Questions, questions

I found this post confusing to write so I sure as hell don't know if it makes sense to anyone else. I wrote it as a step to try to resolve my own confusion.

I'm never been a particularly religious person. I don't really understand who or what God is but I do believe that we all have souls and that these souls are not just extinguished along with our bodies. I am more influenced by Hinduism (my family's religion and whence the title of my blog) than by Christianity (the religion that surrounds me in the society I live in). But I wasn't really brought up in a Hindu tradition*.

I've realised, however, that I did believe the existence of universal justice, be it divine or non-divine. For me, universal justice meant that if you live your life correctly, try to be a good person, helping others when you can, being generous of spirit, of time, of money etc etc, then really bad things won't happen to you.

This is obviously bullshit. Nice young people get cancer. Nice people have children who die before them. Nice people's husbands or wives are murdered in the street for no reason. Nice people get maimed in freak accidents. Nice people get sucked into war and become refugees or amputees. But all those things happen to mean people as well. So, what's the point of choosing to be nice or to be mean?

It's also bullshit as the flipside of universal justice is that somehow we must deserve our children dying because of something bad we did which I clearly do NOT believe. (Or rather I manage to quite strongly not believe it for other people but not so strongly for myself. I must have done something to deserve this, right? There's that universal justice again..... Actually I do think I'm making some progress on my own guilt factor).

Despite Moksha dying at the last hour, despite reading about people losing not one but two or even more children, or who want children but are having trouble getting pregnant, I still deep down believe that those things couldn't possibly happen to me, not now, because I've already paid my dues. It's someone else's turn. It's another one of those get-it-with-my-head-but-not-really-with-my-heart things. My conscious mind knows that it could happen again but my subconscious is saying, "Rubbish". Why, why do I still deep down believe this? It must be because I still believe that universal justice protects me. Even though it doesn't protect other people. Even though they already paid their dues as well.

I think I want to believe in universal justice as believing it means that I believe that I can influence the way in which my life turns out and therefore have some sort of control over it. But does this mean that I only do nice things for other people because I'm buying protection from the universe? I don't think so. I suppose I do them because they make me feel good. But why do they make me feel good?

I'm by no means an authority on the matter, but it seems to me that Hinduism teaches that the karma, good or bad, that you accumulate in this life will influence your next lives and not this one. But it also teaches that to be freed from the cycle of rebirth, you need to stop desiring to reap results from your actions (things, outcomes). That's how you attain moksha. I think this means I'm expecting too much from universal justice, at least in this life and that I'm not close to attaining moksha. One of my cousins, a life-long practicing Hindu, told me that he believed my son's soul only needed to spend very little time on earth for this last, earthly life before attaining moksha. I found his words comforting, despite never having been very religious.

Or am I just confusing universal justice with hope? If I am then I suppose it is a good thing as it means I still have hope. Which is supposed to be a good thing, isn't it?

*Well, other than not being allowed boyfriends - until I was 18 and went away to university and could throw that rule out of the window on my own. For the record I don't think the rule did me any harm but I obviously didn't think that at the time.