Religion, philosophy and me (pt 2)

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My karma just ran over your dogma

  Ho ho.

  It’s an amusing line when you hear it the first time, but I’m betting this is the hundredth time for you.

  The real problem with it is that it’s not even true, most of the time. Your dogma is the two-metre Great Dane I saw a photo of the other day, and my karma as the term’s understood these days is a clapped out Goggomobil made from tinfoil and pipe-cleaners.

  Your dogma makes a mess of my karma every time these days....

  Karma isn’t what most people think it is. If you call it fate, then we need to have a talk about our terms, because that is not what was intended by the Hindu philosophers who used it.

  Dogma gets discussed every day and it’s easy to reach some common understanding on its meaning. I don’t want to talk about dogma. We all know the comfort it can bring to those who hold it dear, and the misery it can cause to those who suffer under it. Dogma in the hands of those who know how to manipulate it is a powerful tool. In warfare, it can be wielded like a sword.

  "Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities," said the irascible Voltaire. Enough of that.

  Karma = Fate? Let’s not. The latter's anything from crystal balls to kismet. Go to Wikipedia and it will tell you far more than you’ll ever need to know about destiny or fate, and you’d probably come out less clear about it than when you started.

  But karma? This is the one worth talking about, even though it’s bandied about like a football. It deserves much better.

  In the simplest terms, the Sanskrit word “karma” means “action”.

  That’s it.  Action.  It's an active principle, not a passive one. It was never meant as a justification for lying down and bewailing our fate. We take actions over which we have some measure of choice. Actions have consequences. Actions are the results of other actions and in their wake new things happen. Karma then is cause and effect, and it’s as simple as that.

  But nothing’s ever simple while there are humans around to muck it up and give words a moral dimension, and words seduce us into thinking they have precise meaning, especially when a series of them are strung together. 

  If karma’s purely mechanical, it should be in the realm of science, surely. Engineering, mathematics or physics. What can it be doing in philosophy, where its place seems so firmly rooted?

  All the sciences are actually branches of philosophy, as that word means loving of knowledge. Karma is embedded in them all. But I don’t want to get into semantics here.

  Being utterly logical, karma saves us from some ethical dilemmas encountered by the Semitic faiths, but it's not exactly a license to do anything we want - not without consequences we can escape. Everything we do has consequences, which we might think are small or large. But the notion of Godhead is so very different between and within religions. Some of these are quite radically different.

  Do I want to tackle that one? No, I don’t. But if I don’t, then everything I’ve written on this so far is a waste of time.

  OK, let’s do the ‘God’ thing.

NOTE: This has already come up in comments on another blog posting. "Some actions we have a degree of control over, some we don't appear to. The trick in life is to understand causes and effects, not deny them, and change what seems sensible to change if possible and work with what you can't seem to change.... Even karma's 'cause and effect' is misleading, as cause can be effect. The potter makes the pot. Cause/effect. BUT the pot also makes the potter, because without the pot, there is no potter! Cause and effect intertwined."

'Yin and yang,' says Lao Tzu.

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