'Karma' 2.0 — a secular spin on Edward Arlington Robinson

Ennui was in the air, and one lament

From me, one of a few confusing flaws

In divers of self-images. Because

The world round me would not march to my bent,

Was I to answer for my discontent?

I pondered, and the reason for it was 

A purveyor of a religious cause

Warning the world that it must repent.

 

Accepting a wonted disgust at this

I magnified a fancy that I wished

His own evil led to an end so grim.

Then, my eye rove, found solace if not bliss

And, from the pavement before me, I fished …

A dime for myself who was dead to men.

 

====

 

“Karma,” by Edward Arlington Robinson

 

Christmas was in the air and all was well

With him, but for a few confusing flaws

In divers of God's images. Because

A friend of his would neither buy nor sell,

Was he to answer for the axe that fell?

He pondered; and the reason for it was,

Partly, a slowly freezing Santa Claus

Upon the corner, with his beard and bell.

 

Acknowledging an improvident surprise,

He magnified a fancy that he wished

The friend whom he had wrecked were here again.

Not sure of that, he found a compromise;

And from the fulness of his heart he fished

A dime for Jesus who had died for men.

The old 'We don't have a god in Buddhism, so karma isn't punishment' BS rises again

That was raised by the second of two people I blocked last week on the DebateReligion subreddit. The first was a "just asking questions about definitions" Hindu troll, one of a general subtype of social media trolls who always claims the burden of proof is totally and solely yours.

Anyway, Mr. Rootin Tootin or whatever his name is, apparently blocked me from replying to his second response to him. (I'm not genius-level yet on Reddit, so I don't know how you block commenting if you're not the OP, which I don't think he was, but I digress.) 

So, I updated my first sub-response with what would have been my sub-sub-sub-response, then blocked him. But, again, I digress.

His big claim was that because Buddhism has no deity, karma can't be considered punishment.

Bullshit. If you're reincarnated as something "worse," and there's a metaphysical law, which karma is, as to WHY you're reincarnated as something worse, it's punishment. It's not for your health.

Sidebar: How do Buddhists claim that there are reincarnations as something "worse" if everything here is illusion? Better yet: How do they claim that reincarnation is real, or the karma behind it is real, if everything here is illusion?

Now, I know that at this point, some Buddhist sage, like Jesus telling the young rich man that he's not far from the kingdom of god, is going to tell me I'm not far from enlightenment.

And, he or she would be right: I'm enlightened as to just how much petard-hoisting bullshit you spout.

Anyway, back to the Reddit nutter. He talked about "Lord Buddha" this and that. Sounds kind of deity-like to me, and of course that's an issue of note in taking a good critical comparative religion look at the varieties of Buddhism. (And, we haven't even talked about Pure Land and similar, which rejects reincarnation vs a one-off afterlife.)

Part two on Rootin Nutter? His talk about "Lord Buddha" and this life made it sound like we were currently living in a Buddhist version of reincarnation like the stereotypical Christian versions of heaven skewered by Mark Twain and others. That, in fact is part of why I blocked him. I didn't want to waste time even trying to wade through that much blather. I wish I had copied his nonsense before blocking him. Seriously, it came off as an (alleged) Buddhist version of something Twain caricatured in "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."

Part three on Rootin Tootin Nutter? Sounds like he (surely a guy) was awfully "attached" in the decidedly no-no in Buddhism sense to this current reincarnation.

This is likely to be the start of a miniseries, with separate posts addressing other problems with karma and reincarnation in both a theistic religion and a nontheistic one.

While you're here, though? Reincarnation has other problems, biological, metaphysical, logical and more, whether you're Hindu or Buddhist, or Jain, or New Ager or whatever.

Oh, Buddhism was a religion when I first blogged about that, still is a religion, and still still is. 

And, karma is still as offensive as hell. Pun intended in a non-funny way by this secularist.

More problems for reincarnationists

Stimulated by reading a book Michael Shermer wrote last year, I've identified two more explanatory problems for the people who tout reincarnation.

I'm talking primarily about those who tout traditional religion-based reincarnation, whether the personal soul version of much of Hinduism and Jainism, or the impersonal life force version of Buddhism.

I'm not talking about the New Ager distortionists who believe all their past lives were as the king, queen, or mighty warrior, because they're wrong even within the world of reincarnation.

Anyway, the actual reincarnation world of Hindus, Jains and Buddhists says you may come back not as the  king or queen, but as the peasant shoveling shit out of the king's stables, or, much more importantly for this, a dung beetle in that shit in the stable.

We have, a la ideas explored by and generated from Thomas Nagel's famous, or infamous, "What Is It Like to be a Bat," (text here) a mind-mapping problem. This is more a problem for the personal soul type of reincarnation; obviously, an impersonal life force doesn't have human personal soul characteristics. Whether early Buddhists thought of this as a way to explain, or explain away, this issue, I don't know.

Anyway, Nagel argued that we can't understand bat consciousness because of its subjectivity and its different sensory basis, and went from there.

Well, except for Hindus and Jains, many people, whether of professional biological bent or not, would have difficulty extending consciousness at all to a beetle. Plus, the difference between its sensory interactions with the world and ours is orders of magnitude different from the human-bat difference.

So, if karma is an iron law of rewards and punishments, beyond the well known difficulties with people (if we're all being reincarnated) not remembering past lives, how can it even be a punishment to be reincarnated as a beetle? How can the "beetle-self" feel punished? Since as far as we know, beetles don't have emotions, period, along with not having consciousness, how can they feel anything, as in feeling as emotional affect and not sensory input?

This has a flip side. If, especially if you're a Jain who takes consciousness of some sort down to what most of us would call inanimate objects, what if a, say, an ameba is being rewarded by getting promoted UP to being a beetle for being an incredible ethical and altruistic ameba?

Does that sound as silly to you reading it as it did to me, typing it?

That leads to what I see as the even larger problem. (Yep, the above is the lesser problem.) And this one hits the Buddhist types as well.

While Charles Darwin wasn't around 2,500 or more years ago, nonetheless, these ideas of reincarnation and the karma behind them seem based on a "progress" misunderstanding of evolution, and of biology in general.

Who says it's "worse"being a beetle than a shoveler of the king's shit or even the king? I suppose a "good Buddhist" might use this as a wedge to claim that the whole idea of karma is itself maybe maya, but in that case, he or she is already lighting the fuse on their own petard. From that, they're making themselves even more irrelevant to the discussion.

So, we move forward. Given that the planet would soon be run over with shit, if we had no dung beetles, whereas the world might be quite good had we no more Homo sapiens, if I were to engage a progress-based version of zoology, I'd argue the dung beetle is superior. (And, we haven't even talked about the myth of cockroaches surviving nuclear war.)

That's bad enough. Let's take it inside the human world.

Here, of course, the claim is that being the shoveler of the king's shit is worse than being the king.

Says who? Per the French Revolution, we could stand to get rid of yet more kings. Per the labor theory of value, the shoveler of the king's shit is more important whether the king is alive or shat mat.

In other words, karma and reincarnation, taken as a unit, are ultimately part of the classism of the Hindu caste system. And, as I see it, here, Buddhism talking about only an impersonal life force being reincarnated is still a Social Darwinist failure too. It still based karmic reincarnation cycles on the idea that some humans are, by group sociological observations, superior to others.

On the third hand, the British Raj intensified and codified the caste system, as part of the old divida et impera.

What about God and the first tornado. ma'am?

I'm no Gnu Atheist, and I know at bottom line people in general are creatures of emotion, and desire for psychological comfort first, then rationality second.


Nonetheless, I can't help but point out this line from a survivor of the Harrisburg, Ill., tornado, in light of the possibility that a new round of severe weather could bring more twisters to the area:

"You just keep thinking, 'God, please don't let there be another tornado.'"

Sorry, Ms. Wise, but the god you believe in, under your belief system, already let one happen there. Why not another?

IF religious people were willing to drop either omnipotence or omnibenevolence from belief systems, then non-Gnu Atheists like me would dialogue more on more issues. And, this is primarily an  issue of western monotheisms.

But ...  



Or course,. as I've said before, karma is in some ways  worse than hell, so I'm not letting Buddhism or Hinduism off the hook.

Karma — as offensive as hell

This extended CNN blog, with broadly multifaith comments on "why suffering" in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear worries, following the Japanese tsunami and eaerthquake, makes the case well for me.

Is it any worse for a fundamentalist Christian to say:
1. God is inscrutable;
2. Original sin brought on this disaster for you;
3. It's God's prerogative to damn some people to hell.

Or a hardcore Buddhist to say:
1. Karma is inscrutable;
2. Your past life that you can't even remember brought on this disaster for you;
3. It's a cyclical universe's "prerogative" to damn some people to recurring rounds of bad karma.

I know of people who are skeptics, and atheists, even, in the sense of not believing in a western monotheist divinity, that still believe in the metaphysics of karma. Well, sorry, but, karma's as offensive as the heaven-hell of western monotheism. (The Buddhist version is more offensive than the Hindu version because it claims that not even a person or personality, but just a "life force" is reincarnated and the "self" [nonexistent as it allegedly is] is STILL punished in a new life.)

Beyond that, both western and eastern religion offer the same pablum when confronted with the problem of evil.

And, a "shout out" to "it's not a religion" Buddhist Sam Harris — what say you now?

And, speaking of that, I give a kudo to Chris Hitchens, the one "name" New Atheist to look at eastern religions just as toughly as those of the west.

Buddhism IS a religion and IS metaphysical

Unfortunately, it's not just Sam Harris who is wrong about that. A friend/acquaintance of mine on an e-mail discussion group claims that Buddhism has little to do with metaphysics and that karma is non-metaphysical, but just a physical-type law of cause and effect. (Update: And just how is this "physical-type law" enforced? At that point, we usually enter the land of handwaving to avoid metaphysics.)

I first said that the Dalai Lama himself, despite his self-purportation to being open to the findings of science, said he would never surrender a belief in either karma or reincarnation. I noted the linking of the two beliefs as further attestation that Buddhism in general, and also karma in specific, was about metaphysics.

He claimed karma was a physical law specifically encompassing things like cutting a neighbor's lawn, and the grass is shorter as a result.

I then said Hinduism back in the Gita, the Hinduism from which Buddhism evolved, already believed in karma as metaphysical and linked to reincarnation.

I then posted a Wiki link specifically to karma in Buddhism, including a reference to how this doctrine, in metaphysical understanding, goes back to the reported teachings of the Buddha himself:

The Buddha most often spoke of karma as the determining factor of the realm of one's subsequent rebirth--for this reason karma is often explained in tandem with rebirth and cosmology. The Cūlakammavibhanga Sutta ("The Shorter Exposition of Action," Majjhima Nikaya 3.203) is devoted to describing the various rebirths that various kinds of actions produce; negative actions such as killing lead to rebirths in the lower realms such as hell, and virtuous action such as gracious behavior under duress leads to rebirth in the human or other higher realms.

At that point he said, in a semi-direct quote, "I've actually studied Buddhism; you're just posting a Wiki link." (He ignored that three-four e-mail chains prior, he had posted a Wiki link himself.)

Of course, that said, Buddhism has the combination of illogic and moral offensiveness to believe in reincarnation without the existence of a "metaphysical self." In fact, it's this pernicious combination that leads me to label Buddhism as more offensive, in some ways, than fundamentalist Christianity. (That said, the Buddha didn't deny that that whatever was reincarnated in the new life had some connection with the "personhood" of the old life.)

On the illogic side, if you try to wrestle more fully with what Buddhism, and allegedly the Buddha, meant by "not-self," you see just how logically full of crap he and his religion were and are.

On the morals side, the belief that an impersonal non-"metaphysical" self is not reincarnated, that a quasi-impersonal life force is all that goes to a new person, but that that new person is punished for deeds of a past life to which he/she is not connected, and about which he/she has no memory, is more morally offensive in some ways than a Christian fundamentalism belief in eternal hell for people who haven't heard of Christianity.

And, it only gets worse. Some schools of Buddhism even go so far as to, along the lines of collective guilt, to believe in "collective karma."

Unfortunately, not only do the Sam Harrises of New (and Old) Atheism distort and deny what Buddhism actually means, they peddle a bill of goods about what it is that's about as bad as New Agers' own bill of goods about Buddhism.

As to more specifically how Sam Harris is wrong?

The following is excerpted from my Amazon review of his "The End of Faith":

Harris, in his last chapter, claims that mediation and “spiritual” practices **as taught under the aegis of Eastern religion** (one can meditate using the Western scientific tool of biofeedback also, etc.) is “not a statement of metaphysics.” (I have in the past, through self-hypnosis, gone “deep” enough to see the mandala-like spirals that come right before the tunnel of white light, showing that one can meditate deeply without any “spiritual” program whatsoever.) Harris also ignores here the fact that “mystical” traditions in the West, through the vehicle of Gnosticism, had far more social penetrating power than he will admit.

In short, his final chapter is about setting Buddhist and other spirituality on a pedestal, undermining the title of his book,

Sam, if you claim that meditation has to really come from an Eastern “spiritual” discipline, instead of biofeedback, self-hypnosis or other non-“spiritual” tools, that’s a faith statement. Pure and simple.

Note this quote on page 221: “Mysticism is a rational enterprise.” Would that include “sky-clad” Jains who deliberately starve themselves to death rather than risk swallowing even a microbe? ...

And that was without Harris’ incredible credulity on the existence of psychic phenomena and even reincarnation.

I refer to footnote 18, page 45. Here, Harris credits Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin as being credible writers on the subject of psi phenomena. Any credible skeptic knows that ain’t so.

He then goes on to say, “There may even be some credible evidence for reincarnation.”

So, how does Harris try to get away with claiming that, ultimately, Buddhism is just a psychology?

In "Killing the Buddha" (PDF), he cheats. He claims that Buddhist meditiation (which he, wrongly, considers the core of Buddhism) should be separated from Buddhist religion.

Now, is meditation de facto religious? Of course not. But, Buddhist meditation is ultimately meditation on Buddhist religious concepts. It's religious, indeed.

For more "problematic" quotes of Harris', see Wiki.

For more on his problematic beliefs, go to Skeptic's Dictionary. (I'm the complaining reader, and, yes, technically Harris is an atheist; I made a category confusion mistake on that. A skeptic, though, he is not.)

For more on his uncritical belief in Buddhism, go here, near the bottom of the webpage, about 3/4 the way down.

So, you skeptics and New Atheists who "heart" Sam Harris? Get a clue.

(Sidebar update: Buddhism IS a religion.

Religion is about:

Metaphysical matters of ultimate concern, within a social group setting; and 

How one orients oneself within that group to a better relationship to these metaphysical matters of ultimate concern.)

 

Karma, karma-lite and evolutionary psychology

I’ve blogged elsewhere before about my take on full-blown karma, that it’s both as illogical as western monotheism’s heaven/hell, and personally, at least as offensive.

But, what about “karma-lite,” the non-metaphysical, or less-metaphysical, generic claim that “what goes around, comes around”?

There’s a better, scientific explanation from evolutionary psychology. It’s called “reciprocal altruism,” or, in even easier layperson’s terms, “tit for tat.”

Animals with enough memory intelligence to remember past good or bad actions by their fellows and attribute them to specific actors, especially amongst highly social animals, can and do practice this. In the case of bad actors, it’s the old “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” schtick. Intelligence social animals can and do remember who cheats in the old game of back-scratching and won’t let Mr. or Ms. Cad play in any more reindeer games.

It’s that simple. Nothing metaphysical needed.

And, scientists are finding the first genetic support for reciprocal altruism. The gene in question appears linked to dopamine production and a similar gene in voles that promote social bonding, which makes sense to me. Reciprocal altruism certainly promotes social bonds, and a dopamine-based “feel good” feeling for doing it would be the reward individuals get to be good group members.

So, do altruism cheaters lack a copy, or good expression, of this gene?

Karma: The greatest religious evil ever perpetuated?

Maybe it is. (In saying this, I’m referring to the traditional Hindu-Buddhist metaphysical doctrine, not the metaphorical “what goes around, comes around” phrase — unless that phrase reflect a person’s underlying metaphysical belief.)

And I hold this belief whether the believer in karma believes in the reincarnation of a personal soul or an impersonal life force.

First of all, I find it as intellectually incomprehensible as any Western doctrine, including the traditional Christian one of original sin plus hellfired damnation.

Second, from a philosophically-based psychological standpoint, i.e., the problem of evil, I find it as psychologically disturbing as any “Western” belief.

Finally, from an emotional and highly personal standpoint:

I find karma far more emotionally offensive and abhorrent than any Western belief, including original sin plus hellfired damnation.

I say this as a survivor of various events of sexual and physical abuse.

Neither I, nor millions of other boys and girls at home, nor any Catholic altar boys, fucked up so badly in a previous life as to literally … in a pre-adult stage of this life. Period. End of story.

So, let’s remember that Eastern religions aren’t necessarily “good” in comparison to Western ones.

And as for sane, Western-raised adults who eventually buy into some belief in karma, and still want to hold it after thinking about something like this, especially while claiming to be “enlightened,” they can go fuck themselves in this life.