That's Karma Baby...

No, sorry I don't believe in Karma.

I heard the story of the man & woman in India who fell in love but they were from different castes. You might not have heard this story, I head it on a Ravi Zacharias podcast. They are in love and against both their families wishes, they marry. Both their families disown them, they're now on their own and I gather in another time it may have been their death sentence. But for them life goes on, til one day the wife is transferred to another city with her job. Sadly they grow apart and she falls for another man. The husband suspecting something has gone wrong travels to her only to be told by his wife that the marriage is over, she's met someone else and she plans to marry him

Despite all his best attempts she's unmoved in her decision. The story goes he asks her why, that they both lost all their family members and contact, all they had was each other. Still she is unmoved.

In acceptance of the fact she's unwilling to save the marriage he re-enters the room and tells her he will not oppose her but all he wishes for is to lay his head on her lap for half an hour and with no words or movement, just  rest there, enjoying the closeness before she moves on in her life. She agrees and he lays down his head and rests in the last closeness they will ever share.

She not knowing he's taken a strong poison and before the half hour is up, he is dead.

Time passes by but understandably the woman never really gets over the ordeal, eventually she calls on a Hindu mystic and consults him. He takes her birth date, the husbands, their marriage date and other factors looks at his charts, and relies on his spiritual knowledge. Eventually he concludes its actually not her fault at all, in fact it is the man's fault completely. The mystic explains to her that in a previous life the man was not her husband, he was someone she knew and he had raped her and that the failed marriage and his suicide was in fact "KARMA".

In the casts system, your only way of moving up the caste system to a higher social status is to be a good person to other people so when you're reincarnated you can step up a position or two based on your actions, or go down to abject poverty and disease with no future because you were not a good person in a previous life.

So you either believe in Karma because :-

1. You're a believer in re-incarnation and you're a follower of eastern mysticism. With origins in ancient India, it is a key concept in  Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Taoism, Shintoism, Ching Hai and others.
2. You've simply cherry picked an aspect of eastern mysticism because it suits you for any number of reasons. Not sure how one is able to intellectually support the idea of construct your own religious faith by picking out aspects from a range of faiths that suit you best. Seems odd but that sort of oddness seems to rest easily amongst some eastern mystic influenced types we commonly & possibly call hippies or alternative types. 
3. Perhaps the concept of cosmic come-uppance appeals to you because someone's wronged you & you're now happily living in the knowledge they will get their just desserts some day. No forgiveness, just everyone bad or more accurately, everyone who's ever been bad to you will not go unpunished. Kind of an appealing passive revenge system.
4. Or even odder still, you're one of those folk who opposes religion, thinks religion is the root of all evil and the Karma thing is where its at...even though its from a religion. Contradiction Alert buzzer should be flashing and ringing like a banshee. And seeing banshee's don't exist something that rings and flashes a lot...a big alarm ;-)

Reincarnation falls flat on its one life face for a number of very simple reasons. There are more people living now then any other point in history. The world population today is higher than say 1000B.C. so at some point there has to have been new people born that didn't exist before in the reincarnation model. In fact if there was "a beginning" in the reincarnation model, there must have been at least as many people as the subsequent time with the highest ever world population.

 

On a different angle, why is it that many celebs used to be reincarnated famous people, indeed some decades ago some stand up comics who were ridiculing reincarnation were saying "Hurry up and claim someone famous before all the famous ones are taken". There was another glitch, no one was ever able to establish facts around the previous life that could then be verified by other sources. There is in other words, no circumstantial evidence corroborating previous lives lived.

 

There's also the awkwardness of the otherwise atheist person (who connects with Karma) commenting that the Biblical account of the creation of earth and all its creatures is false as there is no evidence to support it. This somehow doesn't apply to Karma and reincarnation. Also doesn't apply to Darwinian versions on the creation of life. No evidence how chemical soup turned into a living cell and evolved into life as we know it. No evidence, no replicating in experiments just theories. That's branching off if we're not careful, but the point is Science is wrongly pointed to supporting the Darwinian approach, but there's no science or evidence for Karma or reincarnation.

 

So...

 

Person # 1 "Yeah I believe in Karma"

 

Person # 2  "So do you believe in reincarnation"

 

Person # 1  "No that's ridiculous"

Person # 2 "I don't believe in either and can't understand how you can not falsely believe in one and reject the other, what religion are you?"

 

Person # 1 "I don't believe in religion, there is no religion that is right or wrong"

 

Person # 2  "So what you're saying is two opposing religions don't contradict, they just are...they're both neither right nor wrong. How's that work, I mean how do you believe in religion but you believe that all religions are not right or wrong? Who's that work?"

 

Person # 1  " ahhh...."

 

From this point much, much more creativity is required for the person to try & develop a solution. Open mindedness is essential, the type that says its right without any idea why its right and pushing away anything that shows its wrong or even doubtful. Accepting KARMA as being legit is a decision based on a desire to agree with it after one has removed all logic. You gotta like it to believe in it, nothing more.

 

KARMA - its there for folk who might also care to buy a bridge in New York that was once owned by Elizabeth Taylor and was built solely by George Washington with his bare hands.  Take my word for it :-)