Bad Karma

It gets my back up when I hear people talk about 'karma', or the supposed philosophy of 'what goes around comes around'. The actress Sharon Stone recently described the devastating earthquake in China as 'bad karma'.

It seems to me that the people who like to think along these lines, happily and readily apply it to others, but are far more hesitant to apply it to themselves.

You often hear someone say "they'll get theirs" or "what goes around comes around" when they have been treated badly. But rarely do you hear the flip side-- I was a jerk to that person this morning. I deserve to be treated badly by somebody else tomorrow.

The problem with karma is that when you apply it practically, and insert people's lives into this equation, the results are proof that it doesn't add up; that the equation doesn't work. David Bentley Hart makes a good argument--

Equally problematic, in some ways, if far more spiritually sane, is the view that all suffering and death should be seen as the precisely apportioned and condign recompense for human sin, balancing all accounts and contributing to a final harmony of all things.

It is a pleasing vision of things, in some ways, though quite horrifying in others; it is also a vision so pointlessly complex as to verge upon banality. If it gives us comfort to believe that the death of an infant from disease and the death of a serial murderer late in life from a heart attack, congenital madness and innate genius, the long fortunate life of one of nature's Romans and the brief miserable life of a born pauper are all determined by a precise calculation of what each and every one of us deserves, then it is a comfort sustained by absurdity.

The Doors Of The Sea p.30-31