Do you believe in fate?

Post Reply New Topic

I was just wondering if you believe in fate, ie whether you believe that things happen for a reason and sometimes we're given certain situations to learn something - or whether you think life happened and is happening randomly, and things that happen are a result of pure randomness? Do you believe that some things are just meant to be, or is it just pure chance how our lives develop?

Just in a curious mood...

I don't believe in fate, but I don't believe in randomness either. Events are generally deterministic - they occur due to prior causes. I am uncertain as to whether there can be really anything said to be true chance, or whether what we see as chance, really represents causes that our intelligence/knowledge is insufficient to see.

When I was younger I used to be more fatalistic - humans have evolved to try and find connections in things and reasons for things happening. This helps us to try and make sense of suffering. Ten years ago I was desperate to do this - I couldn't bear the idea that all that suffering was for nothing. Now I have accepted that things are just the way they are, and there is no purpose or reason behind them. People hurt you because they themselves have been hurt. You then go on to hurt others (generally without meaning to). Similar with other types of suffering. Everything influences everything else. Although it is deterministic, it isn't predictable because there are too many variables, for even the largest computer.

^^^I pretty much agree with MMS there. so basically, cause and effect, but also part chaos.

I don't believe in any sort of "big plan" for everything, or that everything is already determined and God just plays a tape that he already nows the ending of. that would make no sense, plus believing that everything is predetermined would be pretty dangerous- I could kill someone and say "well, if I managed to kill them, it must have been their fate".

so no, fate is complete BS.

I do believe in fate. I believe things happen for a reason...even if only for the simple reason, things must happen.

Fate, show thy force: ourselves we do not owe;
What is decreed must be, and be this so.
~ William Shakespeare

If time is the fourth dimension the future exists.

Thanks for the interesting replies. I totally agree that feelings of anger and hurt travel down the generations (if not dealt with by the person) and cause hurt to others, and the cycle continues. This is a big part of why things happen to us. Unresolved emotions have so much power!

I'm also curious about seeminly random events such as meeting the love of your life halfway across the world, or through a wrongly dialled phone call, or something like that. Or if one person survives a plane crash when everyone else dies. It is just pure luck/coincidence or is there some purpose for it to happen?

I struggle to make sense out of suffering, why some people die young and leave behind their kids, and why people get violently attacked in terrible ways. It's hard to fathom why people have to go through such pain. I'm not sure it's all just random. Maybe some of it is, but for everything to just occur for no reason, I don't know.

I believe that I have a soul that put my sorry ass here to learn some god awful truth.
I know that everything in this world is living. Atoms are alive.

People suck and lie and pretend to have it all together. It's only in their dreams that real reality haunts them. Then they go and buy some trendy meds to make them happy and quiet their howling souls that yearn for something worthy and truthful. Yet, ads are so powerful and people get all excited over billboards that promise sex and beauty.

It is all fleeting. One day they will realize how shallow the mainstream life is and then their minds will shatter or create a bubble to protect them from truth. The fact is, is that no one cares about you, they only talk about you to make themselves look better.

Everyone is f****d up. Only, some people get along better with pretending that they can't think.

A computer programmer/scientist would say a computer random number generator can never really be random because it needs to seed data from a source. And if the source is the same, so it the random number.

The universe can be seen as a computer virtual world, like in the film call The Metric. Where on set of events seed others and so on so on (like the computer random number generator)…. If one could recreate the big bang, exactly the same way, without even the slightest difference, you would end up with events happening Exactly as they have already happened. Neapolitan would have won the same war that he won, Obama would have won the election and my workmate would still have multi-coloured tatos on her arm in the same order..

So if you take that into conservation , everything is pre-destined. And if you had a computer powerful enough and that can measure everything in the universe from the temperature of every star, to the size of every cats private parts it would be able to calculate/ predict the future.

Am I good or am I good.

The viewpoint of non-fatalists is like somebody walking a road and staring at his feet and believing the road does not exist before him until he takes a step. It is similar to the view of a watching baby that believes you cease to exist when you walk out the door.