I love Skepchick. I find a lot of their content intriguing and in some cases they have managed to change my mind on topics that I thought I had surely got pegged down. And their Afternoon Inquisitions are fantastic. Today’s is no exception. Surly Amy wrote this one and talked about how she had always accepted the idea that “just being a good person and thinking positive thoughts would bring positive results”. And I did that too, or versions of it, for a very long time.

This is what most people think of as karma, some universal wrong-righting mechanism that makes sure that what goes around comes around. And it’s absolutely wrong. When I was a wee Christian lad, I believed that good things would happen to me because God loved me and would take care of me when things were hard. As I grew, I began to just think that my being a good person would serve me, and that good things would inevitably come to those who wait with goodness in their hearts.

What I figured out in time was that this wasn’t the case. Whether it is prayer, karma, positive thinking, The Secret, or any number of areas, the only thing that gets me where I need to go is me. The universe does not have these controls in place because the universe is far too busy being a universe, expanding, having stars, and all the stuff that universes do.

Of all of those things we believe, though, I think the most common is actually karma. It is an elegant solution that tells us everything is going to be okay, that jerks will get what’s coming to them, and that the whole universe pretty much takes care of itself. Christians who don’t believe in the power of prayer may still believe in karma, imagining it is the tool by which God takes care of them in the same way that they view Intelligent Design as God’s ability to use evolution to make wonderful us.

The thing about universal forces is that we can measure them. Gravity, for example, always works. I hold a rock out in my hand and let go, assuming that I am in an environment with some amount of gravity, that rock will make its way down to the ground ten times out of ten. Karma doesn’t work that way. Karma is our wishful thinking and our schadenfreude all put together. When bad things happen to bad people, we can say that karma finally got them back. When good things happen to bad people, we know it’s just a matter of time.

And, of course, it is. Eventually good things and bad things happen to people, and when that happens, much like Skinner’s pigeons, we wrongly draw the association that the difficulty or blessing in their lives is in some way related causally to their past behavior.

You want the truth? Stuff happens. Sometimes that stuff is good. Sometimes not so much. Sometimes it happens to good people. Sometimes not so much. Sometimes babies die and murderers get acquitted and single moms who struggle to make good have kids that don’t respect them. If life was fair, karma or prayer or The Secret or positive thinking or the invisible hand of God would work.

Life ain’t fair.

Jim