, following my dreams. Which quite frankly is more than a little creepy. Karma, if you're real, get a fucking life! In the karma world (and the Christian, Jewish, Muslim worlds) humans are expected to adhere to a strict moral code, and to ensure compliance their lives are all carefully (and secretly) monitored and manipulated by some controlling intelligence. But the Hindu and Buddhist religions don't distribute a handbook that simply explains the moral code that believers are expected to follow. That in itself is a huge problem for souls that come into the world with their previous memories of the moral code erased, and no instruction manual. It's all trial and error. But a bigger problem is who, what intelligence, created this (hidden) moral code in the first place? Who decided what behaviour was good and what was bad? It can't simply be the material universe, since as I've said there is no evidence that atoms or shrubbery or even tigers and sharks can understand the difference between right and wrong. The intelligence in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim worlds is their all-knowing god, so at least they grasp that they had to invent a thinking god to think about morality, and to judge whether we humans were sticking to it. So clearly this again shows that karma requires an intelligence behind it, it can't just be "the universe" deliberating on whether I'm behaving morally. And this raises yet another problem, how did this intelligence determine what is right and wrong? This is a question that has been aimed at gods that push a moral code. For example, is murder objectively wrong, meaning is it wrong to murder regardless of whether the Christian god exists or not? Or is murder only wrong because the Christian god said it was, meaning could God change his mind tomorrow and say murder was now good? If you say no, that murder is always wrong, regardless of what God might suddenly proclaim, then clearly that moral view has nothing to do with God, since you've overridden God, and therefore God is not needed for humans to lead a moral life. On the other hand, if you say God could change his mind about murder, he's God after all and he's in charge, then clearly morals have nothing to do with right and wrong, but depend solely on how God is feeling on a particular day. If you think about it you'll realise that morals don't have anything to do with God, or karma, that we humans decide from generation to generation what it means to be moral, what is right and wrong. Recall how in the past that humans thought it was morally right to own slaves, burn witches, persecute homosexuals and punish their children for masturbating? Now we're more enlightened, and we humans, not gods, have decided that behaviour like that is morally wrong. And what have religions done in response? They have slowly been forced to ignore (but not delete) many of the offensive passages in their holy books that are clearly immoral. And now the majority of believers of all faiths live their lives based on secular ethics (most without fully realising it), on a moral code developed through reason, not on one supposedly devised and forced on them by some invisible intelligence thousands of years ago, where invisible actually means imaginary. Oh I see, it's all natural ... like gravity Out of curiosity I went online and asked Google who keeps track of karma. On the Quora.com website someone had received many replies to the question, 'In Buddhism, who keeps track of your karma and manages your reincarnation accordingly?' Of course the correct answer is that the question is meaningless because there's obviously no need to have someone controlling something that's only imaginary. Karma isn't real bitches! But in the sense of who the gullible believers in karma think is keeping track of karma, then the popular answer seems to be that no one is watching, karma is just a natural, unthinking (dumb) part of the universe. Here is a sampling of some typical replies: 'Prahlad YeriIt always makes me want to bang my head against the wall in frustration when I hear religious morons try and explain their silly beliefs. As to who keeps track of karma, the first five answers all basically give the same flawed explanation as Adam Blackshaw (answer #4), 'No one. It is simply a natural phenomenon. Same as asking, 'who looks after gravity?'' In my opinion comparing karma with gravity, temperature and exams is like comparing apples with oranges, because they're comparing two quite different things, the supernatural with the natural. Their argument is that karma and gravity are both natural phenomenon, and since we accept that gravity and temperature work without an overseer, then so too can karma. But all they've done is merely assert (without evidence) that karma is a natural phenomenon, what they haven't done is show that, like gravity, karma is 'hard-wired into the universe at the most basic, fundamental level'. All they've said is that we know that most things that we see happening in the world do have a material cause-and-effect, one that happens in real time with an obvious physical link, like gravity, heat transference and failing an exam. But that gives them no reason to argue that karma, something we have no evidence of, is also a natural phenomenon. We can detect and measure gravity, we know how it interacts with mass. Likewise we can detect, measure and explain heat transference. Even with exams it's easy to see the material cause-and-effect, that a person's intelligence and study effort will determine whether they pass or fail. To liken karma to gravity and other natural phenomena that have a material cause-and-effect would first require that we could detect, measure and explain the karmic cause-and-effect. Obviously none of that has happened, so if we have no evidence of its existence, how can anyone even begin to pretend they know how it works? It is pure arrogance to argue that something no one has ever detected and which is surrounded by ignorance nonetheless works just like the stuff we can detect and do understand. They have no justification to liken karma to natural events, it's merely a childish attempt to explain a supernatural event by arguing that it works due to cause-and-effect, just like a toaster in the natural world. The effect of the toast popping up was caused by a human putting some bread in and switching it on, and in karma the effect of someone losing a leg in WWII was caused by their soul mistreating a leper back in the Middle Ages. Therefore, the argument goes, since karma works on cause-and-effect just as your toaster does, and since the functioning of the toaster is perfectly natural, karma must also be natural. But again that leap is totally unjustified, you can't claim knowledge of something of which you are ignorant. We know toasters are real, but karma ... not so much. Imagine if someone presented this slightly different argument: 'Does a microwave or cordless drill require magic to work? No! And I propose that Harry Potter's wand works the same way, through natural processes, not magic. Thus I don't have to explain magic, since I've moved Harry's wand into the natural world of science, where I'm sure you'll agree that sticks in the shape of wands do exist. If a microwave can work using fundamental forces, then so too can a wand, and indeed it must since I've just said it can'. I'm hoping you wouldn't believe magic wands must be part of the natural world just because someone said they found a wand-shaped stick outside, but that argument is no different to those wankers insisting that karma must be part of the natural world just because they can posit cause-and-effect in both karma and the real universe. The problem they fail to grasp is that just as sticks in Harry Potter's world and the Muggle world are different, cause-and-effect in the karma world (say, being punished for being rude to your waiter), is driven by moral actions whereas cause-and-effect in the natural universe (say, the wind blowing down a tree), is down to physical actions. Causality wise, we know how the natural world interacts, so what those arguing for karma as part of that natural world need to explain is how these moral judgements interact with souls through space and time. For example, they need to explain what links two incidences that happened to two different human bodies separated by perhaps a thousand years. I know that believers in karma will say that the two bodies are linked by having the same soul, but the soul is quite ignorant of its previous life, and is not deciding to later reward or punish itself for some past behaviour. Something other than the soul is invoking karma. It requires no conscious thought for an apple to drop from a tree, just gravity, brute physics, but I'm arguing that it requires intelligence to decide what morality is, to judge whether some observed behaviour is morally good or bad, to store that decision without acting on it, and to then suddenly retrieve it decades, centuries or millennia later to punish or reward a soul that has been closely observed over all that time for other moral infractions. To argue that karma is just as simple and mindless as gravity requires that these wankers reveal the evidence that justifies that view. Simply saying that they both involve causality is bogus as each relies on a different type of causality, either moral or physical. A physical world can function without intelligence, without humans or gods, but in a world where the life forms are judged on a code of morality, that most definitely needs an intelligence to play the part of the morality police. Then we have the answer from the Quora website that karma is 'an auto-camera which is always on. It's recording your experience of life ... [but] ... There isn't a person or an entity managing all this'. So the universe is recording the life stories of quadrillions of souls, but then just ignores them? Does it even store them somewhere? Probably not since storage would require managing the recordings for later retrieval, which our respondent says isn't done. How can karma judge the moral life of anyone if it never even watches a single recording? And we know it doesn't because again that would be a form of management. That's like the judges for the Oscars determining the winners without watching any of the submitted movies. Clearly these idiots just don't think their answers through, since the universe creating an unimaginable wealth of personal data on everyone that is never going to be managed is just senseless. How would it even evolve in the first place? And yet from this chaos karma can still somehow track our souls through untold lives and manage, without any structure of management, to judge and punish us all. To claim that a system with such astronomical complexity could be run efficiently and fairly and at the same time insist that no one is managing it is just ludicrous. And then we have the bogus explanation that, 'karmas are stored in your mind and in your DNA'. So why is it that neuroscientists and geneticists haven't discovered these karmas? But even if that nonsense were true, our mind and DNA cease to exist on the death of our body, so there is no way that the karma records stored there could be used in some future life of the soul to judge us. The final answer I want to provide from the Quora website is this one, 'John Charles HarmanThis person is wise enough not to attempt an explanation, apparently as dismissive of the usual answers as I am. However by attempting to sidestep the problem he merely reveals that he's as mystified as all the rest. He merely argues that, 'what is most important is not understanding ... how your karma is kept track of ... but rather how an individual can change it!' So, it's more important to understand how we can change karma, but at the same time he assures us that, 'It will not be changed by pure intellectualism'. But surely to understand something means to use one's intellect, and yet he argues that going down that path will be futile. We're told to shift from trying to understand how karma might work to understanding how to change our personal karma, but that this new understanding won't come from actually thinking about karma. So yeah, I'm confused. But I guess that's my fault for thinking about what he said. His childish explanation is no different to those screwed up Christians who argue that their god is far too mysterious to understand, and that we should concentrate solely on pleasing him. Essentially he tells us nothing, except that he doesn't know the answer either, and his reply can be paraphrased as, 'Don't be a smart-ass that asks embarrassing questions, just believe!' Google also led me to another website article, 'Who controls karma?' Again the answer was that no one controls karma, that 'The rules of karma are such that when you create karma, the result will come naturally and automatically. ... [the result does] not need to be decided. The karma itself does this. It happens on its own. ... Nobody makes the rules; otherwise there would be a creator. This puzzle has come about on its own governed by the laws of science'. So again the view is that karma is perfectly natural, it operates blindly and nothing supernatural is going on. It goes on to repeat the material cause-and-effect argument, saying that, 'If you were to drink poison, you would die. No one is needed in the middle to bring the results'. It also offers a causality argument that adds morality into the mix, saying that, 'If you hurt someone, that person will bear a grudge against you and will vow to take revenge when the opportunity arises'. Any fool can understand how one person can bear a grudge, perhaps for decades, and then suddenly take revenge, because that one person is constant throughout, their memory of the offence remains constant, their burning desire for revenge remains constant, and their knowledge of who offended them remains constant. However that's not karma, that's simply human nature, one person consciously and deliberately making some action toward another person, whereas karma is claimed to be something separate from us, an automatic and natural part of the universe, and quite outside our control. Clearly karma transcends individual lives, so what these morons always fail to explain is how knowledge of that incident could survive the death of that person and the erasing of their memories. While their soul survives in another body, it is oblivious of that incident from a previous life, and therefore will make no attempt to seek revenge on someone it has no memory of. And even if it did remember, it will have no idea in what new body the soul of the person who offended it now resides. Seriously, these answers are like little kids trying to explain how Santa's reindeer can fly. All they do is reveal their ignorance. As we've seen, believers in karma offer an analogy, arguing that karma works somewhat along the lines of the way gravity and heat transference works. But does this analogy stack up, is it plausible that something that's 'hard-wired into the universe at the most basic, fundamental level' could do the fantastic things claimed of karma, could something very simple do something very complex? Gravity is certainly a natural, impersonal, basic and fundamental example of cause-and-effect, and how it operates has a very simple explanation. Gravity is the force of attraction felt between two masses and is dependent on their mass and the distance that separates them. That's all there is to it, and with that simple law gravity can work across space and time. The same with heat transference, the law is that heat always transfers from hot bodies to cooler bodies, until they reach equilibrium, when both bodies are at the same temperature. And again this simple law can work across space and time. For any pair of physical bodies, be they on Earth or at the far reaches of the universe, existing now or billions of years ago, their gravitational attraction and temperature will be constrained by the simplistic laws of gravitation and thermodynamics. When two masses "meet", they "know" what they must do. With this basic knowledge, predicting how they will behave is child's play. No matter where in the universe or when in time you observe a pair of bodies, you know how they will interact, and so, as a hobby, observations of this sort would get very boring very fast, because their interaction is kept simple by very basic, fundamental laws. But can it be argued that karma works like this, in a simple, controlled and predicable manner due to a very basic, fundamental law? Let's recall that karma is claimed to be 'a natural, impersonal law of moral cause and effect', that it is about morality, not about how living physical bodies move, but how life forms behave in terms of right and wrong. Recall, in the physical realm, how simple cause-and-effect is, gravity causes masses to attract each other and heat flows from hot to cold. End of story. Now consider how simple or complicated morality is. Is there one clear law that dictates our behaviour, or two, or perhaps many? Are the laws black and white or are there some grey areas? Do the same laws apply to all life forms, eg humans and bats? Can the laws change over time? My view is that karma's moral code must by necessity be horribly complex and unchanging. But just how big must a moral code be, how many different moral situations might arise? Since you might be more familiar with Christianity, let me use the Bible's attempt at devising a moral code to show how complex morality can be, compared to gravity. How many commandments — instructions on right and wrong behaviour — are there in the Bible? You'll no doubt bring up the Ten Commandments (although you probably can't list them all), but there are in fact 613 commandments in the Bible, everything from whether you can have sex with your aunt (no) or tell God to piss off (no). Christians tell us that there's also prohibitions on premarital sex, abortion, contraception, divorce, allowing women to speak outside their home, and permitting homosexuals, witches and atheists to live. Contrary to Christian belief, the Bible does not prohibit masturbation (which is good in my view) but likewise it doesn't prohibit sex with children (which is bad in my view), even though it does think it necessary to prohibit sex with goats (seriously, it does). And on and on it goes, preventing men from covering their heads in church while demanding that women do just the opposite, saying that it's wrong to work on Saturday and that you must never drink a milkshake while eating a hamburger. Just look how complex the Bible's moral code is, and even though people have had thousands of years to memorise and understand it, there is still much disagreement amongst believers as to exactly how these moral commandments should be interpreted. Confronted with numerous incidents of human behaviour, believers are often conflicted over how to respond, was the action right or wrong? And that's just the ancient Biblical world, untold things happen in the modern world that weren't conceived of when the goat herders wrote their moral code, like is it moral to support stem cell research, is it rude to un-friend someone on Facebook and is it wrong to fake an orgasm? Many of the world's religions have written tomes on what they regard is the correct moral behaviour, and no one could argue that understanding what comprises good and bad behaviour is simple. But if just listing good and bad behaviour is a complex process, and interpreting it even more so, when it comes to karma, how could 'a natural, impersonal law of moral cause and effect', something that's 'hard-wired into the universe at the most basic, fundamental level', be able to detect and judge the complex behaviour of billions of different life forms? How could an unthinking simplistic law, one operating at the most basic, fundamental level of the universe, be able to know whether I'm being rude to my girlfriend or whether I'm just distracted by a bad headache? And this is just one of thousands of different moral situations I could find myself in, and untold others could find themselves in entirely different moral situations yet again, all of which would be quite different to the situations elephants, humming birds and sloths experience every day. And yet as wildly different as all these moral situations would be, all calling for a different insight into what is happening, we're asked to believe that, operating on the most simplistic level possible, karma is easily able to understand the event from a moral perspective and quickly decide right from wrong (something that we with our big brains still struggle with). But it doesn't stop there, this simplistic natural process can do more tricks, it can source an identification code for the soul performing the moral action, and then send that code and judgement report off to some remote storage point. And still it doesn't end, in the future this soul's moral ledger will be retrieved at some point, by karma, and this simplistic natural process will then locate the soul and will deliberately manipulate the soul's body and/or inanimate objects and other bodies nearby to bring either good or bad fortune into the soul's life. To further debunk this notion that karma is a natural force, operating somewhat like the force of gravity, let's compare them. When a physical particle floating through space encounters another, gravity only has to do one simple thing, cause an attraction between the two particles, so it's quite plausible that a basic, fundamental force could have arisen naturally to do this one simple task, over and over again, never changing. But when two human bodies interact socially, understanding the morality of their encounter could be astronomically complex. Imagine karma sees a naked woman, who thinks that she is home alone, walking from the shower to her bedroom, and karma notices that a man has also seen her. He could have looked away but he didn't bother to. From a moral perspective, is the man's behaviour good or bad, this is what karma must determine. It would likely be no problem if they were married or lovers, or nudists, or if they were twins, a brother and sister that had seen each other naked since birth and didn't care. On the other hand, it would be wrong if the man was a stranger spying on her without her knowledge or consent. So before karma can make a determination, it must clearly identify each person and consider their relationship to each other, and not just whether they are married or not, but, say, whether their married history shows that the wife is comfortable being naked in front of her husband. Strange as it may sound, some women are not, so in that case a husband spying on his wife would be doing something wrong. Or they could be technically married but have separated and she has a protection or restraining order out against him, so again his action would be very wrong. So karma has to know a great deal about this man and woman, far more than just some simple rule that it's wrong, wrong, wrong for a man to look at a naked woman. And how would that moral rule account for another woman, a lesbian, spying on our naked woman, is that now OK because they're both women? Would karma just ignore that since the simple rule only works with men watching women? And this is just one example of how one simple interaction can throw up a multitude of answers. Karma even has to understand sarcasm and when people are joking to know whether some verbal exchange should be taken seriously. Obviously every encounter will range from subtly to vastly different, each requiring a different moral interpretation. Gravity requires but one simple rule, but monitoring and judging the morality of billions of species would require a massive framework that encompassed a vast multitude of rules and algorithms of unbelievable complexity. Plus karma hasn't just stumbled upon a way of registering how moral the behaviour of trillions of souls is (as unlikely as that is), it can also use this information to later manipulate the physical universe so that the lives of specific souls are impacted for good or bad. As implausible as the notion is that a basic, mindless, fundamental force of the natural universe could somehow evolve to effortlessly understand the morality of human behaviour, when we humans with the brains often fail, it immediately becomes a laughable fantasy when it's argued that this simple, mindless force also has the ability to plot and enact revenge sometime in the future by taking control of all the fundamental forces of the universe that we know do actually exist, like gravity and electromagnetism. To insist that no gods are doing this, no intelligence of any sort, it's just the blind actions of a mindless universe, is almost grounds to have them committed to a mental asylum. They're like those people that make up fanciful stories for young children such as the Easter Bunny, expecting them to be believed (at least for a while), but the story of karma is aimed at adults, and as silly as the story is, the morons expect us to believe also. That believers in karma argue that a natural law as basic — as stupid — as gravity is doing all this wildly sophisticated interference into our lives, and no one in the science world has noticed, just shows how fucked up their thinking is. If these morons were in positions of authority we'd still be living in caves and shitting in the corner. As a Christian, of course I believe in karma The next article I came across explaining karma to the masses, one on Huffpost.com entitled ‘What Is Karma and How Does it Work?', is written not by a Buddhist or Hindu but by a Christian. Now before you complain that I'm an atheist writing about karma, so why not a Christian, the difference is that I'm not trying to illogically defend a belief that conflicts with my worldview. Buddhists and Hindus will of course attempt to explain how karma works because it's a core part of their religious belief, just as an atheist will attempt to debunk karma, and so too you'd think, would a Christian. In the above article I thought Judith Johnson would argue that karma is just superstitious nonsense from a false religion, that God created our moral code and he's most definitely in charge of judging the morality of humans, it's certainly not left to some simple law of physics. That's what you'd expect a good Christian to argue, but no, Johnson tries to claim that karma is quite real, and no doubt to the surprise of Buddhists and Hindus, is actually part of Christianity. Designed, created and controlled by God, and then apparently stolen by others. This confused Christian writes that, 'we, as souls, are here to learn' and that, 'Karma … offers us chances through life circumstances … to learn important spiritual lessons'. She explains that in Christianity the notion of sin is commonly defined as 'deliberate disobedience to the known will of God', and that this wilful behaviour is 'also called karma … the spiritual accountability for our actions'. She claims that, 'As souls we are spiritually held accountable' for our behaviour, and that 'we carry karma forward through time within a given lifetime or, as some believe, from one lifetime until the next'. Her understanding is that our goal in 'life is to pay off our karmic debts rather than accruing new ones so we can come to know ourselves and others as divine beings and enter into the consciousness of God'. This talk of lessons, being here to learn, paying off karmic debt and coming to know God all sounds very nice, but let's get honest here. Let's remember that Christian souls, what Johnson defines as 'spiritual beings who are animated by a vital and divine force', enter into their earthly body and new life completely oblivious to the fact that they are souls and not simply an organic life form. In this sense Christian souls are just as blank as Buddhist or Hindu souls. Whatever they may have learnt from lessons in a previous life that might have got them a step closer to God was erased, and they are back at the very beginning. They have no idea that their goal in life 'is to pay off our karmic debts rather than accruing new ones'. The soul has never even heard of karmic debt, and for most people on the planet, especially Christians, never will. And even if the soul was reborn into a Hindu or Buddhist society, the lessons it learns in its short life will again be erased on the death of the body. It's just unbelievable that these morons think that their soul is on an upward path of improvement, that each life will see them get closer and closer to their goal of enlightenment and/or meeting God, when clearly they start each life just as ignorant as the previous one, and being ignorant and naïve will see them making the same basic mistakes over and over again. Based on the things you can do wrong, especially in God's eyes, they'd be bloody lucky if a single life saw some improvement, and even if one did it would quickly be cancelled out by all the negative ones. As I've already argued, the idea of karmic debt and learning from lessons only makes sense if people understand how this debt works from the very beginning and are allowed to retain a memory of the lessons they've learnt. Clearly none of this happens, souls are reborn ignorant of karma, they're never made aware of what karmic debt they may have accrued, and lessons that inform morals are extremely short-term, erased after each brief life. Johnson's view that, 'we, as souls, are here to learn' is contradicted by the facts, since what we (might) learn is soon taken from us. Like struggling upwards through various levels of a video game, her God suddenly resets the game and drops us back at the start once again, Level Zero. Unlike playing a video game though, souls don't even realise that their character has just been killed and they're starting over once again. Unable to learn from their mistakes their struggle will be endless, any gain will be short lived as a system reset is written into their future, implying that God has no intention of ever welcoming them into the divine hot tub with him. Note too that God, the Christian god, has entered into the world of karma. Johnson argues that, 'Just as gravity is a law of the physical world, so is karma a law of the spiritual world', unlike the Hindus and Buddhists who argued that karma was a simple law of the physical world, nothing to do with a spiritual world, and certainly not controlled by anyone, such as a god. And yet Johnson the Christian insists that, 'As souls, what we do comes back to us according to God's design', that 'When one deliberately disobeys the will of God, karma is accrued'. In Johnson's warped Christian view karma is not like gravity, something 'hard-wired into the universe at the most basic, fundamental level', karma is where a soul disobeys the will of God, and then God notices and consciously decides to punish that soul further down the track. At this point you might (justifiably) be a little confused. Why would a Christian take karma, a silly belief from a radically different religious worldview, and try to argue that it's actually part of Christianity? What's next, are Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy actually angels doing God's work? Is the Quran, the holy book of the Muslims, just the Bible written in Arabic? The weird thing is that (due to where I live) all the people I've encountered with a belief in karma have been Christians, never Hindus nor Buddhists. Maybe not Bible-thumping Christians, but since they were unwilling to deny the existence of the Christian god, that makes them believers in the Christian god, ergo Christians. That said, I recall the strange case of an American woman, a friend of a friend, who, like many Americans, was a very devout Christian, with a Bible next to her bed and everything. She told me she was very interested in Buddhism and a few years previously had seriously considered converting, but in the end decided to stay with Jesus. What I can't comprehend is that during her infatuation with Buddhism she apparently never lost her belief that Jesus was the real deal … which makes no sense at all. How can you be absolutely convinced that God, the Christian god, is real and at the same time flirt with changing to another religion? She said she wasn't considering Buddhism because she had lost faith in Christianity, but simply because she liked some of the notions in Buddhism, especially around ideas of justice which seemed fairer than some of those in Christianity. While no doubt true, the reality is that if you believe Christianity is true, then fair or not, those are the commandments you must live by. It makes no sense to swap to a false religion (which you acknowledge is a false religion) simply to follow some nicer commandments if you still accept that you will be judged harshly in the end by the Christian god. Logically you should choose the religion you believe to be true, not the religion that is offering the best imaginary benefits. That's what a reasonable person would do, but clearly when religion is involved, reason isn't. It seems many fuzzy Christians happily flirt with Buddhism when they become offended by Christianity and still want to lay claim to belonging to a religion of some description, to remain religious, far too afraid or ignorant to admit that the bullshit that made them look outside Christianity exists in all religions. Johnson doesn't seem to be considering a move to Buddhism or Hinduism, since she argues that understanding the lessons karma is providing will lead us towards 'a healthy relationship with God'. Although she does also accept the notion of rebirth, that our souls can 're-embody, carrying the karma over from one lifetime till the next', even though reincarnation is not part of Christian belief. She also says she's a person 'who helps others to raise their consciousness', which sounds more New Age than Christian. I suspect she is a fuzzy Christian, someone who has rejected all the vile stuff in the Bible and is simply cherry picking the stuff she likes and the stuff she hopes is true. And surrounded by other religious beliefs, she's also cherry picking the stuff she likes from those religions, even though God's commandments strictly forbid that. Of course that Biblical commandment is probably one she's rejected, arguing that God couldn't be that mean and insecure. So she embraces the notion of karma, and then tries to convince herself and others that karma, even though there is no mention of it in the Bible, is nevertheless part of God's design. Like most Christians do, she is rewriting the Bible to create a religion she is more comfortable with, ditching all the crap stuff and introducing notions from other beliefs that better fit with 21st century society. She is of course a hypocrite, failing to understand that once you start editing the holy book of your true religion, then it ceases to be a true account of your religion and becomes nothing but a work of fantasy. Of course people started editing the stories in what we now call the Bible before they had even made it into a proper book, and it's continued apace ever since. Ditto with all the other holy books in the likes of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, and all those that were long ago placed on the fantasy shelf, like the holy books describing the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman religions. Continual editing is essential if a holy book is to even try to keep up with scientific discoveries and ethical revelations made over the centuries. Gullible believers in these fantasies are forced to explain, in light of modern knowledge and sensibilities, how fanciful claims made in these holy books can be true, and if true, how they might work or be justified. Long gone are the days when a naked holy man could simply say karma is real, and ignorant, superstitious fools would blindly believe him, now people want to know how it would work before they'll commit. I guess that's progress of a sort, but unfortunately a slight increase in skepticism has been met with increased deviousness from those mired in superstitious nonsense. Modern knowledge that has made people more skeptical of religion is being used by some to delude and confuse people; the language of science is, ironically, being misused to convince people that science actually supports a belief in religion. Believers in karma talk of it being encoded into our DNA, that it's a natural phenomenon, like gravity, and 'is hard-wired into the universe at the most basic, fundamental level'. The argument is that we don't have to choose science or religion, because science is actually the handmaiden of religion. Karma is real and science-y sounding explanations show exactly how it all works. Of course that argument is bullshit, science and religion are not compatible, no more than matter and antimatter are, or Superman and kryptonite. Just as Christianity and Islam can't both be true, neither can the views of science and religion, the universe either has a natural origin and evolution or a supernatural one, it can't be both. Naturally religious nutters don't reveal this truth, they recognise the power of science and misuse it to create fake news: 'This just in, karma is real. And don't just take our word for it, this is straight from the mouth of science'. The sad reality is that many adults are prepared to tell a lot of lies to keep a silly belief alive. Just think about some of the explanations that parents come up with to convince their kids that Santa is real, everything from cloaking technology to hide the sleigh from radar, warp drive engines to explain its speed, and extra spatial dimensions to allow all those toys to fit into one bag, like Doctor Who's TARDIS. Even questions on how Santa gets down a chimney or into a house without a chimney generate surprisingly complex answers. If adults will go to such lengths to just keep some childish nonsense alive, imagine what they'll do to convince us that their religion is real, something that is far more important to them, and something they sincerely believe is actually true. They'll lie to you and me and to themselves. They'll delude themselves, telling themselves that any argument that exposes their religion as false must be wrong, somehow, since karma is just obviously true. That's been known for thousands of years. And you see it happening around you every day, bad things happening to good people and vice versa. What explanation is there but karma? I'm being watched you say, even in the shower? But have you ever wondered why people (not gods) invented the notion of karma in the first place? One important element of many religions is a thing we'll call divine justice. For thousands of years ignorant and superstitious people have believed they are being watched and judged by a higher power, one they are subservient to and are expected to obey. For ease of communication I'll just refer to this higher power as "the gods", but it could mean one god, many gods or some unspecified higher intelligence. Since real authorities that are interested in human justice, such as a police force, can never observe everyone all the time, religions were quick to take advantage of this notion of a divine policeman that is watching everyone all the time, and they use this fear to compel good behaviour. Do something wrong and your friends and your community may miss it, however you will be seen and punished by the gods. As silly as it was, this notion worked for a while, like maybe a year or two. But then people realised that clearly this isn't always or even mostly true, many people get away with doing bad things, which suggests that the gods are not really watching at all. So one reason to invent the notion of karma is to try and explain why the gods don't react in real time and why people are not punished immediately for their misdeeds, like why can a person do something bad and benefit from that action, like committing fraud and then living a long life of luxury off the spoils. Most religions argue that the gods do indeed believe in justice and will interfere by punishing and rewarding humans, but since the gods are never seen stepping in to set things right, so excuses must be found to explain this glaring inaction. Enter the immortal soul. In Christianity for example, the excuse given is that justice will be delivered to the immortal soul (the real culprit) after the death of the body, and in the presence of God. Unfortunately no one living has ever had this explanation verified, it has to be taken on faith. In Hinduism and Buddhism the answer is karma, that the gods (or the universe) will see that justice is done, but alas, the wheels of divine justice turn slowly, and the gods being immortal means that sometimes justice is dispatched long after the guilty body has died. It seems in the karma universe it can take quite a long time for the paperwork to go through. But fear not, even 200 years later the guilty soul is still around and will be duly punished. Oh, please. Clearly karma is nothing but a childish attempt at explaining why imaginary gods don't seem to be doing anything. That primitive humans accepted this nonsense thousands of years ago is understandable, but that billions of humans still believe it today is nothing but depressing. Seriously ... you still believe in karma? So where does all this leave those who still foolishly believe in karma? They can simply accept the justice of karma and ignore the cries of those it is punishing, confident that it knows what it's doing, and that those suffering are fully deserving of the punishment. This is what most do, and as Trumble's quote said, it allows widespread discrimination and unnecessary suffering to continue, all because of the bogus belief that these people must have done something really bad in a previous life, and now some unseen power is holding them to account. However there are some who believe in karma who still feel compelled to help regardless. It's certainly admirable and praiseworthy behaviour, but is this a rational move to make? Even if it's argued that human's have free will and can still act on their compassion and sympathy caused by observing the suffering of others, they must, if they believe in karma, also realise that they themselves are now likely creating bad karma in their own lives. By helping those that karma has marked as deserving of bad fortune, they are going against the will of karma, something they must realise is unimaginably more knowledgeable and powerful than they are, or at the very least, is a dumb, uncaring, natural law that has absolute control over their life. As I said above, if I truly believed in the Christian, Jewish or Muslim god, then I'd be slaughtering homosexuals, witches and those bloody atheists. I'd be true to my belief, not a foolish hypocrite. So why would someone believe in karma and then fight against it by offering assistance to someone karma was punishing, thereby dulling karma's justice? To challenge karma must surely be a misdeed in itself, at least as far as karma is concerned, and will just make things worse? The person helping will now need to be punished, and the person being helped didn't suffer as much as they should have, so their suffering must be extended. Anyone that sincerely believes in karma but through their compassion hinders karma in its work is exhibiting what's known as cognitive dissonance, a state where someone's belief doesn't align with their actions. It's like believing in God's justice, power and moral right to rule mankind, but then working for Satan on your weekends. You can't argue that karma is doing the right thing and then, at the same time, get in karma's way. My view is that these people don't really believe in karma as much as they profess to, or even think they do, deep down they know it's likely bullshit and that helping someone who is suffering is really the right thing to do.
Yeah right! That's as moronic as parents believing that they need do nothing as Xmas approaches, that Santa Claus will deliver presents to their kids if they just have confidence in the system. So to conclude, while we can't prove karma (or Santa) isn't real, there is absolutely no evidence it is real and the way it claims to work makes no sense, meaning the chance of something making it work is nigh impossible. The likelihood of it being real is a sliver away from zero. Seriously, Santa has a better chance of being real. The foolish belief in karma does serious harm by implying that any compassion towards those that are suffering or being discriminated against is not warranted. In the view of karma their plight is deserved, so ignore their cries. This is especially noticeable in Hindu and Buddhist societies, but even in Western culture misfortune is often dismissed as justified, something self-inflicted and brought on by past misdeeds, that it serves them bloody right for behaving immorally when their soul was in one of Attila the Hun's warriors, and then again for making fun of that disabled kid in high school. We need to challenge this primitive nonsense and rid it from modern society. Karma isn't real, and couldn't be real even if it wanted to be, but belief in karma is real, and genuinely harmful. Even when people say 'Karma's a bitch' to describe some friend's misfortune, we need to reply, 'You know that it's just superstitious bullshit right? You know that keeping belief in karma alive is subjugating some 200 million Dalits in India, condemning those "Untouchables" to a life of picking up shit? As the sewer and latrine cleaners they're literally picking up the shit of their fellow Indians!' It will be much harder to convince Hindus and Buddhists to question karma if we in the West appear to also embrace karma, even if only in a trivial way. So repeat after me. Santa Claus, not real. The Tooth Fairy, not real. Gods, demons and angels, not real. And karma, also not real. Obviously. 
Authors: John L. Ateo, Rachel C.
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good deeds contribute to good karma and happier rebirths, while bad intent and bad deeds contribute to bad karma and bad rebirths.'
as embodied by the Indian caste system. Untold millions have suffered irreparable harm due to the subjugation and poverty imposed by this one unsubstantiated belief. And people will continue to suffer as long as prejudicial doctrines are preserved and maintained purely on the basis that science cannot disprove them.'
bad fortune to befall them, say by being hit by a car while crossing the street, or conversely deserves good fortune by winning the lottery, this controlling intelligence must go on to actually stage that accident or manipulate the lottery to ensure their revised plan for this person actually happens. Karma is only real if it truly comes to pass, it's not about what society might think certain people deserve based on their actions, it's knowing that good or bad actions will without fail cause good or bad outcomes in the future. Just try and think how unimaginably complex it would be to monitor the thoughts and actions of just one person, without them ever noticing. And then manipulating, again secretly, the physical world around them to give them good or bad fortune. But if we think of manufacturing a car accident or a lottery win, we are now impacting not just the life of our particular person, but the lives of those around him. Say this person is allocated bad fortune by being hit by a car and severely injured, but this accident will also heap bad fortune on the driver who was somehow compelled (unknowingly) to strike this person. The driver has now been charged with careless driving causing injury, he's lost his licence and has feelings of horror, guilt and sleepless nights as he relives the accident. Likewise the accident also upset the lives of those who witnessed it, the doctors and nurses who had to treat the horrific injuries of the victim and his family who now have to take time off work to nurse him back to health. The absence of this person and their caregivers from work cause problems for their employers, and on and on it goes, the negative influence of this one accident ripples out into the wider world, untold people are suffering needlessly just so that one person could be punished for something he did in the past. Did all those other people impacted by this accident also deserve bad fortune, and of the level they received? If the car driver also deserved to have a bad day, just imagine the further manipulation of yet more lives to put him in the right place to hit our initial person. Likewise the doctors and family members, did they also deserve to suffer, and so were their lives manipulated to put them in the firing line too? Let's imagine our guy was actually killed, and because of his fraudulent property deals in the past everyone agreed he had hurt a lot of people, so lose the tears, but now his innocent wife and young children are without a loving husband and father, and about to be evicted and made homeless. They are caught up in his punishment, in his karma, even though they don't deserve it. Even if we take the opposite tack, that of the lottery win, and karma rewards someone for good behaviour, the manipulation of the lottery result to give it to a specific person means that it will no longer go to the person that would have originally won, before karma interfered, that person has (unknowingly) had his win stolen from him, you know, like Donald Trump. Did the original lottery winner deserve to have his win snatched away from him at the last moment, is this what his karma was aiming for? And as for the person that karma has now delivered a huge lottery win to, maybe they deserve it, but does his wife and children who will now benefit immensely from this new wealth also deserve it? Was their good karma level the same as his? That's highly doubtful. So how could karma deliver good fortune to one person without it rubbing off on less deserving people around them? And how could karma deliver bad fortune without the fallout affecting others nearby who don't deserve it?
Then a thousand years later, in 2021 CE, after the same soul has been in and out of some 20 bodies, the soul's latest body suddenly gets infected with COVID-19. The infection wasn't caused by unwise socialising or lax safety, in fact medical authorities can't even understand how the infection occurred, because it was covertly introduced to the body by karma. What's quite unbeknown to our COVID victim is that their soul is (finally) being punished for stealing that bread a millennium ago. But clearly the physical action of the bread theft was not the physical cause of a coronavirus entering a body 1,000 years later. There is no direct link whatsoever. The effect we now see, the coronavirus infection, was clearly not caused by the medieval peasant, who is long dead. But perhaps you can argue (as karma does) that there is a moral link, a moral cause-and-effect, that the moral error of the bread theft caused the later coronavirus infection, that had the theft not occurred then neither would the infection. In the karma world the infection is a deliberate and conscious punishment for a past misdeed. But it's quite obvious that the physical act of the bread theft didn't reach through time and cause the coronavirus infection, and so even if we agree that stealing the bread was morally wrong, how did the theft actually cause the physical infection? Is there such a thing as a moral force that can locate, capture and transport a coronavirus and then deliberately push it into the body of its COVID victim? Not that I'm aware of. Morals only exist in the minds of intelligent beings, those capable of determining right from wrong. It requires intelligence to judge an act as morally wrong and to then plan and dish out a punishment. We don't need anything beyond natural processes to explain the wind blowing a tree over, the cause-and-effect is simple and obvious, but the act of making a moral judgement 1,000 years ago, of somehow remembering that judgement and keeping track of the soul it was linked to, and now a millennium later deciding that the time is finally right to effect a punishment, that action most definitely requires an intelligence. When they talk of karma's 'moral cause and effect', the only plausible link between the moral misdeed of the bread theft and the later punishment by coronavirus infection is a super intelligence that sees itself as the morality police for the universe.
Unfortunately if you really are a true believer in karma, and even if suffering and discrimination upsets you somewhat, you still know that the right thing to do, or at least that rational thing, is to ignore it. An intelligence far, far more powerful and knowledgeable than you is working with information you aren't even aware of, all to bring about a world where supreme justice prevails. For a mere human to think that he could challenge the decisions of karma would be like a talkative parrot challenging Albert Einstein's view of what special relativity says about time dilation. We, like that parrot, are woefully incapable of understanding (let alone challenging) an intelligence that is capable of managing the karma of all life on Earth, and I imagine, the entire universe. Trumble is right, for true believers karma isn't the harmless nonsense that many (mainly Christians) see it as. For those that truly believe that their actions influence karma, and that karma will in turn influence their lives for good or bad, maybe in a month, maybe in 500 years, but definitely sometime, then it's prudent for them to turn a blind eye to suffering and discrimination, and just let karma get on with its work. It may often seem cruel and unjust, but this is due to their ignorance, and if they just resist the humanitarian urge to interfere then rest assured that karma will (eventually) ensure every soul gets exactly what it deserves, and true justice will have been delivered to all. One just needs to have confidence in the system.