I know that, in theory, once you become “saved” as a Christian and realize that since Jesus is paying for your sins, you wouldn’t want to sin again. If you do, well, you’re just adding to his misery, and unless you’re a really big jerk you wouldn’t want to do that, right?

(Of course, that begs the question- since he already died on the cross can the amount he suffered be changed retroactively based on how much we sin today?)

But that didn’t always make a heck of a lot of sense to me. I was that kid that probably bugs the heck out of the Sunday School teacher who asks things like “if Jesus forgives us for all our sins, then if we sin and just say we’re sorry, is it all better?”

I recently read a pretty terrific quote that sums this up. It’s attributed to Emo Phillips. I don’t know if it’s for real or not, but it goes something like this:

“When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in His wisdom, doesn’t work that way, so I went out and stole one and then asked Him to forgive me.”

Now, I know this is meant to be a funny, but it does point out the seeming contradiction that Christians exhibit sometimes. Go out and sin, and all you gotta do is feel bad and want to repent, and God forgives you. (Most of the Protestant churches don’t even require you to “pay off” your sins with varying levels of penence when you’re doing reconciliation. At least the Catholics have to do a lot more stuff the worse their sins are!)

A Buddhist take on it, on the other hand, would be that there is no sin; there’s only cause and effect, and you have to decide what kind of effects that you want to have in the future. Yeah, when you steal the bike, you might wind up having a “good” effect- you have a bike to ride. Of course, you’ve caused some misery in someone’s life, and that “bad” karma is in your karmic account books no matter what.

You might live to suffer the effects of that action in this life; you could be riding down the street on your shiny new stolen bike, and the owner could see you and run you over with his truck. Or the cops might catch you, and you’d have to answer to the law. Or it might be that nothing happens in THIS lifetime, other than you have to live with a guilty conscience bugging you at night. (Of course, this isn’t much of a threat to some people; they seem to be quite untroubled by their consciences.)

The point here is that when you compare the Christian viewpoint to the Buddhist one, after stealing the bike your “soul” (for lack of a better word) is in some bit of jeopardy. The Christian God is going to be pretty ticked off for your sin; there’s nobody running the show in Buddhism other than the natural law of the universe, but that law will come around to bite you in the ass sooner or later, via karma.

To get out of this situation, Christians need merely repent, say they’re sorry, and be cleaned by the grace of God or Jesus’s sacrifice or however you want to term it.

So how, exactly, does a Buddhist “repent” or clean up their karmic permanent record, so to speak? There’s no “God” that we appeal to for mercy.

In fact, this is where some people get hung up in Buddhism. Annoying little kids in Dharma Class (yes, there is such a thing in some Buddhist organizations) probably say “well, since the stolen bike is on my karma now anyway, there’s no sense in feeling sorry for it- I’ll pay the price, right?”

Well, not exactly. See, the thing about being Buddhist is that we think that at every moment in life- every split-second- we each have a chance to elevate our life condition into the state of Buddhahood. We can attain the enlightenment that Shakyamuni knew, and indeed that’s what we encourage ourselves and others to strive for.

So if we’ve got that stolen bike messing things up, what can we do to improve our karma? Well, the obvious thing is to try and make things right. We can return the bike, for starters. It would also be a good karmic cause to apologize for it (not to mention good manners, although as budding bike thieves we probably don’t give too big a rip about manners.)

Then the person would get their bike back and we would have added to the happiness in the world. Of course, we might not have totally fixed our karma; their happiness is likely not quite enough to make up for the sorrow and misery they had while we had stolen their bike. But we’ve gone a long way to repairing our karma, which is nice.

Now, this brings up a bunch of other questions. Can we leave a note anonymously, or do we make a “better cause” if we also turn ourselves in to the cops after returning the bike? What if the person never noticed the bike was gone, did our karma take a hit at all? You could make an argument that in that case, stealing the bike was a net good; we got to ride somewhere we wanted or needed to go, and the victim of our crime never knew it so there was no suffering involved.

You can see how Buddhism has its own set of questions and things to ponder!

I don’t think I really have a point here; I’m just kind of meandering along the page.

I guess if I do, it’s this: People sometimes think that if you don’t believe in God and some kind of ultimate punishment or reward for doing good things or bad things, you would go out and do all kinds of bad stuff all the time.

The right-wing fundies sometimes say this straight up, claiming that all morality comes from God and therefore anyone who doesn’t believe in God (or at least believe in God the way that THEY do) is an immoral scumbag.

Yet we can see that there’s plenty of ways that Buddhists, or at least some, struggle with the effects of bad causes (or “sin”) and wind up wanting to do the right thing.

The difference, for me, is that as a Christian I often wanted to do the right thing because of the big threat- make God happy, or you’re going to hell. (Talk about extortion!) Even if you’re motivated from a relatively positive point of view- not wanting Jesus to suffer more than he should- it’s still motivating you via guilt and manipulation.

As a Buddhist, on the other hand, there’s no mystical thinking involved (at least if you ignore the notion of reincarnation and karmic retribution/rewards via that process). You want to do the right thing because you want to minimize people’s suffering, and that directly includes your own. Even if you set karma aside, many Buddhists would say that the scientific law of cause and effect is at play, and the odds are that being a bike thief is going to have a bad result for you at some point.

To me, while the Buddhist system can be more weird and frustrating, overall it makes more sense. Yet another reason I wound up as a wacky Buddhist instead of a very lapsed Christian like I was!