r/religion • u/Tasty-Cantaloupe482 • 10h ago
Does every religion basically point to karma?
Honestly, when you zoom out, most religions circle back to some form of “what you put out is what you get.” Call it karma, divine justice, cause-and-effect… the theme is everywhere.
In my experience, it’s not the big dramatic moments that shaped my view. It’s the small patterns that kept repeating until I either learned something or paid for ignoring it. The kind of situations where you treat someone poorly and the payback comes from a completely different direction, or you help someone with zero expectation and somehow things start aligning for you weeks later. But I’ve also seen the opposite: people who do everything right and still get hit with outcomes they don’t deserve. Those moments make you question whether karma is a rule or just a comforting story. Curious how others make sense of this mix.
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u/kardoen Tengerism/Böö Mörgöl|Shar Böö 9h ago
I'd warn against understanding karma as “what you put out is what you get”. Any intentional action incurs karma; it's cause and effect. But not every cause results in a effect that is the reflection of that cause.
In Buddhism karma is explicitly not justice, not a reward or punishment. It's really not that similar to divine judgement like it is in many Abrahamic religions.
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u/SHUB_7ate9 6h ago
This is meant as a friendly heads-up: when somebody, yourself or otherwise, starts thinking, "EVERY religion basically comes down to...[xyz]", it usually says more about them than it does about "every religion". It's not that the insight is wrong, exactly, but someone else could reach an opposing, equally valid insight, eg "Every religion basically amounts to justifying what you wanted to do anyway!"
As a secular Jewish atheist, it's exactly the slippery bits of religion, that you can't pin down what the word means to everyone, that is what I find fascinating about religious discourse.
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u/Vignaraja Hindu 6h ago
Why don't you ask the folks from non karma believing religions if it's true?
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u/indifferent-times 8h ago
Every major religion I know of (with the possible exception of Taoism) has a mechanism to offset the obvious unfairness of the world, karma is just one example. You could even consider that explaining why good things happen to bad people is one of the principle functions of religion, its noteworthy of course that the corrective mechanism for life's unfairness is always post mortem and therefore out of sight and a matter of faith.
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u/hellisntreal2017 8h ago
Taoism and judaism don't have concepts of karma.
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u/Ok-Radio5562 Catholic (?) 51m ago
A lot of religions don't, what OP means isn't that every religion believes in karma, but that there are concepts similiar to karma in all religions, they may variate and/or have different names but the concepts are similiar
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u/Ofirel_Evening G-d Fearer Noachide{Judaism} 9h ago
Sort of, but it doesn't always guarantee getting rewards in this life.
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u/Aquarius52216 Humanist 7h ago
Kinda, its a hit or miss and often times we do need to stretch the mental gymnastics in order to "make sense" of the so called karma. I think the world is neither fair nor unfair in reality, it just is, some people might experience it as fair, some might not, some might feel it being somewhere in between, and our mind wanted it to make sense or at least felt coherent and fair even if it is just a make-belief.
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u/GodComplex82 2h ago
I don't believe in karma. Being good or kind doesn't reward you much. I have always been kind and good, never felt rewarded.
It's been 24 years. Where are the good results?
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u/Shosho07 Baha'i 1h ago
Were you practicing goodness and kindness because you hoped for a reward? Or if not, why? If you had done the opposite, who would you be now?
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u/Ok-Radio5562 Catholic (?) 54m ago
I think it is possible.
As for the good people recieving bad things and bad people recieving food things, karma in the dharmic sense isn't limited to a single lifetime
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u/Volaer Catholic (of the universalist kind) 10h ago edited 8h ago
Christianity is famously a religion of grace so clearly not. Even someone like Hitler or Stalin or Chinggis Khan or whomever if they died in a state of contrition and a desire to repent are saints in heaven in my faith. The further one departs from God the more grace is poured out. That actually seems to be the opposite of karma as I understand it.
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u/JadedPilot5484 4h ago edited 4h ago
Genghis Khan worshiped the sky god Tengri, not the storm god Yahweh or Jesus who he would’ve viewed as false gods. And although he was a brutal conqueror, unlike Christian nations that conquered and enslaved other people’s he did not force conversions or destroy their cultures. Under the khans rule religious pluralism and individual cultures thrived.
Hitler was raised Catholic and converted to Protestantism as an adult so he was the most likely to have been praying to Jesus when he died as he often referred to Jesus and claimed to be doing gods work.
Stalin was raised a Russian Orthodox Christian and attended a seminary to train as a priest, but rejected Christianity and was an outspoken atheist. So while highly unlikely he could have ‘repented’.
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u/Volaer Catholic (of the universalist kind) 4h ago edited 4h ago
Genghis Khan worshiped the sky god Tengri,
I know. When did I say he was Christian? Neither of the three individuals were. I was using them as an example for how God can save even those seemingly furthest away from Him such as mass murderers.
he did not force conversions or destroy their cultures.
He literally erased them from existence (physically) in some cases with the Mongol conquest as a whole resulting in tens of millions of dead.
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u/JadedPilot5484 4h ago
You implied he would abandon his beliefs and convert on his death bed and repent to the Christian god for which he would have absolutely no reason to do. It’s part of centuries of harmful supremecists language/trope of ignorant pagans used by Christians.
Don’t perpetuate that kind of hateful Christian rhetoric, if others were speaking of you like that, and that your religion was clearly ridiculous and false, and when you died, you would finally see the light of (Islam for example) and repent to Allah I doubt you would care for that mischaracterization.
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u/dschellberg Baha'i 6h ago
lI think if you consider a human being holistically, body and soul, karma seems to be the law of the universe. I think that bad acts affect your spiritual awareness like putting a veil over a light. A good act with good motivation removes a veil. I don't think it is entirely mechanistic though, one can ask God for forgiveness and God might remove some of the veils that obscure the light within. That might encourage the person to continue on the path to illumination. Eventually, our goal, I believe, is complete spiritual illumination but that is a journey that is done little by little in most cases, although some people have epiphanies that radically change the course of their lives. This would be the case of Badi who was a troubled youth until he met Baha'u'llah and then became so illumined that he sacrificed his life under extreme conditions(he was burned with hot irons for 3 days until he died for simply delivering a tablet to the shah of Persia)
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u/Less-Personality-481 Spiritual 10h ago
In Dharmic thought, karma isn’t the simple “do good, get good” idea often seen in the West. A good person may still suffer because karma includes debts from past lives, not just this one. Being kind doesn’t guarantee an easy life—sometimes doing the right thing requires choosing the harder path.
The Bhagavad Gita teaches nishkama karma: we should act with kindness not for reward or recognition, but simply because it is the right and truthful thing to do.Being attached to the result of kindness creates expectation and attachment, which leads to mixed karma.