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Destiny?

Do you believe in Destiny? Some religions consider each person born to fulfill a specific purpose and no matter what they do they are only doing what they are meant to do. Others believe that we have a destiny and are guided to fulfill it and yet others believe that we make our own destiny and no one else decides this but us. What do you believe?

Destiny

Well, I don't believe in destiny. I do, however, believe we might have certain things in life we are meant to experience or do. Whether or not we actually do them will be determined by our own actions. A result or consequence of what we do in life. So, I might have a "calling" so to speak to be a great religious leader. However, if I choose, I can ignore that calling. If I choose to get hooked up in things that would lead me away from such a religious "calling" my destiny isn't going to force me to become that great religious leader.

Destiny? Beliefs Religious General

I believe all three.

1. I believe that some very important people are destined to Lead, to Rule, to Command, to Prophesy, and that to do otherwise is to incur the Wrath of God. Yes, they still have Agency to choose for themselves; however, I believe the great ones know there is only one true choice.

2. I believe others are destined to do great things (but on a smaller scale), and are led step by step in the path they should go -- many never knowing that they are led, but it just feels right to them to do what they are doing. They may feel that opportunities "fall in their laps" for no particular reason, when it is part of a divine plan.

3. I believe others make conscious decisions to go in a certain direction, and then go and work really hard to become/do what they've decided upon. (although these may just be a part of group 2! )

Roz

Destiny

I definitely believe in destiny. I met my husband, Paul, on the internet. He live in the UK and I here in the USA. We came from very different backgrounds and are very different ages. Something brought us together. Something told me that he was the one for me, even though intellectually I thought it was a long shot. We had so much in common, despite our age difference. I came to know that I had found my soulmate, the one I had waited for so long. I believe in my heart that we were destined to be together. I have always believed that each person is born with a destined time to die. This is why I think that even in the worst plane crash that kills 100, there can be one survivor. It wasn't that person's time, or destiny if you will, to die. This is also how I cope with things like the death of my brother at age 11. He died of a heart valve defect. The doctor who treated him went on to develope the artificial heart valve. In this way I see that my brother's death was destined for others to have the chance at life. This may be a simplistic view, but it's what I've always believed.

Destiny

Do you believe in destiny? Do you think there is such a thing as a pre-determined universe? that everything you do is bound to happen, and you have absolutely no say about it?

I find the paradoxes of this question very interesting. Here are some examples of different attitudes.

• God controls everything, it is all part of his grand scheme, so we shouldn't do anything at all to help him - he manages it on his own!
• God does have everything planned but we are supposed to help him. that would be part of his plan. We are his tools, and our desires and emotions which we think are our own, were actually created by him for destiny.
• Yeah, there is such a thing as destiny, but not god's - but evolution's. The survival of the fittest and evolution is geared towards a single possible ultimate future, no matter what we do now.
• Nonsense! No such thing as destiny. How could it possibly be? If I spill my coffee when I wake up, couldn't I have prevented that by putting a lid on the mug?

I find the second and third ones very interesting - I am not saying I accept them, I tend to not accept anything as true, but just as a possibility.

But two and three are interesting. Imagine that all that goes through our head and our heart was planned by god! That would mean there is no us. Nothing that identifies us from the others.

The third one is too. I thought about now, when writing this topic. Imagine that everything that happens, all the wars, all the good deeds, no matter what we will do, will produce the same future. The wars will just slow the process down, or vice versa, but no matter what we do, we will ultimately reach a single ideal state through evolution, where nothing more can be improved?

So where do you stand?

Destiny?

I believe in a mixture of it all, sort of.

I believe that God has a purpose for us all, but we make the decision to follow that route or to go our own way. I think we can create our own destiny, but I would have to stop and think "Is the way I'm shaping my life the way God wants me to be shaped?" It's a matter of who you believe is in control of your life.

I personally believe that God does know what is destined to happen in my life, but He allows me to make the decision to get there. God gives us gifts and talents, and we make the conscious decision whether to use them for Him, for us, or to abandom them.

Destiny

I have had a strong belief on this since I was a kid, even in church.
I do not believe in destiny. I believe that we make our own way, choose our own path. The wrong path gives us less desirable choices, the right path gives us better choices. Our choices determine if we can and will be used in our personal faith and life. Our decisions create the good and the bad. Even God gave us free choice, and that means that our lives are not pre-planned or pre-destined, our life path is chosen by us.

Destiny General Religious Beliefs

I believe there are contradictions in many variations of concepts involved.

If there is an omnipotent, omniscience God, then it is impossible for anything else to have free will since any choice it makes could be retroactively altered by God to have been made differently. Similarly, if God is omniscient, then he must know what choice everyone is ever going to make before the universe starts, so how can we really regard them as choices?
Of course, all of these problems stem from our ascribing human conceptions of knowledge, consciousness and desire to God. We can remove these problems by considering God to not be describable using our words and concepts, but then we can make no predictions in this area and there is really nothing further to think or talk about on this line of thinking as far as I can see.

If we live in a purely physical universe, it is theoretically possible to know what choice a person will make before they make it by having complete information about the physical, electrical and chemical structure of their brain and everything that will interact with it before the choice is made. This would seem to counteract the idea of free will, but it also does not truly allow for predestination either, as there is still the randomness from quantum mechanics to account for. Roger Penrose seems to believe that choice comes from this rather poorly understood area of quantum randomness, but that would still not allow for free will as it would simply make decisions random rather than choice.

I believe here, as with many other things, that our concepts need refinement and redefinition before we can have a satisfying answer. In the case of God, we will never be able to truly conceptualize or define God. In the case of a physical universe, we think of free will on the macroscopic level - a choice is a particular pattern of state change in our brain and behaviours - whereas we think of determinism in terms of tiny, nonconscious particles and we will need to resolve this scale discrepancy before the concepts can really be compared.