> Tom wrote, On 7/9/2008 10:51 AM:
>>
>> Karma is no more like sin than it is like grace. It is not a punishment
>> or reward. It is neither "good" nor "bad". Your blithe acceptance that
>> karma works "over many lifetimes" is just another untestable claim based
>> on your irrational religious beliefs.
>>
>
> When you are talking about karma; from the Sanskrit root kr, "to do,"
> "to act," you are talking about religious belief.
No, what *you're* talking about is religious belief. I'm talking about the
way things quite observeably and demonstrably are.
> The qualifier, "your"
> that you use in reference, is entirely irrelevant in the definition of
> karma.
*Your* declaration that karma is a "storehouse" for all the bad or good
consequences of past lives is *your* religious belief.
> It is not based on the Christian religious belief of sin, which I clearly
> am not trying to compare it with.
You cannot conceive of anything outside your bastardized and bowlderized
Christian faith, not even concepts that have nothing to do with it at all.
That's why you attribute to the non-Christian concept of "karma" all the
qualities that you attribute to sin and grace and then claim that it's
really something different because you're using a different word.
>> There is no "karmic debt" and no "karmic surplus".
>
> No, that is not how the theory of karma is said to operate.
Then it cannot be stored.
>> It is not "stored".
>
> Yes it is. When you are reborn, if you have stored "a lot" of "good"
> karma, your station in life will be described as "better" than your
> previous birth, such as being reborn in the Brahman caste.
Again, with no reasonable evidence for reincarnation, all you're doing is
repeating inane religious babble. What's worse, you don't actually
understand the Hindu babble, so you just assume that it's the same as the
Christian babble. So you pile one absurdity onto another to continue the
pretense that you know what you're talking about.
