Does Bad Karma Have an Expiration Date?

7 years, same as for 30 day delinquent credit card payments I'd imagine

Sure--today, if you like. Repent and believe in Jesus Christ.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Rick C wrote in news:c28de5d4-7121- snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Instant Karma never expires, but the recipient of it definitely does. Many times sooner than one likes.

Did anyone tell Jim Thompson?

Bad cars do. But some escape their karma, eg the Hoffmann.

Sounds like an expensive solution. Particularly when you have to also believe in the people who claim to currently represent Jesus Christ (who may not have much to do with the person who gets depicted as getting the religion going).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Grin, Hey Phil, (speaking of religion) I've been sorta interested in this idea that religion might be in some ways an evolutionary adaption in humans, to the problem of how to get along and live together. (I don't have a good link or paper to recommend.) I'm wondering if you've heard of this idea, and what you think of it? and if I trust you find the question offensive.

(Hmm, maybe the current crop of agnostics and atheists will be consigned to the dust bin of human evolution. :^) George, confirmed agnostic, Herold

I agree. Religion is one of the things that a tribe or culture can rally around, and creats a common morality that makes civilization work better. The Ten Commandments, and Jesus's approach to life, make for a pretty good legal and moral structure.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

mandag den 22. juli 2019 kl. 18.49.01 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

And it is easier to get the unwashed masses to obey the rules of you convince them that God made the rules and God will see if they break them even if they think no one else does, rather than try to explain why and how sticking to the rules are best for everyone

Yeah you can see the influence in some civilizations. But I think if it's an evolutionary thing... like we have some genes/ adaptions that make us (.. I don't know the right words here... ) 'more likely' to adopt a 'religious' outlook.. then that may have made those humans more successful, they got along and trusted each other more. (In times beofre we had civilizations.)

Anyway I find it an interesting idea.

George H.

Hmm I can think of a lot of ways it could help that doesn't involve large groups of people... but just your own little tribe of hunter-gatherers.

George H.

You are talking about Animal Farm, right? That was a pretty good book even if not *the* "Good Book".

--

  Rick C. 

  + Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  + Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

On 7/22/2019 1:01 PM, George Herold wrote: ...

Well, pre-civil-izations didn't have religions with a personal god. I.e., a god that cared what they did. Their "religions" deified things in nature (the god of wind, rain, etc). See "The Evolution of God". Humans may have evolved since then to prefer a personal god, but civilization is not that old and evolution is slow.

The evolution of gods is less to do with need (though we do need ethical frameworks) but more to do with the external expression of abstract thought, i.e. writing. Pre-literate societies tend to be animistic, but as writing allows the development of abstract categories, we create them. So for example we see horses, and we see animals with horns, and we can cross over the two ideas to suppose the existence of unicorns.

In the exact same way we cross over ideas of creation, of person-hood, of justice and mercy, and you come up with a supposition of the Alpha and Omega. It's intrinsic in the increase of sentience, and would happen in a similar way on any alien planetary species (I find this a bit depressing!).

The existence of writing allows these suppositions to take on a life of their own and to be promulgated beyond the individual. The absence of any positive confirmation doesn't stop folk wishing for certainty from wasting their lives believing such nonsense, and of course it creates a culture that cushions them from the absence of evidence.

Clifford Heath.

.

It is one of the ways that a tribe or culture could propagate a common mora lity.

It doesn't work all that well, since there seems to be a built-in tendency to demonise other tribes and cultures.

You can leave out the irrational elements, and justify much the same common morality on rational grounds, which lets you get rid of some of the sillie r religious embargos, and leaves you with a common core of rules that work for all sane people.

Trump's prejudices against Mexican and Muslims probably aren't inspired by any religious conviction, but rather the fact that they play well with the US religious right, which provides a current illustration of the down side of religion as a bonding mechanism. History offers a lot of others.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Yeah, (I don't know much about the idea... it's hard to follow the language in the few papers I tried to read.) If you start with the idea that a cooperating group is going to outperform a group that doesn't cooperate as much. And then ask what else might go along with selecting for that....

I have this unrelated mechanism, what if evolution is driven by making a few critical fast decisions per lifetime?

George H.

OK, I guess this idea*.. is that God is more about just doing good. On the individual level, if I first do good when I meet you, (cooperate first in the simplistic tit for tat exchange.) That's best... can you select for that?

George H.

*I'm at least 1/2 making this up, but aren't we a people that help others first? Maybe God is so baked in now that we take doing good for granted.

So you define "good" as doing for others? Isn't it important to do good for yourself?

Do you really think "doing good" is a result of "God" or religion? That's a huge assumption.

--

  Rick C. 

  -- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  -- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

We had no reason not to kill each other on first sight until we started to benefit from the enlargement of our society beyond the family, tribe, village, etc. Some people still subvert ethical norms, so we extended the idea of just "doing good" to include omniscience and eternal consequences. It's all pure invention and manipulative bullying.

We've learned to do that, but it's not innate.

It's perhaps still baked-in where you live in the USA, but in more intellectually advanced countries it's rapidly being baked out. Fewer that 50% of the UK now professes any religion, for example, and the flow in Australia is even more advanced than that, I believe. It works because we now understand that social ethics does not require religion, and in fact cannot continue to advance beyond a certain point in the presence of religion, which creates too many opportunities for abuse (as has been amply demonstrated!)

Clifford Heath.