Which concept has done more good in the world? Karma or The God of Abraham?

[MTZehvor]

snyps said:

MTZehvor said:
By the definition of the word "more," it's fairly obvious that belief in the God of Abraham has done more, simply because more people believe in him than have ever believed in Karma. Far more acts of "goodness" can be attributed to believers in God simply because there are more of them that have done good acts. The same can be applied to be evil question as well. Far more people have done evil in the name of the God of Abraham (regardless of whether their beliefs are well placed or not), because there are far more believers.

It's simple counting, really.

I don't believe you can say there's more chritians than people who believe in karma. Half of the world believes in karma. Even christians. It's a common philosophy in all of asia and india too. I don't have hard numbers and you make a valid point. I'm just saying, that's my understanding.

Then I suppose we need a more concrete definition of the term "karma." Karma is the belief that, when you die, the various amounts of good and bad deeds that you have done during your life are weighed against each other, and you are reincarnated into a new life, the quality of which depends on how moral of a life you lived. If you lived a morally upright life, you are likely to be reincarnated into a higher quality life; if  you lived a bad life, you may be reincarnated into a lower status person, or perhaps even an animal. Going by this definition of karma, no, half the world does not believe in it, and certainly no Christians do.

If you are simply defining karma as "believing that at some point your good actions will be rewarded, and your bad actions will be punished," then yes, you could make the claim that more people believe in karma than do God (or at least the God of Abraham). However, that in and of itself is one of the central pillars of essentially all religion, so this comparison is a nearly impossible one to make. There's no way to determine for sure how many people are acting simply out of goodwill, or acting because they believe they will be rewarded for it, or whether there's a combination of the two motives.

So it really all comes down to what exactly you mean by "karma."