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.

 

Liberty & Freedom are worthless

Liberty and Freedom are worthless words. The ideas those words used to represent are still invaluable, but we no longer have words to represent those concepts.

In George Orwell’s 1984 there is the important concept of “double speak“. Double speak is the deliberate distortion of language in the hopes of making meaningful discussion impossible. Controlling language, just like controlling history, is an extremely powerful weapon. If you can debase and alter the very language of a debate, you can frame it any way you want. Your opponents will become victims of their own language.

We see this happening in America today. In the past, conservatives successfully altered the connotation  of the word liberal. They turned it into something dirty, a crime, a perversion. What did liberals do? They cowered and switched to progressive. Now the right is hammering away at progressive as hard as they did liberal to try and make that a dirty word too.

Liberty & Freedom have fallen victim to the same war. What do those words mean? I don’t know what they mean now. I see them constantly being used by people who would, if elected, severely restrict who could marry who, what women could do with their bodies, where women and blacks could work and go to school, who could serve in the military, what religion the government would favor, who could enter this country in search of a better life. The people using the words Liberty & Freedom would make a lot of decisions controlling the actions and choices of other people. Is that what Liberty & Freedom mean?

There was a time when those words, like liberal and progressive meant something different. There was a time when Liberty & Freedom meant the lack of control. Liberty and Freedom were words feared by people who sought to coerce and control others. People uttering those words were to be quickly and mercilessly put down by the authorities.

Now those who would take away people’s ability to do what they please use these words to describe their cause. Liberty & Freedom are now worthless words.

Glenn Beck promotes violence

Glenn Beck recently spoke at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference where he claimed America’s ills were due to progressivism. Ok, that’s fine. I disagree with him greatly, but he’s a conservative. He then goes on to compare progressivism to cancer. (see the video of his talk here) Ok, so now we’re getting a little shaky. But then he dives off the deep end and says “it can’t co-exist. You must eradicate it! You must cut it out of the system!” Seriously? How are people supposed to interpret that? The way I interpret that, the way I believe most people would interpret that is an urge to use violence. “Eradicate! Cut-out! Can’t co-exist!” You may laugh, but Glenn Beck’s viewers are scared, stupid, and armed.

Take this for example. Canada is thinking about allowing people with terminal diseases to elect, of their own free will, to undergo doctor assisted suicide. Beck twists this into “euthanasia!!!!” and tells his viewers that Obama and the progressives are trying to bring this hear. “Just like the Nazi’s in the 1930’s!” “A great evil is coming! Like in the 1930’s! Are you going to stand up and do something?!?!?” A caller calls in, believing all this bullshit, scared to death that Obama is going to kill her, and Beck says HE WILL!!!

What do you expect is going to happen? Eventually some scared idiot is going to take Beck’s urge to action seriously and get their gun and do something horrible. They might shoot a government employee, be it a cop or a mailman, or they might blow up a federal building.  If an angry mob marches on Washington with guns, the situation could rapidly deteriorate. The last thing Obama should do is send in police or troops to break up the protesters. It would quickly turn to shooting, and regardless of who fired the first shoot, the Tea Party idiots would claim another Boston massacre and use it as a rallying cry for more violence. The best thing he could do would be to pull back all law enforcement officials and just let the mob go, destroying everything in their path. This way the world will see them for how crazy and violent they are. Don’t give them any martyrs.

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.