thought experiment--need help

Well a person who does bad things will never experience good things such as love, giving to others and peace.

Well in what context are you asking them?

Are you implying that there is a force which resides over all actions and will systematically respond to those actions in a just way?

Or

Are you implying that there is NO force in which all actions are to be judged?

There is one last alternative to this. That it is only our eyes where the judgment reaches, so to get away with "evil" actions will occur until the person is discovered.

But I wouldn't say that a person doing evil, receives evil in return, but instead there is an attempt to prevent further evil and to prescribe some sort of punishment for the evil done.

I think there are times, and situations where people have committed great evils and the world has never been able to bring them to light. I would really like there to be some alternative force which will ultimately get these people in the end, but however I believe no such force actually exists.

I don't think murderers should be killed for their crimes. I don't think thieves should have their hands or feet cut off. I don't think rapists should be chemically castrated. I don't think child molesters should have to register themselves.

All of this can be used equally the same for people whom do good things. They don't always receive good in return. The world is not clear cut nor justified because humans are able to be inconsistent so is nature.



I'm sorry Caroline but I don't see how this could be true. Two evil people could find love between their own evilness. As far as peace goes, well show me a person with very little conscious and I'll show you an evil person who can sleep like a baby.

This forum isn't here to answer your homework questions for you.

The idea of thought experiments is to come up with your own thoughts regarding the situation. What does your intuition tell you?

Think for yourself. There's no right/wrong answer here.

Is this true?

I think you would have to define if an act in itself is "good" or "bad".

An old arab poet wrote something along the lines of,

" a snakes poison is life to itself, death to others".

So when a snake bites a person and kills it, the snake will survive and the person dies. What is good or bad about that?

Well in order for the snake to bite someone it must have felt threatened so it was either attacked or stumbled upon by accident, it is only nature in answer your question.

Why would you suppose that is true?

Because if you're bad people won't give you love, what Krumple says about well they can love each other, yes but what if they have a child, that child will grow up in a world that he/she does not fit into because the parents are evil and the child will never find love from another. People still have to live in the real worl and it wil be very lonely with just each other's love and I think they would be sad people leading sad lives.

Ok, I think I answered my own question while lying in bed thinking last night. I was in a hurry when I posted. It was one of those deals....I felt I was on the verge of a small epiphany, when I got interrupted, and I lost concentration.

I was questioning karma. Does it really exist? Anyway, I've concluded that it does not. Everyone experiences good, and bad regardless of their nature. Good and bad cycles, just like the weather or tides.

It was not a homework assignment, but thanks for your concern.

I had a friend once, let's call her Amy, short and nice name. Well, Amy and I and some other friends started fighting, I honestly don't remember why. After a while things settled and we apologized to eachother. But then Amy hacked in to my friend's, let's call her Sue, email and sent mean emails to Sue's friends. Karma got the better of Amy. She abandoned her friends, and just wanted to be with the ones who were popular at the moment. In the end of that years she almost didn't have any friends left.
I don't think that she was a bad or evil person. I only feel sorry for her. But she did some mean stuff, and had to pay for it. I don't know if that's fair or not.

I disagree Chad, I believe karma does exist, bad people who do bad things inevitably end up having bad things happen to them or experience life without the joys that good people experience albeit they don't know it.

In his play, The Importance of Being Ernest, by Oscar Wilde, one of the characters is talking about a novel she wrote, and she says, "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.".

I don't understand what you're trying to say?

"good"/"bad" is an interpretation. You perceive "bad" things happening to "bad" people because it is consistent with your own intuitions about what is "good" and what is "bad."

Life is not as simple as this, I'm sorry to say. You perceive reality dualistically and apply this same linear progression to your conception of "karma." It is in fact a simplistic mental modification of the chaotic, nonlinear dynamics of life.

It's easy enough to say things such as, "what goes around comes around." But have you applied your own thoughts to these issues, or accepted what has been told to you? What does it really mean to say something exists?

I have learned myself Chad and RG, from my own experiences about karma, if someone treats me badly then I'm not going to want to know them, whose loss is that, certainly not mine. I don't accept what people tell me without investigating it myself or how could you accept it?

That it is only in fiction that the good are happy, and the bad are miserable. But not in real life.

I don't know, I know of people who haven't a thing in the world, people who live in tribes in Africa, for instance, some of them are happy.

And that's not fair. :disappointed: But the bad has to live with themself...

But happiness and goodness; and unhappiness and badness; don't necessarily go together in real life.

It depends on what you call happy, to me being happy includes exploring myself and learning and growing, you can never truly do that if you're doing bad things.