From: doug@uuisis.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Subject: Re: Blindness & Justice (A Course In Miracles)
Organization: International Shared Information Service (Ottawa)
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 92 18:36:19 GMT

barry@calmasd.Prime.COM (Barry Hynum) writes:

> >We also dealt with the man who was blind from birth. They couldn't answer my
> >question of "*why* the apostles imagined that the man could sin before he wa
> >born. 
> 
> I would carefully rethink the short sighted version that blindness is 
> caused by sin in any way, shape or form. One perspective is that the
> chosen one is to feel more in this lifetime than see. I do not regard that
> as bad or the result of sinning. I offer this as an alternative view,
> not as a criticism.

Too much hell fire and damnation theology has made 'sin' a bad word. Too
bad, because the concept in the Greek is that of 'missing the mark'. In
that way you could say that one writing a math test who makes an adding
mistake (2+2=5) 'misses the mark' and that this is a 'sin'.

The student 'missed the mark' in this case. This doesn't mean she is a
'bad girl'. It simply means that she made an error and to 'hit the mark'
has to learn how to solve the equation 'correctly'.

Karmic connections (as articulated by Rudolph Steiner anyhow) suggest
that certain imbalances, errors, missings of the mark, etc., in one life
lead to bodily characteristics (and defeciencies) in a subsequent life.
Therefore being born blind can indeed be the result of past 'sin'.

Karma, as hopefully everyone knows, is not a theory of vindictive
punishment or retributive justice.  It's more like you simply reap what
you sow and as you come to understand that you start to get more careful
about what you sow :-) It is similar to the idea in a school that if one
fails a grade, one repeats - you get another chance to get it right.
This is not designed to 'punish bad people' so much as to give everyone
the chance to get it right, even if they get it wrong the first time.

This is the schoolmaster's idea of justice which is intended to help the
children in his charge learn.

Within the Jedeo-Christian tradition, I can discern two very different
ideas about divine or cosmic justice.

One is a rather simplistic idea that if you sin you get punished and the
basic punishment is eternal damnation in Hell.

This is the schoolboy's idea of justice in which he expects to be
punished if he breaks the rules and is found out.

In this model, after death one is put on trial, accused of 'sin', and is
either aquitted and goes on to Heaven or is convicted and incarcerated
in Hell.

This is a bit of a comic-book caricature of this theology, but those
themes can be found throughout the Bible.

Along with those 'crime-and-punishment' themes there is another theme,
which is often called 'Grace' or 'Forgiveness'. In this thread of
Judeo-Christian theology God is characterized as one who forgives sins
rather than as one who punishes sinners. The idea of 'divine justice'
here is one of reconciliation between God and man rather than one of
God's punishment of sinners.

Central to this theme are the ideas of substitutionary sacrifice,
repentence and atonement.  The ancient Hebrew animal sacrifice cultus
reflects this idea. The people confess their 'sins', resolve to do
better, and domestic livestock is sacrificed as a 'scapegoat', the idea
that the animal's death 'pays for' the sin in a token way and in return
for this gesture God extends forgiveness of the sins.

In modern Christianity there is a similar idea played out in the cultus.
The death of Jesus on the cross is described as a 'sacrifice' offered to
atone for all the sins of all people for all time. Christianity suggests
that all people are sinners, no one 'hits the mark', and therefore
everyone is in need of salvation from the consequences of missing the
mark. The doctrine of Grace says that no one can earn this forgiveness,
it is a free gift from God. In order to obtain the forgiveness one must
only confess and repent of one's sins and accept the
forgiveness/salvation freely offered by God by virtue of Christ's
sacrifice.

This idea of 'divine justice' diverges very substantially from the
schoolboy caricature of crime and punishment.

Various Christian groups and teachers place varying emphasis and weight
on the several aspects discussed here and they come together in the end -
with the idea that the sinner who does not confess and repent has
excluded himself from God's Grace and must then face the consequences of
his sin.

This salvation can be obtained, according to many Christian teachers,
simply by acknowledging Jesus' role and power - i.e. 'believe in Jesus
and you're saved'.

It should be noted that Hell doesn't get mentioned all that much in the
Bible and there is really very little in the way of description of hell,
and Satan. The guy in the red suit with the trident who is called Satan
doesn't actually show up in the Bible. It is a creation of folk culture.

There *are* references to hell, eternal damnation, and like that, but
not many and they are not very detailed. Folk culture has supplied the
details. 

When I compare the ideas of karma in relation to 'cosmic justice' as I
understand them with the Judeo-Christian ideas about justice as I
understand them, I see a number of things in common:

1) both have ideas of good and bad which are similar. It is good to be
loving and kind and generous and bad to be greedy and mean and nasty.

2) both understand that there are cosmic consequences to good or bad
deeds as well as any obvious and immediate consequences. That is, the
results of your deeds, good or bad, have to be dealt with in the future,
possibly after death, if they are not dealt with in life.

3) both understand good deeds as something that can be saved up for the
future and used even after death.  One can build up good karma, or one
can 'build up your treasure in heaven' in Christianity. 

4) both address the problem of 'bad karma' or 'sin' and outline ways and
means of dealing with the bad. In the theory of karma, as I understand
it, bad karma must be paid off, in a future incarnation if necessary. In
the Christian idea, there are two different things that can happen with
one's 'bad deeds' or 'sin'. One is eternal damnation with no exit and
the other is repentence and forgiveness.

In summary, both ideas hold that the individual is responsible for his
actions and responsible for living a 'good life'. The responsibility is
owed to a supernatural cosmic force (the law of karma or God) which will
ultimately call you to account.

The difference appears to me to be:

Karma is completely lawful.  For every cause there is an effect and
there is no way to avoid the consequences.  Every debt must be paid. The
essence is a cosmic law which cannot be bent or changed or violated.

Christianity is completely relational. Against a background of cause and
effect, law, crime and punishment, etc., man can appeal to God for and
expect to receive forgiveness of outstanding debts, mercy, salvation.
The essence is a relationship between God and Man whereby recognition and
repentence of sin results in cancellation of debt.

> One of the concepts that took me the longest time to really get is that
> beliefs like Christian, as modified by the Course, or any other set of
> religiously based beliefs constitute the mental constructs that a person
> or people build to contain their fears. Each set of beliefs has a
> protective quality that is somewhat unique and affords a special kind of
> protection from that which is feared. To have a religion that truly
> encompasses all of what everyone fears or avoids is like dividing any
> number by zero. The probability of success is 1 over the population of
> the world. 
> 
> To think that one's religion is the one religion and that all others are
> false, or to think that one's relligion has all the answers for everyone
> (able to contain the fears of all), to me this is foolishness. I've
> given up looking for the one religion or trying to convince anyone that
> I know the way for them. 

That sounds very logical at first glance. But I rather think that all
human fears have a great deal in common and that most all religious
ideas recognize 'bad' (sin, bad karma, whatever you call it) as
something that one is responsible to God or the Law or the Cosmos for.

The 'religion' - the 'Church' - this consists of a community of people
who share a belief in this idea and together attempt to work out its
meaning and implications in daily life.  While the 'religion' is based
on the theology it is not identical with the theology.  It is just a
particular group's living expression of its understanding of that
theology. 

Within the Christian religion there are innumerable sub-groups
(Churches) with various different histories and ideosyncratic
manifestations of ideas which most of them share.

I fully agree that no local or national 'Church' with its own little
history and its own little culture can be a comfortable community for
all people, I'm not sure that there aren't universal or absolute answers
to all human concerns. In theory anyway. We cannot expect everyone to
recognize the truth of any proposition. Truth doesn't have to be
recognized in order to be true, however.

> What we commonly think of as evil is God's messenger standing across our
> path. Where we should not go, that we persist in pursuing, envokes God's
> wrath. I'm not sure I'd call that justice. 

The problem of evil is an exceedingly interesting one. Christianity
readily embraces an idea of 'sin' which is like error, or missing the
mark. It's not active 'badness', but more a passive 'falling short'.

With less ease and unanimity, Christianity recognizes that a person who
thinks that a given sin is a good thing is in deep trouble. The simplest
example is that of a thief who thinks stealing is good. He struggles to
do more and more of it. Stealing is evil, and in this case the evil
becomes active and deliberate. The thief is confused, unable to
recognize that he's missing the mark, and therefore unable to repent,
change his ways, and get out of the problem. This becomes active evil.

And the sinner here gets into a kind of moral perversion where the
individual's morality defines stealing as good. Such a belief and
doctrine obstructs and blocks the person's ability to recognize his
error.

Now we get into what you just described as God's wrath. The
aforementioned thief will encounter problems. The people from whom he
steals will be annoyed with him. He'll get all kinds of negative
feedback from others. When people catch him stealing they will try to
stop him. Eventually his community will try to force him to stop
stealing by putting him in jail, for instance. I guess you could call
that instant karma. I walk up to you on the street and say 'gimme your
money' and you punch me out. Direct negative feedback. :-)

Classical Christian social theory suggests that 'the good society' acts
toward sin and sinners in such a way that the sinner is led to recognize
the error, repent, and achieve salvation and liberation. The role of
state and the role of Church (or religion) are only differentiated with
great diffculty in that model.

If evil is God's messenger standing across our path as you say, then the
state, the Church, the police and the courts and the jails are all
'evil' when they act to stop us from sinning. 

That's a very radical viewpoint!

I would suggest that evil is usually an incompete truth that is polluted
with some falsehood. For the thief, it works like this: "Things are
good. I need and want things and that is ok. I need to get things.
Therefore I will take from others the things that they have and I need
rather than earning the money to buy the things I need." The honest
person, has a similar idea with a small but important difference:
"Things are good. I need and want things and that is ok. I need to get
things. Therefore I will earn money to buy things rather than taking
things from others."

So you see that which is 'evil' or 'wrong' corresponds with that which
is 'good' or 'right' quite closely up to a point.

I would say that evil almost never presents itself as 'bad'. It presents
itself *legitimately* as good, takes a number of good things and adds
them together, and only after demonstrating quite a lot of goodness and
correctness, it makes a twist, a false turn which perverts the ordinary
and healthy desire for things, in the above example, into a criminal
intent when it should be converted into an honourable intent.

Evil is a trickster, I'd say. The Bible says the Devil is a Deceiver.
Deceit almost always proceeds with liberal doses of authentic and valid
truth, slipping a critical error into a complex thought form.

Almost any good thing can be perverted by an error into a gestalt that
is bad. 

There is a corollary - *every* good thing *will be perverted* into a
gestalt that is bad by a person who's moral and ethical constitution is
suffering perversion and corruption. And that, in Christian teaching, is
everyone and therefore everything.

The 'devil' here plays the role of tempter and tester attempting to find
the weakness in each of us which will lead us to take a 'good' intention
and a 'good thing' and slip in just enough pollution or falsehood to get
a bad result. And the deceiver will do his utmost, in this theory, to
help us rationalize our 'sin' in order to avoid recognizing it and
repenting and getting forgiveness, etc. Even if you don't believe in
Christian forgiveness, you can still stop doing the 'bad thing', make
what amends you can, and cut your losses.

Evil then, as I am describing it, is the sin of error and
misinterpretation and misunderstanding which leads us to be spiritually
blind to our own errors and mistake good for evil.

I am sure, quite aside from any theological considerations, that every
human is vulnerable to the 'error' of self-justification and
rationalization of 'errors' that suit his own selfish desires.

Theologically I would say that:

IF the Christian teaching about Grace and forgiveness and salvation
from the debt of sin is true, 

THEN the karmic theory which suggests that there is no possibility of
the cancellation of karmic debt, and that you are stuck with it *no matter
what* is - well - questionable.

I suspect that a great deal of the historic concern Christianity has had
with reincarnation and karmic ideas relates to this question. At the
bottom, the two ideas, reaincarnation and karma on the one hand and
Christianity on the other sand poles apart and suggest entirely
different cosmologies.

The one says you have to work out your own debt in as many lives as it
takes and "God" or the "law of Karma" is a relentless task-master that
will ensure that you pay every last penny and the other says that you
*cannot* work out your own debt, it is far too large for any human to
handle, only a gracious and forgiving God can save or rescue you from
the debt of sin (or bad karma) and this can happen only through a
personal and loving relationship between self and God in which the human
acknowledges God's supremacy and allows himself to be shown his sin and
error in order to repent and be forgiven and find the 'right track'.

Those two ideas could hardly be *more* different in how the cosmic
positions of man and gods are understood.

As I have said there is much that is very similar between my
understanding of karmic ideas and Christianity. In one way,
re-incarnation is a moot point for Christianity. Whether the drama is
all confined to a single life or extends over many is not important.

What *IS* important - and vitally so - is whether salvation is something
people earn (in however many lives) or whether it is something given by
God to people who are inherently undeserving by virtue of their own
merits.

I suspect that Christianity stands or falls on this one point and on no
other: Is there a loving God, as Jesus taught, who can and will forgive
sins (bad karma) in order to reconcile the creator God with the created
Man or is there not? It has to do with who is God, and his role in the
cosmos and who is man, and what's our role in the cosmos. It has to do
with error, sin, mistakes, shortcomings, or what have you and the
remedies which are available to recognize and treat those problems both
for individuals and communities.

Christianity says God will show you your errors, you may repent, and God
will forgive and free you from the consequences. The classic notions of
karmic doctrine (as I understand them) suggest that you have to work out
the consequences of your own sin and you will have to spend as long as
it takes to do that.

I must admit that personally I find the karmic idea enormously
attractive intellectually. It is remoreselessly *fair*. You get exactly
what you deserve, and what you have earned, nothing more and nothing
less. Each mistake you make will be paid for in full by future bad
karma.

I must also admit that the Christian idea of Grace (which I have spent
years studying) is an enormous outrage to ego and intellect.  It seems
so unfair that God should take my debt as his own, suffer on my behalf
(Christ on the Cross), and cancel my cosmic debt simply because God
loves me and wishes to remove all barriers which stand between a
full and open intimate relationship with Him. 

The main reason I believe it is that I can see in scores of human
relationships I have known that life really does work that way. Jesus
called God "Daddy". I know my own human earthly father did so much for
me that I did not 'deserve', forgave so many wrongs where I did not
deserve 'forgiveness', gave me so incredibly much simply because he
loved me - a gift which I could not hope to ever repay - I know that
LOVE transcends LAW, that reconciliation is achieved much faster through
forgiveness than through amortization of debt, that the gift of love is
so powerful and large and overwhelming that it cannot possibly be
repaid, that love can heal almost any wound and that love is a
transcendent and miracle-working power.

I know those things because I have seen and experienced them in my own
life, time and time again.

I know that LOVE is all-powerful and that real LOVE pays no attention
to 'just deserts', fairness, reason, balance sheets or anything like
that. LOVE is a free gift, always undeserved, and always unleashes
miracles. 

And I am persuaded that Jesus proclaimed that God loves the human race
with an infinite, unlimited largese of spirit and that God's deepest
longing is for us humans to drop the barriers which we erect to block
that love - barriers of ego, self-deception, pride in our own
intellects, our limited notions of fairness - everything that stands
between us and recognizing our weakness and shortcomings, His love and
strength, and his power and willingness to forgive it all and reconcile
us to himself.

It's true - I believe that.  I also believe there is a law of karma -
that one does 'normally' reap what one sows.  I believe that the law of
love is God's justice however and that it takes precedence over the law
of karma.  I believe that God can and will cancel any 'karmic debt' or
forgive any sin that a person recognizes, acknowledges and genuinely
repents of. And I believe this process is 'para-normal', outrageous,
miraculous, an insult to ego and intellect, but neverthess the single
most important and radical fact about the universe.

In a nutshell, love is stronger than law. God is love. As we love we
wreck the machinations of karma and destroy the debt of bad karma and
liberate/save ourselves and those around us through the power of God's
love manifest in our own willingness to allow love to flow through us.

That's what I think.

Religions may well be based on the problem of dealing with fear but
Jesus and his 'Daddy' do not talk about coping with fear, they talk
about making it totally obsolete through the power of God's love for man
once it is humbly accepted and received by a person.

"New Age" religious thinking is, in my experience, very eclectic and
impossible to really categorize. Participating in this newsgroup for
some months I have seen hundreds of references to Christianity and
theological ideas that have been associated with Christianity over the
aeons. I've yet to see any articulation of what I consider to be the
essential nature of the message of Jesus, though, or its relevance to
modern man and theories of reincarnation, karma, etc. To be fair, it is
very rare that I see any Christian articulate what I consider to be the
essential stuff of Jesus' message either.

I was inspired by this discussion of the problem of sin and evil and the
fact that I know this newsgroup is frequented by many spiritually
curious and open folk - the 'spirit moved me' you might say to
articulate my own "Present Age" concerns regarding how to grapple with
the still-radical, still-revolutionary, still-preposterous teachings of
Jesus of Nazereth.

Comments welcome. I hope I didn't offend anyone.

=Doug

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