God

K is for Karma…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


Karma – (in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.

There are many people who think, and many more who are wondering, whether the Covid 19 crisis is Karma for the human race, whether the fate of our present state and future existence has been determined by our heretofore actions in regard to the way we live in and treat this world. The definition at the top of the page (courtesy of Wikipedia), uses the word deciding in relation to future existences, and it is, of course, referring to the lives, deaths and reincarnations of individuals. You may have noticed that in connection with the collective fate of the human race, I have used the words “determined by”. The religious use of Karma implies that some divinity weighs the action ( for which karma is the Sanskrit word) of a person’s life and as we say in the west – “As you sow, so shall you reap!”

Does Karma always work?

It is clear in life, that neither the good nor the bad always get their just desserts, and whether anyone becomes demoted to a lower animal in the next life, or the opposite, nobody in this life can actually say. Most religions use the threat of some kind, karmic judgment or heaven v. hell, to try to cajole their congregations into behaving better and without intending to be too cynical, the odd natural disaster, especially ones that have a leveling effect on society, does not go amiss in helping religion in its quest. Ironic then that in this present crisis, those western religions at least – I can’t speak for others – who have been languishing with ever diminishing congregations, have had to lock their doors due to social isolating and are unable to offer comfort in the hour of need – at least not in person. They are asking themselves whether their role is going to be even more diminished once this crisis is over, and with many of the elderly members who have remained staunch attendees having “gone to meet their maker” according to their beliefs, churches are asking themselves how they can reinvent themselves now, in new and perhaps digital ways.

Mind you, there have been some religious people who have brandished their belief in God/Yahweh/Allah as a shield which they are sure will protect them – bible belt evangelists going about their business and their worship as usual, Moslems queuing up to lick shrines and as to Yaakov Litzman, Health Minister for Israel, well he said “all LGBT+ people are sinners” (in other words, the virus is a judgment on them) but has since tested positive for Covid-19, his wife has also tested positive for the disease and, being a cabinet minister, he has caused Benjamin Netenyahu and several top government officials to go into quarantine. All those other virus defying groups will probably also learn the error in their thinking.

Free Will and Karma

Lest you think I am wantonly attacking religion, let me tell you an old joke. A flood was building and as the waters rose around the church, a parishioner ran in to the priest and begged him to come away to higher ground. “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!” The waters surrounded the church and a boat was sent to collect the priest but he said: “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!” As the waters rose the priest climbed up to the roof and a helicopter came to rescue the priest but still he said: “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!”. During the night, the waters washed the priest off the roof and he drowned. Standing before St. Peter at the gates of heaven, the priest asked: “Why did God not save me?” At which, God, who hears everything, rushed up fuming. “What do you mean not save you, you idiot?” God shouted, “I sent a man, a boat and a helicopter to save you!”

The moral of this story is that even for those who believe in God, he has given free will so that you may act well or badly (otherwise there would be no point in judgment) and that means you have to act well and wisely and not expect God to save you from folly of your own making.


The Rationalist’s position…

I don’t believe in God, but I very much believe in free will and folly of our own making, in people who act well and those who act badly and I believe (see C is for Covid 19) that microscopic viruses which are arguably not even alive, have no intelligence and certainly no moral judgment against any of their victims. The very fact and mystery of their pointless existence could be enough to cause a man of faith to question his beliefs…

So can Rationalists, Materialists, Atheists, can they have any truck with the concept of Karma? Very much so – “As you sow, so shall you reap!” is simply cause and effect you can’t get much more “scientific” than that! If you mess up your planet by unrestrained growth, wanton use and waste of resources, unrestrained pollution, you will find yourself in the shit. If you sell live, wild animals that have been infected by disease-carrying bats in a world that is crisscrossed with the airways of the global village, you will get crossover virus events that sooner or later will become pandemics. No moral judgment involved, no Gaia is punishing us with a restorative crisis – just scientifically explainable inevitability!

That is, however, Karma, the consequences of actions chosen – “As you sow, so shall you reap!” So as I have said before in these pages, as we grope towards exit strategies form this crisis – there are past actions to be reassessed, choices to be made,, new ways to be formulated…

C is for Covid 19

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. Since I didn’t discover the challenge till April 1st. – the first day of the challenge, I missed the pre-challenge post where you let readers know what theme your A to Z will be outlining. As this is day three, I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


What is the point of a virus?

Our lives have been turned upside down by a virus, an object so tiny it is invisible to the naked eye. I say object, because although some commentators have referred to Covid 19, a Coronavirus, as “living” on different surfaces for various lengths of time, a virus is not really alive in the usual sense – it is a parasite that cannot exist long outside its host cell nor reproduce on its own. Scientists still debate whether the many viruses should be included in the “tree of life” for they do contain DNA and/ or RNA which are the building plans for all life and the chances are that they have accompanied us closely on our evolutionary journey. But if they are not really alive and their only capability is replication – in the process, damaging or even killing their hosts – what is the point of them?


Darwin, who gave us the Theory of Evolution, was originally training to be a clergyman but far from debunking the ideas that geology was spreading about the Earth being millions of years older than the Bible indicated, Darwin disappointed the devout Robert FitzRoy, Captain of HMS Beagle by postulating the theory which would explain the progression of life to be found in the rocks. After the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin settled down to marriage, family and working on his theory, holding back from publishing his work until the last minute, when others threatened to get there first, out of a touching desire not to upset his friend FitzRoy’s religious sensibilities. But during this period, Darwin’s beloved daughter – Annie, died of Scarlet Fever (a bacterial rather than viral) and Darwin’s own belief in God took a terrible knock. The final nail in the coffin for Darwin’s beliefs was his learning of species of parasitical wasps that lay their eggs inside a living caterpillar so that when the eggs hatch, the wasp young feed and grow – eating their host from within. For Darwin, the idea that God could create such cruelty not to mention take the innocent life of his daughter, was too much to bear.


So Darwin would have been fascinated but appalled had he been around to see how the development of our understanding of the parallel evolution of viruses and animals, reveals something so pointless and so potentially devastating for the animal kingdom. We sit transfixed by daily news broadcasts announcing death tolls reaching and exceeding thousands in different countries but this is nothing compared to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. We think that 50 million people died worldwide but it could have been up to 100 million – our means of recording the deaths in that pre-global village world was simply not adequate enough to know. Given the ease of the spreading of the virus by modern transport and mass travel, we might think that we are doing very well to have contained the pandemic as well as we have, government failure to act notwithstanding…

So what is the point of virus? Well there simply is no point, they just are because they are. They hone our immune systems but if they didn’t exist we wouldn’t need such defenses. They are not living organisms such as bacteria (though we could do without some of those little critters too). If you believe in God, you would have to ask yourself why he would create such a thing. If you don’t believe in God then and you accept evolution as the roller-coaster ride that has brought species and their attendant parasites, including viruses, to the place we are today, then, ironically, something which is arguably “life”, is a metaphor for life itself. Life appears to have been, likely, accidental though probably inevitable given the inconceivable multitude of planets that exist in the universe. Life, apparently, exists for no purpose other than to exist and reproduce and as the mathematician  Augustus De Morgan, said in his short rhyme “Siphonaptera”, from his book A Budget of Paradoxes (1872), (Siphonaptera being the biological order to which fleas belong)

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
(Wikipedia)

If that analysis seems a little negative, stay with me, it’s not the whole story…

Now to the technical stuff:-
If you want to understand what a virus is, there is a good article here. This excellent article explains the body’s defence mechanisms – in particular B-cells and T-cells. A very technical article explains the body’s immune system over-reaction called the Cytokine Storm which is mostly the cause of death with Covid 19.