Karma in Christianity

By Charles Pradeep

Millions of people read the Bible everyday and most are indeed fascinated by this wonderful book of books. The essence of the bible and of the law of karma are ‘what you sow – so shall you reap’ – a statement that can be understood by laymen, people of all religious faith, farmers, fishermen and scientists alike. Are there more commonalities between the texts of the bible and the tenets of Sanatana Dharma?

Unravel some of the mysteries inlaid between the stories of the bible as you read on. What you will find inside is a fascinating paradigm on the evolutionary cycle of man, sieved through the hidden layers in the biblical context and contrasted with science and Sanatana Dharma. The seekers of ‘Truth’ will find some missing pieces to the giant jigsaw puzzle, compressed within the thousand pages of the Holy Bible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CinnamonTeal
• Release date: Aug 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9789381542125

Book preview

KARMA IN CHRISTIANITY

Charles Pradeep

Published by CinnamonTeal Publishing at Smashwords in 2011

First published in India in 2011 by CinnamonTeal Publishing

Copyright © 2011 Charles Pradeep

Cover Design and Typesetting - CinnamonTeal Publishing

ISBN 978–93-81542-12-5

Cover Illustration: ‘Golden Serpent’ Copyright © 2000 by Michael Parkes All rights reserved.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter I - The Bible Story

- The Old Testament

- Author’s Addendum

- The Story of Job

- The New Testament

Chapter II - The Biblical Life - In Perspective

Chapter III - A Travesty on Life

Chapter IV - The Gods, Angels & the Devils

Chapter V - The Prism - Inverted

Chapter VI - Birth, Debt & Sudden Death

Chapter VII - In-Conclusion

About the author

Glossary

Preface & Acknowledgements

As I set out on this work during mid 2010, and during the course of discussion on the working title of this book ‘Karma in Christianity’, a good majority of my mates were rather bemused, confused, critical or neutral. They nevertheless understood the fact that it was a difficult concept to analyze. What in the hell has karma got to do with Christianity? was the most common retort and expectedly so. Karma along with the concept of reincarnation, for many, stands as a concept unique to India and Sanatana Dharma, or Hinduism. Therein lay the challenge for a credible message delivered with conviction, which could probably answer the above question.

Back in 2006, after taking a sabbatical from work with Accenture, I had set out on a different thesis on the ‘Gods’ in the bible. I, however, abandoned the work midway, as it had lost appeal even to my own self. It is my honest belief that any finished work has to be rendered in a living, breathing form which can be sensible and thought provoking to the reader. However, while doing my research, I studied the basic tenets of all major religions of the world and looked for similarities. This took me closer to the study of Sanatana Dharma or Vaidika Dharma or Hinduism as it is more prevalently called. Being the oldest known religious belief in the world, and based on the four Vedas and also on the Upanishads, the puranas and the great Indian epics, namely Mahabharatha and Ramayana, Sanatana Dharma greatly enlightened me on the aspects of the atman, the Brahman, Dharma, Shakti, maya, reincarnation and ‘transmigration of the soul’, fate, and needless to say, karma and many other aspects.

Armed with a reasonable level of understanding and with my thinking hat on, I thus ventured out again to seek for some semblance of similarities which may crop up in the other ancient religious beliefs of Christianity / Judaism / Islam, and then arose, this work. The direct references, narratives and comment for this work are drawn out of the Holy bible – The Authorized King James version (Zondervan Bible Publishers). For historical and geographical accuracy, I have referred to the second edition of ‘The New Bible Dictionary’ (Inter-Varsity Press, UK).

Any work, relating to any works or the words of God, is indeed to be done with the highest respect and reverence for all moral scriptures, which I hold in my mind. This is the work of a curious ‘seeker’ whose individual soul (atman) sought answers for some intriguing questions on faith and wished to share the findings with like-minded souls. ‘Faith’ is a very important ingredient even to believe in ‘science’, and essential to the belief of ‘God’ and religion. Though I have briefly dabbled on the scientific implications of evolution in the ‘Introduction’ and in Chapter III, I would rather leave the work of science in the hands of the scientists. For as much as ‘science’ has grown on to become ‘rocket-science’ in the last millennia, if work does not keep apace in the fields of theosophy and theology, moral malnutrition would abound and we may be struck with a famine for the soul. Let us therefore till some new ground on the old soil, and plant some new seeds on the moral high grounds and supplant old beliefs. Let us pray for the rain of wisdom and understanding, that the seeds of our thoughts may take root and nourish and enlighten us.

As I set out on this mission, I recount and wish to thank all the interesting and influential people whom I have come across (and can recollect), for all their contributions. In primacy, I thank the all pervading Almighty. My parents especially my mother Vimala - I thank for showing me the light of this world, and providing the platform to stage and shelter myself in. In high reverence and in prayers, I thank Mrs. Vasanthi Raghavan and Mr. T L Raghavan and their children Harini and Rajgopal, and also his wife Radha and their two children Prahlad and Sattvika. These are people who have helped and inspired me in keeping the light of my life alive, which my parents gave unto me.

I thank my friends, Akash, Gokul, Jai, Koshy, all the Manja’s of Tumkur, Parameswaran, Prakash, Rajesh, Raj Prasad, Sharad, Srihari, Sudarshan, Late Sudhir, Vinod Nair, Vivek Rawat et al. Among the countless other folks, I would like to make a special mention of Amith Ghali, Deepak Sharma, Girish, Madhu Rao, Mukundan, Prathiba, Ramesh Krishnan, Ravi K, Rema P and her children, Sudhanshu Sharma, Sushreem Jadhav and to the many more who missed mention due to the lack of cranial RAM but are yet close to my heart.

A special word of thanks goes to Ms. Maria Sedoff and Mr. Michael Parkes for offering me the use of the work – ‘Golden Serpent’ for the cover of this book, and for their kind words of encouragement during our interactions.

Again, unto the most high and the ‘One’, I leave my forehead unto his toes for servitude and my humblest and most sincere prayers and pranams.

God bless us all.

Introduction

The laws of life and the laws of nature are universal and applicable to all life forms irrespective of faith, clan, caste, creed or colour and brand, breed or pedigree. All who are wounded physically bleed some form of blood, internally or externally. When a person is hurt physically or morally it causes pain. Pain has no form or humanly calculable value. Pleasure has no limits and usually has a price. Tomorrow is a perennial misnomer and a paradox because it never arrives. We do not know anything about time beyond ‘now’ as tangible and that ‘present’ is a slippery ground that we walk on, like on a treadmill. Now talk about corporate life, and life in the fast lane and you can see a picture emerging in your mind. But then, even in the slowest of lanes, we all have twenty-four hours in a day which passes by whether you like it or not and yet, logically no one can say, I control time on my own terms.

When people of science talk of time and evolutionary history, a million years sounds like a mere speck of time. Distances of light years sound ridiculously simple, as the closest star apart from our sun is only about three or four light years away, with the farthest, going into hundreds of light years. Yet the same science is yet unable to explain how fuel and fire continue to burn in a controlled manner in a star or the sun, without incinerating itself like an atom bomb. Our own modest sun, a star in its own right has been burning bright for millions of years, and is expected to do so for the coming millions of years, with a near constant temperature. Mysteriously, all the constellations and the stars have stayed on in predictable orbits for millions of years. Ever wondered if the ‘Big Bang’ was a controlled explosion? Many a times, it feels that even as scientists search for needles in a haystack, they indeed are sitting on needles, to explain to us about a haystack. But the, we are not discussing science anyway!

Leaving science to answer specific scientific questions, and assuming that on God’s command, the firmament of space and celestial bodies and the earth came to existence, it would yet have been eons ago. Science does come close to calculating those eons vide theories or practical proofs. Of course, science is centric to the ‘Big bang’ theory and on evolution of matter. Sanatana Dharma talks of Srishti (cycle of creation) or manuvantara (interim period between two Manu’s – the progenitors of men), and the creation of the cosmos and other celestial beings, as well as all living entities. Christianity talks of God’s creation of the firmaments of heaven and earth and the stars, thereby giving us a middle path to tread upon.

According to science, the basic form of life and even the evolution of apes to human life evolved a few million years ago. According to Sanatana Dharma, the time of human evolution is again calculable in millions of years (as mentioned by the highly evolved holy men called rishis), through the four various ‘Yugas’ or the four time spans, through an orally communicated, and a closely guarded learning system of the Vedas, which talk of the standards of life to be maintained by all classes of individuals. The timelines discussed in the Vedas do come close to hundreds of thousands of years in each Yuga, or a time period, thereby matching the timelines calculated by science. A recent work titled ‘The Genesis Enigma’ by Andrew Parker, a professor of science, attempts to prove the timelines of the Genesis era in the Bible, and does a commendable work on the timelines of evolution for the flora and fauna, starting even from the Cambrian explosion some five hundred and twenty million years back, but does little to prove the timelines of man’s evolution. I would assume then that it would only be a question of time before somebody actually does.

A biblical man of the early Genesis period easily lived close to a thousand years. Adam supposedly lived for nine hundred and thirty years. Adam’s son Seth, lived to be Nine hundred and twelve, and Methuselah lived to be nine hundred and sixty nine, recorded as one of the highest in longevity. However, the exception in that period was Methuselah’s father Enoch; he saw no death, as at the age of three hundred and sixty five ‘God took him’. A man that is born invariably has to give up his ghost and die, and that is the essential part of life, science and karma, and is indeed the tacit law of nature.

Ok, now what next after death? Is the body of the dead going to sleep in a grave / sepulchre, never to come back till the moon and the sun burn away until they are ash? What of the souls whose bodies are burnt, and they have nothing to wait with, till the end of world? Practically, the only things left of the dead would be the bones or ashes in either case. What good is the hope for man then? One could be stillborn or die at the age of six or sixty! Of what good is ‘good and evil’ then, or why should then one care for mere morals and morality or even mortality?

Christianity discusses the concept of the resurrection of the soul, and in a similar way, Sanatana Dharma discusses the concept of reincarnation of the atman. Soul and atman would definitely have to be translated in the same lines to essentially mean one and the same. That fundamentally means that there indeed is life after death, as recounted by both faiths, and the similarities seemingly end there. The Christian resurrection is supposed to happen only once, at the time of eventual judgment, and only the people who ever lived righteously attain Salvation, and the rest are supposedly cast into a perpetual hell fire, for eternity. However, in Sanatana Dharma the soul transmigrates endlessly, until it reaches or attains the state of Brahman, which indeed would roughly translate as Salvation or vice versa, if the translation does offend no one. For starters, these indeed are encouraging signs for a ‘curiosity seeker’. As we proceed along, we will take a closer look to see if there is more to these concepts than meets the eye.

Karma, in its simplest form is explained as akin to Newton’s third law of cause and effect: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. As you sow, so you reap. You sow wheat and shall reap nothing but wheat, you sow hatred and shall reap hatred, you do a good deed and good shall return to you. If you hurt someone or for that matter kill someone, either out of intent or out of ignorance / negligence, it is for the law of karma to see to that you to suffer so, in another instant. Or contrarily, you probably would have suffered so, at an earlier instant, and are / were merely repaying or encountering the fruits of that deed. Strangely, the bodies of many vegetarian Hindus get burnt by the wood of the trees, and conversely, most of the bodies of the consumers of flesh and meat, get eaten by maggots and worms when they are buried, and that then looks logically karmic! You eat off the tree and are consumed by the tree, and you eat off the flesh, and are consumed by another form of flesh.

Human life, if we are to take it at mere face value, springs forth a plethora of seemingly unanswerable questions, and life looks unequal to each individual. One comes across birth, death, suffering, pain, different ability and capability, anguish, sorrow, natural disasters, accidents, joy, happiness, money, power, sex, orientation, spiritualism etc. in unequal measures. Some are born rich, some are born in penury, some are lame, sick, healthy, or wealthy again in unequal measures. Science, nevertheless would not be able to answer the inequalities in the state of the ‘human condition’, and perhaps would not even be interested in attempting an answer, and hence religion seems a safe haven to shelter upon, to seek solace or Salvation. If however, different faiths talk of different concepts, and differ in the basic understanding of the human values of life and death, questions are indeed again bound to arise. The term ‘blind faith’ sounds like a misnomer, as seemingly and understandably so many seem to capitalize on keeping the faithful, blind! What of death and the human condition within the lifetime of a man, and the evident inequalities and iniquities and afflictions? Are they different for different religions? Are human beings caught in the crossfire between the lesser gods, and the greater gods, with Satan as the referee?

Sanatana Dharma answers many questions with relative simplicity vide the transmigration of the soul to another physical form, based on accumulated karmas. It also enumerates the many battles between the good and the evil, the many battles between the Sura’s and the Asura’s, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. But then, there are acres of ancient scripts on Sanatana Dharma, written by the highest of the sages and seers, and preserved for posterity. There had to be an answer somewhere within the confines of the Holy bible (all of around a thousand pages at best, considering the Authorized King James Version), as definitely there are many references in the bible, on the few occasions wherein, a handful of ‘lucky’ people were raised from the dead, by the prophets, Christ and his disciples. Jesus Christ himself rose from the dead on the third day. Lazarus, the brother of Mary Magdalene and Martha, seemed to be the most ‘lucky’ individual, in the fact that he was already ‘dead’ for four days before he was brought back to life. Also, there are scores of instances where the sick or the lame had been cured. Yet, all these miracles were performed with an instrument no less than ‘faith’. Again, if a ‘lucky’ few had indeed had the chance to ‘survive’ death the first time, and then lived to tell their tales for a few more sunsets, till the time of their ‘second’ physical death, what of the other, ‘not so lucky’ majority? Are we missing something somewhere, or are the rest of us just plain ‘unlucky’?

As we analyze a little more, the mysteries of the bible become all the more intriguing. As depicted or as often mentioned, is Satan / Devil really such a bad being as portrayed? Is he the only perpetrator of all ills and evils? And if he is so, would it not take a mere millisecond of a timeframe for the all powerful, all pervading God, to annihilate Satan and his band of ‘bad’ workers out of this universe, in order to wipe out all forms of ‘evil’ from the face of the earth? Coincidently, a good number of the major protagonists of the Old Testament seem to have held maleficent traits, and with questionable morals, as you would observe whilst reading the chapter on the bible story. What is the mystery behind such a portrayal? In the account of the Old Testament of the bible, God talked directly to the people of Israel from Mount Sinai, yet they did not believe him and made a golden calf for themselves to be god! And in the account of the New Testament how is it possible that despite the multitude of people witnessing the wonders and the miracles of Jesus Christ and his Apostles, not many believed in Jesus Christ and instead condemned him to die on the cross? How much more difficult is it going to get, two thousand years down the line and counting?

Or, is there really another layer to all the stories in the bible, and the scenes behind the portrayals? These are some of the questions behind this work, as we attempt to unravel this glorious text, and some of the secrets that lie deep within. As I travelled on this exploratory journey, I kept an open mind, and would implore the reader to try to do so as well, even as I try and narrate some of the answers which I came across, within the confines of the Authorized King James Version of the Holy Bible. I wish and pray that, God may guide us closer to the ‘ Universal Truth’, for according to the texts of Sanatana Dharma, in this last of the four Yugas which is this current Kaliyuga, ‘truth’ is the only precept left alive to guide us.

May God bless us all.

Chapter I - The Bible Story

For the uninitiated, The Holy Bible (The Old Testament and The New Testament), derived from the Latin word biblia meaning ‘books’ is held in deep reverence by the Christians as a part of their faith. The early parts of the texts are often shared and in common with the Abrahamic religions namely Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The first five chapters of the Bible namely Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, collectively called the Pentateuch is known as the Torah in Hebrew, and is also called the Samaritan Bible for the Jewish faith. The collective book of the Old Testament, in Hebrew is called the Jewish Bible. Much of the works and the words of the bible had been translated from the ancient texts, originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Syriac and Latin and translated to English and canonized in its current form, in the Authorized King James version, circa 1610.

The Old Testament

The text of the Bible starts with God’s creation of the heaven and earth on the first day, and the earth was in darkness and without any form, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. God then created light and separated the light and darkness and called them day and night. On the second day God created the firmament of the heavens, and on the third day, he separated dry land from the waters and brought forth all vegetation of grass, herbs and the trees. God made the Sun, the moon and the stars on the fourth day, to rule the days and the nights. On the fifth day, he made the living creatures of the sea, great and small, and the birds that fly. And on the sixth day, he made the animals, the reptiles, and created man in his own image - both male and female - and blessed them to be fruitful and multiply, and to have dominion over the fishes, fowl and all living things. God saw everything he had created and it was very good. On the seventh day, he ended his work and rested.

Later, when God had not caused it to rain and when he saw that there was no man to till the ground, ‘there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul’+. God then placed man in the Garden of Eden, to be maintained by him, wherein placed also were the ‘tree of life’ and the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ among other flora and fauna. Man was permitted to eat freely of any tree, however, was forewarned of certain death if he so ate out of the tree of knowledge. However God’s other creation – Eve, the woman, who was created out of Adam’s rib: to be his companion, was