I am a terrible, terrible person.
I was in the shower this morning, doing showery things--singing, soaping, pondering religion--when I realized that, if there's a God, she most certainly hates me.
Let me explain:
Somehow, after a stirring rendition of Can't Help Falling In Love (with an encore of Prison Sex, no less--the irony of this just strikes me now), I got to breaking down various aspects of religion as I understand it. With the multitude of faiths in this world, both theistic and ethicalistic, there are some obvious common threads. These are, I decided:
1. The world was created.
2. Eventually, the world will end.
3. When a person dies, something happens to them corresponding to the actions they took during life.
The first two precepts are fairly self-explanatory: God, Yahweh, Allah, Brahma, or whomever made the world, and, at the Eschaton or the coming of Shiva or what-have-you, the world will end.
The third idea has much more variation between Eastern and Western faiths. While Semetic religions generally believe in a Heaven or Hell (with or without a Purgatory first), Easterners tend more towards a belief in reincarnation until ascension to nirvana or a similar goal. And karma.
My understanding of karma is basically this: you do something. If that something is good, you will be rewarded for it later; if bad, you will be punished accordingly, perhaps by being reincarnated as a slug or something equally disgusting.
Now, while I'm mulling over this karma stuff, I'm also in the process of shampooing. As I try to close the top on the bottle, a huge glob of VO5 flies right into my eye. I don't recall ever getting shampoo in my eye before, but this stuff was downright corrosive. I thought my eye was melting! I leapt from the shower and started the excruciating process of rinsing my eye out to try and quell the burning. It still stings a bit an hour or so later.
What am I supposed to make of this? I think about karma and the afterlife, deconstructing beliefs in my head, and I get an eyeful of shampoo! Talk about an omen! I'm so going to hell...