What's your take on fate?

[-Sanguine-]

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about this.

 

Fate, things happening for a reason, etc.

Do you believe in this sort of thing?

 

Please explain why or why not. I'm really interested in others opinions on this matter.

 

I'll explain my opinion later on.

[greywolf]

I don't really think things happen for a reason. Usually people say that when something bad happens to them. Yes, you can learn from bad things and good things can also come out of it, but I don't necessarily think it happened for a reason.

[Dinka]

I think everything happens for a reason, because cause = effect. That doesn't mean that you will necessarily like what happens or that fate makes everything work out magically in your favor. It's not like that at all - it's practical.

 

The good news is that you have some control over what happens and what the reasons are, though that isn't to say that it'll happen exactly like you wanted or expected. Even dominos can stop in the middle of a line of 'em that are falling down.

[-Sanguine-]

I don't really think things happen for a reason. Usually people say that when something bad happens to them. Yes, you can learn from bad things and good things can also come out of it, but I don't necessarily think it happened for a reason.

 

I very much agree.

[Theblueman123]

Fate is like us finding a door, the door is meant to be there but it's up to us to walk through it. We can decide our fate by choosing to act on what is destined to happen to us in essence. It would be like getting dumped and either 1: Moving on and finding your future wife or 2: Killing yourself. Up to you, but the decision was pre-destined.

 

I'm not going into free-will as that is a religious debate, so this is only part of it.

[tiredofvampires]

I don't believe that everything happens for a reason in the sense that there is some moralistic lesson to be taken from all events, or that there is some "greater good" that existence is operating on.

 

I do, however, believe that the more we can find our own meaning in the experiences that happen to us, the more we are likely to value the apparent reality that we have been given life. Life being an opportunity that can't be denied. We are alive, and we have many capacities, regardless of what the significance or "purpose" of this being the case. We don't need to find out the REASON we are alive to make it worthwhile and to use our mysteriously-granted abilities to their potential.

 

I also believe that while there may not be a reason for things, everything that is happening, must be happening. Whatever the very complex collective forces that have converged to make something happen, nothing could have happened other than what's happening. Or what has happened. And therefore, nothing really is out of place.

 

Rather than being predestined -- I think rather that things are just continually in a state of cause and effect, stimulus and response, unfolding, and that sometimes the causes for things were set into motion in a design far beyond the immediacy of the events. I see that as more like evolution of phenomena rather than everything being pre-determined or "fate".

 

I think "fate" is a hindsight experience, and doesn't exist before that. It comes into being -- to fruition, so to speak. But it's dynamic along the way. And the nature of our own consciousness plays a role in this. In other words, we're not just passive pawns in the scheme.

[erase this face]

It's a load of b.s. People starve to death for a reason? No, that doesn't work for me. The world is cruel enough, to attach "Fate" onto some of the atrocities that occur is spitting in the faces of the victims who have no control.

[mad rabbits]

I don't believe in fate...but I do believe that a combination of things...each person has a genetic and psychological heritage if you will...stamps us from the get go with a series of challenges to be worked through, in this lifetime.

 

We have free will up to a point, but we are also heavily determined by past legacies whether that be physical and genetic or environmental.

 

Many of our reactions are unconscious. This is one way in which determinisn creeps in.

[Day_Walker]

I do not believe in fate. I think that after some event happens people try and trace the decisions that led them to that point and because of that hindsight analysis they feel that this event must have been predetermined.

 

I think the basic idea is that if you have free will then you cannot have fate.

[-Sanguine-]

I don't believe things happen for a reason, and I definitely don't believe in fate.

There are so many things and outcomes that can take place in this world and in our lives. I don't think it's fair to say something happened for a reason, when something different could have happened just as easily, depending on your decisions and such.

 

It's like.. I worked at a movie store for three years. I met my boyfriend there, through absolute chance. He's not even from the same town, but he rented movies a lot. I could easily say "The reason I worked there was so that I could meet you".

That seems ridiculous. I could easily have worked anywhere else and met someone different. That right there rules out fate for me.

 

I think that things happen and you learn from them. My dad was an alcoholic. Was there a hidden reason he was that way? No, he just was (or maybe he had his own reason for being that way, but it didn't have anything to do with me). But I learned something from it - I would have also learned something different had he not been an alcoholic.

 

So I guess what I'm saying is everything in life just happens, there is no rhyme or reason. Things are not planned out in advance for us. Our different decisions lead us to different places and outcomes and that is it. It's really quite simple, I think. And you can learn from whatever happens to you, but that's not to say you wouldn't have learned something or found "reason" in a different outcome.

 

I hope that makes sense.

[tiredofvampires]

It's like.. I worked at a movie store for three years. I met my boyfriend there, through absolute chance. He's not even from the same town, but he rented movies a lot. I could easily say "The reason I worked there was so that I could meet you".

That seems ridiculous. I could easily have worked anywhere else and met someone different. That right there rules out fate for me.

 

I think that things happen and you learn from them. My dad was an alcoholic. Was there a hidden reason he was that way? No, he just was (or maybe he had his own reason for being that way, but it didn't have anything to do with me). But I learned something from it - I would have also learned something different had he not been an alcoholic.

 

 

I'm not arguing your beliefs, as they are in line with what scientists call "randomness", and there is a strong case to be made for such.

 

However, you should be aware that in the examples you've provided above, you have not made a case against fate.

 

Yes, you could have worked somewhere else and met a different boyfriend, but the fact that you DIDN'T -- that you worked THERE and met THIS ONE -- would be a pretty good defense for fate. You were not somewhere else and he wasn't somewhere else because it was "destiny" that you meet him there.

 

And likewise, your father might have not been an alcoholic, or you might have been born a boy, or learned other lessons from his being an alcoholic, but no, you were you and you learned THESE lessons. And so because none of the other outcomes occurred, and this roll of the dice did, it could be said that this was your "fate".

 

You have not disproven anything about fate there, nor "ruled it out." And in fact, you can't disprove it.

 

Just because other things *might* have happened doesn't mean they *could* have, if this was your fate.

 

Edit: And btw, the question "does everything happen for a reason?" and "is there fate?" are two separate issues. Someone could say that everything is predestined (there is fate), but there is no reason for it. "Reason" implies some motive/agenda by some force, and that is separate from things just being preordained.

[Seraphim]

Things happen so you can learn whatever lesson you need to learn. Whether one chooses to learn it or not is the question.

[grymoire]

I wish it were not true but I believe that Fate exists and yes I also believe in it. I am a Hindu and we have strong beliefs in past and future lives which brings Fate into existence in the current life. It is difficult to believe but what I am now was predicted by the Indian astrologers some 25 years back itself.

[Lucius]

Sometimes I think that, if our proclivities and personalities could be well enough understood and quantified (as though by some vast computer, God, or the reflexive, dynamic system we call the Universe at large), and if those calculations could be cross-referenced with the proclivities and personalities of everybody that such a system determined we would - via cause and effect - encounter, that our futures could indeed be predicted. I also sometimes wonder, if such a database were to somehow exist within the Universe at large, whether it might not be glimpsed, temporarily, by some, and referred to (variously) as 'fate', 'visions', and the like. I wonder too, when I think about such a phenomenon, how fate would then be less about a path into which we are forced, but more a description of the calculation that might conceivably be made of all our possible paths, actions, and ends.

 

Of course, that's just my idle speculation. One can never know. Trying to apply our minds to something as vast as this Universe of ours will always result in half-answers at best. It makes me think of ants trying to describe the purpose of the building on which they crawl. But it IS fun to think about.

[Anthropic]

Fate is just another word for history.

My views are similar to tiredofvampires'. She sums it up nicely in this paragraph.

 

I think "fate" is a hindsight experience, and doesn't exist before that. It comes into being -- to fruition, so to speak. But it's dynamic along the way. And the nature of our own consciousness plays a role in this. In other words, we're not just passive pawns in the scheme.

[raining.stars]

I think some things are fate, in that they are predestined. For example our genetics, where we are born, who we are born to, our brothers and sisters. This is all fate we have no choice in the matter. But I think we choose what we do with this fate, there comes a point in our lives where we realise we have more control than we think. I think it is how we see our fate and how we chose to act and learn despite our circumstances that matters most.

[jenny_mcs]

I don't believe in fate. Things randomly happen. Life is 5% what happens to you and 95% about how you react.

[sidehop]

To me it's mind boggling, the word 'fate' seem like a such broad term, we can dig up the entire universe and still not find the answer...although I love topics like this

[vhere]

I like how you think.