anyone with a belief in reincarnation and activism, how does it compute?

I had an argument with a nice person, so I stopped at a point with "this is a religious disagreement and we can't test it, so we can jsut change the subject :)", but I'm still uneasy.
I don't understand how can you simultanously believe that "people just get what they deserve karma-wise" and "activism to stop people hurting others is valuable". If all those raped women had it coming, then if you stop their rapists, it only will cause more bricks to fall from construction sites on their heads, or something. Is it to keep the rapists' karma clean? So it's never for the benefit of the actual people the activism is arguably for? Do all the people in marginalized categories commit shit in their lives before? My brain hurts, but I do not believe that I am more original at discovering moral problems as all the vague-leftist reincarnation-believers put together. :/

 

Nitpick: What you´re asking about is karma not reincarnation persay. I believe in reincarnation meaning being reborn after one dies, but not that morality has anything to do with it. Because I do not really believe in karma.

 

Oh, thanks! I didn't stop to think that these are two separate beliefs.

 

I was going to say.

Also, even if we're using Karma, this is a ridiculous misunderstanding.

Note: I am not of a faith that actively believe in karma, and I've got only the barest understanding of the system.

In the kind of reincarnation you're discussing, you get put in "worse" circumstances as punishment for your previous life. You're also put in 'better' positions for coming closer to enlightenment.

The interesting part: part of the path to enlightenment is knowing that even bad people don't deserve what happens to them. And eventually realizing that suffering is an illusion/something we do to ourselves.

But most people are in the first half of that equation: Figuring out that even if you do something bad, you don't necessarily deserve bad things happening to you.

 

Yeah, that's a very specific kind of reincarnation belief. And, ultimately, I don't think it follows through philosophically, because there still had to be a First Bad Act. A first time someone was raped, or murdered, or stolen from, or what have you.

And so unless reincarnation is something that takes place outside the timeline (and thus the cycle of souls is non-chronological), the victim of the First Bad Act can't have deserved it. There's still at least one innocent person harmed. And if there's one, then who says there aren't others, who then get brushed aside if you assume a just world reincarnation?

I can't speak to religious beliefs on the subject because Resident Awkward Atheist, but: If there is even the possibility that innocent people are suffering, then activism is the right thing to do. And holding people responsible for what they did in past lives (if you believe in that) is pretty much the same, to me, as holding them responsible for what their parents do. There's no way they can change what happened, and they aren't that person at this moment, so punishing them for it is ultimately just sadistic and cruel.

 

adigitalmagician: "The interesting part: part of the path to enlightenment is knowing that even bad people don't deserve what happens to them." It's funny how, in the end, recognizing that the system is not fair is key. Just like in the simplified, atheist view. I don't think my conversation partner believed in this version, but I am still interested, because what other people might believe is still interesting in itself.

"suffering is an illusion/something we do to ourselves." How does this compute with the whole "is this abuse?" subforum? Or the idea that making other people hurt is bad - they are doing to themselves, after all, I just happen to stand by with a knife?

I... don't want to be an Asshole Atheist who argues too agressively about religion. I guess my primary interest was finding a way to understand how that person I've talked about can be as generous and activist-y as I think if they are in the same time believing in this kind of thing. But if the belief is softer ("it's not always so! it's not so exclusively! this thing and it's opposite are both true on a certain level"), and mostly serves to feel in peace about someone who hurt them a lot and got away with it by dieing, and also to get in peace with why they suffered... then this whole thing is on a level where barging in with questions is not just unpolite, but would be extremely useless, too.

But I am still interested of a coherent version someone else may believe in.

starcrossedsky: that's a kind and coherent version, thanks.

 

I'll have to see how much I can dredge up of what I remember from my Buddhism class, because I think the way you're thinking about karma and reincarnation isn't really the way that tradition thinks about it, but it's late and I'm tired, soo...

Watch this space, I guess.

 

The one thing I know for sure is "karma" does not mean what it's often taken as meaning by non-Buddhists. It doesn't mean getting what you deserve. It means getting what you get, what you are in a sense fated?

 

While that is true, the concept of "get what they deserve" implies that it's related to their past deeds/a punishment. Just World Is For Jerks and all that. A "you need to learn this thing in these life circumstances" isn't a "deserved," it's a ... Well, "needed."

#fun with connotations

 

"Imagine that there is some amount of ongoing learning and development of souls. The point of putting someone in "humble" circumstances might not be to punish them, but to help them understand a thing they clearly did not yet understand." I had a snarky post about this on tumblr yesterday - the problem is that people who are born in abusive families usually just learn/understand stuff like "I am not worthy to be loved" "I don't deserve to live" "the only way to make other people be nice to me is to be passive-agressive and manipulative and mean" "I ruin everything" "the only reason a man would ever pretend to like me is him wanting orgasms" "the smell of lavender means I am in IMMEDIATE DANGER". If this is deep wisdom that needs learning, then the Universe is shit.

@Morven, if fate can be unmerited/unfair, then we are right to fight against it... except, wait, if it's fated then activism is useless, you can't modify fate? Or you can have a soft version of it where things play out however, and then the DM says "I was intending this to happen all along". In catholicism, you kinda resolve it with time travel: there is free will, but God already knows the endgame.

anyway, the whole system seems to me perfectly fit for sustaining a caste system, and even if the original initiators of the religion, and some non-mainstream monks, thought differently, I can see the people in power promoting the version that causes the least amount of unrest amongst the lower classes - "our suffering is inevitable and is not the kind of exploitation that could ever be changed"? Again, I am very far from an expert. In case this seems like I dislike asian people: in the Catholic Church, liberation theology got excommunicated in a similar manner.

 

Yeah, you're hitting on precisely the thing I don't like about Buddhism, which I suspect is the side that got a lot of political support; institutionalized religion tends to shape itself to support the status quo. Not all Buddhists think that way, I must hasten to add.

 

@anononthewathevr I can only speak from my own experiences, but i went through some shit growing up--nothing as bad as some things on this forum but plenty nasty on its own right--and while I did learn (and have had to subsequently work really hard on unlearning) some of those things? I dont regret it. Because I also learned a lot of valuable things I wouldn't have without suffering for them. I feel like I'm able to understand people and things I wouldn't without having felt worthless and afraid like that for my own self. Im able to be more kind, more patient, and I'm actually more motivated to do good things in the world and help people because of those experiences.

Note that not everyone has to feel this way about it! But it one possible way to look at it.

 

I'm glad you feel this way. I am mostly unable to make deep friendships and I have spent, at the very most, 4 months of my life in relationships and I am close to 30 (more details in my thread)... so it's hard for me to emotionally understand your perspective. But in my brain, I am honestly happy it exists, and that you are happy. I just think that all my abuse teached me is negative, and I don't believe in life after death, so in my system, I have lost unreplaceable years of possibly being loved or accepted. (or feeling like I am accepted, because it's hard to see what is real and what is blocked out by internal filters.)

 

Yeah, i want to be really clear that feeling like you do about things is 10000% valid. I mean, I really hope you're able to work through those things and get to a place where you can be happy too, and if you're angry still even when that happens, thats ok. It just. Really wasnt useful for me to keep spending the spoons to be angry, and this is the peace i made with my situation.

 

thank you, Lissiel! I'm glad it works for you to think this way. And it might be true or not, or most probably variable depending of the person, and I don't have access to trustworthy kindness statistics correlated with childhood-shittiness, so I'll just wrap up my disagreement and put it in the unsolveable box, because I have no proof to base any further argument on. Just like reincarnation, I can't just test it.

[sorry if this topic is not separate enough] I'd still be curious about why would a happy childhood make it harder for people to become kind or understanding or patient, but I am not asking this as a rhetorical manouver to undermine you! just separately from you, in general? (Well, @seebs says they had a nice childhood and they also don't have certain kind of empathy, but they say it's a case of autism, not happiness overdose.)

 

Well, i think its very heavily dependent on the person, and it can go different ways. Like, this is by no means the only way to look at it, right? But i think theres a certain amount of cluelessness involved sometimes. Look at the tucutes, with their "oppreshun is fun game lol kill urself cis scum ::flower emoji::" bs. Amazing how few of them seem to have actually experienced say, abuse or depression or dysphoria. Its really easy to look at those things as nothing mire than social capital and ways to control others if you've never experienced them. People who are afraid of getting physically attacked for presenting as their right gender /tend/ to not deliberately try to trap people into 'misgendering them' by changing their pronouns after the fact, because being misgendered actually bothers them. People who have been suicidal tend to be much less quick to tell people to kill themselves, because they know what that shit feels like, its not just a hypothetical that wins them arguments. Look at how good seebs and co are at spotting their attempts at manipulation and abuse after having it aimed at them for so long.

Now, yes, sometimes people get fleas or just hurt so much so long they just want to lash out, and some people are just assholes, so please dont read this as some sort of romanticizing "suffering makes you a saint" thing. Just that increased empathy/understanding is one way it can play out.

/edit: also! Just realized this might be read as "people deserved to be in bad situations because it might make them into better people." Experiencing bad things might have valuable results, but that absolutely does NOT imply that anyone deserves bad things to happen to them. I'm not saying that, ok?

 

Thank you! We can agree on this. :)

 

Disclaimer: this is based on half-remembered stuff from an intro course, supplemented by a bit of review on Wikipedia. I am not anything like a practitioner of Buddhism.
(and I'm not even going to try to speak to Hindu ideas about karma) I recommend you back a salt truck up to this post and just kinda... unload it all over everything. Kay? Kay.

Yeah, this, mostly. Karma literally just means "action" or specifically intentional action. What usually gets interpreted as "karma" is the idea that actions have consequences, both the obvious immediate consequences, and longer-term, indirect consequences that are the "fruits" of the "seed" of the action. When one dies, the unresolved effects of one's karmic actions pass onto one's next life, keeping one bound to the cycle of rebirth. It's more a causal idea (albeit some kind of moral causality) than one based on any kind of judgement or fate. It's also framed more as there being "skillful" actions, which act to end suffering and "unskillful" actions which act to cause or preserve suffering, rather than being framed as "good" actions which are rewarded and "bad" actions which are punished. It's also not thought to be easily comprehensible - full understanding of karma is tied to enlightenment. (again, salt truck, dump it all over everything)

Also note that the whole point of Buddhism is to escape from the karmically driven cycle of rebirth that ties you to samsara.

And there is, of course, considerable dispute over all this between various traditions of Buddhism (this is all pretty Theravada-centric because that's what I know best).

 

If I remember correctly, some Buddhist sects also believe that it's best to have a certain amount of suffering, because the happy and exalted life of say, a god, might make you forget that existence is suffering. And given that the ultimate goal of existence is to escape the cycle of death and rebirth, that's counterproductive. It's been a while though, so I may be mangling the philosophy.