By now, the reader has probably noticed a link to Right Wing of the Gods, where I'm one of the contributers. A warm winter has left me with an unusually busy January, chasing around nephews who are at an age at which they need to have elder relatives chasing them, and preserving food which the winter chill hasn't been able to keep frozen, so only now am I catching up to some of my correspondence.
In How does religion affect politics, which I am now responding to, Pawnman writes:
Paganism, at least in many forms, has a concept of karma. Do good, and good comes to you. Do bad, and bad things will happen to you. This meshes perfectly with the conservative view that hard work brings reward, and you should work for your own happiness rather than trying to appropriate someone else's.
With the moral component of that quote, I am in full agreement and I suspect that most of the ancient Hellenes would have been as well - what you describe is an honorable man's self-reliance; no society builds a healthy future for itself by praising thievery. Karma, however, I'm not so sure about.
In Hellenism or any offshoot of Hellenism (eg. Christohellenism), the cause and effect relationship is going to become a little less clear because the gods are not uniformly benign, and they don't work together harmoniously. Even generally benevolent deities such as Zeus have their malevolent aspects, which certain rituals seek to turn away, and in the case of some of the deities (eg.Eris), if they had benevolent aspects as they were known in antiquity, those aspects were kept well hidden. One does not take for granted that good actions will be rewarded with good fortune through the action of any sort of Karma or Divine Grace; rather, one builds a relationship with the Divine in an attempt to promote those conditions in which that desirable result may occur.
Good actions, then, are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the blessing of the gods to bring the sort of good fortune that a rational man would desire; that, and the showing of proper respect for the gods through the offering of their traditional honors. (I am NOT going to place twinkies and pepsi on an altar as a sacrifice to Aphrodite, and then sing "sounds of silence"; I can do much better than that, as so I would and should be expected to). Even good fortune, even when it comes to one from Olympus, does not guarantee good results; it merely tips the odds in a direction more favorable to one as one works through one's own challenges. If, for example, it's AD79, and you're a small child in Pompeii, with or without the blessing of the gods, you're still almost certainly going to be barbecued; the level of blessing you'd be asking for to avert that outcome would be incredible - miraculous, in fact.
In the more purely human arena, part of the problem with the good karma = good fortune equation is that it forgets that the others we encounter in the course of our lives are as much free players as are we, and that we are never quite as independent of the need for the help and cooperation of others as we'd like to think we are. Good men who've shown their goodness through righteous acts have still met with the hostility and outright evil that their fellow men are capable of. Indeed, to deny the possibility of this is to deny the very possibility of negative karma or divine displeasure at one's unrighteous conduct, because if nobody can ever be harmed in any way which he does not deserve, then no action can ever work an injustice upon anybody, leaving nobody with any opportunity to be unjust.
On balance, this might not be ideal, but no circumstance could be. For the gods to enter the world so bluntly as to insure that justice would always be done in the here and now, regardless of the choices those around us made, would be to make all of our individual battles meaningless and to leave us with no opportunity to pursue any sort of virtue, because we would never have the opportunity to do for anybody but ourselves. The price of this opportunity is that individuals may find themselves confronted with battles they have no chance of winning, and in some cases (Anne Frank) no chance of even escaping, but at the other extreme, Man becomes a dependent upon G-d, and the blessings of the Divine a sort of spiritual welfare. The gods are too kind to us to be that kind to us.
Similarly, if someone attacks you, they have some bad karma coming. Who's to say you can't deliver it yourself? Many modern pagans seem to feel that no conflict is ever worth the cost. I say that history is full of examples of pagans going to war.
Absolutely; take a look at the number of war gods and goddesses in the various pantheons, and the lengthy history of warfare during ancient times. How many Christians were fighting during the Peloponessian wars?
If you shorten the whole rede to "harm none", then it's easy to see how you can be a strong proponent of peace. But if you take the original rede that Crowley put to paper, you see the nuances:"Do the least amount of harm possible, to the least number of people possible".
"Harm none" is an impossible goal; at the very least, one will harm somebody else through an act of ommission, because needs and desires come into conflict, and some of the players aren't going to try to be nice, fair or even civilized about it no matter how others will treat them. To stop the bad guys, you have to take away their ability to do harm; nobody has found a way of doing that which the bad guys end up feeling happy about, to date, angry pacifists included.
So, what's the worse harm? Letting your own countrymen get steamrolled by a foreign power because you don't want to harm anyone? Or standing up and protecting those who cannot help themselves. I'm inclined to think that the latter leads to fewer people harmed all the way around.
True, and more importantly - you've protected the innocent; ie, those who did not choose to force a choice between their well-being and that of others. Aren't our militant rede pacifists found of saying "An ye do no harm, do as thou wilt"? They have chosen to place themselves in a situation in which they must be harmed lest those who have not chosen to force such a dilemma be harmed themselves. One might say that they have chosen their pain; why deny them their wish, when they have worked so hard to make its fulfillment a reality?
(Comment: I placed an announcement of this response on Right Wing of the Gods, where Pawnman should be able to find it, in case anybody was wondering).
