Seems to me that curageous people make courageous mistakes and get courageous karma - hot like my tea. Wimpy people make wimply mistakes and get wimpy karma. I think Jesus' remark about them was, "Because thou art neither hot nor cold I shall spew thee out of my mouth."

Courageous people also tend to get there faster, whether they believe in the current mythology or not. Reminds me of Star Trek where Klingons scream loudly when a friend dies - to warn the lord of death to watch out.

What I don't understand is how come you let these people rain on your parade?

dave

Bman -
I know your post wasn't directed at me but I would like to respond.

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This is the argument of evil and suffering again.  Natural evil (and suffering) comes about because there needs to be regular laws of nature that form a baseline, so that cause and effect are in play, and actual moral choices can be made and ethics can happen.  If someone has a physical ailment, its because there are physical laws that govern our present existence, and if we didn't have them then the universe would not make sense, and causality would break down.  If only the good results happened and cause and effect broke down people would have good health magically, no matter what was done to their bodies.  Then actually doing something terrible to someone else's body would no longer have an ethical or moral component to the action, or would have an unclear moral consequence.
 Its debatable whether or not the physical universe was created for anything else other than the possibility of real moral choices to come about.

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And what reason do you have to back up this view of God?  The fact that there are repercussions for poor behavior?  Actually the idea that there is justice in the afterlife makes up for the fact that people can have terrible lives presently, and actually brings meaning to suffering and pain.  If there was no justice in the afterlife, if there was not a God who set up laws of (spiritual) cause and effect, then the world would truly be an absurd, sick joke for most of humanity.  Most people talk about this as 'the problem of evil' as an argument against Christianity.  I think the real 'problem of evil' is that if one doesn't believe in an afterlife there truly is no meaning, goal, or value in all of life that is permanent and worthwhile - life, and especially pain and suffering, is a sick joke for most of humanity.

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The suffering of animals come about not because of their sin (which they don't have), but because of these natural laws that are in play which are necessary for an orderly universe to exist.  And an orderly universe is necessary for ethical and moral choices to be made.  Tapeworms and other parasites came about through natural selection, which is a law that governs interactions that leads to evolution.  To have the evolution of thinking creatures, natural selection must allow for the development of parasites as well.  You cannot have one without the other, while still upholding cause and effect for the majority of events of the world.

Put another way, how could God create a physical existence that didn't have cause and effect in play where there is a real ethical system produced?  Or how could God keep the positive effects of natural selection / evolution while getting rid of the negative effects and still allow cause and effect to reign so that there could be a real ethical system?  The answer to both of these questions, is that it cannot be done.  If you set up laws that allow for the development of humanity in the form of a Francis of Assisi or Nietzsche, then the same laws allow for the development of tapeworms.

Predictably enough I tend towards Dave's view on karma.

Another argument in favour of it is the thought that being happy in this life seems to require the development of equanimity (which in turn flows from higher consciousness and understanding of life, leading to support from higher energies and the collapse of delusional beliefs)  so that we  become able to rest easy with or 'go with the natural or divine flow' of events.

In the selfish and deluded mode that's more typical we end up always trying to buck this. We grasp after what we mistakenly presume will make us happy (money, women, cars whatever), and regardless of whether or not we succeed in realising our urges we usually end up making ourselves deeply unhappy.

In doing so we create a displacement of events away from the natural flow which seems to represent some sort of divine optimum.

Karma seems to amount to some sort of divine balancing of the books - when we create such a displacement from optimum in the flow of events we somehow end up having to ride out the consequences which show us the error of our ways, but which are painful. But which restore our consciousness to where it should have been again.

The issue underlying all of this seems to be that happiness arises not from altering our external circumstances, but from remaining connected with light, and by relating wisely to our experience.

Per the four noble truths there doesn't seem to be any means by which any particular external reality can bring anything better than a transient ersatz sort of happiness which in the longer term is anyway impermanent and going to cost us when the tide of our fortune turns. No matter what we try in this regard 'life is suffering......'

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  Good and interesting point Blink.

Interestingly enough Buddhism argues that the apparent 'flow' of a continuous stream of consciousness is in fact a delusion. That as Blink says we mistake an unconnected series of moments of creation (dreaming) for this.

That continuity of awareness exists only at the level of the absolute, of for example the light discussed on the other thread. That we superimpose snatches of mind made experience over this.

It could be true - we certainly seem to experience abrupt breaks between moments of awareness. Watch carefully what's in your awareness at a given time. Its like something was abruptly switching us between channels - like some sort of celestial security guard sitting in front of a big bank of camera monitors and switching between them.

One moment conscious of an ache in the foot, then snap!, thinking about what's for lunch, then snap! teeny boppers. There really are abrupt breaks between them....