Now, me and Lady Philosopher: I’m in Blue.

I’m reading your FATE conversation now – there are some interesting discussion points in there!

I personally do believe in fate and do not feel that people use it as a scapegoat as you suggest. Instead people put actions or outcomes down to fate where they cannot identify any other logical explanation. I can hear you saying now – well then it is a scapegoat but it is not. People are not using it as an excuse for something but as a way of trying to understand better why something happened – be it good or bad. This does not make it wrong or the people who believe in it simple as they should be asking deeper questions or identifying the real reasons – it is just there is no other reason but that it happened.

The first paragraph of mine points out my perspective, which is that things do not happen for a reason. They just happen. People say they happen for a reason because they can obtain some kind of meaning once the situation has passed. I do not believe anything happens for any reason. Read the first paragraph again. People may not use Fate as a reason to sit back and do nothing with their lives, but the one person I had in mind when I wrote this used Fate as a reason not to think about the future as “everything will be done for her”. She also believed in a predetermined life “map”.

I believe that your life is mapped out for you. You are going to die when that map tells you etc. You can travel to work on the same train every day and cross the same road a hundred times – yes it is a choice you make, but how do you know that on that one day the train is going to crash or you get knocked down by a car? Alternatively, you may be five minutes late that day – miss the train and it crashes and you survive – why?

Because you made the choices to be five minutes late. You decided to brush your hair instead of running out the house to catch your normal bus. You decided to stay in bed just that little bit longer. Because you made the choices to use the same section of road every day to cross over. You die on that one day because the person driving the car made those choices which provided an opportunity for him to be in the specific place to run you over on that day. The driver was “Fate” for himself. You were your own “Fate”. Today, your choices made you cross paths.

It is a bit like that film we watched with the plane crash [Final Destination]. They were fated to die so when they escaped the crash death still came looking for them because it was supposed to happen.

At the bottom of my document it asks: is it conceivable that one can act against one’s own “Fate”? Like the guys in the movie. My opinion is that they acted according to their choice. He made an informed decision to get off the plane. So did the freaky girl. The others had it decided for them by behaving irrationally, but they still made the choice to behave inconsiderately which resulted in them getting thrown off the plane. They made it happen for themselves. Death was “cheated” but by your reasoning, how could they have possibly cheated death when their lives are mapped out? Surely it was their “Fate” to NOT die on that plane, but instead to die in other places. Ask me about the story of Death and the horsemantoday. If you believe our lives are mapped, those kids were not destined to die on that plane, therefore, it was NOT “supposed” to happen as you suggest above.

I cannot help but think emotively about fate as well. I know you say you should not bring emotions into it but we are not machines and it is how we live, what defines our thought processes etc therefore emotions cannot be ignored. Take my Dad dying at 53 of bowel cancer – he did not make that choice. He hated the fact that he only had weeks to live. By the time the cancer was identified, his body was so ravished with it that he did not have the opportunity to live out his last weeks as he may have liked. We could note explain that – his time was up and there was nothing any doctor could have done to change that.

I have something to say here but it’s not something I should say to you in this instance so I’ll keep my mouth shut.

I also heard another story once related to re-incarnation and fate. It is said that people can only live on this earth a maximum number of years, say 100 for instance. However, this is not always in one go and if you do it in one go you are lucky. Instead a lot of people do it in segments. This is supposed to explain why people die so young as they only had say 2 years of their maximum time left. I do not really believe in this though although it is an interesting theory.

It’s not an interesting theory. It’s a nice escape or convenient route of release for those people who have lost loved ones at an early age. It’s a way of assigning a “reason” to something unpleasant, as I say in my first paragraph. Re-incarnation is also an act of faith by a people who cannot accept we die and nothing comes afterwards. It is man’s inherent conceit: his need to feel more than he actually is. We are born. We die. That’s it. People who believe any different are scared that they may have wasted their time on this planet and are hoping for another go in either an afterlife or another chance at life. Try making the most of this life first. You’re a long time dead and 70 years is not very long in the grand scheme of things.

When you talk about changing over time and making decisions that affect the outcome of your life – you feel that you are taking control and not fate. Would you consider that this process is all part of fate and that you were supposed to change in this way and supposed to make those decisions?

Absolutely not. You read my mail yesterday in reply to this. If that were the case, how would we ever make a decision in our lives? Why would we even bother if things were mapped out and every decision we made was supposed to lead us to our predetermined life goal? So, if I were to sit at home and not do anything for the next 20 years, would you say that I was Fated to be a lazy fat bastard on my couch? But the simplest choice I could make for a life-change would negate that course of action. So where is your argument? I don’t understand your reasoning.

Finally, I disagree with Laura when she says you know you are on the right path because it all becomes easy. Life is never easy. Fate can mean things are going good or bad for you – but they are going as fate intended!

“Fate” doesn’t intend anything for you Lady P.. Nor me. Is it “Fate” that you and I met? Did we meet for a reason? Did we meet for the sole reason we should marry? Are we “Fated” to know each other for the rest of our lives or are we destined to break up at 40? Only you and I hold that answer. Not “Fate”. WE decide our “Fate” there. That is why I said when someone is asked “What is your Fate?” their only response should be “Me”. Take responsibility for your actions. Stop using Fate as a reason to believe life is planned and therefore any decisions we make are acceptable as it is what “Fate” intended. It’s too easy to use a concept to release you from any decision-making responsibility.
I believe life is as easy as you want to make it. Or as complicated, obviously. If you make your life easy, it will feel right, therefore Laura has a point, although I do not agree with her intrinsically.

A lesson learned is not something that was predetermined for you to learn. A situation just didn’t work out. The fact that you can gain a lesson from it shows your intelligence and your ability to learn. It doesn’t mean it was meant to happen, ergo “Fate”.

It also shows the human need to assign meaning to everything. We place meaning on our lives by believing in the existence of a “heaven”. We create a God to back this theory up. It would be inconceivable to us as sentient human beings if we didn’t have a bad experience and pull some meaning out of it. And should we live 70 years with nothing to show after we die, well, that would be unbearable!!!

I don’t believe in heaven nor god. I believe they fill a gap for those less independent of thought than myself.

If something bad happens to me, it is due to my own bad decisions or choices. The fact that I have been fired from 3 jobs in previous years and now think I am on the right path could be misinterpreted as “they were meant to happen”.

Nonsense!  I messed up and I paid the price for each bad decision. I have learned from my mistakes, as any normal person would which is why I am able to keep this job and be on better terms. Do you see? If you learn from previous errors, of course you are going to fair better in your current situation, whether it is love, work, family, cars… and because you are doing so much better now, you then assign meaning to your previous errors and say “they were meant to happen”.

I hope that cleared it up for you. I’m just kidding. I don’t purport to have any answers at all, just my own meanderings.

You can decide whether there is a God and if it gets you through the day, then so be it.

But what is certain is that you are exactly where you are right now because you made ALL the decisions to get you there.

And I mean ALL of them.