The concepts of karma are very much a part of Christianity, but it's not called the same thing. In Christianity, sinfulness roughly equates to bad karma and good works (or charity) equate to good karma. Everything you think or do, good or bad, has impacts far beyond that specific thought or action, just as with karma. Salvation, though, has nothing to do with your works. That requires faith in Jesus' sacrifice as payment for humanity's sinfulness.
Overall, my experience tells me that many of the concepts associated with eastern religions, such as Hindu and Buddhism, have their equivalents in western religions, like Christianity. The perspective and the lingo tends to be different, however, but translating between the two is usually not difficult given a reasonable working knowledge of both.
To change the subject a bit, here are a couple paragraphs out of an e-mail correspondence an atheist friend and I were having about some purported contradictions in the bible. He was trying to make the the point that, since the bible acknowledges the existence of other gods (false gods), those gods must be real despite the contradictory claim that Jehovah (Yahweh) is the one true God. I used a bit of subjective logic do deal with the issue. This has been slightly edited to remove a local reference that everyone here might not understand. The edit does not change the meaning, however.
Quote:
Just because something is false does not prohibit its existence. For instance, you may consider my belief in the omnipotence of the one-eyed spaghetti monster to be completely false, but that belief still exists and, in my warped little belief system, the omnipotent one-eyed spaghetti monster is very real just as Zeus, Apollo and Mars were very real to those who believed in them. Today, most people consider those gods to be quaint legends that happen to make a good story. The bible claims, however, that Yahweh is the only true God. The others, while perhaps real to us, are not real to God but, since they are real to us, to deny them would be tantamount to something like failing to deal with an inner-city crime problem because, as a suburban resident, that largely does not exist in my world.
The concept of free will is very tightly intertwined with this whole argument. Christians believe that God created us to have our own free will. Being omniscient, God knows our future but does not control it. We can believe in whatever we want, think whatever we want and do whatever we want. An aggregation of the beliefs that arise from that free will is one of many things that distinguish one person from another and one society from another. This free will is what enabled the ancient Egyptians, for example, to believe in the divinity of the Pharaoh, at the same time Israel strictly believed in Yahweh. That free will also enables the existence of “false” gods and belief systems, despite what the bible instructs. Again, to those who believe in them, those gods and their correspondent belief systems are very real and cannot be denied to exist, even by God himself. After all, he’s the one who endowed us with the ability to create them and make them real, or even to deny his very existence.
|