Determinism, Free Will and Paradox

[bennyboy]

I can choose to eat a Mars Bar, or to rape an entire nation, or to type in an internet forum, or to sit next to a river for 20 years, and in the end it all "works out," because the paradox of determinism means that everything I do is exactly what I am meant to do in order to keep the Universe chugging along toward the Big Crunch (or whatever).

Are you saying that- because the end is unavoidable and immutable, everything we do is towards that end, no matter the choices we make, and so we have free will but the end is determined?

That's fatalism, I believe, which is not quite determinism. So yes, I'd say that what you've said accurately describes my position, with the added comment: that the "end" can be any future time, t(n).