Fate and Destiny: a philosophy thread

[€uroMeinke]

I guess I was thinking more in the face of the unknown. With faith, you needed trouble yourself trying to figure it out - it is simply God's Will, or workinging in mysterious ways, etc. I guess the rules or moral codes fall out of that in their attempts to put something concrete around those unknowns.

I think the most troubled souls are those that follow whatever dogma (religious or atheistic) without actually embracing those beliefs.

[wendybeth]

You're right- it's a workout actually wading through the dogma and trying to arrive at a truth that works for you. It's much easier to blindly follow or not question at all. I suppose one can question too much and just wind up confused about everything, but I respect that far more than I do someone who dogmatically sees things in black and white and refuses to even try and look at things differently.

[alphabassettgrrl]

Dang, ISM, you said everything I could have, only better! Was it fate that I didn't read this until after you posted?

The thing that stands out most is you share my belief that time is happening all at once. It's rare that I find somebody who will consider that.

I believe we create the world around us. My husband challenged me on that, asking me if the world really was flat and the center of the universe when everybody believed that to be true. I couldn't answer that, though my initial thought is that yes, somehow, it had to be flat. I'm reading a book on quantum physics and the "observer effect" seems to bring us back to humans creating our world by thought. At the very least, we create the kind of interactions that we choose. If I smile at somebody while shopping at the mall, hopefully their day is just a tiny bit brighter, and they may pass that on to the next person or two. Tiny sparks, true, but it's at least on the preferred side of the balance sheet.

I believe we choose the circumstances of our life. If I had a really good life in a particular circumstance, one would think I would choose it again. I would meet the same kind of people there as in the past, hopefully, so the same souls would be drawn together again.

I believe coincidence is more than chance. I'm not quite sure what it means, but it means something.

I do believe in a higher power, though it could be created by man's consistant belief and need. The Norse (I am told) believed the gods changed with man and his belief. This definitely makes sense to me.

[Alex]

I believe we create the world around us. My husband challenged me on that, asking me if the world really was flat and the center of the universe when everybody believed that to be true. I couldn't answer that, though my initial thought is that yes, somehow, it had to be flat.

For me this raises a question. I'm curious how you would answer (though, of course, you don't need to):

What about the, at least, 2,000 years when all educated people knew the earth is round (the ancient Greeks had competing calculations of the circumference, some of which were amazingly accurate) and the uneducated believed it to be flat?

Is the reality creating require a shared belief or an individual one?