(September 29, 2010 at 11:11 am)Scott Richens Wrote: How do you define fate and how would you separate it from religion?
I, personally, don't think there's any bloody difference... apart from how it's a shit load more subtle. I've noticed a few of my apatheist friends are fixated with fate and how it governs their lives. Apatheism, of course, is the name for people who don't give a fuck about anything to do with God and religion and what it means to them. Yet some find meaning in something else; Fate.
There are secular and religious views on fate.
Religious ones obviously have to do with predestiny in the sense that god knows our beginning as well as our end and everything in between as well as less simplistic views on the matter.
The more secular/non-religious views on fate isn't nearly as prominant in our everyday lives beyond our view of what time is and can be extraordinarily complicated. For example, the idea of the grandfather paradox touches on this in this and there are enormous implications as to the control we could have on our own future even in our daily lives. The good parts of the terminator franchise is absolutely all about this (that is, the first two movies and the short-lived TV series.)
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
