belief, karma, atheistI don’t believe in god but I do believe that something bad will happen to you if you do something bad. But my friends argues, that I cant believe in karma unless I believe in god, because god is the one who is in charge of doing something bad to me.
I need some answers to clear this up.
That’s called “confirmation bias.”
You do something bad (behave rudely, cut in front of someone while driving, break something in a store and hide it rather than ‘fess up and pay for it). Two days later, your chimney springs a leak and you have to repair it at a high cost.
Because you did “something bad” and you feel guilty about it, and it’s on your mind, you equate the “bad thing which happened to you” (expensive repair) as a “punishment” to make you suffer because you made someone else suffer.
In reality, your bad behavior and the chimney repair are unrelated. As jjnguy correctly points out, there’s nobody watching you, nobody deciding you were bad, and nobody directing other unrelated events to make sure something equally bad happens to you in retaliation. Bad shit happens for no reason. You didn’t intend to break the item at the store; you just bumped into it and it fell and broke. That wasn’t a punishment for the store manager stiffing someone on her overtime hours.
Confirmation bias is also how people think they can predict the future, or read someone’s thoughts: they only remember the hits (there was this one time that I just knew Aunt Martha was sick, and I called Aunt Fran and she said Aunt Martha was in the hospital!) and forget all the misses (all the other times Aunt Martha was sick and you had no idea until Aunt Fran called you to tell you).
Now, if your bad behavior is that you were rude to the chimney cleaning guy, and as a result he damaged your chimney so that it leaked, then there IS a direct correlation. But that’s not karma; that’s a consequence of your behavior.
Generally speaking, I think that if you’re a decent person, and you usually behave decently, the people around you will react to that and treat you decently, and vice/versa if you’re a jerk. Also not karma, just common sense.
There is a difficulty embedded in your question. I'm not sure if you assumed this, but karma is not a concept where "you assume that there is someone/something keeping track of the current score of your actions". That is a clever way to frame the debate, but inaccurate. Remember, karma is not just a religious concept but a component of the Indian and (much of) Asian worldview. Per the wiki,
"Karma is not punishment or retribution but simply an extended expression or consequence of natural acts. Karma means "deed" or "act" and more broadly names the universal principle of cause and effect, action and reaction, that governs all life. (karma in Hinduism)"
More interestingly, and to your interest specifically:
In Jainism, karma is referred to as karmic dirt... Karmas are attracted to the karmic field of a soul on account of vibrations created by activities of mind, speech, and body as well as on account of various mental dispositions. Hence the karmas are the subtle matter surrounding the consciousness of a soul. When these two components, i.e. consciousness and karma, interact, we experience the life we know at present.
If you strip away the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and look at this as a psychological projection of the phrase you reap what you sow, it's is easy to understand the subtlety of Karma and how it does not need to rely on any god or supernatural concept in order to give one a sense of the world.
Karma is not some cosmic piggy bank of good = good, when reduced to that it is a bastardization of it's millenias-old meaning. In this form, it is not an idea or worldview that can be gamed or exploited, as such it is not something that adds to how to understand the world.
Karma in its truer-to-form framing, it is a shared understanding of the world, indigenous to the East, that is a projection of the reciprocity of one's actions. That's it. Reap what you sow. Basically, the choices you have in front of you are the outcome of the choices you have made in the past. There is no itemization to specific actions, but rather it must be construed as a gestault.
Last, on a psychological view:
Since the 20th century emergence of emotional intelligence as a novel paradigm for viewing human experience, karma has become a sectarian term which umbrellas the entire collection (both conscious and subconscious) of human emotionality.[41] This modern view of karma, devoid of any spiritual exigencies, obviates the need for an acceptance of reincarnation in Judeochristian societies and attempts to portray karma as a universal psychological phenomenon which behaves predictably, like other physical forces such as gravity.
(Note: If someone wants to add in reincarnation, they do make it a supernatural concept. So if you are an empiricist atheist, then it becomes contradictory. If you simply don't believe in god, you can still believe in anything else you want and still be an atheist, loosely speaking.)
Yes. It is possible. Many Buddhists are atheists who believe in karma but not in any god. While Buddhism is a religion, it has no god. Therefore, all Buddhists are atheists that believe in karma.
Believing in karma is believing in the supernatural, but not all supernatural beliefs are of gods.
If you believe that because you do something bad something bad will happen to you (Karma), you are making three assumptions. (that I could think of off the top of my head)
First, you assume that there is someone/something keeping track of the current score of your actions. In other words, there needs to be a running tally of bad things you have done, and bad things done to you. I believe this requires a belief in a higher power.
Second, you also assume that there is someone deciding which actions are bad and which actions are good. This also requires a belief in a higher power.
Third, you assume that there is someone/thing capable of doling out the punishment. This would also require the intervention of a higher power.
So, to answer your question, no, I don’t think you can believe in karma, and be an atheist.
I don’t think it’s contradictory, but I define atheism narrowly (lack of belief in god) so there is plenty of room in there for other nonsensical ideas.
However, I am curious as to what you believe the mechanism to be? Karma depends on a sort of metaphysical scale which balances good and bad, dispensing punishment and reward as appropriate. How do you believe this works without god? How do you know that your “bad” karmic actions are not actually karmic retribution visited on some schmuck with lower karma than you?
Note: while the Buddhists do not necessarily believe in a “standard” god, they absolutely believe in an energy/metaphysics that would satisfy a number of modern definitions of god (for example, Spinoza’s holistic god).
A good friend once told me:
Life is not fair.
Sounds silly, right? It isn’t. Many people assume that life sort of compensates in the long run, bringing you good things after something bad has happened, or the other way round. But that is not true. What happens to you is not orchestrated by any superior being or by life itself. That’s what the phrase “life is not fair” means: it can be extremely good to some, and extremely bad to others. We should avoid words like “cruel” or “unjust” applied to this, since life has no intentions or intelligence. It just happens.
Most people have a very limited idea of what Karma is. I tend to do good things which tends to attract me to people who do the same. I find that I am rewarded by having my good deeds noticed by my friends and returned in kind.
score: 2
I was in a Buddhist sect for over a decade, and the belief that Karma was operative, and operated across lifetimes was a major part of it. Of course the concept of past lives is necessary, to explain the unfair distribution of outcomes in this world: those born under favorable circumstances must have done good things in past lifetimes, and those born under terrible circumstances must have done great harm in the past… This was referred to as Karmic Retribution, although Karma worked both is positive and negative ways. The central tenant of the practice was to find a way to pay off retribution with a steep discount.
Now it was never claimed that a supernatural entity existed to perform this function. It was claimed to be was a natural function of the universe, just like a physical law. Although no theory of how this could arise (other than the moral case) was known to me.
Of course you don’t have to believe in god to believe in karma. Any time you are making up magical forces, you are free to make up whatever you like!
It’s less important what words you chose to apply and more important what you believe.
There are many definitions of the word atheist. You fit some of those, but not others. You should always be prepared to back up your beliefs with more than a dictionary.
Your belief leads you to being less of a jerk, from which both you and society benefit. I think your belief is useful and worth keeping, irregardless of what is it based on.
Life is extremely complicated to navigate and predicting the true effect of your every action is hard, so having simple and intuitive rules of thumb, like “bad karma” is IMHO a smart thing to do.
You can even invent explantions for karma that sound truthy by twisting natural laws of physics.
Fake Mechanisms for Karma
Gravity: Throw a ball into the air - it comes back down to you. Send good or evil out into the world and they come back to you.
Entropy: Heat will tend to flow from hot areas to cold until equilibrium is met. If you increase the evil in the rest of the world for your own good, the universe will tend toward equilibrium by sending that evil back to you and reducing that good you felt.
It’s been hinted at in other answers here too, but I believe in ‘karma’ in the sense that the fundamental mentality you adopt in life and your interactions with the world around you influences the responses you get from others. People warm up to friendlier, more helpful folks, and close off to those that are less so, limiting your opportunities in life.
If I’m constantly mean to everyone, the cute girl in the book store won’t give me the time of day. If I smile at her for a month, put books back where they came from, and help her with a display that fell over, she might engage in some further conversation with me when I see her on her lunch break (yes, I actually do have a crush on a cute book store employee).
I’m not going to win in the lottery no matter how many old ladies I help across the street, but when it comes to interpersonal relationships, it could ‘pay off’.
In a sense, I’ve reduced the idea less down to some all knowing bookkeeper in the sky, but rather to statistical probability. There are no guarantees, but trends in one direction or another. What’s interesting then is that I don’t have a sense of certainty or reference point for what might tip off the system. How ‘bad’ can I be without avoiding repercussions from my surrounding? Is there a minimun threshold? How long until you reap what you sowed?
That doesn’t mean I purposefully do nice deeds, expecting something good to happen in return. I do them for the same reason that I respond to believers with when they ask where I draw my morales from if I don’t believe in a god’s judgement: because I’d rather live in a world where people are nice to each other, than become a cynical, greedy, manipulative person who tries to claw himself ahead in life. The latter doesn’t sound any fun, and anything beyond that is just a nice, added bonus.
I think most atheist will argue that it is hypocritical to not believe in gods, but then believe in other supernatural ideas such as ghosts, angels, ESP, etc.
I think karma or good/bad luck (defined an external force) falls in line with the idea of supernatural. Now, if you say, “I like to do good deeds because it gives me purpose in life”, that that is perfectly fine. However, the world is not fair, and some of the most evil people will live wonderfully happy lives, just as saintly beings will be forced to live in continuous misery.
It depends on your definition of atheism, I think. I have explained before how the term literally translates to “no god”. So in the literal sense, and by using the definition for Karma budhism uses, you can be atheistic (i.e. don’t believe in any gods) and believe in Karma, because Karma would for you be some kind of energy, and not a god.
However, I think you do need to define atheism in a broader sense, in which it means you don’t believe in any kind of religion, superstition or other mystical and mythical things. By this definition atheism and Karma are not compatible, as Karma is a mystical energy or something along those lines.
If we look at Karma as not a supernatural entity, but a physical, social entity, then yes, it’s perfectly possible.
To explain:
If you are kind to many people, will it never come back to you? Will someone not notice your kindness and repay you in some way? - Maybe.
If you hurt someone, murder, rape, whatever it may be.. Do you go to jail? - Most of the time.
It seems to me that Karma can be controlled by us. By rewarding people that do good and punishing people that do wrong..
So for me, I would never say that “I believe” in Karma, because it’s just something that is, but it depends on societies ability to notice and act. Not that of a supernatural force.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.