Charles Stuart said:
...Quite certainly "karma" would hold no purpose either if our "future lives" were happening simultaneously. Indeed we might prefer not to refer to karma as "punishment", but it is, IMHO, a question of "justice". Laws and justice are not necessarily one and same, but why would we judge it correct that someone should be sentenced to jail for a serious crime but not that one should respond karmically for their errors? If we humans hold a notion of "justice", so much greater and more perfect would have to be a "Divine Justice"...
Charles, we have had this discussion before, but I say again, you see things very simplisticly and mechanically - as though life (lives) were some kind of clockwork or like a locomotive on a track. I see the whole process as more like clouds forming and then melting and blowing away, forming again, or like billowing smoke swirling up into the night from a fire, water rippling in a brook, to the ocean, forming rain, going round again.... I don't see it as something neat and geometric or, dare I say, 'linear'.
The whole process of life (lives) is chaotic and multi-dimensional and far more complex and complicated than we can possibly understand in the blinkered one-day-at-a-time reality that we necessarily experience in our mortal form. Things happen, cause creates effect, then other things happen in a fractal unfolding into eternity. It gets way too complex for us to follow it, but that does not mean it does not have its own logic and pattern - like smoke billowing from a fire.....
Although there may be a 'Deity' (however you conceive Her) directing things (who knows?), in my view, there does not have to be
any 'Divine Justice'
at all like some kind of 'Super Nanny' or cosmic puppet master pulling the strings of people's individual and multitudinous lives. It's just far too simplistic a view in my opinion. Personally, I think it's a bit of a cop out and people should step up and deal with responsibility for their own actions, endurance of their own bad luck, enjoyment of their own pleasures, suffering of their own pains and generally just get on with living their own lives. That's what we're here for after all.
Just because humans have come up with a justice system to punish 'criminals', it does not follow that the universe uses the same system to punish 'bad' behaviour. Why would it? What is 'bad' anyway? Who decides? Did the universe once torture and burn 'heretics against God' (however you conceive Her) because humans thought that was a good idea at the time? Did the Universe once sacrifice virgins to the Sun God, ditto? It makes no sense at all to assume that the Universe takes its queue from what humans get up to.
I like the idea posed in the original article that we are all 'one' and we are all just doing 'stuff', having experience, working it out, learning, growing, improving, making mistakes, testing things, hurting each other, deciding we don't like that very much, trying again... until we get to some point of spiritual maturity. Then it's on to the next thing, whatever that might be...
