Karma smarma

Good afternoon boys and girls! Today I want to talk about Karma! Every once in a while I run into someone who proudly touts the fact that they’re a “big believer in karma!” This they usually do with a smile on their lips, a twinkle in their eye, and a bounce in their step! Yes sur-ree! They firmly believe in that warm and fuzzy notion that every good action done will be payed back in return!

And that’s about as far as their thinking goes.

But let’s follow this notion through to its logical conclusion, shall we? Now karma is originally from the Hindu faith, a main tenant of which is reincarnation. You see, karma has two parts to it:

A do good and good things will happen to you.

Do bad and bad things will happen to you.

“What goes around comes around” is a simple summation. With reincarnation, karma acts as a sort of moral equalizer, an assurance of justice in this life or the next. If you do bad things now, sooner or later bad things will happen to you; which brings us to kids with cancer:

Aw, don’t feel bad for this little guy! He’s getting what he deserves! He must have been a horrible person in a past life! So too were his parents! Wow, can you imagine how bad they must have been to deserve to watch their otherwise innocent child slowly die before their eyes? Payback’s a bitch ain’t it? Oh well, you know what they say, “what goes around comes around!”

Whenever someone says they’re a big believer in karma, they most always mean they only believe in half of it, the feel good half.

People who don’t believe in reincarnation, yet who still want to hold onto karma, often try to rationalize this conclusion away. In my personal experience, the majority of these types of people are the warm and fuzzy, liberal “spiritual but not religious” types. The problem is, without the cycle of rebirth, karma loses a lot of its ability to be a moral equalizer. Karma without reincarnation has no good explanation for why bad shit happens to otherwise good people early on in their lives. (Like kids with cancer). These people simply haven’t been around long enough to accumulate enough bad karma to deserve something so horrible.

You could argue that it is a result of the child’s parents’ bad karma, but that is beyond not fair to the child; and karma’s supposed to be all about fairness!

The other problem with the idea of karma sans reincarnation is (ignoring childhood diseases) the notion that you will eventually get what you deserve later in life. All you have to do is take one look around the world to see that that is blatantly untrue! Bad people get away with everything all the time! Just look at politicians, bankers, and child molesting priests! Stalin killed between 20 and 80 million people and lived a life of luxury and power till his last dying gasp. Evil wins every single day while the downtrodden and oppressed are distracted with movies and TV dramas where good always wins out in the end.

No, for these “spiritual but not religious” types their karma is a special karma, one tailor made for what they wish were true: To them, karma mainly focuses on paying back good deeds. In the rare times when it deals with paying back bad deeds, the farthest it will ever go is in giving a speeding ticket to that jerk who cut you off at the stop light. That’s it. No worse “punishment” for simple things that offend the believer in karma.

At best it’s very self-serving. At worst it’s an excuse to be apathetic about achieving justice.

 

Blood and Bullshit

WARNING: If you are more offended by the marking up of a book than by the contents and commandments of genocide, rape, and torture contained within, proceed no further.

A few days ago I happened upon a wonderful gem: a rubber BULLSHIT stamp. Once I discovered said stamp I quickly went out, bought a red ink pad, and began testing it out. I decided to test it out by applying it to some of the texts most deserving of it’s seal off approval. (Click pics to enlarge)

Later that evening I hit upon another idea to illustrate the bloody nature of the bible and the koran, but unfortunately I didn’t have any professional fake blood. (I missed my chance to stock up on Halloween) I tried to cook up my own, but unfortunately it ended up looking a more like jam than blood. I guess I’ll have to get some professional fake stuff and do it over again. In the mean time, here is how they came out: (again, click to enlarge)

Lastly, just a prototype of something I thought up last night, religion as “Just a bandage.”

I feel it is important to preemptively conclude with a note about respect for religion and books some believe to be holy. No beliefs deserve automatic respect, no matter how intensely a believer values them. I personally find the edicts, theologies, stances on women, homosexuals, slavery, etc contained within these books to be abhorrent. I am exercising my free speech by branding these books as bullshit. Furthermore, I will not be burning these books. While I see no problem marking up my copies of these books, burning them historically implies that I wish to burn the people associated with these books. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I do respect the rights of those individuals to believe in these books, even if I find the books to be repulsive. When I am finished with these books I will bury them and plant flowers on top so something beautiful can grow from the ugliness contained within.

How is god both father and son?

The trinity is one of the “great mysteries” of the christian faith. A “great mystery” is really just another way of saying “Over the course of being invented by iron age goat herders, manipulated by the church, and then translated over and over again by scribes, this shit makes no logical sense.”

The Arians had it right. Father and son have distinct definitions. A son cannot exist before the father that begat him. A son is literally the offspring of a father. Created by that father. Existing after that father. They by definition are not the same being. Brothers would make more sense. They at least can be created at the same time as twins, neither existing before the other. But then that raises the issue of two gods plus “who was their father”

Also, where is the mother in all this? If god is the father, Jesus is the son, then who is the mother? Don’t say Mary because while you might claim that she is miraculously the son of human Jesus, Jesus existed before he was sent by god to earth.

“Well that’s simple GP, god can create anything, so he created a son without needing a woman”

First off, does the sexualization of god not bother you? Secondly, then why the hell do we have two sexes here on earth? Would it not be easier to just reproduce a-sexually? Think of all the “problems” that would be solved if humans reproduced a-sexually. No Eve, no eating from the tree of knowledge, no sex and the “sin” that goes along with it, no prostitutes, no women to subjugate, no rape!

The virgin Mary wasn’t a virgin….

Later this week my religion class is going to be “debating” whether or not Jesus was born of a virgin. I of course am going to say he wasn’t, and as practice thought I’d run through my reasons here.

What I think it comes down to is probability. Which is a more probable explanation for crop circles?

A) Aliens with super advanced technology that allows them to travel MILLIONS of light years flew all the way to earth to secretly make patterns on farmer Joe’s field and leave without making official contact in broad daylight

B) Somebody is playing a prank on farmer Joe and made the crop circle like this.

Naturally, B is more probable, so what about the explanation for the “virgin birth of Jesus?”

A) An invisible being that created the entire universe decided to zoom in on earth, single out Mary, and send an angel to tell her that he had magically impregnated her with his son right before she was to be married

B) Mary became pregnant the same way everyone else always had, through sexual intercourse, right before her marriage, and knowing that the punishment for such an act was death by stoning decided to claim that god did it.

Again, B is more probable. Occam’s razor states that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed.

This is the point where I expect the christians in the class to pull what they believe to be the ultimate trump card, “Anything is possible through god!”

Let me ask you something. Is it possible that ships float because invisible mermaids hold them up? Yes, it is possible. But then we have two competing explanations for the same result, on one hand invisible mermaids, and on the other the entire field of ship design and science of buoyancy, which is observable and testable. “Anything is possible with god” is a slipper slope to all forms of ridiculous bullshit. Yes, ANYTHING is possible with god, but not PROBABLE. It’s possible that unicorns exist. It’s possible that all pigs could grow wings overnight and fly, it’s possible that there won’t be a sunrise in the morning, but none of these things are at all probable.

This is where I assume the argument ends, yet there is something else I might come up against. One of the christians might become so desperate as to try and say that we can’t trust observation as a way of gaining information. For example, they might say that we can never KNOW for certain that a ball will fall if we drop it. They will admit that a ball has always fallen when dropped, and that the theory of gravity explains this, but we can’t 100% KNOW it will happen again in the future.

Basically this person is advocating that since we can’t know anything to absolute certainty, we should just believe something stupid, regardless of the amount of supporting evidence the opposite side has. There is a really good/short video that explains this here

One should also take into consideration that there is precedent for Mary’s claim. The Pharaoh Amenkept III, Ra, Perseus, Romulus, Mithras, Krishna, Horus, Melanippe, Auge and Antiope all claimed to be born from virgins. Plus, Mary, being Jewish, would have know the prophecy about Immanuel in Isaiah 7:14. What’s more likely?

Yet I expect some people to say “well it’s a matter of faith, and I choose to believe it.” Well fine, as long as you acknowledge that you’re purposely believing in something that has been demonstrated to be ridiculous in impossible, and to that extent you should not be considered a rational adult, nor be taken seriously as such.