While the Orlando terrorist attack was unfolding I was in a local Wiccan shop browsing around. Another customer was talking with the shop owner and like everyone else in every store that day, the discussion eventually turned to the attack. The discussion wasn’t anything none of us haven’t already said or heard but one phrase caught my ear.
“He’ll get what’s coming to him, you can’t run from Karma.”
The customer apparently had yet to hear that the terrorist had been killed by police. Later leftist liberals took to social media to blame christians for the attack, and then once it was know that the terrorist was a muslim democrat they blamed Trump supporters… yeah, the same people who want muslims like Mateen to be checked out to make sure they don’t support Daesh or that their fathers are not out and proud supporters of the Taliban… Yeah, those people.
As the days went by America mourned and we kept hearing again and again about how fifty INNOCENT lives were lost not to radical islam, but to guns. (here we go)
But let’s for a minute focus on a different word in that sentence, Innocent. I know the Pagan community wouldn’t dare question the innocence of a single person who was in that club that night. Just look at how much rage and outcry there was when a christian priest said during a sermon that the victims died because that was their punishment for living in sin. Of coarse there was no rage of outcry for the islamic priest who said the same thing, but who care right? And neither of them are dropping dead for what they said, not even a cough or cold. Meanwhile we have 50 people dead and 53 more wounded. I am going to do something that is daring, that the mere notion may offend people but I feel it’s a question that needs to be asked to spark something among my fellow Pagans.
“What did these 103 people do to deserve what they got?”
You see karma is an eastern philosophy, not a Pagan one. There is no history of it in Druidry, Asatru or Celtic lore. So why do so many Neo-Pagans cling to it? Because of 60’s Hippie movement that was hungry for any theological belief that wasn’t the christianity they had been raised in, and the fact it’s a moral code that conforms completely to whatever morals the believer has. It became so popular that Gerald Gardiner included karma into his version of Wicca because he knew it would attract hippies like moths to a flame and it’s been carried throughout Wicca since, practically burying the actual concept behind the three fold law, which was that what you do effects you in mind, body and spirit… not come back to you three times. Yet it amazes me at how many Pagans will dogmatically go on about karma but the second that belief is in contradiction to the leftist liberal law “Thou shalt not blame gays” their belief gets turned off like a light switch, only to be turned back on once it’s convenient.
We know what Omar Mateen did to serve what he got, there’s no question there. But what about the people he hurt. If you get back what you do (especially three times fold) then what did these people do that half of them deserved death?… even if you loosely believe in Karma then you have no choice in this, they must have done something. If these people were completely innocent and have done nothing themselves to warrant such a fate, and that these clubs are gatherings or the purest tolerance, love, joy and happiness, then shouldn’t that night club have been shielded by good karma like a glass dome? Meanwhile why do places of frothing hate like the Westboro Baptist Church only experience the tragedy of their leading dying a quick painless death in his sleep after living a long 85 years?
Isn’t it time that Pagans let go of their belief in karma?
In case you are wondering what this author thinks about divine justice/punishment. I have come to my own belief. The Gods are neutral and we are all equally divine, they don’t pick favorites. Like all life in the universe they have given us free will. But like all freedoms they come with a price, that price is that free will can be used to harm us. But the Gods did not leave use naked in the cold, they also gave us the freedom to defend ourselves.
