Re: Karma vs. sin
Posted by kit on 2025-May-14 08:57:04, WednesdayIn reply to Karma vs. sin posted by Sick Rose on 2025-May-13 20:52:20, Tuesday
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One major difference, I think, is that the idea of sin is fairly egalitarian. Original sin means that everyone is tarred with the same brush: even the saints. Despite common belief to the contrary, Augustinian Christianity is the great enemy of self-righteousness and of heaping moral blame on others. "Everyone is responsible for everyone else," says Fr Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, meaning that we all share in the human condition of sin and that nobody's sins are wholly their own. Sin is a universal disaster, in both its general and its particular sense. At the same time, Christianity doesn't underestimate the degree of violence that sin can do to individual souls. This is the whole message of Dante's Inferno: that the irremediably sinful choose their own path until they are reduced to the state of being unable to choose anything else. This is perhaps the point at which the idea of sin most resembles karma - Dante's contrapasso looks a bit like the familiar idea that we reap what we sow. But for Christians there is no impersonal cosmic law at work here. Salvation is not a reward for good behaviour, but rather the fulfilment of the purpose of all human life; damnation is not a punishment so much as it is the working out of a fixed choice to reject salvation. There is no necessity to either option, though both sin and virtue form habits that shape the soul and may be difficult to break. Sin enslaves, but human choice is nevertheless ultimately free. |
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