As the wheel of karma turns

When disaster strikes, we want to understand and we seek explanations why. But there are those who experience the losses, then there are those who make uninformed commentary based on their world view. Katrina was a big one, with Christian apologists arguing that it was God's wrath upon the wicked Gomorrah of New Orleans, a view that sparked appropriate outrage. But this sort of calculation is hardly exclusive to Christianity. Sharon Stone, a convert to Buddhism, made a similar statement when she equated the recent earthquake in China with bad karma over it's treatment of Tibet. She apologized and her image has been removed from Christian Dior's Chinese advertising.

There are two basic kinds of evil, natural and moral. Both are a consequence of imperfect, finite beings living in an imperfect, finite world. Karma is concerned with moral evil, though direct cause and effect isn't as easy to diagram as a sentence. Indeed, the Buddha explained that two causes of earthquakes were the loss of a Buddha and the return of a Buddha.

The bigger problem in both cases is the equation of divine vengeance and acts of natural evil, as though the victims deserved their suffering because of divine book balancing. This ignores the basic requirement of compassion that forms the foundation of every religion. And when that happens, it that's a disaster for everyone.