Bumper Sticker

I was driving behind another car today with that bumper sticker "My karma just ran over your dogma." I swear that one day, at a long light, I am going to creep out and peel it off someone's car - not really but I do not like it.

If you know me you know I have a pretty good sense of humor but I just find this particular quip so symptomatic of things which seem to haunt our society that it always irks me. Firstly it is bladly cruel but then so is much humor which I would find funny so I shall override that objection. More that that though, it plays on a fear of anything absolute.

Karma seems in the popular mind to be self- propelled, molded by my own experience - dogma is imposed by a distant male oriented and controlled world. Karma is warm and very fuzzy while dogma is cold and defined. Karma heals while dogma hurts.

Now of course people have always used dogma to poke holes and carry kingdoms but that is not the fault of dogma - it is the misuse of it. That God exists is dogma, to state it is to be dogmatic - and the fact that I, somehow, feel bad being dogmatic - which is not a bad thing - is why I do not like the bumper sticker because it plays into a set of assumptions and developing cultural norms which I do not believe are healthy.

By allowing this creeping warm and fuzziness to invade everything we lose the ability to proclaim boldly what it is that we believe. There is nothing wrong with definite belief, there is nothing wrong with working things out and asking questions either - but it seems to me that the fact that it has become OK just to poke fun at anything which someone did not think up yesterday just because people are people and establishments get tangled and untangled over time - that is not right.

My reality is that I find rest and in the dogma - sometimes I find it irritating or hurtful and then I have to decide where to go with that - but there are edges to my life - edges which would be really hard to find if I were waking up every day and writing my own rules. I see dogma and doctrine not as a prison cell but as a safe shelter so perhaps I should make by own sticker

"How about taking my Dogma for a ride in your Karma?"