Often we hear things and say things such as “God has a plan for us,” “God will see you through,” or the more general: “It was meant to be,” or “I believe everything happens for a reason.” On other occasions, from the mouths of the same people, or ourselves, we hear or say: “God wants you to choose the right path,” or “God gave you free-will.”
Mostly this contradiction goes unnoticed. In fact, when it is brought to someone’s attention it is either passively avoided or defended by means of definitions. Actually, this contradiction is one of the few that is not pointed out by a mass number of very rational people.
If you can’t defend it you will avoid it. If you think you can defend it your options are limited. A contradiction is simply the assertion of two propositions that imply two different conclusions. An obvious example is something meaningless like: “I see what I cannot see.” -a contradiction. Another is: “The restaurant opens at 10pm and serves dinner between 9pm and 10pm.” If your watching the big game on Sunday and your friend says “Brett is the greatest Q.B. to have ever played, but I think Young was better,” you would mention to him that he was drunk..
You can tell when people aren’t making sense because it is a feature of the human intellect to be rational and deny one’s self of two opposing beliefs. Either you see something or you don’t. Either the restaurant is closed at 9pm or it’s open. We cannot, by the nature of our understanding, believe in something contradictory. In the case of the restaurant we would assume that there has been a misprint on a sign, that maybe it meant to say it opens at 10am. We don’t know that it actually does open at 10am but we make an inference to the best explanation as to what caused this contradiction. Though it still seems a bit odd that dinner would be served between 9pm and 10pm. So in this case, a reasonable person may just want to avoid making a conclusion, and rather go to a 24hr restaurant.
You can also compare two contradictory labels. For example: “Free man” and “Prisoner.” A man is either one of these labels, he is free or he is not free. He cannot be free and prisoner at the same time. There is also another meaning to the word “Free.” In the quote mentioned above “God gave you free-will” freedom is not meant to directly imply that you are not in prison, but rather that you are not destined to carry out specific actions before you decide to. To be destined means that no matter the decisions you make your life will end up the way it was planned to end. Any decision you make was a decision that you were destined to make. This is not to get confused with “predetermination” which means that certain causes led to certain effects that you really had no control over, mental or physical. This can happen even without a God.
Most emotional people like the idea of destiny. That is only because they “feel” a certain comfort in believing that their life is going to work out in the end. That is, they’re going to get the job they always wanted, or they’re going to have two kids and a suburban after they get out of this crummy apartment, or they are going to get through a stage in their life that is particularly difficult only to see that it was a part of some holy plan to get them to higher grounds.
Don’t be so egotistical. If people are destined than that means everybody is, not just you.
Consider that every day good people die. In the Congo a woman is kidnapped from her family by a rebellion army, raped for two years, and when finally returned to her village finds out that her family has disowned her because she is tainted. She spends the last two weeks of her life homeless and starving, only to die in the mud. Consider a child born so premature that she only lives for two days. Was this her destiny? Some egocentrically driven response to this may be that “God planned it to show my husband and I how precious life really is“- “so now we are activists for pro-life campaigns, saving other lives.”
So God, the God that considers every human life precious and of it’s own value, planned on using another individual as a means to assist you in your political agendas? This is contradiction 101.
Consider the woman from the Congo mentioned above. What was gained by her death? Who was taught a lesson? Of course, this could very easily fall into “the problem of evil “with responses such as “the devil did it,” or “she had bad Karma as a result of her bad decision making, or “we have free-will”
We can eliminate two of these right of hand. Karma is a belief of a polytheistic culture that was based on caste systems, which is completely foreign to any Christian doctrine. The devil did it? Believing that there is an Evil and a Good implies that there is a decision to be made between them, that is not destiny, that is free-will. The basic problem of evil forces us to confront a possible limit to God’s power. It is: Either God can stop the horrible things that happen in the world, but he won’t, Or God wants to stop them, but he can’t. The first one implies a limit to God’s benevolence, the second one implies a limit directly to his abilities. Either way, something doesn’t match up with the definitions Christians have known him by. (that by definition to be a God means nothing is above you, that you are perfect, timeless, and the beginning and the end, more precise: Omniscient, omnipresent, Omni benevolent)
The most sensible response to these evils (the girl in the Congo, the premature baby) is indeed actually the free-will argument. In a world of free-people there are necessary evils. To explain- what brings me joy may bring someone else pain. Consider the temperature of a room. I like to have a fan on even in the winter, it comforts me. Most likely this bothers other people and makes them uncomfortably cold. If it doesn’t then its just coincidence. For two people to exercise free-will there must be a neutral world that is not controllable by either one of them. I cannot control you’re world and you cannot control mine. If I were able to manipulate my surroundings it would be impossible for you to have genuine free-will. The “necessary” part in the term “necessary evil” is that having such a neutral meeting place means that naturally bad things could happen. You could fall on a rock or be in the wrong place and time when a piano falls from the third floor apartment. Or, being that we have free will, I could use this medium (the earth) to hurt you by deciding to throw a piece of it, a rock, at your head. These possibilities are just necessities of having free-will.
Though now, what happened to destiny?
Here’s where the unnoticed contradiction that I spoke of earlier comes in to play.
That is why we hear such lame remarks as “God’s ways are mysterious.” -that is only because, you, a rational person that in any other situation would be quick to point out a contradiction, continues, against your rational nature, to allow a contradiction when we speak of God. You made it mysterious by making it unsolvable. There are two different conclusions to “God will work it out for you“, and “We have free-will. You can’t believe in both because that is non-sense and “non-sense will always be non-sense even if you talk it about God.” “It’s just as impossible for me to carry out two mutually exclusive alternatives as it is for God to carry it out.” For example: Either God exists or he does not exists. He cannot both exist and not exist now can he? He can’t because it’s a contradiction. Is this a limit to God’s power? I don’t think so. It’s just simply non-sense. Moreover, as shown above, if we are to understand how there can be a God and so much shit in the world, then are best guess is free-will. Though, if we are going to continue to believe in destiny and books like The Revelations, then we should continue to be confused.
So you must choose either God has planned your future for you, or God does not know your future since you have free-will. We will not use the “God has a God view, and my past and future are the eternally present for him.” That’s nonsense and a really bad analogy. The decisions I act out are at first the contents of my mind. There is no “view” into that except by me.
The problem now is that, as a Christian you cannot choose. Because by Christian definition, God is omniscient, omnipresent, Omni-benevolent…. In other words, perfect in every way. He has given you the revelations of the end of the world, and at the same time given you the freedom to change the world. Does that make any sense to you, especially when you consider the problems of evil? No it doesn’t. Though instead of correcting this contradiction most will chalk it up to a mindless labeling of “oh well, my mind is too feeble to understand the mysterious ways of God.” Remember though, that using definitions for God ) is a logical conclusion. The law of non-contradiction is as well a logical conclusion. So are we applying logic whenever the hell we want? Yes. Unfortunately I think that what drives our decisions to let certain contradictions slide is a psychological weakness. We want so bad to have comfort in knowing that there is a higher being to which we can rely on to keep us safe, or to give us assurance that even if life sucks for us, it’s a temporary state leading to an eternity without death or pain or sadness, rather with eternal treasures.
Get over it.
If you believe that you have free-will, if you believe that you are morally responsible for your actions, then it is non-sense to at the same time believe that God has planned your life out for you or that you have a destiny. It’s non-sense. If God knows what you will do then you cannot be morally responsible for what you do. Furthermore, at this point you may be wondering what to believe. Your wondering is the answer for you. In wondering you are “choosing” what to believe. By choosing, you have just exercised free-will. You choose everything in your life. If you want to believe in Heaven and Hell, though for me that is just as much non-sense, then you must believe that we are morally responsible for our actions. Though that means you do not have a destiny, which contradicts the Bible’s Revelation.
So where does this leave us? Well obviously that Christianity is contradictory, that’s no big news. I didn’t expect it to be. Where this leaves a normal, non-dogmatic person, is to contemplate atheism. Yep. These contradictions lead a person to atheism. But it doesn’t have to. It only leads to that because people can’t make sense of it. What one must do is think for themselves. Re-contemplate your God and your religion. Its seems logical that if a God created us then he would given us something to understand him by, in order to do right by him. Maybe that’s rationality itself. I’m not sure. What I am sure of, are the obvious contradictory remarks that prompted this short essay. “I believe everything happens for a reason.” “We were destined to meet.” I think I’m your soul mate.” These remarks that pay no attention of the contradiction they make with the other beliefs that the person saying them might have, are old, worn out, and down right non-sense.
Final note: I left a lot of content out of this, such as further problems with heaven and hell.(if you have a destiny then why is it that you have a judge? If you’re destined to carry something out then how is it that you can be punished for eternity. - absolute bullshit. Don’t believe it. Other things left out include more detailed problems and answers to the “problem of evil”, which philosophers term as a theodicy. Really this was just a short run through of some of the most obvious contradictions to the most frequent remarks that I am confronted with everyday- for which I must bite my tongue(because you can’t fuck with someone’s religion man!) So in conclusion- stop talking about your mindless destiny as if reality were some 80 million dollar box-office romance that always ends in getting the job and the guy. Reality is not like that. Have some respect for those less fortunate than we are. Make decisions for yourself, and live as a free person without a destiny must- responsible for the person you are. Stop forcing yourself to believe in contradictory bullshit because thats how your parents believed, or that’s just the mystery of God. Think for yourself and believe what makes the most sense.
More on this stuff later……
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