General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: A Karmic Moment? [View all]Demo_Chris
(6,234 posts)I will be blunt:
There is NO magical cosmic justice. The Lion doesn't 'Get what's coming to him' for destroying the Zebra, the Lion gets fat and the Zebra gets dead. Replace that Lion with Mitt Romney, and the Zebra with the poor people he has devoured, and you get the same results. There is NO god or karmic preternatural entity watching over us, keeping track of the good and bad, and waiting to balance the scales.
Pretending otherwise isn't just wishful thinking, it's twisted.
Karma assumes that the good and the bad are earned and rewarded appropriately. This is, of course, both demonstrably false and diabolically evil. It's just another way of talking about BOOTSTRAPS, it's an excuse for tolerating inequality, oppression, poverty, and social injustice. Like all religions, that's what it was invented for.
Kids with cancer did not earn it. George Takei did not deserve to spend his youth locked up in a concentration camp with his family, and the kids who were just slaughtered at Sandy hook didn't have it coming. Slavery is not pay-back for some past-life transgression, it's not because Cain murdered Abel, it happened because we allowed it and profited from it and the good people who might have said "Hell No!" didn't because they subscribed to magical thinking as well.
And we are still doing it today. We're doing it in this thread -- a thread about a mythical morality fable filled with clichéd cartoon character good guys and an evil bad guy Republican man. The moral, we are told, is that everything works out for the good because "The universe has got this!"
It's a wonderful fable. It doesn't really matter if it did or did not actually happen, what matters is that the conclusion is not. Even in this story the universe did nothing to address the problem. PEOPLE did. Like the Magi from afar, three wealthy liberals arrived on the scene bearing gifts for the suffering old woman. They ACTED.
CONCLUSION: stop talking about karma and any other magical nonsense. There will never be any justice, our problems will never be addressed, unless we ourselves act to acheive it. Discussions about imaginary nonsense at best just get in the way, and more often serve to justify indifference to the victims.