Flavours are Flavours and yet no Flavour All the Same All the Same!!!!!!!!!!!
Belief in Karma
The doctrine of karma supposes that everything a person does will have its effect on him sooner or later, and will have a bearing on his so-called next incarnation. According to this belief, people are continually reborn into this world, where they must bear the consequences in that later life of what they did in a former one. Buddhism denies the existence of God and believes that karma is the unique power that governs everything.
Karma is a Sanskrit word that means "act," and refers to the law of cause and effect. According to those who believe in it, a person will experience in the future what he has done in the past, for good or ill. The past is one's former life; the future is supposed to be a new life they will begin after death. According to this belief, anyone who is poor in this life is paying with his poverty the price for evil that he committed in some former life. This superstitious belief also claims that in a later life, an evil person may be "demoted" to rebirth as an animal or even a plant.
According to the theory of karma, those who are poor, handicapped or ill are paying the price for evil deeds committed in a previous life. Therefore, they deserve their present misfortunes. This perverse understanding results in prevalent injustices in societies where belief in karma is widespread.
One harmful result of believing in karma is that it teaches that present helplessness, poverty and weakness are punishments for a person's moral evils. According to this belief system, if a person is disabled, it's because he has inflicted a similar injury on someone else in a former life and therefore deserves it. This superstitious belief is the main reason why the unjust social structure of the caste system dominated India for so many centuries. (It must be remembered that karma is a Hindu idea, and Buddhism actually arose from Hinduism.) Because the caste system was based on karma, the poor, sick and disabled within India were despised and oppressed. The wealthy high-caste ruling class regarded their own privileges as natural and other people have the very important duty of helping those who are in need. For this reason, IJudaism and Christianity, and islam other religions based on divine revelation but that may be in some cases - later -altered-has a very strong sense of social justice. But karma-based religions like Buddhism and Hinduism and others tolerate inequality and pose a great obstacle to social progress.
Karma is based on the belief in reincarnation: the idea that people come back into the world with the same spirit but in a different body. This idea of a "wheel of rebirth" supposes that every life influences a subsequent one. But this belief fails with one single question: how does this karma operate? If Buddhism doesn't accept the existence of God, then who judges a person's former life and sends him back into the world in a new body? This question has no answer! Buddhists believe that karma is a "natural law" that functions by itself, spontaneously, like gravity or thermodynamics. However, it is God Who created all natural laws. No natural law observes what people do throughout their lives, keeps an account, and judges them after death on that basis. No natural law determines, as a result of this judgment, what kind of new life a person will have and re-creates him accordingly; and no natural law imposes this process flawlessly on billions of people, much less animals. Clearly no such natural law exists, and so, neither can such a process exist.
So many people throughout the world believe in reincarnation, even though it has no logical basis, because they have no religious faith. Denying the existence of an infinite afterlife, they fear death and cling to the idea of reincarnation as a way to escape their fear. Belief in reincarnation-like belief in karma-is based in the false consolation that death is nothing to be feared, and that anyone will be able to attain his goals in a new birth. If reincarnation can't occur on its own, as a natural law, then clearly it could exist only through a supernatural act of creation.
Eternally just, merciful and compassionate, God gives the perfect reward for what everyone has done. If a person seeks comfort in false beliefs because he fears death or the possibility of going to Hell, he will experience certain ruin. Anyone who has intelligent awareness, conscience, and fears in this regard must turn to God with a sincere heart if he hopes to escape the pains of Hell and attain Paradise.
Never yet has being old or young, beautiful or rich been able to prevent anyone from dying; and so, no one can disregard death's reality. Whether people disregard that reality or not, it is something they can never avoid.
Reading these lines, you may be led to consider the closeness of death. Perhaps death is closer to you than to others; and you may die before you finish reading this blog. It may come for no apparent reason, with no illness, accident or age-related cause. God will send the Angel of Death to come at the hour of your departure and take your soul.
Buddhism's Misguided Belief About the Afterlife
Buddhism's belief in karma leaves no room for belief in the eternal afterlife, Paradise or Hell. This false and perverse position -the idea that an individual returns into the world after each death, continually-conflicts with what God has revealed in the Qur'an. In The Religions of India, Edward Washburn Hopkins, a professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology, explains that Buddhism does not believe in an afterlife:
. . . The logic of his own system led Buddha into a formal and complete pessimism, which denies an after-life to the man that finds no happiness in this . . . In his talks with his questioners and disciples, he uses all means to evade direct inquiry in regard to the fate of man after death. He believed that Nirvana (extinction of lust) led to cessation of being; he did not believe in an immortal soul... What he urged repeatedly was that every one accepting the undisputed doctrine of karma or re-birth in its full extent (i.e., that for every sin here, punishment followed in the next existence), should endeavor to escape, if possible, from such an endless course of painful re-births. . .
From some Buddhist writings, one can glean the following information on the afterlife:
Whether one is reborn in Heaven or in one of the various levels of Hell, the forms of existence in these places are transitory, as they are on earth, and are not eternal. As in Hinduism, the period of time during which . . . individuals remain in these places depends on the amount of good and evil they have done while on earth. When the prescribed time has been completed, they will return to earth again. Heaven and Hell are no more than temporary states of existence in which the individuals receive their reward for the acts they have committed while on earth.
According to superstitious Buddhist beliefs, the existence of the universe, human beings, death and rebirth are all uncontrolled processes. Those who believe in this irrational claim are spiritually unbalanced. They live in tension and discomfort that comes from the frightening idea that everything in the world is arbitrary. But Islam teaches that God controls everything that happens in the universe. Those who understand this trust God at every moment, living in the joyous comfort of His support and protection.
Buddhism teaches that there is a kind of Paradise and Hell, as a reward and punishment for what a person has done. But because this belief does not stem from a revealed religion, it contains many contradictions and illogicalities. Above all, and contrary to what God has revealed thru prophets Buddhism believes that Paradise and Hell are only transitory.
Again, one of this belief's most illogical aspects is the idea that all systems in the world operate, in effect, by themselves. According to Buddhism, just as the existence of the universe and human beings is uncontrolled, so is the cycle of death and re-birth. There is no room in this belief for a Creator Who has brought into existence the world and the life upon it, together with Paradise and Hell, and rewards human beings for what they have done. However, accepting the existence of Paradise and Hell as places where reward and punishment are given, but not explaining how these realms were created, is an extremely illogical, unacceptable claim.
But who deals out the rewards and punishments? Moreover, how were these realms created? The philosophy of karma claims no account of how Paradise and Hell could have come into being without a Creator. This superstitious belief has been passed down from generation to generation, without ever being questioned or logically explained. Buddhism has no logical explanation for the existence of the universe or how it functions, nor of the origin of the flawless creative art evident in all living things. For this reason, Buddhism can never presume to be more than a mystical movement with no basis in logic, supported only by myths.
The Reality Awaiting Us in the Hereafter
Someone who submits to God, conforming his life to the true guide He has sent down and to the teachings of the Prophet s(may God bless them believes with all his heart that on the Last Day, he will account for all for his deeds-and will receive the reward in eternal Paradise or endless Hell. God has revealed this to humanity in the books He has sent down and the prophets He has chosen. But Buddhism is a man-made doctrine, built through hearsay on the foundation of a philosophy propounded by one single man.
Using human reasoning to change what has come from God is a serious error. Those who get their heads full of half-baked ideas about the Buddhist way and, in their desire to imitate their favorite pop musicians or film stars, start to follow Buddhism as a fad, should consider this and free themselves from their mistake.
Why we rest at 9?