o those who believe in karma: do you see some basis for it in reality? Is at least part of your belief predicated on a desire for it to be true (e.g., you *want* "good karma" for being a good person)?
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I believe in a kind of karma, or at least, I believe in a few different principles (and am agnostic on one) that could fit under the 'karma' umbrella or at least pertain to it.
I don't believe in karma as a kind of cosmic scoresheet, where good people necessarily have good things happen to them and bad people necessarily have bad things happen to them just because that's the kind of justice that people crave..
I don't know if the life is ultimately fair or not. I've talked to a few people who *have* to believe in justice and *have* to believe in karma, a universe without fairness is unacceptable to them. I on the other hand am prepared to accept an unfair universe, where things just happen. Not that I think it's necessarily unfair or that I want it to be unfair, just that I'm prepared to accept it if it seems to be the case.
Life can be beautiful and meaningful without being fair.. First, we're all one being anyway, so what happens to one person ultmimately happens to everyone. Why does it matter if one drop of water in a river, which only has a discrete existence for a split second, suffers more or less than another drop of water in the river?
Second, we demonstrate who we are--ultimately, we demonstrate love--within the contexts that the universe gives us. That's life's offering to us, nothing more or less (more or less). Granted, it would suck if some people had to suffer for eternity while demonstrating who they are, but I don't believe anybody suffers forever; the only constant in the universe is change. In Conversations with God, God says that everything will be OK in the end.
Third, everyone is ultimately innocent. Whatever we do, we believe it to be the right thing to do at the time, even if we only believe that because we're unaware and don't know any better at the time. We may do things against our better judgment--in other words we may be conflicted about what we should do--but if we act against our better judgment then it just means that our better judgment wasn't 'real' enough or clear enough for us, or that we felt we couldn't afford to take the high road, or something like that. So if everyone is ultimately innocent, what use is there for karmic retribution?
We're all ultimately actors on a stage, and one of our purposes is to explore the terrain of all possible experiences, which includes making decisions that others might call "evil."
Finally, In the absence of any indicators otherwise, the most prudent thing to do is to assume that life is the way it seems. And by all accounts life seems to be extremely unfair. To assume anything else is the case without a good reason/indicator is to believe in pie in the sky.
I doubt there are countless overseers wandering around who enforce our puerile desires for 'fairness'. (I say 'puerile' because it reminds me of a child screaming for their parents to punish their sibling for something they did while their parents desperately try to make everything as fair as possible.)
I guess one could argue that karma, of a kind that implies fairness, is just an automatic principle, just like the ones I said I believe in that are somewhat like karma (such as the law of attraction for instance), but the problem with that is that what actions are good and what actions are evil is completely subjective. Nobody can agree on it, so even if life were made 'fair' by some measure, half the people would be unhappy with the measurements. (And can categorizing actions as 'good' or 'evil' be made automatic anyway?)