This morning on CNN, there was an item about a new movie coming out called The Adjustment Bureau. It's about a politician who meets a woman he's interested in, but when he attempts to pursue her, these men in fedoras and overcoats keep coming along trying to stop him. They're from The Adjustment Bureau, they tell him, and they're just trying to keep him on his life's predetermined path .
According to CNN, the movie is raising a lot of questions and debate about fate, free will and predestination. Such things are, of course, the stock in trade of the Christian religion, if not others. I went to the CNN web page where a discussion is taking place between some of their viewers in the comments section. I've even contributed a couple of comments myself (under the name Patti, of course - I rarely use a pseudonym these days).
I was about to say that "as an atheist" I don't believe in fate. And I don't. But I'm not 100% sure that it's safe to say that that is a belief held by all atheists. Most, for sure. But, I have seen the occasional atheist science head claim that there are arguments to be made for predetermination from the scientific standpoint. I'm not even gonna go there.
Be that as it may... from either perspective, I find the whole concept of fate and predeterminism to be repugnant. The Christians say that their god has decided from before the moment of their birth, whether they'll wind up going to heaven or hell. Then most of them somehow twist in there the conviction that they still have free will in spite of this. They say they can decide how to live their lives, but their god will be sending them to the good place or the bad place based not on their actions during life, but on his decision made before their birth.
"Oh, but," they say, "He knew in advance whether you'd live a good life or a bad life. He gave you free will to do as you wished, but he knew already how you'd use that gift."
And this is where my repugnance comes in. What kind of twisted being would figure out in advance the untold billions of lives of every single human on the planet, not to mention every animal, every plant, every tiny turn of the weather or other "act of god" (because, of course, those things impact human lives -- and so-called "fates" -- as well), and then decide that this one is going to heaven, and this one is going to hell, and then setting them all down on earth, like so many wind-up toys, to chatter and hop and live our silly little lives while he watches benignly over us, knowing that no matter what we do along the way, our ultimate fate is already decided.
That's just sick. That's like an SS officer telling a Jewish concentration camp prisoner that he might be freed if only he works really hard and obeys all the rules, knowing all the while the exact day and moment that that prisoner will walk into the death chamber to be murdered. And if any Christian is reading this thinking "it's not like that at all"... well it is... just think about it for a minute and try to tell me how, when it comes to "fate", your god is any different from a Nazi butcher.
One of the commentators on the CNN page said that free will could be described as a spoked wheel, where each spoke is a decision, though all decisions ultimately lead you to the same destination.
How can anyone live that way? Seriously! Going through your life knowing that no matter what you do, you have no control over your ultimate fate. You could argue that none of us does. That, regardless of religion or lack thereof, we all end up in the same place... dead. But the religious believe that there's a life beyond death, and the most zealous ones are just trying to get through this life so they can get to that one. And that is another scary thought, because it means that, to a huge proportion of the humans on this planet, the world we live in is basically a throw-away...a way-station on the way to somewhere better. Kinda makes me think of roadside rest stops, with putrid toilets, over-flowing garbage cans and perverts and freaks waiting in the shadows to victimize the unwary.
But the world is not a way-station. This is it, this is all we have, and all we'll ever have, and I just wish so many people out there would stop thinking of it as a passing-through point.
A Christian might ask "then, if there's no heaven, no afterlife, what's the use of living a good life on earth? If there's no heavenly reward for being good, why would anyone bother?" And my answer to that is: if you have to ask, you're not truly a good person, are you?
The truth is that, no matter what kind of lives we live, we all go to the same place when we die: Nowhere. Our remains are buried or burned, and that's that. We stop. Here and now is all we have, and THAT is the best reason there is for exercising our free will with morality, goodness and decency.
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