Karma

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

my handy dandy dictionary defines Karma as:

Karma: (In Hinduism and Buddhism) The sum of a
person’s actions in this and previous states of existence,
viewed as deciding their fate in future existence…

Part of what is also Karma, is that the west also uses Karma…
when god/Jesus judges one, that too is Karma… your previous actions
decide your fate in a future existence…the story of Adam and Eve
eating the apple is a story of Karma… and the story of all human beings
suffering from “sin” for all time is just another story of Karma…we are
punished by past sins into our future existence…

Now in the west, morality is based upon religious constructs,
we have the religious ideal and then we can know what is moral
and immoral… thus ethics/morality is built upon religious ideals…
without religion, we cannot have ethics/morals… and this idea has
been quite clear since the fall of the belief in god… “God is dead”
and we still struggle to find a morality/ethics that we can hold to,
that we can believe in…the loss of morals/ethics is seen in the
acts of the 20th century… the Two World Wars, the Holocaust,
the dropping of the atomic bomb, the “my Lai” massacre in the
Vietnam war… the various “ethnic cleansing” in dozens of countries
since 1900…

the other path is to have the ethics/morals before we have the religious
ideals… this act is right/or wrong and then we discover the religious
implications… we can say, beating someone up is wrong… just because,
and then we seek conformation of this later… either in a religious context,
or a political or a social or a philosophical context…

but there is another possibility here… we use Karma as our guide…
if we act, as if we beat someone up, we will get our “Karma”
put upon us… for every good action lies a good result, for every bad action
we will get punished for it, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow,
but sooner or later, we will get punished for that action…
Karma is a bitch… as they say…

what if, what if we hold to Karma as our ethical/moral guide?
not as Christians hold it, we get our Karma in our afterlife,
but we get Karma in this life… we get rewarded or punished in
this life for our actions… not in the next life… but in this life…

that could be one possibility for us to use as a moral/ethical compass…
in our understanding of what is “good” and what is “bad”…

but the case is, we have other possibilities to use in our understanding
of what is “good” and what is “evil”

but we need to seek those out, we need to explore them to see if
they will work in our modern age…find the right and wrong
and then seek out the principle we will use to justify our actions…

what is “right” “good” and what is “wrong” or “evil” and then work
out the ideals we are going to use in judging what is “right” or “wrong”…

Kropotkin

2

one of the problems with seeking out “good” or “right”
and avoiding “evil” or avoiding “wrong” is that quite often
we have no sense of what is “good” or what is “evil”…

and if we were to pin it down, say “evil” is… that idea of
“evil” changes and modifies… as I have mentioned before,
the idea of the Holocaust being considered to be “evil”
was after the fact… during the Holocaust itself,
it was quite well known what was happening, but the average
German didn’t think it was “evil” as they benefited from the
Jews being sent into concentration camps… what if I benefited
from an action, say, got a better job, better housing, made more money…
how do I then call the Holocaust “evil” if I am benefiting from it…
it isn’t “evil” for me, in fact, It is really working for me… “evil?” not at all,
in fact, I would call it “good” “right” because it has benefited me…
for the Jews, not so much, but hay, what do I care about them?
what have the Jews ever done for me? Much “evil” can be justified
by such words…now, would we still considered the Holocaust “evil”
if the Germans had won the war? To the victors go the spoils…

If we were to deal with the Holocaust in a pragmatic way, we
might even see the Holocaust as being a net positive…
Kill 6 million Jews for the betterment of 30 million Germans…
Math like that makes the Holocaust seem almost, reasonable…

and yet, make no bones about it, the holocaust was “evil”
and yet, I am unable to prove that point…I just know it…
it is “common” sense to say, the Holocaust was “evil”

Perhaps we can better understand the Holocaust in terms of
Karma… I am judge by past events in deciding my fate in
future existence…the problem here, among others,
having committed the Holocaust, what future punishment
can make up for the actions of thee Holocaust?
to simply execute the leaders of the actions of the Holocaust,
seems to be far too little, far too late…

I am just not sure what could be punishment enough
for the actions of the Holocaust…

Kropotkin