Karma literally means action, to do. It simply means “what you do”. Implicit within this notion, though, is the idea that actions have consequences. If you are cruel, the problem is not that you offend God–God doesn’t care, because he has given you an infinite number of lifetimes to get smart, and an infinite amount of joy when you do–but rather that you hurt YOURSELF. This is essentially the claim I have made in my own ethical system is that the punishments for “sins”‘ are INHERENT within them.
Take a psychopathic serial killer. They are scarcely human. They live their daily lives filled with rage and fear, lusts they can only rarely satisfy, and completely disconnected from most or all of the world. They are alone, even if they have partners.
Take a more subtle sin, like marital infidelity. If you are psychologically normal, all of the positive moments will likely be balanced with anxiety, and disconnection both from your partner, and from that part of yourself that is capable of innocent joy. You become little more than an animal in rut.
I would contrast the relatively lax Hindu/Buddhist approach with that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the first case, you exist in an infinite amount of space and time. If you fail, get back up and try again. You have as many chances as you need. In the latter religions, though, there is an anthropomorphic deity conceived more or less as a father.
In the case of the Jews, he intervenes actively DURING your life, to variously bless and curse you, not just according to your piety, but also sometimes simply by whim. Your only recourse to get the best deal you can is to follow the Law very diligently, and to fear God. There is in fact a saying, if I am not mistaken, that “the fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom.”
In Christianity, you nominally have a loving God, as “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Ponder this. God controls everything. He controls the movement of the stars, the tides, the seasons.
Yet we are to believe both that he only had ONE son, and that he needed that son to be killed in lieu of sacrificial goat, sheet and chickens so that he could assuage his own anger at the sins of his “people”. I do not think atheists are wrong to point to the fundamental craziness of this notion, even if in their case it is frequently a constitutional sadism that motivates them, and not a concern for truth.
Further, this God is quite content to condemn for ETERNITY people who violate his laws. The role of grace in redemption, of course, has as a theological point no doubt gotten many people killed in many wars over the centuries, in what, also, can only be seen as craziness when located within a religions nominally devoted to love and non-violence. But what kind God, given infinite freedom, would structure a universe in such a way?
I have said on a number of occasions that I don’t think Christ himself would be a Christian, as the faith exists today. I think that early on it was perverted for purely political, power-mongering purposes. It is an interesting apparent fact that Christ’s Mass began to be celebrated during the existing pagan Roman festivals, one of which was the Saturnalia, and the other of which I don’t feel like looking up. But December 25th, the exact date, was chosen because that was an important holy-day of the Mithraic cult.
In Islam, everything is absolutely black and white, right and wrong, and social conformity an absolute value. It is an effort more or less to automate human society. One could in fact see parallels between the industrial age, with our factory whistles and daily grinds, and the call to prayer for all men sounded five times a day. This is the reason that Muslims have culturally been so uncreative. Aside from some very interesting geometric patterns, they have contributed very little to any realm of human knowledge or art. As I have pointed out, Israel, with roughly 1/100th the population, easily eclipses the number of patents generated by the entire Muslim world (or perhaps it was the Arab world, but the point is the same).
In the end, what I want to argue for is a merging of science and religion, to the benefit of the FORMER. Religion knows things that “science” (and it is always dangerous to assume it to be a unified thing, rather than the collective output of millions of people of varying levels of talent and integrity; and much more dangerous to reify it and conflate it with “reality”, as some poor thinkers do) does not. Scientists, for their part, can help to make plain what is wheat and what is chaff in religion. What beliefs appear to survive critical scrutiny, and which do not?
It is my considered view that most of Buddhism is scientific in the formal sense that their claimed chains of cause and effect can in fact be observed and–to the extent it is possible with any subjective human state–measured. This will be the path of actual human progress, and will depend entirely on not letting Fascists like Barack Obama and whoever backs him dominate the world.