Karma my ass! Quail, Davemarc, Kurt, and Doug

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

In einer eMail vom 02.12.01 23:06:51 (MEZ) Mitteleuropäische Zeit schreibt 
barbara100 at jps.net:

> He
>  said "the karmic debt of the Jews," but did you make a line of distinction
>  where maybe he didn't? Could he have meant that because the Jews are a part
>  of this world, this system, and their forebearers ran a show of force and
>  destruction (like virtually every other people on the planet) they should
>  expect (as we should all expect) ugly repercussions somewhere down the 
line?
>  I doubt the monk would cite some specific blame to the Jewish people.  
That,
>  I'd guess, is what a Western mind would try to cite.  (Is this what Pynchon
>  is on to in his Reader's obsession with Cause and Effect, I wonder...) The
>  holocaust is a karmic debt. How could it be anything else? All bad things
>  that happen are a karmic debt. 
Oh Barbara, such interpretations can only be read in two ways: as platitudes 
or as justification.
I liked a lot of what you said in the last two, three months, but can't you 
see that arguing in such a way could also be a job of holocaust-deniers? In a 
way like "Sorry, not personally meant, jews, but we have to kill you because 
of your carmic debt"? And if you interpreted karma as "everything is 
connected with everything" it becomes a (paranoid) platitude. And can't it 
also be interpreted as justification of the Indian caste system? Didn't your 
hero Gandhi ignore this by touching the untouchables? And didn't 
Schopenhauer, the great misogynist and popularizer of these ideas in the 
western world, want to break out of it?
I know a little zen-buddhism (my brother is a professor for Japanese Studies 
at the university of Munich) - but there's no critical thinking in it. It's 
just the way it is, and the rest is - karoshi. Japanese teenagers have the 
highest suicide rate in the world, and they are more and more revolting 
against this kind of thinking and attitude towards life. 
Barbara you don't do yourself a pleasure in speaking in such a way. You could 
only be misunderstood, or get the applause from the wrong side. 

Kurt-Werner Pörtner