Hey, she was just asking
Shirley Maclaine speculates:
In her memoir, the 80-year-old, who won an Oscar for Terms Of Endearment, writes: “What if most Holocaust victims were balancing their karma from ages before, when they were Roman soldiers putting Christians to death, the Crusaders who murdered millions in the name of Christianity, soldiers with Hannibal, or those who stormed across the Near East with Alexander? The energy of killing is endless and will be experienced by the killer and the killee.”
I guess if you believe in karma plus reincarnation, you could be led to that sort of thinking. It certainly does away with the problem and/or the riddle of evil. If karma is always fair and just, then when bad things happen to good people it’s really because the people were bad in a past life. Payback’s a bitch.
Maclaine’s choices are interesting, though, aren’t they? So let’s see: those Crusaders who killed some Jews on their way to the Holy Land are paid back by becoming Jews killed by Hitler in the Holocaust. Just to add to the cyclical symmetry, Germany was central to both events. According to Maclaine’s theory, those Jews killed in the Holocaust could have been the crusader perpetrators of the Worms massacre. And those 800 Jews of Worms who were killed, they probably were the perpetrators in some earlier—well, you get the idea :
The Worms massacre refers to the murder of 800 Jews of Worms, Germany, at the hands of crusaders headed by Count Emicho during May 1096.
The massacre at Worms was one of number of attacks against Jewish communities perpetrated during the First Crusade (1096”“1099). Followers of Count Emicho arrived at Worms on May 18, 1096. Soon after a rumour spread that the Jews had drowned a Christian and used contaminated water to poison the town’s wells. The local populace later joined forces with Emicho and launched a savage attack on the town’s Jews. Every Jew that was captured was slain. Bishop Adalbert intervened and allowed his palace to serve as a refuge, but eight days later the mob broke in and slaughtered those seeking asylum there. They were in the midst of reciting the Hallel prayer for Rosh Chodesh Sivan.
More:
According to David Nirenberg, the events of 1096 in the Rhineland (such as in Worms) “occupy a significant place in modern Jewish historiography and are often presented as the first instance of an antisemitism that would henceforth never be forgotten and whose climax was the Holocaust.”
Who knew that the Jews were on one side at the beginning and the other at the end?
Look, I know Shirley Maclaine’s a twit, but I hesitate to apply the term “evil” to her. What she says demonstrates a built-in problem with that particular belief system—reincarnation and karma. Talk about blaming the victim! The problem is certainly not just Maclaine;
The free will controversy [connected with the idea of karma] can be outlined in three parts: (1) A person who kills, rapes or commits any other unjust act, can claim all his bad actions were a product of his karma, he is devoid of free will, he can not make a choice, he is an agent of karma, and that he merely delivering necessary punishments his “wicked” victims deserved for their own karma in past lives. Are crimes and unjust actions due to free will, or because of forces of karma? (2) Does a person who suffers from the unnatural death of a loved one, or rape or any other unjust act, assume a moral agent, gratuitous harm and seek justice? Or, should one blame oneself for bad karma over past lives, assume that the unjust suffering is fate? (3) Does the karma doctrine undermine the incentive for moral-education because all suffering is deserved and consequence of past lives, why learn anything when the balance sheet of karma from past lives will determine one’s action and sufferings?
The explanations and replies to the above free will problem vary by the specific school of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The schools of Hinduism, such as Yoga and Advaita Vedanta, that have emphasized current life over the dynamics of karma residue moving across past lives, allow free will. Their argument, as well of other schools, are threefold: (1) The theory of karma includes both the action and the intent behind that action. Not only is one affected by past karma, one creates new karma whenever one acts with intent – good or bad. If intent and act can be proven beyond reasonable doubt, new karma can be proven, and the process of justice can proceed against this new karma. The actor who kills, rapes or commits any other unjust act, must be considered as the moral agent for this new karma, and tried. Life forms not only receive and reap the consequence of their past karma, together they are the means to initiate, evaluate, judge, give and deliver consequence of karma to others…Karma is a theory that explains some evils, not all ….
My guess is that most Americans who dabble in the idea of karmic punishment for past lives don’t think it through to the extent Maclaine has. They don’t go there, but she does. The religions themselves (Hinduism, for example) have certainly thought it through, but I bet a lot of people who say they believe in reincarnation wouldn’t especially like the answers those religions have given.
I guess if you believe in karma plus reincarnation, you could be led to that sort of thinking.
i guess if you dont know what Karma is, it really doesnt matter if you use it to replace god and imagine a universal reflex as replacement…
Karma, also refers to a conceptual principle that originated in India, often descriptively called the principle of karma, sometimes as the karma theory or the law of karma [ie. the bastardization is the norm, and the origin is an also refers to] – In the context of theory, karma is complex and difficult to define. – [but thats ok, liberals redefine things anyway, and redefining the pagan three fold law as karma, is a ok to them, after all, cultures are made for them to destroy, and our ignorance supports them as we use THEIR bastardized versions without a care as to CONSERVING meaning] – Different schools of Indologists derive different definitions for the karma concept from ancient Indian texts; their definition is some combination of
(1) causality that may be ethical or non-ethical;
(2) ethicization, that is good or bad actions have consequences; and
(3) rebirth
Other Indologists include in the definition of karma theory as that which explains the present circumstances of an individual with reference to his or her actions in past. These actions may be those in a person’s current life, or, in some schools of Indian traditions, possibly actions in their past lives; furthermore, the consequences may result in current life, or a person’s future lives. The law of karma operates independent of any deity or any process of divine judgment
Now as a man is like this or like that,
according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;
a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;
And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.
–Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th Century BC
They just gave us the justification for their own execution, although perhaps they are too stupid to know that.
Who in their right mind even listens to that moron Shirley Maclaine?
My apologies to morons everywhere. You probably have a clearer thought process than Shirley Maclaine does.
What if most Holocaust victims were balancing their karma from ages before
Good Lord. Would she think the same if someone balanced her karma?
The midwits aren’t capable of seeing it, but the creation of new souls means that some souls are without sin or at least without the totality of sin from before. Besides the Christian one at least. But back to reincarnation and karmic cycles: it’s most about the user reaping what they sow. Or the Golden Rule, the enforcement branch of it.
Since there’s no way to delve into past lives effectively, one cannot effectively determine what a soul is guilty of in a previous life, only the current one.
As such, the proof in the pudding is that there were more Jews than there were population centers for cities in the past. So where did the Jews get the millions of new souls, which either did not exist in the past or existed in the past without any connection to Europe?
But math and numbers, you know, is something above the mid wits. The nitwits, actually know what is their limit, the mid wits think they are smarter than some of us, they think they occupy the “top” or 20-10% of the top for human competence.
M’kay . . .
I’ll just go for the facile, superficial, “only reason people listen to the crazy anti-Semitic bitch is because she’s a celebrity.”
What about the Armenian genocide or Stalin’s purges or Mao’s Great Leap Forward or the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields? Shirley is a very dim bulb.
I’d say that the idea of Karma Neo describes was invented by someone who wanted to influence other people’s behavior. Why would mass killing result in bad Karma rather than good Karma? Karma doesn’t provide any objective reason to choose any behavior as either good or bad.
There are other to interpret reincarnation which are much less problematic than the traditional Indian theory of Karma. For example, the movie Groundhog Day could be a different take on Karma. In this movie the character relives the same day repeatedly, but instead of appearing as a lower life form because of his failures he begins each Groundhog day exactly as he began the previous Groundhog day. The only thing that changes is that he maintains the positive accomplishments from the previous Groundhog day.
“A person who kills, rapes or commits any other unjust act, can claim all his bad actions were a product of his karma, he is devoid of free will, he can not make a choice, he is an agent of karma”
They can make that claim but the ‘hypothesis’ of karma does not claim that free will is non-existent. Nor logically could it, as if there were no free will, the chain of bad karmic actions could never have been initiated in the first place. As one has to have the ‘agency’ to act independently (i.e. free will), to start the ‘chain of karma’ to begin with… otherwise we are simply robots that can only act according to our programming. Which would BTW, place the responsibility for bad karma upon the creator’s shoulders. As we would only be ‘acting’ as we have been created to act.
To my knowledge, karmic theory does not hold that innocent people cannot have bad things done to them.
Perhaps known to many but of which I only recently realized is that arguably, Buddhism is to Hinduism as Christianity is the Judaism. Buddha was born and raised a Hindu. Buddha purportedly ‘broke through’ to enlightenment and then shows the way to enlightenment that he has discovered.
One Buddhist hypothesis of reincarnation and karma posits that as long as we generate bad karma, we simply stay on the ‘wheel’ of reincarnation. That compared to heaven (a state of bliss) living through this “vale of tears” is punishment enough. Thus, no need for ‘deserved’ bad karmic punishments. This also provides justification for altruism, the more ‘saint like’ we become, the sooner we achieve a permanent state of inner bliss and are released from the wheel of reincarnation.
That inner state of bliss has a parallel in Christianity;
“And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you”. King James Version (KJV)
I would argue that there is no practical difference between “an inner state of bliss” and ‘inhabiting’ the kingdom of God within…
Sounds like Shirley is just trying to explain why bad stuff happens to innocent people through her particular religious beliefs. Yeah, it sounds awful. However, if you’ve ever been dealing with something awful (loved one suffering from a horrible disease, etc.) and been told “All things happen for a reason” or “God works in mysterious ways” you know that Maclaine isn’t all that alone in putting her foot in her mouth while attempting to explain why bad stuff happens.
Take into account all the devils, karma, Allah, Freud, parents, and Satan himself, there ain’t nobody ever done bad shit of their own accord — ever. Between that and Deepak Chopra lies our salvation.
I give her credit for following the logic of reincarnation through. Buddhist teachings are quite clear that it’s all samsara, i.e., endless rounds of suffering. The child on your lap that you love and fight for may indeed be an enemy from a former life. All attachment–even love–leads to further suffering for someone somewhere down the line. Buddhism is supposed to teach you to transcend all that.
What did we all do to deserve that twit?
I’ve found it somewhat interesting that under Jon Haidt’s framing (if it is “his”) Christian beliefs are “karmic”; at least as far the politically progressives “WEIRDs” understand it.
I take that WEIRD sense of “karmic” to be the sense wherein any actions which might be described as “moral” or “immoral” within the Christian worldview, are further held by Christians, or the like, to have objectively evaluable consequences and ultimate moral repercussions. Right and wrong then, are held by the Christian to be objective features of reality, and such actions as might be evaluable as either “right” or “wrong” to be embedded within an ultimate causal structure. Therefore, that view is labeled by the WEIRDs, who accept no such principle, as Karmic.
I think we all are familiar enough with progressive thought not to have to try and demonstrate that; and, to recognize that when push comes to shove, even causality is ultimately abandoned by many WEIRDs as an objective feature of reality. How much less then, would they imagine that interpersonal actions have any “objective” status from a (non-existent)”god’s eye” point of view.
This then, makes someone like Shirley Maclain, or the typical California Neo-pagan transcendentalist, a bizarre subtype of their politically progressive WEIRD brethren. Perhaps it is their lack of the proper university education, rather than their wealth and leisure, that is controlling in this respect: and ultimately makes the Maclain type seem anomalous – a weird type of WEIRD
The one feature that militant atheist WEIRDs seem to share with their transcendentalist loon brothers, is a belief that they create reality and are evolving to become Gods. Though they probably have somewhat different ideas of precisely what being a “god”, or your own god, entails. The death or breeding out of the less spiritual or intelligent or progressive from the earth through some totalizing regime of human enlightenment usually seems to be part of it, in either case.
Something bad in a previous life, no doubt …
She needs to check her White privilege.
Why couldn’t the Jews killed in the Holocaust have been reincarnated Muslims who slaughtered Jews when they over ran Israel and Jerusalem?
Oh wait, that is still Caucasian people, but if we go by skin color…
So, where did it all begin? The Karmic cycle that is.
Someone had to be first. Some group had to commit the first Genocide. And the victims were free of Karmic debt.
So, we get back to the existence of Evil, which removes that Pretty Pink Bow they’ve wrapped their belief system in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Guido_Sarducci
Guido postulated that nuns are atoning for prior lives as mafiosi.
Squirrelly Shirley ought to atone for her brother’s crazed politics and bedroom antics. (Warren Beatty)
Ymarsakar Says:
May 20th, 2015 at 12:25 pm
But math and numbers, you know, is something above the mid wits. The nitwits, actually know what is their limit, the mid wits think they are smarter than some of us, they think they occupy the “top” or 20-10% of the top for human competence….
There is a formal theory about mid/niwittery.
Math can be challenging.
Eight excruciating minutes of your life that you will never get back. …
Another holocaust for Shirley to chew on:
Islamic India: The Biggest Holocaust in World History.
Not all holocausts are equal.
First of all, the Crusaders did not kill “millions”.
This wench as been reading far too much of Howard Zinn material, if she reads anything other than Nostradamus and ‘Astrologer Weekly’.
Dear God,
Thank you for having given me two parents who, while flawed, did not impart upon me the kind of experiences leading to a version of wackiness which drew me to pseudo-science, serious contemplations of reincarnation or other fringe-fantasies.
And thank you for giving me the common sense to limit my dalliances with eastern religions to mere cursory in nature.
I apologize God, for having been so hard on you for the afflictions I’ve complained about; a seriously dysfunctional family and the perception of not having all of the essential “tools” to navigate through the storms of life.
.
Dear God, it is only through the wisdom you’ve graced me with that I now know I could have been seriously injured in life.
The kind of irreparable damage that can only be observed in the superficial existence of one such as, Shirley McLain (others of her ilk).
Amen
clarityseeker Says:
May 20th, 2015 at 3:34 pm
First of all, the Crusaders did not kill “millions”…
Correct. There were not enough Crusader for that.
I did the maths.
The why of the Crusades. Skip to 0:46.
Not that it matters.
G6loq,
” What did we all do to deserve that twit?”
I can’t imagine what it could be but it must have been really bad… seriously though, the explanation is simply that Maclaine is just an example of the eventual effects of a long life of dissolution and drugs 😉
And there’s no need for a 3 minute video to explain the why of the Crusades, it can be done in one word… Islam.
That book was published in the U.S. over a year and a half ago, but I guess has just now been published in the U.K. I don’t recall any outrage over those ghastly words about the Holocaust here — I wonder why not.
@Ann like Obama’s book, nobody read it !
If a person didn’t like a book, they would put an amazon review up like a normal sane person.
Only activists do something else.
“…the Crusaders who murdered millions in the name of Christianity…”
Didn’t the spirits she’s in communication with inform her that it would have been physically impossible back in the day of sword and lance for the Crusaders to have murdered millions?
G6loq,
they should have asked her to convert 10 in binary into trinary.
A lot of people doubt their own judgment, that’s when the MSM interviewed Sarah Palin, people immediately jumped on the propaganda wagon and started obeying the Left’s authorities. They had no ability to competently judge other people, except based on the “experts”.
But these so called experts in the media have problems, such as being in the bottom 25% of human competence. So where does that put the people who rely on the opinions of experts?
No way anyone will find me relying on the media’s “interviews”.
When you’re dead, you don’t know you’re dead. It is only difficult for others. It’s the same when you’re stupid.
Shirley Maclaine has dabbled in a number of religions. At one time in the 80s she was a follower of Ramtha (J.Z. Knight) in Yelm, WA. (“JZ Knight, is an American mystic teacher and author, and is known for claiming to be channel of a spiritual entity named Ramtha.”)
About Maclaine from Wiki: “She has a strong interest in spirituality and metaphysics, the central theme of some of her best-selling books including Out on a Limb and Dancing in the Light. She has undertaken such forms of spiritual exploration as walking the Way of St. James, working with Chris Griscom, and practicing Transcendental Meditation.”
That she would delve deeply into reincarnation is just another of her spiritual quests. All of us are following a path to what lies beyond. Most people have found their guide in religion in its many forms. Some, like Maclaine, never seem to find what they are looking for. The quest goes on right to the end. Well, nobody ever said we were going to have answers to all our questions or longings. Personally, I find Maclaine’s spiritual quest less of a puzzle than that of the Islamist jihadis. Fundamental belief in an apocalyptic, vicious, intolerant cult is much harder for me to wrap my head around.
As best I can tell, karma and all this other exotic Asian stuff are hypotheses, born as revelations to one person, like Buddha (or Muhammad), which are untested and unwitnessed.
Jesus Christ, however, performed miracles witnessed by multitudes, foretold his coming execution at the Last Supper, and returned to witnesses (apostles) after his resurrection, and had these events recorded as history 20-30 years after the Cruxifixion by four independent writers (Matthew Mark Luke and John) in more than one language.
Millions!! Millions, I tell ya! Millions of people were killed by crusaders!!
Millions because of folks with stuff !