Originally Posted by
mstateglfr
It is beneficial and inspiring to hear or to believe that your life on this earth is predetermined and you have no control over it?
How is that inspiring? Such a view can lead to a total lack of responsibility towards oneself and others. For example- well, I'll die when I die, so might as well rob this bank.
When life is no longer controlled by the individual, then the individual is no longer vested in protecting their life.
Yes, that's how I typically think about fatalism, predestination, or whatever you call it. But the way I understand this approach to thinking about death is that fear of death can be released by believing that what we control is our level of health while the moment of death is fixed. So that would lead a person to think that if they live healthy and happy, their (fixed) amount of time in this body will be better than if they neglect their health and choose a negative life orientation. In other words, you have to stick it out for as long as you do, but you can try to stay healthy and happy for that time, or you can make bad choices that increase the misery of your time. Since Roody seems to be on the positive track, I thought this post about predetermination would come across as encouraging, but he and others here clearly don't share this philosophy of predetermination.
The simple reality is all this is there is 0 evidence that clearly shows we die at a predetermined point in life.
It's impossible to show as the cosmos would have to predict when car accidents and heroin overdoses will occur.
I think it's more of a spiritual belief. On the other hand, though, you could look at any situation that seems sure to result in death and find examples where it didn't. The person might go into a coma and come out of it later or have a near-death-experience and then survive to tell about it. So maybe there's some validity to it, but of course you don't want people trying to disprove it by attempting to successfully self-determine their own death or that of others, so maybe it is not a philosophy for people who are really into proving they have more control over death (and life) than nature.
Yes, I understand some people find an ignorant bliss in approaching life as some sort of Disney ride where they sit and watch everything happen until the ride ends.
But there is nothing to show we are all on such a ride.
Everything we have observed and learned leads to our fate being determined by our choices and decisions, as well as the choices and decisions of others.
We control some aspects of life and others are out of our hands. Physics is very complex and I can't believe that our choices are somehow predetermined by the mechanical functioning of our brains based on chemical reactions that are as inevitable as the trajectory of two galaxies drifting toward a collision with one another. Still, all the possible paths various forms of energy can take form a superset of natural determination that goes beyond the simple dichotomy freedom/fate.