Karma and Bad Luck Explained

It has been said by sundry wits that it is bad luck to be superstitious. Many people believe that when they endure a series of negative incidences in their lives, that it is as a result of bad luck, or sometimes karma.

Karma is the belief that your deeds shape your past, your present and your future. Some dogmatists of karma believe that if you are having a spate of bad luck, it is your fault.

Now this may be true if for example you committed a crime and now find yourself ostracized and unable to find work. But in this situation, one can connect the dots between cause and effect.

What about when ordinary people suffer a string of reverses that is not their fault, or as a result of their action? They bemoan that fact that God is punishing them for something, or that there an a causal agent that is giving them a string of bad luck.

In a world with a naturalistic, non-mystical viewpoint, we must consider the "sum of all histories and probabilities" explanation.

Life on earth is chaotic. When you add the chaos of many individuals operating in society, the amount of deterministic events that go into any particular outcome is absolutely huge. There are more factors in every day living than we ever imagine. For example, by going to the grocery store, we never imagine that as we cross an intersection, a driver becomes distracted by any number of causes and runs into us. Our day is ruined, and we think that we somehow brought this bad luck upon ourselves. In fact, when one examines this in the cold hard light of reason, it is very much like a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing, ultimately causes rain in New York City.

So we must rid ourselves of thoughts of superstition. Luck is a convenient way of ascribing attributes to outcomes. If the outcomes are pleasing to us, it is good luck, and if they are not, it is bad luck. There is no higher element that sits in judgment of us and punishes us because we contravened some universal code of conduct. Stuff happens. How we react to it, determines whether it is beneficial or not to us.