Not why we’re here, Pat, in my estimation. You’ll have picked up that I follow the insights and worldview offered by Tom Campbell’s Big TOE (amongst other wisdom-caches that resonate with me), and I operate on the assumption that we immortal souls incarnate here - in this virtual reality (sic!) called physical material reality - which is really a deliberately-created holodeck on which we play out our repeated incarnations - in order to help Big Mind pursue its over-riding Great Purpose.
This I take to be the endless struggle against all-encroaching high entropy, which strives to dissolve everything into the white noise of total chaos. Not that entropy is some sort of devil figure, but simply a logically-inherent tendency in the basic nature of things, which has to be opposed if any structured reality at all is to be created by evolution.
To this end, Big Mind creates individual souls, as never-disconnected outgrowths of itself, to act rather as the special-purpose organs in our bodies act: We assist in this struggle. And Big Mind creates our holodeck, on which we run our repeating bouts of incarnation, life-after-life, for this basic purpose.
Rum-sounding ideas, I know. But I think they stand up to critical inspection. Our adventures here on the holodeck, where free-will is a logically-essential condition for the existence and useful functioning of each soul, are a sort of accelerated contribution to the struggle against entropy; a struggle also quite realistically described as growing towards love, in the broadest interpretation of that many-facetted word.
On this thesis, any kind of vengeance-driven punishment is definitely a step in the backwards direction. Growing towards love - including compassion and forbearance - is a prime imperative. If we don’t do that always, we’re actually detracting from, rather than contributing to, the Great Purpose.
Believe me, I feel the temptation towards punitive vengeance myself, constantly. It requires continual self-discipline not to succumb to it. But in the end, I think that it can never be right.
My prescription for the appalling criminals loose in the world is less indulgent of the vengeful impulse. They’ve been using their free-will most unadvisedly, since every time they die and go back for another sojourn in the bardo state between incarnations, as the Tibetan buddhists call it, they’re going to be confronted with a kindly, compassionate, gentle, but nonetheless withers-wringing life-review of what they did in their latest incarnation. Their negative karma will be reckoned, and then in their next incarnation they’ll be offered yet another chance to re-balance it; to their own benefit, and to that of the Great Purpose, if they choose. It’s all a matter of choosing freely to be more loving and compassionate oneself, voluntarily. We’re here to lead the good life, as best we can.
So, as I’ve recommended before, those convicted in our tribunals of dreadful crimes need to be put to substantial stints of public service work, for fixed terms, without the option to decline, whilst they think about what they’ve done, and where it’s lead them. Justice, but always with compassionate mercy. A sort of restrained preliminary to what they’ll have to face when they next visit the bardo state.
I’d say that our will to vengeance needs to be confined to that level of response, simply so that we ourselves don’t fall into the error of actually contributing to, rather than working against, entropy.
In the long run, I think that souls who indulge in acts of negative karma persistently will simply be reabsorbed back into Big Mind, as being defective, non-functioning units. No more incarnation adventures for them!
But then, the buddhists say that getting off the Wheel of Rebirth is precisely the point of their idea of nirvana…
I dunno…!