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Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Either it's your fate to die in a car crash or isn't. If it was 'fate' for someone to die in a car crash, or murdered by someone, then it also has to be fate for 300,000 people to die in a natural disaster.
..I was just saying you can have a God and have people dying in natural disasters at the same time, maybe its off topic but thats where it was heading on the last thread so thats what I wrote..
Doesn't make God a terribly attractive proposition though.
But in any case, aren't God and fate linked? Fate must have been laid down by someone after all. Someone must have decided that Mr so-and-so is going to be run over by a bus next Monday- otherwise it wouldn't be fate, just a random occurrence.
It could be linked to God, I mean they say "God has a plan for you" and such. But again we do have free will, which indicates our own choices and possibly not a fate.
Myabe it doesn't make it attractive but if he said he isn't interfering, he isn't interfering. Sticking to the word at least.
People have to die somehow anyway, you can't live forever. Its just antaural occurance you may or may not die in. No real biggie for me.
I suppose then we start getting into ideals of freedom and whether or not we have the liberty to make the decisions and choices that we imagine we do. I'm not too sure that we have completely free will, but I think that any predestined conclusion has to be reached through some voluntary decisions...if that makes sense. :crazyeyes
The idea of predestination/determinism (whether you're religious/agnostic) usually just gives me a headache, so I try not to think too much about it. However, I do try to believe in free will and being the master of your own "fate" - whatever the hell that means...
It makes sense to me briggi
Its a nice view actually.
Mmm... debatable
"Join the Dark Side Luke. It is your destiny"
Hmm, it's true that I hadn't considered George Lucas's philosophical school of thought.
:chin:
Well they were very profound and believable.
:yeees:
Seriously though, there's no way I believe we're all pencilled in to die on a certain date. If someone decided "haha, I'm going to trick fate/death and kill myself TODAY" would "fate" have predicted that? It's all a wee bit daft to be given much credit imo.
It's like when somebody has a lucky escape from a car crash or even a plane crash, and they say "it simply wasn't my day to die".
Oh really? Why don't they put it to the test, and jump off a cliff or shoot themselves with a shotgun before the day is over? Surely they'll survive that too since it wasn't their day to die. :rolleyes:
People will die of natural disasters or any other cause. I don't believe God is there to save you from death, he's there to give you life after death and, consequently, to give meaning to present life, before you die.
That's what makes Him attractive IMO.
My own "belief" is mixed. I believe that most things are sort of within our control: John can choose to take the bus or a cab, and his choice will change his short term future a little (it's obvious how).
Of course, there are consequences that John can't predict; for example, the bus might get hijacked, and if John had chosen to take it he'll end up in city B instead of city A where he planned to go. If he chose the cab, he gets to city A.
But I also believe that there are some things that will happen no matter what. Not necessarily important ones. In the above example, imagine John takes the bus and ends up in city B. There he loses his wallet because of the incident. If he could travel back in time and take the cab, he'd think he won't lose his wallet since he won't be in the hijacking, but someone might pick his pocket.
In answer to this, and to your question 3 posts earlier, anyone who has the power of foreseeing and stopping a mass scale natural disaster that kills hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children and orphans, widows and make homeless many millions more of what are already very poor and struggling people, and does nothing to prevent it from happening is a rather nasty piece of work IMO.
I don't think I'm alone in thinking that incidentally. Even religious leaders were left to question what kind of God could allow such calamity to happen in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami...
Fair enough, it's very reasonable to think that, but as I said before I don't think that's what God is there for. He is not here to intervene to prevent suffering, as I said before. (And just incidentally, how do you know He hasn't prevented many other kinds of even more horrible suffering? If they were prevented we wouldn't know about them would we? But this is beside the point really.)
Of course I know you're not alone, you're representing the view of thousands of people, its not like I never heard of that reasoning before! I know many religious leaders question this as well, as we do all, but that doesn't prevent us from attempting to come up with some answers... i think that's precisely the point of questioning in the first place!
I'm going off the subject here, but I feel I have to "voice" one of my concerns about humanity. Millions of cats, dogs etc die before they're too old, but cats and dogs still exist. They don't have doctors among them, and the human doctors for pets don't bother with the larger part of the animal population.
With humans it's different: People die and it's horrible, so we try to keep everyone alive as long as possible, using medicine and stuff. But isn't that what has caused the overpopulation? So should we set a line at where to stop treating people? Like, someone has an organ failure and it has to be replaced... This isn't a natural process, and it's only done because the person's relatives/friends etc don't want him/her to die. How far does humanity go before it's gone too far?
NOTE: I'm not saying transplants etc should stop; it was just a question used to voice a concern. So don't attack me. If you're thinking about replying with something like "Well, let's have YOU have your <insert relation here> die because saving them wouldn't be natural, and see how you'd like it" then you've missed the whole point of what I said.
i don't really think things are predetermined, i'd like to think theres a choice in everything and infinite paths you can take.. obviously you could say 'you were always gonna choose that'. But i think the impulsiveness of people and the amount a certain circumstance can influence a decision shows we really do have choice. :cool:
I don't believe anyone has a partner marked out in life as "the one".
Every tiny decision you make has huge consequences. Every tiny decision I make has huge consequences. They bring people together, take people apart. But it's just coincidence.
while theres people who need caring for ...there will be caring people. where compassion is needed ...compassionate people will grow.
take out the pain of life and you loose ...something very valuable ...love compassion empathy etc.
the less there is to care about ...the less caring people there will be ...where does that leave us?
I can't say I understand your point? I don't believe that we a pre-determined path at all because we all have the free will to make decisions. You say its fate for 300,000 to die in natural disaster well its not necessarily pre determined that they will die because they could have been elsewhere at the time. I seriously can't understand why anything is pre determined because we always make our own decisions. I can understand that if I said my lifes over tomorrow then thats because its my fate but I find it obscene that a force greater than us has it planned that i'm going to do that.
As I said, I don't believe any of that happens.
Also Fate by definition is pre-determined events and not thoughts, unless you consider thoughts events which, if so, means even every single beat your hearth have has been written.
Fate could exist if the universe was just a piece of software running in a computer.
Also this is a theory that could be exact, as all the universe is is electricity, even when you touch an object or hit someting you think it is because it is hard, but it is actually because of its electrical charge. A blackhole could just be a virus eating a part of the software or a delete button being press. Stars could be just lines of code that haven't been cleaned up yet or process/scripts that are still running.
Don't mess with peoples heads with that shit