Reincarnation and the Law of Karma: A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and EffectAtkinson, William Walker
Religion
Reincarnation and the Law of Karma: A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect
Atkinson, William Walker
Karma; Reincarnation
Before we pass from the consideration of the question of Justice, as
exemplified by Reincarnation, we would call your attention to the
difference in the views of life and its rewards and punishments held by
the orthodox theologians and the Reincarnationists, respectively. On the
one hand, the orthodox theologians hold that for the deeds, good or
evil, performed by a man during his short lifetime of a few years, and
then performed under conditions arbitrarily imposed upon him at birth by
his Creator, man is rewarded or punished by an eternity of happiness or
misery--heaven or hell. Perhaps the man has lived but one or two years
of reasonable understanding--or full three-score and ten--and has
violated certain moral, ethical or even religious laws, perhaps only to
the extent of refusing to believe something that his reason absolutely
refused to accept--for this he is doomed to an everlasting sojourn in a
place of pain, misery or punishment, or a state equivalent thereto. Or,
on the other hand, he has done the things that he ought to have done,
and left undone the things that he ought not to have done--even though
this doing and not-doing was made very easy for him by reason of his
environment and surroundings--and to crown his beautiful life he had
accepted the orthodox creeds and beliefs of his fathers, as a matter of
course--then this man is rewarded by an eternity of bliss, happiness and
joy--without end. Try to think of what ETERNITY means--think of the æons
upon æons of time, on and on, and on, forever--and the poor sinner is
suffering exquisite torture all that time, and in all time to come,
without limit, respite, without mercy! And all the same time, the "good"
man is enjoying his blissful state, without limit, or end, or satiety!
And the time of probation, during which the two worked out their future
fate, was as a grain of sand as compared with the countless universes in
space in all eternity--a relation which reduces the span of man's
lifetime to almost absolutely NOTHING, mathematically considered. Think
of this--is this Justice?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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