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.

 

The human body and the holocaust

I have a feeling this will be another strange post. You see, I’ve just spent the night watching more foreign films dealing with beautiful people fighting, loving, and dying amid one of the darkest periods in human history; and it’s 3am, I’m exhausted.

Allow me to let you in on something a little personal: I often spend time thinking about the human body. No, not in the way you’re thinking a normal 20 something guy would think of human bodies, particularly female bodies, though that is a part of it. Most of the time it’s more of a detached, clinical observation; though to be honest it’s a mix of both, sensual and clinical. The whole thing is somewhat mystical to me, the way you might lie in bed examining the body of a lover; slowly gliding your fingers over their skin, taking note of the texture, the rise and falls of their curves, the soft malleability of their flesh, or the strength and elegance of their collarbone.

The paradox is intriguing to me. While the human body can be a graceful work of art, almost ethereal, at the same time it can be gritty and dirty; unkempt hair, sweat, grime, blood. Without proper grooming and hygiene, we can be a real mess. But the dualities don’t end at aesthetics. While the human body can be soft and delicate, we are able to build powerful machines and structures out of steel. Though we lack thick protective skin, or claws for self defense, we make up for it with tools and ingenuity. To highlight this contrast, imagine people going about their jobs, yet doing so in the nude. (And please leave the crass sexualization for the children, that’s not what I’m going for here) In the middle of a hard, sterile, mechanical environment we have these soft and delicate bodies that created it. It’s hard to try and explain this through words. What I’m trying to express is a thought that is very sensory in nature. Trying to translate how a thought feels, tastes, sounds, and looks like is hard to translate into text, so lets move on.

Maybe it’s the humanist in me, or an extension of that mystical feeling I feel about the human body, but we really are fascinating creatures. Yes, a machine can do something a million times with laser precision, but humans are just so versatile. While we divide up into various social and economic classes, and vary in degrees of intelligence, we all have basically the same potential. For example, the janitor who cleans a building, their job does not make them any less of a human than the CEO of the company they work for. If you took that janitor and trained them intensively, they would be able to do the things the CEO does, it’s just a matter of education and training. (Now obviously janitors don’t become CEOs, but that’s a symptom of society and some starting off in more advantageous positions than others, not because there is an inherent difference between people)

So where does the holocaust come into all of this? Well since I look at the human body as works of art, and value the potential of every human being, the holocaust is something that deeply interests and disturbs me. The wholesale, systematic slaughter of millions of people… It’s just beyond me. I may really hate somebody, but I can’t escape the fact that they are human. I still see them the way the curious lover does. Thus it’s beyond me how you could hurt something like that, let alone pack millions into freight cars and slaughter them.

Seriously, what’s going through this soldier’s mind? How can he not see that the mother and her daughter that is is about to murder are people? It just baffles me. People have been committing atrocities like this for millenniums, it still goes on today, though not as grand and mechanized as in the 1940’s.  How can we live with ourselves? I think most people just ignore it or put it out of their minds. I’m not sure we are able to fully comprehend the horror of what we do to one another. I’ve heard stories about soldiers who liberated the death camps, how many of them could never sleep well for the rest of their lives, how some could never forget the stench of the mountains of dead. I think to fully comprehend the horror would destroy you. My thesis advisor in college was a holocaust historian for a while. He had to stop because it was destroying his humanity just talking about it. He said he went numb and the numbers and atrocities blurred together, that if he hadn’t changed subjects he would have committed suicide.

How are we capable of such acts? How can we do such a thing to something a beautiful and amazing as a human being? I guess it’s also part of our duality;  we have the capacity for great goodness, and the capacity for unspeakable evil.

The dangers of a god based morality

I have a feeling the majority of people know that they don’t need a god to be good. They know that killing, lying, and stealing were wrong long before it was written in the ten commandments.  There are, however, people out there that feel that without a god telling you something is wrong you couldn’t make that decision yourself, or that it would be worthless. These people really scare me. They live by a completely god based reality. Whatever their god says is right is right, whatever it says is wrong is wrong. If the their holy book said “Blessed is the one who sacrifices puppies to me” then you can be damn sure they’d be killing Fido every Sunday. To these people who live by a god centric morality the only thing that keeps them from killing, raping, and stealing, is that they think an invisible man in the sky will punish them for it. To admit that you wouldn’t do these things even if you knew for sure there was no god would be to admit that morals don’t come from a “holy” book.

To exacerbate this problem, many of the people who do believe in the god-centric form of morality subscribe to the iron age desert god of the bible. Some will say “oh, but god is love!” but if you read the bible you will quickly run into atrocity after atrocity. There is a lot of morally repugnant things god does in there. He commands blood sacrifices, forces abortions, condones incest, commits a number of genocides, the list goes on. The value he places on an individuals life is pretty low.  Apologists have spent centuries trying to work out complicated explanations for why god does some of these horrible things. Yet despite all their complicated answers, the simplest one is true: the god of the bible is the creation of numerous men from various iron age cultures. They wrote their views into the bible and created a god in their image, their misogynistic bloodthirsty image.  The old testament just reads like a laundry list of who’s beating up on the Jews, and how they’re all going to die because of it. The god is envious, paranoid, and egotistical, just like the men who created him.  Now take a character like this and apply his “morality” onto the world in the 21st century. You have a recipe for disaster, and indeed that’s what we see everyday. In the past century we’ve developed the technology needed to exterminate all life on the planet many times over. Can we really afford to entertain people who still hold iron age views on morality?

The natural state of things

It’s so hard to do anything, there is so much resistance to everything. Water will eventually wash away soil no matter how hard the soil tries to resist. It’s the natural state of things. Buildings will eventually crumble and fall, it’s the natural state of things. Everyone you love will eventually die, it’s the natural state of things.  The universe will eventually spread out and cool down into cold dead nothingness, it’s the natural state of things.

There are just so many things that if left by themselves will revert back to the natural state of shit and nothingness. It’s a fight to do anything. Even gravity is against you. I put a pencil on a desk and it rolls off and falls, and so I must bend down and fight gravity to pull it back from its natural state. I know that sounds trivial, but it’s the little things that get me down.

Day in and day out, not getting anywhere, it’s a struggle just to get out of bed. My body aches and I’m tired, I’d much rather revert back to being in bed, but I must fight the forces trying to keep me down to go out and perform meaningless tasks.

I used to be all “I want to save the world and help people”, now I’m not sure. It seems that the world is just spinning down the drain, and any attempts to make things better are ultimately pointless. So why fight it? Things in life are naturally shit. Starvation, suffering, and death are the natural states for millions around the world. Masses of people will naturally do stupid shit, like vote republican. Why fight it? Yes they will do stupid stuff, and yes they will suffer for it, but they are so fickle and possess such a short term memory that they will continue to repeat the same mistakes and expect different results. It’s just natural for them. Shit is the natural state of things.

As much as it seems reasonable to just go with the flow and be evil, I can’t. It’s my natural state to be a good person, and so I lament all the shit in the world, but I feel unable to do anything to stop the natural state of things. I think I would be happier if I was indifferent to other people’s suffering. It would make living in this world as we slowly circle the drain easier.

Why Atheism is bad

Everywhere I go I keep coming back to this one argument. I think it is the most universal arguments against Atheism. It’s really the crux of the matter. The odd thing is that this argument is so blatantly false you really don’t have to argue much to prove it wrong. Any sensible person can look around and see the argument is false, yet somehow, people keep subconsciously holding the false claim in their hearts.

The argument I’m talking about is “You can’t be moral without god”. Yes, this is a worn out topic, but no matter how many times it is refuted over and over again, people keep believing it. I guess most people just never stop to actually think about this. They just automatically have this negative gut reaction to Atheism, and when asked to vocalize that knee-jerk reaction, they blurt out that you can’t be good without god. It’s almost like a programmed response, never thought out, just there.

“You need god to be good” is behind all the distrust of Atheists, why they are hated in America, why they can’t run for public office, why people don’t want them teaching their children, why people feel it is sad when someone looses their faith. I always keep coming back to this one ridiculous claim.

It’s ok to lose faith in god

Losing faith in god is often portrayed as a sad and negative thing. It seems like people view it with a sense of anguish when someone looses their faith. But why?

I guess people equate faith with hope. Some people are so fragile that they can’t stand the idea that this is all there is, and so they cling to anything because it gives them hope.  Without their belief in something more they despair. (But this depends on the person, I personally know FAR more happy atheists than sad cynical ones)

As for why it’s viewed as a negative thing, I think it’s because of ignorance. Some people assume that without your faith you lose all moral basis. (So as to not repeat myself, see my other posts on morality as to why this idea is bullshit)

In reality, loosing faith can be a very good thing. It’s part of growing up and out of childish fantasies. It is also very liberating! The realization that you alone are responsible for your actions, that you have control over your life and that you’re not damned or intrinsically imperfect by some original sin, it’s amazing. Also, life is all the more wonderful and precious because it only comes once. If you had to spend eternity existing, existence would be worthless. And then to think of how lucky you are to be alive in the first place, of all the things that could have happened differently from the beginning of existence that would have made you not exist, it’s mind blowing.