My pal Jesse Tanner continues his knowledge-dropping over at Progressive-Practical Christianity with an excellent post about Unity minister Lila Herrmann’s misunderstandings about karma. Though the post has important implications within Jesse’s particular religious community, what he says has utility beyond Unity. He writes:
As a scholar of world religions, I was a little disappointed with the lack of understanding of the detail and nuance with which the term karma is/has been used in Indian religious systems. She recognizes that it comes from Indian traditions, but cites no Hindu, Buddhist, Jain practitioners or Indologists (scholars who study the cultural and religious traditions of India), instead relying solely upon Unity leaders and ministers to corroborate her understanding of karma. Now, I have utmost respect for Charles Fillmore, Eric Butterworth, and many other Unity ministers in terms of their insight into the practice of prayer and knowledge of Unity principles, but most of them aren’t scholars of Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. and so their statements of karma are, at best, simplistic and, at worst, rather inaccurate.
Herrmann does acknowledge the Sanskrit origin of the word and gives its root meaning as “action”; this is all very straightforward and accurate. However, using Fillmore and Butterworth, it seems that she depicts karma as a kind of deterministic cycle of punishment. This negative understanding of karma as dealing only with wrongdoing, sin, and/or punishment simply isn’t always the case in Indian religion. It’s actually much more complex than that, since we’re dealing with several different religious traditions within India and a plethora of various viewpoints within those traditions.
Read the rest here.
