Karma not Dogma! Wait, what?

I am currently in Northampton, Massachusetts doing research for my dissertation. It is a very liberal, very hipster and very awesome little town, and thus is prone to the occasional instance of self-satire just like Berkeley or Portland.

One such stereotype of course would be the fascination many hippy-esque Americans (and rich celebrities) have with all things Eastern, especially Eastern religion. So I should not have been surprised to see the following bumper sticker being sold inside a local gift shop:

KARMA NOT DOGMA!

What a nice sentiment; so much better for us to treat each other nicely in the assumption that we will eventually pay the price one day than to blindly follow the claim of some religion….oh, wait.

Of course the irony is that karma is dogma, if we are to define dogma as the accepted beliefs and doctrine of a given religion. I am sure I just simplified the concept of karma and thus did it some injustice, but however you define karma I am pretty sure that as most people outside of the United States understand it, it is definitely dogma.

But no matter; we wouldn’t want that to interfere with our enjoyment of the woo. (As I am sure most Americans’ understanding of karma is much more closely tied to the different variants of woo in cultural circulation than any profound grasping of Buddhist or Eastern religious tradition.)

It is interesting though — so many people are completely happy to go along with mocking the idea that we should take the ancient fables in the Bible, the Torah or the Qur’an literately, but when it comes to suggesting that psychics are frauds or there is no power inherent in crystals or there actually is no order-keeping justice to the universe, they sometimes get very upset. All part of the great evolution of God, I suppose.

Episode 35: Gov. Bentley, Evangelism, Pascal’s Wager, Buddhism

Episode 35 is now available, featuring a discussion of the remarks made by Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, an explanation of the famous Pascal’s Wager, a general deconstruction of American Evangelism, and our hosts break down why Buddhism shouldn’t be such an attractive pseudo-non-religous option for those on the fence.

The dark side of Buddhism.

Over the weekend I watched the film Blindsight, which is a documentary about a group of blind Tibetan children who take on the challenge of climbing one of Tibet’s mountains. The children are all members of a school for the blind ran by a blind woman from Germany. They are in dire need of such charity because in Tibet, being blind is a horrible stigma. Buddhist doctrine teaches that such physical afflictions and handicaps are forms of punishment for a wicked past life. Therefore, the blind people of Tibet are social outcasts.

It was actually quite surprising to see the level of cruelty directed towards these children. At one point, two blind children accidentally bump into an old woman in the street, who responds “Look out, morons. You deserve to eat your father’s corpse!”

Saddest of all, some of the children themselves speculate about what they did to deserve their blindness. “It’s because of my bad deeds in a previous life that I’m blind in this one,” says one child. “It’s what’s written in my karma. … But I doubt if I killed anybody, because killing a person is heinous, and so I wouldn’t have been born human.”

We don’t often hear as much from atheists about Hinduism and Buddhism, and there are arguments to be made that of the major religions, these are the least harmful. But it is also well known that we in the West receive a very sanitized, very pre-packaged version of “Eastern spirituality,” and it is good to keep in mind that even in Buddhism, the religious tendency to impart shame and exclusion on innocent people is present.