Do you believe in Karma?

No. But of course your actions result in what you do. Example if you keep robbing houses you’re eventually going to get caught. There’s bad things that happen to good people…like dying of a disease.

Yes, karma keeps balance in your life. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction

No. No one is keeping score in this life, in any form.

No, I hold with human justice.

Yes. We were once rear-ended on the freeway? The other person’s fault, right?

But no, the insurance company lawyer for her was a pit bull, and he savaged us so that the jury acknowledged she was at fault, but awarded us no money.

Later that fall, in a windstorm a tree fell on her house destroying her kitchen. My husband and I wished for her the same home insurance company that covered her car.

I don’t pay attention to that crap. I just wish it would stop paying attention to me.

I know that there is cause and effect, but I reject any notion of karma/universal justice or whatever you want to call it, due to lack of evidence.

No.

No, not a mystical “everyone gets their due” type Karma. I do believe that people are shaped by the choices they make.

“Seal our fate with the choices we make.”
Gloria Estefan, the warrior poet :D

My whole difficulty with karma, even though I like to believe it exists, is how far back does it have a memory? Because sometimes I think I’m making up for being an asshole in a previous life.

I totally agree @YARNLADY and @glacial, I don’t believe in it.

I just hope my answer doesn’t come back to haunt me.

No, but I’m sure that one day that will catch up to me.

I believe in it but it’s not a direct relationship. If you do good things good things will find you. If you’re an ass and treat people like crap they’ll do the same to you. And when you need the help they won’t be there for you.

No. What will be, will be. It is not preordained.

I believe in the law of reciprocity. I don’t see any reason to accept that it’s some mystical force though. There are much more mundane explanations of the Golden Rule that explain it elegantly. Walk up and slap someone in the face for no reason, and there’s a good chance they will slug you back. Slap the wrong one, and they will break your jaw. Be kind to others and they are much more likely to be kind to you in return. Logic, not magic.

I was going go just say no, but rags actually represents my point of view much more precisely, so I’ll just say “what rags said”

Only in the sense that if you treat other people badly, odds are that they will treat you badly in return.

There is a modern view of karma, “devoid of any spiritual exigencies, obviates 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.”

In its most basic form, Karma simply refers to the moral dimension of causality. That’s just a fancy way of saying that your intentional actions have moral consequences. In those terms, it seems pretty non-controversial to me.

I don’t think it’s necessary or realistic to think of karma as a cosmic moral book-keeping system. Morality in general is based on a recognition that the choices we make will impact our own well-being and that of others, and that each individual doesn’t exist within a closed system. It’s like peeing in the pool: you can’t expect that the mess just stays contained, or that the pee-er won’t get any on himself.

Acting with the general well-being at heart tends to make things better all around. Acting selfishly or hurtfully tends to make things worse all around. That’s all Karma is. I can endorse that.

As a person who accepts the secular evidence for an afterlife, I’m a believer in the Laws of Cause and Effect and Attraction rather than Karma, though these concepts are similar. I don’t believe in many New Age interpretations of the latter laws though, especially the ones which state that if bad things happen to you, you must be bad yourself. No, I don’t believe in anything like that.

I do believe that we’ll inevitably pay for our actions when we pass on, regardless of what happens to us while we’re alive. I’m not going into detail about these laws on a site where anything spiritual is considered to be a joke though. Cheers.

@Paradox25 Out of curiosity, what secular evidence for an afterlife is out there that you accept?

@Rarebear There’s simply no way I could post everything on a thread like this. I’ve attempted to show the evidence on other threads, but then those protocols in the experiments get criticized so nothing is accomplished through debating. I do post evidence from time to time on here in individual threads devoted to certain topics involving the paranormal. Most paranormal debates are Mexican standoffs, no matter what evidence or counters are presented, so I simply state these views as my own opinions these days.

What is it that I could possibly post on here? Experiments that demonstrated the possibility of mediumship, electronic voice communication and telepathy. are rarely accepted by most sceptics. I’ve already posted peer reviewed papers demonstrating the effectiveness of mediumship and telepathy in other threads on here. Also most sceptics don’t rely on anecdotals or personal experiences.

@Paradox25 Well, I’m not going to go mining through other threads and if you don’t feel like posting it here that’s fine. I was simply curious what you considered “evidence”. You are absolutely correct that a skeptic does not rely on anecdotes or personal experiences as these are unreliable and not reproducible.

@Rarebear It’s difficult (understatement) to present my case since it relies on a host of collective evidence and courtroom logic. I’m not going to convince anybody of anything simply by posting links and using courtroom type logic. It’s also difficult because most sceptics would not even be familiar with a good deal of paranormal terminology.

I’m a member of a few paranormal forums, and I get pounded for asking tough questions myself. Chances are I’ve already asked the same questions (if not more) than you. Pertaining to physical mediumship, despite infrared photos demonstrating some alleged phenomena, I could never understand why these seances weren’t recorded with infrared recording equipment in a laboratory enviroment.

I’d questioned the Scole protocols too. I also can’t figure out why or how a medium such as Michelle Whitedove can demonstrate amazing abilities on national tv such as finding a body buried in a large area of land underground, or in a car trunk on a car lot, but yet a protocol hasn’t been set up to demonstrate these abilities in a more scientific setting. I’ve looked at the frauds, flaws and no gos in some experimental procedures, but it’s still difficult for me to dismiss everything. I have received a range of possible answers for the above questions, but these are not going to pass muster with someone who’s already sceptical. I know this because I was very antiparanormal at one time myself.

I was so antiparanormal that it used to anger me when someone would just simply read me my horoscope. I can justify your scepticism, but obviously we ended up having different opinions about these issues.

@Paradox25 I may be wrong, but I think you may be missing the point of view of skeptics. A “true” skeptic is someone who evaluates the quality of the evidence. Show me a good, well designed study, and I’ll apply the same level of rigor that I utilize for any medical paper.

The Law of reciprocity (or golden rule) is science. It’s logical and rational. It actually is proven by game theory and by controlled testing. Karma is pseudoscience. Here’s how to tell them apart.

I’m not sure I agree in a Law of Reciprocity. But the link is good.

@Rarebear You don’t believe in the law of reciprocity? So if I walk up and slug you for no apparent reason, no matter how many times I do it, you’d just absorb the punishment and not reciprocate. What is I did a huge favor for you that saved your life and brought you great riches? You’d still treat me like a nobody?

I don’t agree with the statement “The Law of reciprocity (or golden rule) is science.” What do you mean by it’s “science”?

And no, I wouldn’t reciprocate. I would defend myself from your blows, grapple you to get inside your hands or retreat from your assult, but I would not hit back.

@Rarebear Game theory—a solid branch of math—shows that in a large population, there are two possible winning strategies but either only works when most of the population set plays it. You can play king of the mountain. There are a few winners, and almost everyone loses. But the outcome is a little better than when there is a 50/50 mix of altruism and avarice. However, when the majority are altruistic, you get by far the best possible outcome.

And it’s just common sense that what goes around comes around. Treat someone despitefully and they are likely to do the same to you. Treat them with respect and caring, and many will respond in kind. There have been plenty of tests to prove that, but it’s so obvious it hardly needs a proof.

I applaud your commitment to passive resistance. But if you conducted an experiment in which you lashed out and slapped people for no reason, I think you would find the vast majority would not adhere to Gandhi and Dr. King’s ideas.

@ETpro I understand what you are saying on game theory, but I don’t necessarily see where it applies to a “Law of Reciprocity”. There is an area of research called “reciprocity” in social psychology, but I’m not seeing how it’s a “law”. It may be a behavioral tendency in populations, but it’s hardly a law like gravity, or even evolution is.

@Rarebear Sorry, Law has a VERY different meaning in science. I was using the term for it coined ages ago.

@ETpro okay. You should know me well enough by now that I take science very seriously and my language is precise :-)

There hasn’t been much karma on this thread from participating. Hardly any lurve at all!

@Rarebear I’m not going to be on here as much in the near future due to current life circumstances, so my response time may be rather slow. I also didn’t expect anyone to question me on Shermer, and I had to dig a bit to find one of my examples.

This blog is from Shermer’s own website, and he clearly sounds like he is admitting that there’s some paranormal evidence, but nevertheless we should remain sceptical anyways due to lack of foundation (like I had stated in my previous post above). I have heard Dr. Shermer make similar statements elsewhere too, but an individual sceptic’s personal viewpoint has little importance to me concerning these issues anyways. I don’t even agree with many people on the paranormal proponent side too on many issues.

@Rarebear I responded to the wrong thread. The above was what you have asked me for in another thread.

@Paradox25 I agree that the research cited is reason to look further. Any evidence gleaned from a meta-analysis, however, is insufficient to set aside current understanding. Here are some criticisms of meta-analysis as an accurate reflection of the research data.

My take. More work is justified, but no firm conclusion is.