ONE HEARTBEATAWAY
PART 22
Mark Cahill's Book
On one of my many flights, a man sitting next to me was taking notes on an article titled "Spirituality in the Neighborhood." I noticed pictures of Buddha statues throughout the article and was curious what it was about.
He told me that he was a Unitarian Universalist minister, and that in his congregation were Jews, Christians, Buddhists, atheists, etc. He had a little bit of everything in his church.
When I asked him, "When you die, what do you think is on the other side?" He replied "I really don't know." He said he was hoping in reincarnation, but that people could believe they wanted to? His church was into social justice by doing good things for others, so they thought that whatever happens on the other side they would be okay.
I challenged him with this question, "Is it possible that a person could believe something is going to be on the other side after death, but when he dies he finds that what he thought was going to be there was not actually there?"
He answered : "Of course."
"You are right, " I said. "If someone believes there is nothing when he dies and there is something , then he is 100% wrong. But you can't have a wrong answer unless there is a what?"
He looked at me and gulped. He replied;
" A right answer."
"Exactly . There has to be a right answer for eternity, and you just said so. That means there is eternal truth. That being the case, then some people in your congregation have wrong answers for eternity. What are you going to do about it? "
His logic forced him to admit that there were right and wrong answers, yet he didn't believe in right or wrong. But either there is something when we die or there is nothing. We can't all be right when it comes to our opinions on eternity.
And if there can be
eternity , then there
has to be a right one.
Do you know what
that right answer is?
Since reincarnation is one of the popular beliefs (in Hinduism, Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation and various occult and New Age circles, among others), I'd like to take a minute to think through how it might work.
The mechanism of reincarnation is based on the supposed "law of karma,"
in which good deeds and bad deeds are tallied and used as the basis for determining a person's fate in the next life.
One's good karma may earn them a better status or some good fortune in the next life, while one's bad karma will bring suffering into that life that matches the wrong done in the past.
Reincarnation typically ends only when one has advanced enough to have neither good karma nor bad karma, but to be totally neutral. Then one will be absorbed into an impersonal " universal consciousness, " or " cosmic consciousness," in which the individual self ceases to exist . That is, the end result is the complete annihilation of the finite self. The individual becomes "one with the universe."
I've always wondered: Who or what is able to keep track of each deed of each person who has ever lived in order to make the karmic circle work? Such an entity would have to be :
* everywhere (omnipresent) - to be able
to see all people at all times and know
their thoughts and motivations.
* all-knowing (omnicient) - in order to
keep a running tally of all those
billions of individuals and their
actions, and to determine whether
someone deserves a cosmic
thumbs-up or thumbs-down for
the next life.
* all powerful (omnipotent) - able to
enforce its decisions.
* good - having a pure sense of
morality that knows exactly what is
"good " and what is "bad" in every
particular situation. It also must be
righteous enough to make a just
judgment in assigning how that
person will be spending that future
life.
Now we have defined what "the universe" would have to be like in order to implement incarnation. But it seems that rather than some impersonal
"cosmic force ," these requirements describe a separate, personal, all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, moral, just, intelligent, righteous Being.
In addition, if individuals will have their actions rightly judged as right or wrong, they would have to know in advance what the definitions of right and wrong are.
They would also have to know in advance where they are on the karmic scale. After all, wouldn't a fair God let people know where they stand? It would be the height of cruelty for an individual to have worked hard for a lifetime to accumulate 7,258,206,418 good deeds - and then find out (in the next lifetime, as a cockroach) that he was just one good deed short of the amount needed for advancement!
That would be a shame. And wouldn't be a fair God at all. Surely a fair, righteous, just God would tell us very clearly Who He is, how we can know Him, and what we can expect in eternity. He would also give us clear guidelines as to what is right and wrong, and let us know how we are doing.
Unlike other religious writings , the Bible actually does that.
next post 22nd August
No comments:
Post a Comment