Do you believe in predestination?

Personally, I believe so. Although I still don’t quite like the idea of having my life destined for me, I think that we all have an individual purpose.

Here on Fluther though, you’ll find quite a lot of existentialists, those who believe that the world universe is essentially what we make it to be. Ergo we give life its own meaning. It’s a concept worth looking into, in my opinion.

And naw, we all reach that stage when nothing much makes sense. If you were to ask me, I think I’m still in it. =)

I do not believe in predestination or determinism. As with any other animal, our purpose is what we make it. We should focus our efforts on improving the human race, and taking care of the environment.

In a sense we do since we inherit genes from our parents.

I don’t think there’s anything like destiny or fate. Every choice we make opens up new doors. Our choice provides us with new choices, which open up even more doors. We live our lives through our own decisions, not through a predetermined course.

I think of life as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. You don’t know what’s going to happen if you go through the ominous door or follow the dark knight into the castle (unless you keep your finger on the page and turn back as soon as you see it’s a dead end, but that’s beside the point). You choose a direction, and where you end up after that is up to you.

I’m afraid I don’t really believe that. I believe there are things that we are good at doing and that doing those things may bring about the most good in the world and the most satisfaction in ourselves. So in a way, you might be “meant” to do that, but I don’t believe that there is any prediction of the future that exists. Every move we make reshapes the path of the future. It’s constantly being changed.

I don’t think “life is pointless” (because I believe we assign our own “point” to it) and there may be more to life than anyone can know and there may be an afterlife and such. But as for predetermined fate, I don’t really think so. Part of the reason I find the Calvinist belief of predestination to heaven or hell to be nothing short of absurd.

It can’t be proved. Postulating it cannot prove or predict anything. So who cares? Even if it is so, it is useless to know it.

And the likelihood that things that can;t be proved, can’t be tested experimentally, and can’t be used to predict anything are actually true is so close to nil as to reasonably be ignored even if accepting the idea would do some good.

If there is a purpose/destiny and I’m not aware of it, there might as well not be any at all.

My outlook is pretty much to enjoy the moment.

In the grand scheme of things, what happens is as much judged by our actions and responses as anything – as they say “it’s all in what you make of it”.

In the end, destiny or no destiny, it’s about what you do and the choices you make.

While our genetics may determine whether we have bodies suitable to be an athlete, or the intellect to be a scholar, our experience with the environment interacts with our genetic heritage to determine what choices we will make. What we become, how we live, and what we will accomplish are the product of our capabilities and our life choices.

We do not simply act out a predetermined script.

Oh, this is always fun.
I believe that we have a purpose, and that God has a plan for everything, though it’s not necessarily irresistible or unamendable.

I do not, however, believe in predestination. Rather, I believe that we have the freedom to make choices, or at the very least to lament that there aren’t more of them. Our circumstances are determined by our past actions and the past actions of billions (trillions?) of other people throughout the ages, but what we do in those circumstances is entirely up to us.

I believe in free will .

Most people who believe in God will have some investment into the concept of predestination if they understand it correctly. More simply put, this same group of people you will often hear say “it is God’s will” hence their belief in predestination.

Me, I don’t buy into it…life is full of too many choices, too many opportunities, way too random and the big kicker….“luck of the draw” to allow for predestination in any shape or form. I am who I am because of my choices and a lot of hard work.

Yes. I think we all have choices, but some are unavoidable, and we are meant to do something.
And not necessarily good things.

I think I’m mainly with @Nullo on this.

God has a plan AND He has a purpose for our being here… but unless we learn of it and pay attention to those spiritual aspects of our lives that He deems most important to satisfying those purposes, we are not going to be very well equipped for what lays ahead in the after-life, which is, initially, the world of the spirits.

We CAN know His purposes, nevertheless… if we desire to know them and approach Him in prayer and learn of the Gospel of Christ. We will gradually comprehend His purposes for us and for Man generally.

For ALL of us: We all have choice entirely, in all that we do, though some options are heavily skewed by those things Doc @Dr_Lawrence mentioned. Materially, they may be severely skewed in their ‘temptation’, for instance, if we are in some prison camp with a knife at our throats for giving any wrong answers!!

But regardless of our genes, backgrounds, or circumstances, and of our capacity to choose for ourselves, the doctrines, for instance, of “predestination” and/or “foreordination” exist in that God, being an Eternal Being, lives and resides in “Eternity” – which means that ALL things are constantly before His eyes that exist in “Time” ... and We live in ‘time’ – Not in eternity.
He, on the other hand, sees ALL things as forever present before Him – both things past, present and future – that is, even what we call “the future” is actually present before God constantly: so although WE personally choose our life’s path for ourselves, God can see all those choices that we have made and that we will yet make before His eyes.
So, in a ‘loose’ manner of speaking, we could say that from that point, “predestination” exists, IF we wish to interpret predestination with that meaning.

Not really, no. We have very little choice in matters, but we aren’t predestined, per se.

I seriously doubt that everything that happens is for the better.

For those who believe that all people are born in sin and doomed to hell unless they believe a particular way and act and think in the prescribed manner, there can be no free will or even free choice.

I believe we have the choice to act morally or immorally. We have the ability to come back from doing hurtful and hateful things. Nothing is predetermined. That is why personal responsibility is so important. It comes with the ability to choose and it is a heavy burden.

No. I believe anything we do has many many paths and posible outcomes.

No, I don’t even believe there is any such thing as a grand scheme of things. What is, is and that’s all there is.

It is baffling to me to see the people in Haiti praising God that they survived, which leads to the conclusion that they believe God chose to let them make it through the quake, when that same event killed half their family including all their children and they do NOT conclude that God had anything to do with that.

No, not at all, nor in any of the underlying assumptions. I believe in the law of cause and effect.

I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter.

@ETpro – I believe you are failing to acknowledge that since Adam chose to follow the serpent-devil in disguise over God’s directive to him that that was his condonement for allowing BOTH – God and Satan to exercise power and influence in the earth and within our lives.
Once you mentally have this picture of things in place in your mind – that Satan equally exercises power in the earth – GIVEN freely to him by man, it will explain an awful lotLOL!

@denidowi We have talked often enough now for you to know that I believe that the creation myth belief is a fairy tale meant to explain human understanding of creation as it existed in the days of the early wanderings of the Jewish people. It is very interesting and allegorically it’s incredibly instructive, but I do not believe it has any bearing on spirit beings exercising control over events on the earth.

I don’t believe in predestination (nor in God). I believe in chance and coincidence, in cause and effect, and I believe that we have the free will to react to those events as we wish. For the most part, we make our own luck.

@ETpro – so if you don’t believe that spirit beings control or influence earth life, why do you persist, with the rest of the sheep, on this claim that God causes our probs and our catastrophes??

@denidow You might not get labled a problem as you were in another thread here recently if you refrained from calling people sheep because they refuse to accept your belief system. You might also fare better if you took the time to read what they actually say before blasting them for being sheep for saying it.

I never indicated that I believed that God causes our suffering, nor do I believe that. I remarked that I did not understand people ascribing all the good that happens to them to God who controls everything, but simultaneously thinking God has no control over the terrible things that happen to them. It seems inconsistent to me, that’s all.

What I am saying here, Etro, is that God is not the sole maker of our probs in life.
ALL things experience an Opposition: light and dark, health and sickness, birth and death, pain and pleasure, and happiness and misery.
I am saying that these opposite experiences do not spring from the Creation of God.
I don’t think it is hard to agree that if God is Eternal, then everything He does is also eternal.
I don’t think that is illogical, or hard to follow.
Yet this earth life is NOT unchanging – in fact it seems ‘ever-changing’.
An eternal God, by His own nature, would make an eternal man… yet man is not eternal.
God cannot be ‘the author’ of death and disease, or that would make His performance imperfect – extremely so, in fact.
That is No God.

So… the question is: ‘How did we somehow become ‘fallen man’??”
How is it that we are so far from Permanent… so far from Forever happy… so far from a life of Purity and calm and peace???
Why if God creates only GOOD… why do we experience so much challenge and misery??

@denidowi I was not talking about any contradiction in your belief system. I don’t know wnough about what you profess to even address that. What I was talking about were contradictions apparent to me in what people in Haiti were saying, as they expressed a sort of on-again off-again belief in predestination.

@ETpro
Fate and predestination are big, big questions; throughout the ages brilliant minds with nothing better to do have hurled themselves at the question, after all. I’d bet that the average Haitian didn’t have the time to sit and hammer out a complete opinion on the matter.

@Nullo Particularly now, I am sure you are quite right about that. Good point. Why would I even expect someone in the midst of that chaos and horror to be making great sense?

stopped following

Some good points on the case in Haiti, Guys
@Shield_of_Achilles – You can’t afford to stop following; there is much value in all this for you ;)

It is, indeed, a worthwhile point, when you regularly hear people say that perhaps our circumstances or unfortunate happenings were meant to be.
Wel… perhaps they were.
I had an extremely TOUGH first marriage . I had served 2 missions for the Lord’s Church, yet I came up against a ‘dragon marriage’ – that had to end in divorce despite all that i and helpful Church leaders would endevour to do.
I know I wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t believe I was ‘worthy’ of such extreme relationship failure, or the extreme aggravations that characterized my first wife’s whole ‘world’, for want of a better term!
I had ALWAYS been faithfull all my life, from only 5 years old… I could not fathom the “Why?” in this most important relationship failure.

Even today, despite the large difficulties I have also experiencedin the 2nd marriage, which would naturally, lead one to think, “Well… if the 2nd is hard too, then surely it must be your own doing!” ... despite all these things, and my knowlege re my family relationships of my upbringing – that I was the hard-working, altruistic son and brother, I still find it awkward to maintain that perhaps ‘it was meant to be’!!??
The Why question still lurks like a deep shadow over the entire scene.

I guess one way or another, we are ALl asking ourselves the ‘Why’ question!!

@denidowi There’s a point you and I can certainly agree upon. Life tests us all. And while we might all want it to be nothing but a bed of clover, it is often the testings that carve us into the caring, strong people we are meant to become.

Precisely, Etro
So I’m sure that was no Accidental plan on the Creator’s part ;)
I think He knows exactly what He’s ‘carving’LOL

@denidowi You may be right. I can arrive at the same sort of construct starting from a Big-Band theory though. So that alone is no proof.

I will never believe that the Lord predetermines that people should be born Autistic or with incurable diseases. Human Kind creates poisons that cause illness. Human Kind is responsible.
If there is a G-d he, she or it gives Human Kind the tools to find cures and solutions. It is up to us to find away. I believe solutions are possible if Human Kind concentrates on finding them. Unfortunately too much Human potential is concentrated on hate, war and destruction.
Too many people wish to stop research and not to use the potential we are provided with. I call them fascist. Who claim to speak for G-d but no Human has that right.
I ask them to please listen to Nancy Regan. Please open your hearts and mines to her experience . Please show compassion for those who are suffering .
I am an Agnostic who desperately wishes to believe in a compassionate G-d.
I am the Mother of an Autistic young Man . If you could walk in my shoes or Nancy Regan’s for a a couple of Years; you would all comprehend the great need for research.
Human society controls most of what happens on Earth. Not using all Human potential is a sin.

i think that we make our own destiny. if we just wait around all day to wait for the “grand scheme of things” to fall into place, nothing would happen. if we wanna achieve something we got to work hard for it. maybe the grand plan falls into play if we succeed or not. but who cares? the point is, we know that we tried and there are no regrets.