Does it work for starving, AIDS infected orphans in Africa?
I don’t
Oh I forgot to add a smiley:
I don’t want to bash Christians, but yes, I think this is a warped Christian thing. I haven’t been to church in awhile, but I will never forget those times when the preacher would try to persuade people to give more (to the collection plate) by telling the congregation that God returns blessings 7-fold. “When the praises go up, the blessings come down”, he would tell people. And not in a one-to-one ratio, but a one-to-seven.
A Christian’s primary motivation to do good works should be living like Christ and loving people, not earning currency. And yet, this is what this guy was preaching.
Isn’t that just another way of saying the same thing?
Not really.
“Justice” generally suggests rewards and punishments.
Consider the act of having sex. For most such circumstances, justice is not relevant. The possibility of disease, pregnancy, emotional entanglement, and so on may be involved, but I don’t generally consider those to fall under the realm of “justice”. Also, the state of being no longer a virgin is a part of the karma of the act of having sex. Some people will consider this positive, some people will consider this negative, some people won’t assign either meaning to it, but whatever additional freighting gets laid on it, one cannot just go and start being a virgin again; that is the karma of the act.
but of course. Atheists can strive for enlightenment as well.
Interesting choice of words. 
Goddamn starving African children, throwing kinks into my system. 
Honestly, I don’t know if children are not developed enough to have any control over their lives or what. Or, probably, my theory is just wrong. I do know, for me (and for most of the adults I know) that trying to focus on the positive seems to lead to a better life. Obviously, this has practical limitations.
The Theravada view, or at least a very reasoned dissertation arising from it, can be found here:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/kamma.html
The Hindu view of Karma is something that passes from one lifetime to another - that our actions in life L, like how we treat others or how much merit we make, create our circumstances in life L+1, such as whether we’re a king or a fish. Depending on how well we deal with those circumstances in L+1, we generate karma (properly spelled ‘kamma’ in Pali) that influences our circumstances in L+2.
In Theravada’s more mystical moments (of which it has far, far too many), kamma can be realized in the same way, though rather than being an ongoing cycle it’s more shaped like a massive U - human, or a humanoid state (at the right balance of pleasurable and unpleasurable stimuli, an allegory for monkhood) is at the center, and depending on your actions in your human life you knock yourself away from the center and slowly work your way back to it.
However, the more practical view is that kamma is the psychological and spiritual consequences of your actions. Killing, stealing, lying, adultery, and drugs are kammically negative - regardless of their consequences in the here-and-now, whether you get away with them or whether they act towards the greater good or anything else, they will impair your spiritual progress.
Unless you’re not kammically human, or you generate neither-light-nor-dark kamma, which are whole other cans of worms . . .