Destiny !!

[Sharn Arora]

Hello Ranchers,

Just out of curiousity.. wanna see how many ranchers believe in Destiny.. how many feel that everything in life is pre-destined.. When I say beliving in 'Destiny', it doesn't mean that we stop working hard and wait for some magic to happen.. but ofcourse it must have happened many a times during the course of our lives that we get something even if we don't deserve it or it may be the other way round that we have burned mid night oil to attain something but failed horribly due to some 'natural' element.. I'm sure lot of people have some stories to share..

[Deepak Bala]

You have a destiby but you can change it. So in the end you dont have one

[Dave Lenton]

The deterministic view is that the universe works a bit like a machine. Atoms bounce off each other, energy whizzes around and matter is formed and destroyed. All of it due to some underlying patterns. OK, so quantum physics may throw a spanner into the works, but determinists would reply that even this probably follows a pattern of some sort.

If the determinists are right, then everything that happens is a result of what has happened before. Essentially, given a particular state of the universe at some point back in time, there is no way the universe now could have turned out any differently. Some people would label that certainty as "fate", but the label is slightly meaningless as you could argue that things we like to not call fate, such as personal decisions, also follow deterministic patterns (being made by our physical brains).

What if the determinists are wrong? Then we could have some other possibilities. Maybe random events occur, affecting what will happen. If so, then we have no control over the random events, so they are (to us) little different from un-random events in terms of being "fateful" or not.

Perhaps we have free will and can act outside of the laws of physics, but this appears to be something of a logical problem - how can something be "outside" of reality, but still able to interact with it? Wouldn't it then be just another part of reality (and therefore subject to some kind of physics), albeit a part we don't really understand?

Does any of this matter though? So what if the universe is deterministic? I suspect it is, but I can't really tell. All that matters is that from my point of view there are things I can influence and things which I can't. There's not much point in worrying about the things I can't influence as they're going to happen to me anyway. There's also not much point worrying about the things I can influence - far better is to go ahead and try to influence them in a positive way rather then worrying.

So, does fate exist? I don't know. Does the question really matter? How would the answer affect how you live?
[ October 18, 2006: Message edited by: Dave Lenton ]

[marc weber]

Oh, that destiny -- not the English title of the 1921 silent film (Der M�de Tod) by Fritz Lang.

[Maureen Augustus]

Maybe not destiny so much, but I definitely believe in kismet, although I am most likely not defining it properly. For me, kismet is the force that pushes you in the direction you belong, but doesn't determine what you do when you get there. That part is up to you, and your 'destiny' changes based on what you do.

Basically, I think life is a big Choose Your Own Adventure book, where every page can lead you toward the treasure or toward the tiger.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Originally posted by marc weber:
Oh, that destiny -- not the English title of the 1921 silent film (Der M�de Tod) by Fritz Lang.

THERE WAS NO SUCH MOVIE!

[Ram kovis]

Originally posted by Ernest Friedman-Hill:


THERE WAS NO SUCH MOVIE!

It is here

[marc weber]

Originally posted by Ram kovis:
...It is here

And here (at allmovie.com).

Before buying the DVD, I had some trouble researching this film, because it's been released under several different titles over the past 85 years. Classic classic.