fate

we are special creatures arent we? the only animal that has not only the physical capability but the mental capacity and a definite history in choosing to kill others of its own species for no reason similarly applicable to the rest of the living kingdom. the only animal that, also on the above premises can choose to sacrifice itself for some greater purpose, again an unknown concept in the rest of the animal world

dictionary calls it good and evil. i call it choice. choice or the hand of God: if you chose to slap your college professor and did, was your criminal assault God's plan? if you chose to set fire to a house and did, and four children died in the smoke and ruin, was your arson and homicide God's plan? if you chose to fly a jetliner into a skyscraper and did, and three thousand people perished, was your mass murder God's plan? if you chose to lead your nation into a new world order of one sole superior race by exterminating millions as means to that end and did,...i can go on with scenarios of sequentially increasing bodycounts, but i neednt. this is where most would take the easy road out and answer safely "yes, it was all part of God's plan."

choice is a divine power that the Creator bestowed on us, a power used for even the most meagre dilemmas such as which sauce to put on your Subway sandwich, the very same power to reckon with the weight of the world, such as the finger that rests next to the red button that launches 5500 nuclear warheads across hemispheres. people have this biased perception of God's omnipotence and omniscience, such that He is the reason for all the good things displayed of humankind, but not the bad things. people neglect to use the same wording, but instead call it part of His Plan. if i asked ten people if God planned for me to choose honey mustard for my cold cut trio, id get weird stares and no useful answer. but if i asked them if God planned the holocaust, suddenly i am taken seriously, but expectedly id get ten answers to the tune of God not having been the one who planned it but having it in His plan, or some similarly cheap semantic trick to conveniently relieve God of responsibility for the ugliest photographs of our past.

before you misunderstand me for blasphemy, i think the only thing God is responsible for is having created us with the express permission to deny Him. every single one of our actions from the ones that seemingly make no discernible impact to the world, to the ones that change the universe as we know it on a daily basis--those actions, we are solely and completely responsible for. that must be the case, for if it were not, we cannot reasonably nor fairly be put next to the pulpit on judgment day and weighed and measured at the doors of hell and sent to eternal damnation for unforgiveable evils committed in subservience to the vice-grip of destiny. neither can God come up to our side and greet us at the Gates and say "My son, my daughter, you have made me proud and are worthy of being by my side for the rest of eternity" if our acts of goodwill were of His own doing in the first place.

i believe that God simply made the paper but gave us the pen, for there is little meaning in life for us or even for Him creating us if He simply wrote all the books and had us individually narrate them to him, from prologue to la fin. yes, i can agree that God has a vision for each and every one of those stories; i understand this to be the truth behind what preachers would tell you in church: God has a plan for you. but i also understand that His plans dont always pan out because people either gave up writing, or threw away their pens, or wrote lies, or tore out the pages, or drew ugly pictures, or had bad handwriting or they simply chose Satan to be their editor instead. neither fate or destiny determined the endings to any one of those stories. pure choice. God gave adam and eve that power. and guess what, He gave you that power, why deny your God-given potential by claiming subordination to an unknown force that the defeatists are so familiar with?

if destiny/fate determined a fixed end point in your life, then destiny/fate must also be the decider of whether you end up in heaven or hell for eternity. hell was created for a reason, and as such there will be occupants. ie, if some people end up in hell, and fate controls all endings, then some people are fated to end up in hell. so i ask now: how might it irk you to consider that there are some people on this earth or even some yet to be born onto it who are fated to go to hell? what a lachrymose image: from before the moment you were born God already planned for some of you to end up burning in sulphur and brimstone for the rest of eternity!

outrageous. if all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players, then God is not the director; He is the audience.