Do you believe in Karma?

Yes…100%. The carnage and reward of Karma is awe inspiring.

Karma in its true meaning is nothing more than the natural law of cause and effect. So yes.

Karma, as most westerners misunderstand it – as some sort of mystical judicial force dealing out rewards and punishments for ones behavior – is hogwash.

Well….I believe that if you’re a shit to people, people are going to be shits right back at you. If you’re a horrible driver it’s only logical that you will probably get into a car accident. But there is nothing spiritual about it. You throw stuff up, it comes back down.

Nope! Fuck that!

I didn’t do anything evil prior to the age of 14 to deserve the hellhole that my teenage years were. Kids with cancer didn’t do anything evil. Sometimes bad shit just happens randomly for no good reason and telling people that you get what’s coming to you only serves to make people feel like shit about their bad luck.

Karma is like religion. You only see it as karma when you want to. Otherwise it’s just “shit happens.”

In Mariah’s case it wasn’t some god that smited her for some reason. It was just really bad luck.

However I do think that bad shit happens to bad people due to the situations they place themselves in. It shouldn’t be shocking if a drug dealer gets robbed and shot.

I don’t believe in god so whatevs.

@Darth_Algar Glad you said so; that’s my understanding of it as well. The way I would explain it is like a child touching a hot stove. If they knew it was going to burn them they wouldn’t need to have touched it to learn that lesson in the first place. If they fail to learn the lesson this time, naturally they’re going to touch a hot stove and get burned the same way again. Thus the cycle perpetuates itself.

No. I enjoy schadenfreude. But it is coincidence, not karma.

All I can say is, if some kind of payback for lying, cheating, racism, hate-spouting and hubris exists, whether mystical, scientific or coincidental, I pray it leaps into full swing to bite Donald Trump in the rear on November 8.

The western notion of karma – payback for one’s good and bad deeds – is nonsense. With all due respect to the late, great John Lennon, “Instant Karma” is rubbish.

But, I do believe that what goes around comes around. It’s simple, common sense; kind, loveable people are loved, and nastiness is alienating.

I believe, if you believe it then it will happen.If not, it won’t.

As in “will come back around,” no. I know a lot of people who have done really shitty things and they lead good lives without any sign of repercussions. As far as people having good karma, I guess so.

Gee, I believed in karma before I was 14 and started bleeding out my ass, wonder why it didn’t work for me.

@Mariah – sorry to hear that..

No. I also don’t believe in a religion, or a higher power, or magic, or fate.

Sometimes bad people live happy lives, free from worry, and never get caught or punished for their bad deeds.

Sometimes good people get screwed over with loss, illness, or loneliness.

Sometimes people get what they “deserve” and sometimes they don’t. No Karma involved.

Cause and effect
what you put out comes back
absolutely.

I’ll just leave this here: http://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/144258735896/37-i-cant-tell-you-why-this-happened-to-my

Think twice before teaching your children this poison.

Jesus…

In the 80’s I had a friend who became Born Again and she gushed about it all the time. She kept saying, “Just leave everything in God’s hands! He will save you!”

I said, “So, like, you don’t need brakes in your car because he won’t let you run a red light? You can just go hide in a cave and never leave because he won’t let you starve to death?”

What she preached was a kind of Karma.

We had a heat wave that killed 700+ people in 1995. Anecdotally some were elderly people with no air conditioning, who didn’t bother to seek help because “God will provide.”

“I sent you two boats and a helicopter. What more do you want?”

@Call_Me_Jay A hoard of people would explain it as, “His will was done.”

@Mariah

Relevance to the subject?

The relevance is the kids suffering cancer when they haven’ done anything to deserve it.

And the kind-hearted boy is looking for a reason and says, ‘I think I know why this is happening. I made fun of somebody at school one time.’

Judging by the man’s cap, I’m guessing he’s not teaching his kids about Karma, western misconceptions of it or otherwise.

Whether you label it karma or not it’s pervasive in our culture. Every goddamn kid’s book and movie tells you that you’ll be alright as long as you’re a good person. Kids who are not okay are then left only with the conclusion that they must not be good people.

My guess is that the kid, most likely, calls it “God”. That God is punishing him for something. That would be my guess, judging from the man’s headwear.

The next part in the series might give some further insight into the dad’s POV

Again, regardless of what you call it, I’m super opposed to teaching our children that we deserve everything that happens to us.

I agree Mariah. To tell a kid they got cancer because God was mad at them is pure child abuse, IMO.

But on the flip side, there are too many parents who don’t let their child suffer any consequences because of their actions, if they can help it. I kind of wonder if that’s why the kid thought it would be OK to slip into the gorilla cage even though he surely knew that he shouldn’t.

My DIL is one of those kinds of mothers, and yesterday was a case in point.
My son’s stepson, Mikey, is 9. My son and his wife got together when Mikey was 4. He constantly tries to get attention, mostly by doing super annoying things. If the baby is doing something that makes us laugh, he’ll immediately do the same thing so we’ll look at him. Well, a baby pulling a popsical apart with his hands and shoving pieces in his mouth is cute. A 9 year old doing the same thing is not cute.

He is extremely intelligent, might even be pushing the genius range (hard to tell because of his behavior, but do I see flashes of it) but he has zero social skills (they’re working on it all, counseling, medication, etc.) He knows how to push adult buttons, which is how he gets attention, although most of it is negative attention. Since my son came into his life, Mikey improved in so many ways, but the button pushing thing still works on his Mom, so he’s at it constantly when she’s around.

Yesterday Mom brought him and his 1 year old brother and 2.5 year old sister over to me to watch for a bit so she could go to a funeral. Mikey sits in the back, between the two car seats.

When Mom got out of the car to unstrap the babies, my grandson climbed over the front seat to get out of the car faster, so he wouldn’t have to wait for one of the kids to be unstrapped, which he’d been told not to do before.
He got out of the car… and then keyed the master lock button before he closed the door. Mom’s keys were still in the car and she hadn’t yet opened the door to get the babies out.
I know, without a doubt, he did it just to annoy her. He envisioned her going, “Why did you lock the door??!!” and then just unlocking it.

Yeah, well, this is what actually happened.

As it dawned on him what he had done the child was beside himself with remorse…as he should have been. He was just pacing and pacing ,sometimes with his hands on his head. He started sobbing. I finally took a little pity on him and and “Try not to worry. We will get them out if we have to take the whole car apart, bolt by bolt. Your parents will just have to buy a new car.”
”NEW CARS COST TOO MUCH MONEY!!” he cried.
I just nodded. (Replacing windows costs too much money too.)

At one point he went and got a brick. I said, “That’s a very good idea. We’ll use it if we have to.” You can see it lying in the grass in that picture.

It was an agonizing 15 minutes for him. It must have seemed like an eternity. I really felt sorry, really bad for him, but I kept my self from reaching out.

Mom ignored him, which was fine, but as soon as they got the kids out she started holding him and petting him, telling him it was OK, it wasn’t his fault, it was an accident, he didn’t need to feel bad. But it wasn’t a fucking accident and it WAS his fault. And letting him feel that guilt and remorse was the right thing to do, not try to take it away.

Then she left for the funeral. I didn’t let him off the hook, not one little bit. I did tell him I knew he didn’t realize what was going to happen, but let that be a lesson in disobedience. You never know what could happen, and we tell him to do things, or not to do things, for very good reasons.

One time he almost drowned in the lake because he was being disobedient. He scared the crap out of himself, and I reminded him of that incident.