Infinite Justice

"... [K]harma is real, part of the deal is with how you started the deal 'cause everything a three-sixty, it'll start to cartwheel, it snowballs..."
-Del, the Funky Homosapien for Handsome Boy Modeling School's "The World's Gone Mad"

I've been thinking about kharma lately. Not because I think I've done anything particularly egregious lately, I've just been thinking about how one person's actions influence other things (chaos theory has been bouncing around my skull as well).

The thing that fascinates me about kharma is the amount of belief required to make it useful. In explanation: if bad things happen to you and you don't believe in kharma, it just seems arbitrary and the point of punishment is to associate a behavior with something bad, but if you don't know what you did you don't learn anything.

However, if you believe in kharma bad things that happen to you can be attributed to wrongs in a past life (thus solving the above mentioned problem of punishment for no reason). What fascinates me the most about the whole thing is you don't have seek vengeance as those that do you wrong will be eventually punished; if not now, then after they die in their next life. In short: no matter what happens, justice will eventually be served. Sure, it may take a few centuries, but all wrongs done to you and all wrongs you do will eventually be rectified.

This concept makes a lot more sense to me than the usual Judeo-Christian explanation of, "it's part of God's plan." I don't know, somehow an arbitrary explanation for an arbitrary tragedy doesn't sit right with me.

I don't know whether I actually believe in kharma or not, but it is a rather appealing philosophy. It also let's you believe in the immortality of the individual, which seems to be fairly appealing to most people.

-Thomas