@chriscudd,
Karma determines the course of a New Life:
as a Christian hinud, Islamic mythologist. I hope I unlike ur last contendor can answer this question.
In Hinduism, Reincarnation is your child. Your behaviours and actions will alter the environment which rains your child's mind. Your actions are absorbed by them and they become effected in their course of action.
Therefor your Karma, in this way directly effects your offspring.
In the same way, your actions alter the course of time.
It also in this way effects your friends and family and community.
They all react to you. Karma.
Karma gets you the MOST, if the most is not through your child, by effecting your personal morality and assortment or memories which make you you. When you are an accumulation of sin, you sin more, and see less wisdom. You have become corrupt and inevitably the slippery slope which never guides back Up will bring about your destruction do to your surrounding yourself with sin/crime/assholes/poverty/whores/corrupt people/disease/loneliness/etc..
This is Karma.
The Afterlife + Karma.
after you have spent a life glorifying perverts and jerks, corrupt politicians or stupidity... in heaven/hevana, etc.. You are forever judged by this current course of action, as that is you. And there will be those who never accept you. and no one will ever be able to glorify you or credit you for those actions.
After centuries, the man of your dreams may not be attainable for you were a whore. and from guilt or judgement you will not attain such rewards.
God does not resurrect you in the form of animals to die again on earth.
If it was so, then there would be no righteous people and only the sinners would return. And this would be as much like the atheist theory of a Billion years of rape, murder tyranny, cannibalism and uneducated idiots as you can get through false interpretation of religion.
Karma is the fact that by being stupid, you only get stupider, and eventually you trap yourself in a corner with jerks.