Karmic Justice

…or why don’t bad things happen to bad people?

Every culture has a way to ask for or seek justice. In ancient Greece there were the Furies who were very much an eye for an eye and for the sins of the father to be visited on the son(s) for generations. Then Greek culture moved from tribal to urban/city culture and got Apollo and the council of gods which made things more logical and formal, but also more legalistic and less satisfying. Judaism has God who is literally an eye for an eye and yet works in mysterious ways. Celtic culture had the triple goddess of war Maeve/Macha/Morrigan who helped people see they reap what they sow. Odin was a Norse god of war and wisdom who dispensed justice. And so on and so on, you get the idea.

Currently we struggle with the notion of justice and how to get it. On the spiritual side we’ve got forgiveness messaging coming from Christianity and Jesus Christ, Buddha asking us to be of service, be balanced, and keep detached from what would hold us back like anger or the need for retribution, and Kwan Yin asking us to be in tune with the sorrows of the world and each other. Plus we’ve got what is becoming a global schism between lived Islam and fundamentalist extremism which is in part a struggle over what is justice and what is a life lived in a just way. To the outside Islam is being demonized while inside the conflict is destroying nations one by one and the losers are the people who live there. On the secular side we have justice as provided and applied by governments which become ever more ungoverned. These systems have become so bureaucratic and entangled in their own baroque legalities which justice might never come and if it does it’s often incomprehensible to the parties involved and disproportionate to the actual event. Oh, and let’s not forget the corporate entities which try through the courts and trade arrangements to make a separate type of justice for themselves which minimizes the rights of individuals directly and through governmental protections.

So who do we, the individual, reach out to when injustice has occurred? I mean, yes God works in mysterious ways, it’s not ours to take justice into our own hands, we need to trust in the system, blah de blah de blah…telling us to be more impotent in a situation, to not feel what we feel, to not express it in any way, and to polish that turd like it will…