disecting a tweet

The other night, NBA Superstar Lebron James posted to his Twitter account this:

Crazy. Karma is a [expletive].. Gets you every time. Its not good to wish bad on anybody. God sees everything!

Now while a bunch of people note want to talk about the very interesting dynamics that he brings to the NBA. People may want to talk about the situation he’s tweeting about [how his old team now stinks]. Some people will love to comment that he’s posting about God. Some will not like the fact that he swears. But I’m interested in something else.

Note how Lebron mentions Karma and God in the same sentence. He has no problem bringing these two concepts into one streaming thought.

Karma:
This is an Eastern religious concept about how the world works. It talks about
balance and even ness in the world. If you do good, the universe will reward you
with good. If you do bad, well the universe will repay you with bad. In the end
it is a sort of weird balance in the universe that governs life.

God
This is the concept that there is a divine being who is out there that is in
control of the world. This being governs all that is, and rules it with complete
sovereignty.

Now if you take just a couple of seconds and look at those two descriptions, you’ll see that they’re opposite views…one is divine being, one is a unspecific “universe” … they cannot exist together. What he has done in his statement is combine two mutually exclusive concepts together.

What gets me is that I see this all the time. We are combining religious phrases and concepts into one, this blending without understanding what we’re talking about is dangerous, because it does harm to religion itself. Yet it is something that is completely normal for the world that you and I now live in.