I was born in a culture in which belief in fate is unquestionable. From lullabies about star-crossed lovers who were fated to die (no, really) to lullabies about poor boys born to be big men, (or rich boys born to be brought low,) through no achievement or choice of their own, I had imbedded the idea of fate through the fingertips long before I set fingers to keyboard to write.
It is of course a concept that exists in every culture. And you can understand why. Or at least I can. Even in the most meritocratic of societies – and no society is perfectly meritocratic, because you can’t make sure that everyone has the same connections/birth, etc, nor can you prevent the social animal humans are from taking that and myriad other sub-rational cues into account — there are inexplicable failures and inexplicable successes. You’re left scratching your head, while the deserving sink and the undeserving prosper.
And even in the most hidebound society, where if you’re born to the right people, and have the right connections, you should have a perfect life, fate intervenes. You get an illness, an accident deforms you, you fall in unavailing love with JUST the wrong person… and your life is a wreck, if you’re alive at all.
Humans are designed, as part of our social animal nature, to have a “moral” component. The moral component is not exactly what we, modern people, consider moral, but something older, less ethically complicated in which morality is doing what is considered right in that society: you appease the right god, you treat your enemies/friends the right way, and you’ll be rewarded and everything will be well.
You catch a wiff of that “morality” in the older legends of mankind (and to an extent it is still around – now feeding the college bubble.)
The only way to reconcile that with reality and to continue believing if you perform X correct action, you’ll get Y desired result is to believe in fate. You could say it keeps us from going completely insane, lost in a world of chaos where nothing makes sense.
Because of that, it shows up in even the most “rational” societies. You find it expressed “I guess it wasn’t meant to be” or “Perhaps the time wasn’t right.” Or “My timing sucked” or…
So… It is everywhere, it is at the back of the human brain… but does fate exist?
We all know some people are luckier than others. It is impossible, for instance, to picture Harry Potter doing half as well if it hadn’t been the early days of Amazon, when it suddenly started selling in the US before it was available here, and the publishers who had rejected it suddenly decided to jump on the bandwagon and give it star treatment. And eh… not that my first three books were Harry Potter (for one, I got so far up Shakespeare that they’re difficult to read – a serious flaw, I must admit) but it took amazing bad luck to – after sixteen years of trying to sell a novel, and two years of waiting for the novel to be published – have it come out right after 9/11. (It might have ended up the same, mind you, but… who knows?) Or to have the first real novel with a real plot I wrote (Draw One In The Dark. Okay, I’m not saying the other novels didn’t have a plot. Some obviously do. But I only UNDERSTOOD plot with DOITD. It was the first time I felt on top of the form) end up through a series of mishaps, with the worst cover possible (the hard cover cover, not the mmp. The hard cover is not only inappropriate for a light fantasy, it displays about the level of competency my son – then eleven – could have managed at that age.)
Was it fate? Probably not. Or maybe yes. Or then again perhaps.
I believe in fate on odd Tuesdays and alternate Wednesdays. I don’t believe in it in the dreadful idea that it controls all your thoughts, all your movements, all your outcomes. I believe in it, more, as an extra weight or an added breeze at your back.
If you study, say, Heinlein’s life before the books finally hit big, you could easily believe he was the unluckiest man alive. Pursuit after pursuit turned sour for him. This isn’t even unusual in people who achieve big and stay on top of their game.
Which brings me to my observation – sometime ago – that the “darlings” of the publishing field, until (at least) the publishing industry got full control of it and could control their fates were often the most unfortunate in the long run. You get a first book you ever wrote picked up and miraculously it hits (back before the game was SERIOUSLY rigged) and then … what? If you don’t know how to keep it up, you will sink. Your luck might still be fabulous, but unless you’re doing AT LEAST competent work, you won’t have a career.
Which I suppose is what Heinlein meant when he said luck was how the envious explained the work of genius. It is, like most such bon mots overbroad and … somewhat wrong. There are people who are suddenly and inexplicably lucky. (Is Dan Brown a genius? Perhaps in tapping into the exact vein that publishers and wealthy patrons wanted to promote. I mean, I could see the same opportunity and had I had no moral scruples, I could have done it. OTOH I’ve seen enough interviews with him, I think he rather believes his bizarre theory. So… Not genius, and definite luck.) But at the same time, those who continue being lucky (like Heinlein himself) owe less to luck and how it’s running than to their hard work and continuous, intelligent repositioning of their options.
Or, as my friend Kevin J. Anderson put it (And Dean Wesley Smith too, I think): the harder I work, the luckier I get.
Now, to the extent I believe in luck, I know my dad’s side of the family (mom’s side is difficult to gage, because people who continuously shoot themselves in the foot might or might not be born lame – who’d know?) has the sort of luck that, to quote Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Tom Bailey, Story of a Bad Boy, available from Gutenberg project, get it, you won’t regret it) “if they made hats, babies would be born without heads.”
And yet, I would bet you half of my writing colleagues think I’m way too lucky to live. After all, I stayed employed and managed to make a living at a time when most people got one book and were out.
Genius? Depends on what you consider genius. It wasn’t intelligence. But I try to keep my eye on what’s happening in the market, and I try to learn to improve my work – continuously, but then I started at a very low point – and I work. I work harder than most people in my field. (I remember being shocked at someone throwing a fit because her agent asked her for two proposals – at a time I was writing a proposal a month, and three or four novels a year.) Not harder than all the people in my field. I know people who work harder. But given my handicaps of health, family, other obligations, I work as hard as I can.
I do it because I know my luck is naturally bad, and my fate probably tugs towards total failure at any given time. And I can’t be having with that.
So does fate exist? Who knows? It seems like the sort of thing that chaos mechanics will somehow prove at some point… like they’ve proven that the mechanics of internet memes are the same as those of an Earthquake – unpredictable but more likely to hit in some places/at some times than others.
And if it exists and you’re fated to fail, does it matter? Well, as I said, I view fate as a current pulling a certain way. But currents can be overcome… with enough force.
Get yourself an outboard motor and go against the current of the river of fate. Yes, you can. And eventually fate gets tired.
Or to put it another way – you have to deal with your destiny. Which is why I’m so fond of the Pratchett phrase that, supposedly means that: You’ve got to dree your weird.
You can spend your life raging at those who look like they’re blessed by fate, and letting envy eat you from the inside out. Or you can shrug, assume your luck runs to bad. And then make it so that nobody from outside can tell.
Dree your weird!
According To Hoyt 
Dreedom!
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“Dree your weird” equals “endure your fate”. Sorry, but IMO what you’re talking about is more like “fighting your fate”. [Smile]
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Well, Pratchett says it’s more like “manage your fate.”
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“who were fated to die”
Who isn’t? It’s the timing that’s open to question.
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Trying to conceive of God as an entity is doomed to failure because we simply have no basis for comparison. Given that, when I was younger and wrestling with understanding God, it occurred to me that a singular intelligence that knows everything that’s ever happened or will happen (ie, fate) while allowing for human free will is as close to knowing God’s true nature as I think I can get.
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God is that entity which can create a universe in which Free Will exists despite His Omniscience.
In other words, God is that entity to which paradox does not apply. If you can believe in such an entity, you can believe in God. If not, you can’t. Simple and complicated as that.
Not that that is the only way God can be defined, obviously, but if you believe in both Free Will and Divine Omniscience, there’s no out.
(You can perform the exact same analysis with Evil and Omnipotence/Omnibenevolence. You need both of the latter for Evil to be a Problem.)
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(You can perform the exact same analysis with Evil and Omnipotence/Omnibenevolence. You need both of the latter for Evil to be a Problem.)
The obvious followup question, then, would be, “Can evil exist without freewill?”
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Or free will, even…
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No.
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Can an omnipotent, omnibenevolent god create evil because he/she wants to? Or can evil only be created by an omnipotent god? It could be that evil itself was woven into the fabric of Creation by God, but was only allowed to break through the tenuous seperation between itself and Paradise because of the Fall. After all, how can something exist in Creation that God didn’t put there?
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Absent the possibility of Evil, is Good a possible moral choice? Or is Evil necessary in order to be able to choose Good?
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Maybe Good can exist without Evil as long as there is indifference to know what’s actually Good.
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That depends on the definition of Evil. Tell me what yours is and I will offer my opinion on your question.
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1) Only if It is not bound by paradox. That was my point.
2) Lots of ways. None of the Three Omnes require God to be the Prime Cause or the sole creator. That is an independent property. It’s not an out for It if Evil has an independent source, however, for obvious reasons.
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Knowing something is going to happen isn’t causing it to happen.
If I know my daughter is about to stick her hand in a too-hot tub, but don’t stop her, I didn’t cause her to scare herself. I let her make a mistake so she could learn.
I could forcibly keep her from doing it, but that wouldn’t fix the underlying problem.
If I’m all-knowing– omniscient– and I know that she won’t learn from the hot water, but she will learn from touching the “pretty” glowing coal, and I only allow her to make the choices that will result in the end I want…then that isn’t free will, either. That’s only allowing the choices that lead to what I want.
If God were free to violate paradox, then He could have both free will and no evil, by making it so everyone freely chose only good.
Same applies with having all power and desiring all good; I could forcibly keep my daughter from the mistake– I have the power.
I do wish only the best for my daughter– I love her that much.
Yet they all end in allowing her to stick her hand in the hot water, resulting in tears and wails.
Those three things are why I have to let her make mistakes on her own. (Thankfully, I’m dealing with a kid instead of a whole people, so I can FREQUENTLY come down like a load of bricks and stop the big mistakes before they end in dire tears.)
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Knowing something bad is going to happen and not stopping it from happening is, however, a refutation of the claim of omnibenevolence.
The claim that we need to learn for our own good is easily refuted by pointing out that we only need to learn because bad things can happen. If bad things never happened we wouldn’t need to learn.
If God can’t give us free will in a universe where nothing bad ever happens, then It is bound by paradox. If God could, but doesn’t, then It is not omnibenevolent.
People have been trying to make this work for thousands of years. There’s no out. Either God is bound by paradox (and thus not omnipotent) or God is not bound by paradox (and thus is not omnibenevolent) or there is something going on which humans cannot understand per se, in which case no human has any business whatsoever trying to tell other humans what God thinks or what It is up to, let alone trying to boss them around based on said alleged knowledge. The minute you start trying to use logic to demonstrate the existence of God and/or establish any of God’s attributes, the whole thing falls right apart. If you want to believe in God, that’s your business. (Note that I am, myself, a religion of one, not an atheist.) But don’t go thinking your belief has any logical basis. It doesn’t. (Neither does mine.)
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I would like to see the basis for the claim that God is omnibenevolent in the first place. Saying that God is love, is grace, is holy, is not the same thing as saying he is benevolent…at all, and the removal of that trait removes the paradox, it would seem. Further, the omnibenevolent argument rests solely on the judgement of Good in our plane of existence. What if this is just bootcamp? A training existence before we graduate up to a higher one? We may be part of a Creation wholly beyond our meager comprehension, the equivalent of being two rungs up out of the muck on the way to becoming what we were originally designed to become.
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Sorry…not the same as saying he is omnibenevolent.
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“Omnibenevolence” is shorthand for the general idea that God is good and doesn’t do bad things to us that we don’t deserve. Lots of Gods do not have this feature, but most Gods that do not also don’t fit into the hole that people who try to logically demonstrate the existence of Gods are trying to fill. It’s trivial to show that God could exist if It were a crazy bastard that does things at random because It feels like it. If you want to debate one particular form of God, kindly list your parameters: I’m always ready to rumble. However, absent specific particulars I’m addressing the most common arguments.
And your hypothesis falls under my third option. :)
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No, allowing someone to CHOOSE the wrong thing because the alternative is worse is not proof of a lack of love, as my example pointed out.
“Bad things” are a result of having the option to choose.
I guess you’re not understanding that “omnipotent” doesn’t mean “violates self-contradicting formats,” it means “all powerful.” You don’t prove God isn’t all powerful by saying “can God make a rock so big He can’t move it” any more than saying “unless God does something He can’t do, He’s not all powerful.” It can be built with words, but that doesn’t mean it’s rational.
Free will means He lets us choose; he can’t let us choose and force us to make the right choice, or it’s not a choice.
You quite clearly are simply misunderstanding what the words actually mean.
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You are entitled to your own definitions, but not to enforce them upon others absent stipulation. (“The applicant may serve as his own lexicographer, but any confusion engendered thereby shall accrue to the detriment of the applicant.”)
You are assuming that God is bound by paradox, whether you want to admit it or not. Here’s a helpful rule of thumb: whenever you say that an omnipotent being can’t do something, you are already in the weeds and going south. Just because you can’t imagine not being constrained by paradox doesn’t mean God has to be so constrained. (“Stop telling God what to do, Albert.”) If God has to fit in your head, then that means anybody with a bigger head *ahem* can make your God look silly. That’s my whole point. If God can’t give us free will without allowing bad things to happen which It could stop, that means God is bound by paradox and therefore God is not omnipotent. You might want to look up the definition of that word, if you’re going to get in such a tizzy about it. It means “all-powerful.” If you can’t do something, you are not all-powerful. QED.
And, while we’re on the subject, I have never seen a logical explanation of what it is about Free Will that makes it worth endless suffering and death at the hands of an allegedly omnibenevolent God who is perfectly willing to pull strings for Its favorites when the mood strikes It. We’re right into Option Three again.
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You are entitled to your own definitions, but not to enforce them upon others absent stipulation.
Well, there we have to disagree– about being entitled to one’s own definitions.
I’m using the standard definitions. If you were using special definitions that were different, you should’ve have mentioned.
“Omnipotent” means “infinite power,” not “able to do anything English language can construct.” As I pointed out, asking the question “Can God do something He can’t do? If not, He’s not all powerful!” is not rational. Just because words can be put in an order to convey something doesn’t mean that the thing they convey makes sense.
And, while we’re on the subject, I have never seen a logical explanation of what it is about Free Will that makes it worth endless suffering and death at the hands of an allegedly omnibenevolent God who is perfectly willing to pull strings for Its favorites when the mood strikes It.
…Wow, you really haven’t even bothered to look at the theology you’re trying to tear apart, have you? Possibly scanned it, but not bothered to try to follow the reasoning, just got angry.
No wonder you’re a religion of one, though variations aren’t new to anyone.
I can’t force you to actually think about what you’re pissed about, and I think your writing with refute itself fine to anyone who comes on this later, so I’ve done my part for rationality.
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In Judaism and Christianity — and pardon me, I was very badly taught, being born in 62, so I might be wrong — G-d sets himself certain limits to operate within principles we can discover (which is what allows those religions to co-exist with science.) Allah OTOH, if I understand correctly, is free to change things any minute, since the universe is the product of his mind moment to moment and — this is very important — THERE IS NO PACT WITH HUMANITY where he respects us as children.
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It’s a good thumbnail. (From memory, this is the kind of thing that takes entire classes to explain, from trained experts to well-studied students who are all on the same page and trying to understand.)
The God of Moses and St. Peter is rational; the god of Mohammad is not.
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Saying that someone has agreed to act rationally (especially when the agreement cannot be enforced by other parties) is not the same thing as saying that the someone is rational. Similarly, saying that someone has not agreed to act rationally is not the same thing as saying that they are not rational. The scriptures of both example religions contain demonstrably false explanations/assertions about observable reality. Neither has an advantage on that score. (Although if memory serves the Bible has fewer really ludicrous ones. That matters not: this isn’t a football game.)
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And, while we’re on the subject, I have never seen a logical explanation of what it is about Free Will that makes it worth endless suffering and death at the hands of an allegedly omnibenevolent God who is perfectly willing to pull strings for Its favorites when the mood strikes It.
Again…I would have to know what omnibenevolent means here. I was raised Catholic and was confirmed Lutheran. I’m a practicing Lutheran to this day and have been raising my kids thus. I have never heard the term omnibenevolent before after that many years of being a participant in our particular flavor of Christian philosophy. Further, I have studied and been exposed to many other sects of Christianity and Judaism and have never heard the term used before in reference to God.
As far as the suffering is concerned, especially at the hands of a natural disaster in which hundreds of thousands die, are maimed, or left homeless, disease-ridden, or starving (or all of the above), consider that our definitions of what’s suffering and what constitutes horrible situations may not be sufficient to describe the greater horrors and greater suffering Creation contains. Ditto the greatest peace and love. It is unknowable to us whether or not the suffering of, say, the victims of the Indonesian tsunamis a few years ago, would be labeled “worth it” by those that went through it, died, and went to join Him in Heaven. Analogy: would you suffer through stubbing a toe if it meant you never had to worry about sickness or disease ever again? My point being, as awful as the aftermath of the tsunamis was, to us, one of the worst things humans can endure. However, that earthbound, material suffering may not be more than a stubbed toe compared to Paradise. The flip side of that is that all of that earthbound, material suffering may well be considered paradise to those that end up with eternal damnation…whatever form that takes.
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I’m gonna blow the Theology Whistle here and call Foul. The only thing crasser than discussing Politics here is discussing Theology. Passing mention is one thing, Drive-by theology is one thing. Extended discussion of the nature and existence of a Deity (other than for story purposes) is quite another thing all together.
Take it outside, folks, it is growing tedious.
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That gave me a great idea for a four-book series. Pray continue…
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And they pulled me in. They’re growing insidious.
RES is right, guys.
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Like rootbeer?!?
[Garak takes a drink of root beer]
Quark: What do you think?
Elim Garak: It’s vile.
Quark: I know. It’s so bubbly and cloying and happy.
Elim Garak: Just like the Federation.
Quark: And you know what’s really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it.
Elim Garak: It’s insidious.
Quark: Just like the Federation.
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I was thinking like Nobby Nobbs. “How did you get in here?” “I don’t know. Me mum says I’m insidious.”
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Oh well, but I am still going to post:
In my case it would be a neurotic constitutional lawyer with a type AAA personality and twin hang ups about cleanliness and organization. No thank you.
BTW: The above quote is from the book A Fatal Stain by someone or other. I highly recommend it as a pleasurable romp.
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Pleasurable romps, it occurs, would seem to be purely subjective based on one’s evolutionary background. What I would consider a pleasurable romp might not include enough viscera for someone evolved from, say, velociraptor-analogs.
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As the book is set in the delightful invention of Goldport in mountainous Colorado I think we can rest assured that the Posleen have absolutely noting to do with it. So if this is the reason you require viscera, well then, no this is not for you. But it does come with explosions.
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ooooo…flowers of black and red, blooming into the sky and coiling away on the slight breeze that gave not a thought to the men dying below.
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Um… I maintain my ideas of G-d were warped forever by being raised mostly (in the sense of the people who talked to me the most, and indulged me the most/were most interested in what was going on in my mind, both parents being VERY busy) by my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather. Imagine being raised by Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde (when it comes to moral judgements. Grandma wasn’t a grand dame. Grandad WAS a bohemian of good birth though he worked as a carpenter — and there hinges a tale I won’t touch with a ten foot pole — after blowing the family fortune. He also spoke Greek and Latin and quoted wildly from the classics.)
Gee, no wonder I sympathized with Adam from Good Omens.
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Grandad WAS a bohemian of good birth though he worked as a carpenter
Did he leave behind a grail?
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By “wildly” do you mean
a) at random intervals
b) with variable accuracy
c) without regard to conversational/situational appropriateness*
d) all of the above
Inquiring Mind wants to know.
* A condition known to Medical Science as “Literary Tourette’s Syndrome”.
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a mostly. “appropriate” is debatable. He just tended to find things that reminded him of something some dead Greek or Roman had said long ago. Sometimes the link was tenuous, but mostly it was humorous. Or punny.
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I confess it was that grand atheist Kurt Vonnegut whose writings enabled me to conceive of a Deity external to Time, making a joke of Causality and rendering irrelevant all questions of Good & Evil, Free Will & Destiny, Benevolence/Malevolence. Once you abandon the Sequential Heresy and accept the Simultaneity and Pandimensionality of a Deity, all becomes hopelessly confusing, like Flatlanders attempting to wrap their brains through Height as well as Length & Breadth.
I want to make a comment about “take your 4-Dimensional reality, sit on it and rotate through 90 degrees” but cannot see a route there that doesn’t come off as Vice-presidential (D.MD.)
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Of course, once I read that, I thought of the apple as something that somehow — brain altering nannos?– made Eve and Adam prisoners of sequential time. Thus knowing good from evil (aka action/reaction) and kicking them from the garden.
(Looks up. No lightening bolt. So far so good.)
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Reason.
Reasoning requires sequentiality.
It is the ability to reason which separates us from lower orders. But so many of us reason sooooo badly.
OTOH, “women’s intuition” might be defined as knowledge of the Cosmic All, inferring without experiencing and drawing information from the simultaneity of existence. Might be so defined if you are full of carp, at any rate. Goldfish! — the new term for BS? (Which suggests a whole new interpretation of the erstwhile college fad for swallowing goldfish as metaphor for higher education … which prompts snarky remarks about “how many college students can you cram into a coed?” … which makes me think the Jesse Stone novel (Seachange) I just finished left more of a mark than I like.)
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Exactly. If you think in eternal terms, things change.
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Take it outside, folks, it is growing tedious.
Yeah, going in circles generally is; I was dead serious when I called it quits, because I recognize when it’s going to be just banging one’s head against a wall, dragging horses to water and yelling for them to drink, etc.
There’s a reason that I like online arguing– once things have been gone through once in a location, you can say “that’s enough” and there isn’t actually a “last word” involved. What was said stays there, unless it’s deleted. Arguing in person, there’s a lot of “I never said that” and “say it over and over, louder, you’ll win.”
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Some of my posts crossed over our hostess’s request to cease and desist, for which I apologize and with which I will certainly comply.
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I read with witch… :-P
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RES:
Precisely. I sometimes wonder if the apparent ease with which physicists simultaneously hold more or less Determinist beliefs about the nature of the physical universe and a wide variety of supernatural beliefs of varying kinds is that they’ve already learned, in their bones, that there is more to the world than what we can see or ever hope to understand as an analogue to anything our senses can tell us. Once you grasp the essential idea of spacetime and/or quantum mechanics, the idea of a Being outside our normal perception and not subject to the macrophysical constraints which will forever hold our consciousnesses in the cage of sequential logic is really not unreasonable.
It’s not that I get angry with God, as religious apologists sometimes assume. I get irritated with people making arguments, consciously or unconsciously, that God is somehow limited to human understanding. It brings out some of my less admirable attributes, for which I am often regretful afterwards.
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I have read and at one time before chemo (BC???) I understood quantum mechanics and other quantum theories. It does have the taste of mysticism especially if you read some of the religious writings. I also know as a person that has had divine intervention in my life many times, it also comes with the after effects. There have been times that I have wondered if it would have been better to have had no intervention– my life would be at a more even keel without the rich texture.
Okay… I can hear the arguments being revved up now about how a single person would not be under this kind of scrutiny especially when there are so many humans and other creatures. It is illogical–
I can’t explain it any other way. There have been times when I have had this agreement “I’ll do my thing and I won’t trample on your thing.” There has been a sort of amusement in the universe as I have said those words. And there have been times when I have been at death’s door and something or someone has saved me.from death. It happened as early as nine years ago. The first time was when I was bitten by a black widow spider in my parents home. I was a toddle then.
If you want to know how it felt– like something greater than I am looking at me with a microscope. But it was also like having my grandfather with me (he was the one person in my life that really cared about me as a person and not a tool besides my husband now.)
I went to religious instruction just a few months ago because I was interested in a certain type of Christianity. I still have a hard time with the amorphous idea of G-d. It is somehow impersonal in my mind. I don’t see G-d as a human being or in human form (as my childhood religion), but I don’t see Him as impersonal either. Plus I have a hard time with any religion who would cut out a major portion of humanity just because they aren’t of the same religion. I can’t believe it.
Sorry I brought this up Sarah… The 4th dimensional G-d and impersonality of it just doesn’t sit right with me. So back to quantum mechanics– I don’t think we know enough about it even now to really ascertain what it really is– not yet anyway.
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We once had a cat who would occasionally require treatment for abscessed wounds. Said treatment typically involved three strong people drawing on shoulder-length leather gauntlets to hold her while the ointment tube was inserted into the wound and its contents squirted in.
I do not think that cat considered what we did to her kind, loving or good.
If it were conscious, would the sword appreciate the beating required to give it strength?
My purpose is not His purpose and I do not expect to understand (for one thing, I am thoroughly confident He cannot possibly be interested in having me sing songs of praise, but perhaps it is merely that He deems such singing sufficiently beneficial to me that He endures the off-key atonal unrhythmical croaking that constitutes my singing.)
It does rather seem to me that perceiving all existence simultaneously would tend to mitigate any urges toward taking direct action.
As to the question of “cut[ting] out a major portion of humanity just because they aren’t of the same religion” I think it depends a great deal on what those terms mean. If you refuse to raise your gaze you cannot look upon the sun; that is not the sun’s fault.
You need to choose your Faith carefully and recognize that the Faith you choose is not necessarily correct (is almost surely, in at least some particulars, incorrect.)
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Cyn (I hope you’ll pardon the informality:)
Once you stop trying to stuff God into that old-man-in-a-robe outfit and let It be what It is, a lot of constraints that a humble (or even just a reasonable) person would instinctively put in go away along with the more obvious ones about paradox and linearity. Happily, one of them is the idea that the God that created the Universe wouldn’t care about a single human being (or a single sparrow, or what have you.) Why wouldn’t They? For all you know – once you admit that you can’t know in the first place – that human being, that particular event, was a major reason, or Hell maybe the reason the whole works was put in motion.
It’s kind of like how we were discussing a while back that many writers construct whole stories around a single scene or even a single line that a character speaks in their heads out of the blue. It would be the height of narcissism for one of my characters to assume that they were the reason the Universe was created… but in a very real sense it’s absolutely true, for values of “the Universe” equating to “the universe their story takes place in.” One could view our own existence as basically the ultimate shared-universe anthology.
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“There you go again.”
Saying I have never seen a logical explanation of something isn’t saying I have never seen an explanation of it. I’ve seen dozens if not hundreds. They all collapse to “God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. It says so right here on the label. Also, ineffable. As opposed to you, who is very effable, if you catch my drift.” Not. Impressed.
And if you can say, with a straight face, “infinite power,” and “able to do anything” are logically different things, then I think we’re just going to go on talking past each other. That’s fun and all, but if it’s all the same to you we can just pretend we did it and move on.
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No fair! We had a religious discussion (the PC term for arguement) and Sarah shut it down before I got my say :( It sucks being gone 18 hours a day the last few days, I miss all the fun stuff ;)
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Which Religious Faiths promise Life will be fair? The only such Faiths of which I know decry (opposing) religions as “the opiate of the masses.”
As the one who blew the Theology Whistle on that discussion, I have no objection to a brief expression of your views on the Nature of G-d, so long as we stay out of the tall grass.
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I’ll just back Foxfier up on this one, she pretty much said what I would have, although I agree with Scott, I have never heard of omnibenevolent, and don’t believe that God is. It’s just more fun to say it yourself, but repeated whistleblowings hurt my ears, so I’ll just keep my mouth shut.
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In defense of my use of the word, I’ve seen it used quite commonly in discussions of the nature of God. (As a theoretical property.) The “it says so right here on the label” is a quote from Time Enough for Love which also appears in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long. The entire thing is:
“God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent – it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.”
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Opinions on omnibenevolence vary according to the viewers’ perspectives. My cat never accepted benevolence on my part as justification for squirting ointment deep into her abscesses. Unless you are as well informed as the Deity it seems presumptuous to attempt to evaluate his “benevolence” — rather like a three-year-old calling Mommy mean for denying exxtra birthday cake and ice cream.
One caution: quoting SF writers in regard to God & His Relation To The Universe is a bit like quoting politicians on fiscal projections: some data may have been interpreted rather loosely in a way contrary to its actual implications.
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It strikes me, given your profession, that a more apt simile might be: like quoting defense attorneys on the merits of plaintiffs charges.
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I said I’d stop, and I have. I was just addressing the word as a word. I’m very surprised to hear so many people say they’ve never heard it who obviously have an interest in this topic. The quote was provided to show that it’s not just some made-up Internet word.
And IME SF writers tend to be sitting at the other table in metaphorical trials of this sort, but I catch your drift. :)
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I recognized the word and was just pointing out the obvious problem in interpretation of the term benevolence.
Employing my oft repeated quote from My Name Is Nobody:
Incidentally, here’s an example of the kind of thing I mean when I say “thousands of years.”
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
Epicurus (Greek philosopher, BC 341-270)
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For purely educational purposes, the above quote from Epicurus encapsulates what is termed Theodicy, or more colloquially, the Problem of Evil. On a more personal note, I shined up my motorcycle this morning, and it’s real purty.
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I shined up my motorcycle this morning, and it’s real purty.
Yes, but did you choose to do that?
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Good question. I think I did, but if I don’t actually have free will, but only the illusion thereof, how would I know?
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Bringing us back to the conundrum of Causality in a Universe of Simultaneity. If Sequentiality is an illusion, you have not washed your motorcycle, you are washing it through all eternity. Verb tenses just go to Heck in a handbasket in Simultaneous existence.
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And on a literary note, among many other works touching on the subject one I quite enjoyed using theodicy as a plot device was Blameless in Abbadon by James Morrow. It’s part of what I think is called the Jehovah Trilogy, which is Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abbadon and The Eternal Footman. The premise of BIA is that God is put on trial for Crimes Against Humanity. (Yes, the Defendant is present. Sort of. Towing Jehovah explains how we got there.) I haven’t read TEF. I think I’ll put it on my wishlist.
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Well… empirical. My plan starts with “first don’t die” — so far so good ;)
Of course you were fated to die meant shortly.
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LOL! Yeah, you have to be alive to do what’s necessary to be successful. Although, come to think of it, many, many painters and sculptors were never considered “good” until after they died. The same can be said about one or two authors (present company — including the commenters — excepted). (It’s also a good thing NOT to get into situations where one’s luck may not be sufficient to protect one from the follies of one’s own behavior, he mumbles quietly to himself.) Here’s to both of us celebrating our 95th birthday — just in different years.
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0:)
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I’ve found that the harder I work, the “luckier” I tend to get.
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ummm– “Dree your weird” seems a little sad. I fight it… and then I get to fight it again.. and again… maybe that’s my weird.
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I should have read your post first. I think my weird has been bad from the beginning especially if I tell you the things that have happened to me. BUT I am grateful because I need something to fight against to succeed. It is my nature to be contrary, I think. So if I had good fate, then I would have not achieved so much. Yes, I am new to publishing– but I am not new to other things … a lot of other things. (Illness, Navy, electronics, science, college– travel etc, etc.)
Each one of these things were hard at first. I managed. And, I will manage to write. Plus being the oldest child, I gave my brothers a role-model. They have told me before that if it hadn’t been for my fighting spirit, they wouldn’t have left home and started their own businesses– etc. So there are time that other people’s weird are on your shoulders too.
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Timing? Luck? Destiny? They won’t do you much good if you have not done the hard work to be prepared to take advantage of it. On this you have the right of it. But all the hard work in the world won’t do you much good if what you have done is the equivalent of developing the best ever Kosher Dairy restaurant — in Germany in the late 1920s.
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Branch Rickey, the architect of the structure of modern Major League Baseball and best known for wondering what would happen if the Brooklyn Dodgers stopped excluding negro ballplayers from their roster, famously said: “Luck is the residue of design.”
Plan well, work hard and you increase your chances for success in the highly complex series of interactions that comprise our universe.
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Agree here – I don’t believe in fate. We all know bad things are going to happen, that’s what insurance is for. :-) Take the risks, understand the potential downside and prepare for them. We make our choices based on the best information we have, with the understanding that everything and anything can fail, just as everything and anything can succeed. (Granted, I haven’t been hit by true tragedy – hardest I’ve received is a job layoff, but that led to some good things overall, enough so that, if you gave me a chance to go back in time and make that not happen, I wouldn’t take it.)
I do completely forgive the “it was meant to be” kind of statements, if they’re used for comfort. It’s not a bad thing to consider one’s self part of a grand scheme and a higher good, whether it’s true or not.
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One of the arguments early Christian missionaries used with the Saxons and other Germanic pagans was that because G-d was stronger than wyrd, Christians were not bound to a set fate. I suspect it had less effect than did not dropping dead after felling sacred trees and kicking over altars, but apparently some Saxons found the argument fairly persuasive, according to the surviving writings we have.
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Part of the persuasion was because they were seeing the people around them being subjugated … I know that in Finland the entire country became Christian after they hid all of their books, which is why we still have a few of the Edda poems. Much of the writings were burned, the sacred items tainted, and the leaders (religious leaders especially) killed and tortured. It was prudent.
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Probably an outlier. Most of the converters did NOT go in with the sword. THAT was another religion. Yes, books and stuff got hid, but that was usually after the country was ALREADY Christian. At its root Christianity was a religion of the slaves and the humble, and subverted UPWARDS. It was their religion because it promised equality before G-d, which no other religion promised.
Now, Middle-Ages Europe (And the Scandinavian countries converted later, so different) was stultifyingly uniform and refused to allow even mention of other religions. I find the art — which was ALL based on the life of Christ or the occasional Old Testament incident — almost painfully uniform, although whether that’s different from our art based on political correctness, I don’t know. THAT was the period of book burning, because when you’re that uniform anything that’s not sticks out and seems dangerous. But even then, they spared the classical authors and those they considered to have Perfigured Christ.
I don’t know enough about Finland to doubt your report, but I’ve heard the same thing about Western Europe where this is “history as rewritten by American new agers” and has no point of contact with reality. Yes, there were people converted at sword point — but not to Christianity. Yes, there were books burned en mass — but not by Christians. In fact, until the struggle with Islam had hardened and twisted Christianity, it didn’t so much fight older religions as subvert them and turn a blind eye to continuing er… irregular practices.
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No– the Finns I met were very proud of the fact that they saved the Eddas. And yes, I have seen the subversion of history by the new agers. (My interest lies with Scandinavian history and their conversion was hard. Of course, their conversion was later than most.) But I think (I could be wrong) that the new-agers use the Inquisition and the Crusades as the example of Christian suppression. So I was thinking Scandinavian… and getting the Celts in there– well wrong on my part.
It is interesting that the Scandinavian countries are mostly Protestant (you have to be a certain type of Protestant to be Queen or King of Denmark btw).
Also, the history of my family is a history of losing power (since they had power and were not the slave or serf class). So I guess my viewpoint is different even though I grew up in lower middle-class America and in a Christian household.
Also – Erik the Red (an ancestor of mine) ‘s wife did convert to Christianity. Erik from the writings I read was not impressed. Of course Erik was not the nicest of men either. ;-)
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Saxons too– BTW my family who went to England (that wasn’t England yet) were Normans.
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You mean Iceland? The Finnish national epic is Kalevala, and those poems were written down only during the 19th century. While the Icelanders were writing down Edda my ancestors probably didn’t even know how to write.
Christianity probably kind of sneaked into Finland. There is some proof of Christian burials, or at least crosses have been found, starting from the 10th century. The earliest influences probably came from the East, and that has been cited as one of the reasons why the Swedes started to push into this direction a couple of hundred years later. And then after this country had become part of the Swedish kingdom only the population centers were places where everybody had to be a Christian, or at least better pretend, people living elsewhere converted when it became more convenient to be a Christian than a pagan, and even during the 17th century some still practiced the old rites, at least when the situation seemed desperate. One of the cases I have read about concerned a trial against a man who had invited his neighbors to drink for the honor of Ukko, presumed to have been the god of thunder and rain, during a long dry season 1662.
I say ‘presumed’ because there is very, very little actual proof of what our old gods may have been like, or what they may have been called. There are only a few written references from the earlier times, like one list of Finnish pagan false gods from 1551, most what we know comes from the poems which were only written down during the 19th century, and there have been some rather convincing arguments that at least some of those gods we know of may actually have gotten their start as Catholic saints, and then, after the reformation, lived on as the characters in the poems.
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See – the problem with chemo is that it curdles your brain. You are right about the Icelandic Eddas. Ummm… arg! I have been on chemo nine years — I usually check before I make a complete fool of myself. ;-) It is sad that my brain doesn’t work like it used to.
Poh– Icelandic Eddas– and yes, Icelanders are very proud of their Eddas… Very interesting about the Ukko– however I think you are right that they seem like a saints… however, many of the pagan gods (hope I don’t make a fool of myself again) and holidays were pulled into the Church to bring certain people into the fold. Christmas and Easter are two holidays that seem to have this history. (see I used seemed to cover my butt).
I just looked it up and I can see why I get mixed up (Dane/Norwegian heritage here). Anyway it was Denmark under Harald Bluetooth (?) 965 that made Denmark and territories (including Iceland) Christian for political reasons. Icelanders talk about becoming Christian en masse.
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St. John, the saint of my city is celebrated at the same time and with similar solemnities to the Celtic summer solstice. (Though we no longer burn people. But we make huge piles of stuff to burn and until some century or other — I don’t have chemo as an excuse, it’s just been a long time — jumping over the fire together, hand in hand was an accepted ritual of marriage.)
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I think it was Niven/Pournelle’s “Legacy Of Herot” (which would make an excellent movie…they should have struck while the Jurrasic Park iron was hot) where the colonists were pretty much secular intellectual types. They had a nearby rapid-filled river and it became their custom to “go down the river” or “take him/her down the river” which sealed the deal, so to speak.
Great book. I’m going to have to give that one another read.
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I remember hearing of jumping over the fire (as marriage). In America 19th century (I think) a lot of people were living together until the traveling preacher could get to their small towns for a bunch of weddings. It all depended on where you were.
Then during the Great Wars a lot of women would move to towns pregnant and would be called Mrs. Some of them were never married. It is sometimes a polite fiction to acquire a new generation. ;-)
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Well, originally any adult woman had the right to call herself Mistress Whoever, and it was the exact female equivalent of Mister. So there’s an interesting transition when certain regions and levels of society were only pronouncing married women “Missus” and starting to call unmarried women “Miss” (which was the same word abbreviated two different ways), whereas other levels of society had never heard of such a thing, or thought of “Missus” as a courtesy title for any respected woman. For example, the housekeeper was always Mrs. Whoever, because she was high up in the hierarchy of the house.
And then, all of a sudden, the younger people didn’t remember why Mrs. Whoever was called that, and assumed she was hiding a Terrible Secret with pitiful hypocrisy. (And probably some women did start to, of course.)
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Of course in medieval times they would have been married, having agreed to do so and consummated the union. . . come to think of it, a lot of those couples would have had common-law marriages in the US.
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well, an engagement was technically the same as a marriage, and sometimes consummation wasn’t so much needed. So… yeah..
Actually, I understand a priest was only needed for a religious marriage from the 4th century on. Up to then, saying your vows on the church steps worked.
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Yep – common law marriages in the US were common for a long time.
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There were betrothals and weddings, which were different, but since so much rested on intent, it was hard to tease them apart.
4th century? They had yet to work out distinctively Christian ceremonies then. Well into the Dark Ages you had the peasants who shacked up and weren’t actually considered married, and those with property, who were married by a ceremonial signing of the agreement between their families, and by having the bride escorted, in a rather rowdy manner, to her wedding bed. Vows on the church steps were introduced rather later as part of the conflict over matrimony, particularly the Church’s insistance that it was indissoluable and that it was undertaken by the couple and not by their families.
The Knight, the Lady and the Priest covers the medieval evolution in great detail.
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MUST you make me spend money, you terrible, terrible person? ;)
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Mary, wasn’t illegal for peasants to marry in many places at that time? Not saying some wouldn’t have shacked up anyways, but if it is illegal to marry… well men and women will get together some way.
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Slave marriages were not recognized under Roman law — as a consequence, you see freedmen and freedwomen putting on their tombstones a depiction of them, holding hands, which symbolically indicates that they were not only married, but free.
Serfs could marry. They had to pay a fee for it — well, we have to pay for a marriage license nowadays — but they could marry.
Inbetween — well, nowadays historians call it the “Dark Ages” because the dearth of records make many events in it dark to us.
(Sorry about the book. I did find it in the library.)
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We also burn big bonfires during the summer solstice. Well, the weekend closest to the summer solstice nowadays. And in some parts of the country also on Easter, right now I don’t remember the exact day.
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Poh– Icelandic Eddas– and yes, Icelanders are very proud of their Eddas… Very interesting about the Ukko– however I think you are right that they seem like a saints… however, many of the pagan gods (hope I don’t make a fool of myself again) and holidays were pulled into the Church to bring certain people into the fold. Christmas and Easter are two holidays that seem to have this history. (see I used seemed to cover my butt).
“Baptizing” celebrations is what it’s called; long and proud tradition, way to meld the local culture with the binding parts of the faith. That said, a lot of the supposed “stolen holidays” don’t hold up under examination– traditions, sure, but even the symbols… not like using baby animals to symbolize new life is an odd thing…. (Don’t get me started on Easter, which turns out to be based on a monk guessing there could’ve been a goddess there’s no record of… or it could mean “east” and “spring” and such. -.- )
Want to get real funny, sometimes there’s evidence of reverse-baptism, where folks rip off Catholic traditions for pagan faiths. ^.^
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Eh. American paganism rips off everyone… The books written in the seventies? ARGH.
But the solstice thing in the region seems to be real — and made for a fun celebration.
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You have to laugh at it though…
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Actually the Romans pulled some gods into their gods– yes a proud tradition.
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Ah, but there’s a big difference between either taking the gods and sticking them in your Parthenon, or taking the stories and sticking new names on them (no matter how crazy the resulting stories end up being) and finding symbolic justification to not change harmless and/or cool things the locals do. (Evergreen trees as a symbol of life, red as the blood He shed, silver as purity, gold for royalty, sparkly because… um… it’s like jewels, which are high value?)
Heck, even snakes and dragons can be symbolic of God or Christ, it’s wonderful fun. ^.^
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One of the weird side-effects of St. John’s I wonder if it got co-opted, corrupted from something older that ALSO got corrupted into Guy Fawkes in England — because kids run around with a statue of John the Baptist begging for “A penny for the saint.” I was goody two shoes at an early age, so it went to charity, but most kids blew it on enough candy to buzz for days.
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note: ah, so that’s why I couldn’t respond in the WordPress ap for chrome, it got to where the topic had no response button!
Hehe, going around saying “give me stuff or Supernatural/socially acceptable doom!” is almost as common as finding excuses for really big fires, isn’t it?
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And, anyway, the Easter thing would only be the name. Christians were celebrating Easter for generations before there were Anglo-Saxons in a position to give it a name in English.
And Christmas sprang from the Jewish tradition that great men die on the day they were conceived. The two argued dates for the Crucifixion, plus nine months, would give either December 25 or January 6. The feast of the Unconquerable Sun founders on the little problem that we have records of Christmas on December 25 that predate any reference to that pagan festivity.
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I think the “East” name was in the Germany area first, but other than that– yeah, pretty much what I had in mind. ^.^ Just didn’t want to bother finding the @#$@# links in my folders of “ooh, this is interesting”s.
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The name Easter apparently comes from the Old English Ēastre or Ēostre which apparently referred to an Anglo-Saxon Goddess.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre
Oh, the feast was also historically referred to in English as “Pash” or “Pace”, from the Latin pascha.
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The Romans probably swiped it from the Hebrews, whose celebratation of the Passover holiday (known as Pesakh in Hebrew) features the Paschal Lamb — sacrificial lamb — in commemoration of His rescuing them from Bondage.
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Because of the connection between Easter and the Passover, it could have been the Christians who “swiped” it. [Wink]
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Lamb is tasty. — this is the whole of my contribution to the discussion, so you’d best ENJOY it.
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That is what Foxfier was talking about. The goddess was a guess, by a monk, centuries after there were any pagans around for him to have to gotten accurate info from. That is the sole and exclusively evidence for it, so saying it “apparently” comes from it grossly overstates the evidence.
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Cyn, the piece I’m thinking about refers to the Saxons still in Europe prior to 800 A.D. or so, when no Christian organization or kingdom was strong enough to convert the Saxons, Burgundians and others by force. The very first attempts at conversions, before Karl der Grosse (Charlemagne) set to work, depended on persuasion, determination, and a large slug of pure nerve. Oh, and getting the pagan leaders to ignore the parts in the Old Testament about battles and warfare, since that blood-feuds and raiding were in part what the missionaries were trying to discourage.
The essay comes from a very good essay collection entitled “The Continental Saxons: An Ethnological Approach” that covers the period from the 400s to roughly 1000 A.D.
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I see TX– haven’t seen that one… course I have been wrong many times before and will be wrong many times again. ;-)
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I have been wrong many times before and will be wrong many times again.</i.
I don't think that's quite right.
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See?
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“I want to be like her.” Only you aren’t her, never will be her, and in wishing so, you miss out on being you.
“New author writes in the manner of (famous author).” A comment that will make everyone compare the new author to the famous author before they read a single page. So why buy the new author at all?
“You know how she is, just ignore her.” Nothing like being dismissed before you even open your mouth.
Having taugh comparative literature for several years, I know very well how to take a book apart and get it down to the skeletal bones of writing, characture development, historical/social expectations and rules. What I want is something to read that removes me from this world and pulls me into a world where the characters live. I want to be entertained when I read fiction, not thrust into a bunch of words filled with angst or fear. There are enough non fiction books to keep me grounded in the here and now. Edification is not the same as flights of fancy.
Lucky or not, I want to go where the fairies play, space travel is normal, and new things are discovered. That takes a writer willing to step out of the norm and into their written world without fear.
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Well, there is the cathartic moment. I do read books that drag me backwards through h*ll PROVIDED they bring me to a good place afterwards. That’s cathartic and makes me feel I overcame adversity.
And I agree with you on escapism. Yeah, I can read stuff telling me how bad a place we’re in (Or how good, but I prefer my fiction straight up) but I prefer… the fun side.
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I like all sorts of fiction, from Edmund Spencer to the newest Sci Fi/Fantasy. As long as the story captures my imagination, I will keep reading it. I like fun stuff too. The M.Y.T.H seris was my first dip into what I call slapstick fantasy. Made me laugh out loud, a lot. So did his series, Phule’s Company. And I LOVE Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Bar series.
Of course, I tend to lean toward the books or writers like Bronte (all of them), Elliot, Shelly, and others from that era. I like Dickens, but some of his books are miserable affairs to read through.
All in all, if I don’t love it, I won’t read it.
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Have you read Expecting Someone Taller by Tom Holt? And also Flying Dutch?
Don’t share your liking for the Brontes. Frankly I thought Wuthering Heights was comedy. Dan had trouble convincing me otherwise…
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I read Wuthering Heights, but don’t even remember what it was about, so that tells you how much I liked it. It wasn’t even something that I remember as be so bad I hated it, so it must have been just blah.
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I was fascinated with Wuthering Heights when I was fifteen. I bet I would find it humorous at fifty plus.
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“Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic….”
I don’t believe in fate or predestination – these are shorthands for beings subject to contingency to try to explain a big picture that’s either non-contingent (“eternity”) or else for which they lack sufficient data.
I *do* however, believe in luck, and that one can increase one’s odds through hard work and good strategy.
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“There was a quote somewhere that I read that reminds me of this: “Luck is what happens to you when G_d wishes to remain anonymous.”
Now, I’ve had bad things happen to me, but on the most part, I’ve been “lucky” — falling 35 feet out of a sycamore tree and landing in a briar patch, walking away with only a few scratches ISN’T “normal”. That’s just one of dozens of things that have happened to me in my life that should have resulted in serious bodily harm, but didn’t. I currently have some pretty debilitating problems, but they’re the result of 35 years of doing “odd” things that I consider myself mostly responsible for. Right now, my health won’t allow me to do many of the things I used to do, so I’ve begun to use one of my OTHER talents, and filling pages with words. I do believe that, for the most part, you make your own luck through hard work and attention to detail. Sure, bad things happen (the current trad/indie war is only one of the things going on today), but that’s always going to be true. Set your sights on a goal, and work every day toward achieving it, and eventually you’ll succeed. The success you achieve may not look like the goal you started out with, but you’ll have succeeded, even if it’s only those close to you who realize it.
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Sounds like my family’s luck: things go wrong in the best possible way.
Skip the next para if you don’t want to read a war story.
My uncle was blown up in Vietnam. They got word he was MIA; mom promised God she’d go to college to fulfill her mom’s deepest wish if her brother came back alive… and they found him the next day. He’d been picked up unconscious, holding the hand of his buddy, who was mostly on the other side of the river.
Less insanely, I’ve TWICE had my brakes go out, one in five feet of where the car started at walking speed, and one a half-block from Les Schwab. Both times, sandwiched between day-long, multi-hundred-mile trips in the middle of nowhere with lots of cliffs.
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I think the thing about luck and hard work is that both are necessary. Luck without hard work leads eventually to humiliation. Hard work without luck leads to obscurity.
So you have to work as hard as you can as long as you can – and hope that you be there on the day your lucky break comes. Moreover you need to recognize that opportunity *as* opportunity knocking.
Imagine a football linebacker with a lot of natural talent. If the player works and trains hard, he is more likely to get a lucky break than if he does not. The more hard hits he makes, the more likely he is to cause a fumble. But whether that fumble gets downed immediately, gets recovered by the other side, or recovered by him, and run in for a touchdown is a function of chance. If he is lucky he gets the ball, and runs it in. If he does not, oh well. But if through hard work he creates ten opportunities for that kind of luck, he is ten times more likely to catch that break.
I think that is what people really mean when they say “the harder I work, the luckier I get.”
Still, don’t badmouth luck. As the Norse saying goes, “all the skill that a man has will avail him not if the gods are against him.” Just don’t *assume* the gods are against you. You can control skill, but by definition, you cannot control luck. You have to grab fortune as it approaches, for she is a sprite with a long forelock who is bald behind.
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Ah. That explains where I am. Obscurity. Yes, siree Bob. Do you know I don’t even care, if I can figure out how to make a living.
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I like playing with the notion of Larry Niven’s (from Ringworld, IIRC) that luck — to the extent it exists and has any influence at all on events — might be a survival trait.
I suspect that, if it is, it’s a VERY weak force. Like gravity.
M
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I recall reading a YA sci-fi in junior high which took place in a future where children were tested for luck: if your luck rating was too high, you were executed because you were a threat to the powers that be.
*Google-fu* Hyaaah!
It was Starluck and the author says on his page, “I wrote this before I read Ringworld, honest.”
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I remember that one, too. Probably would have submitted the cover to “Good Show, Sir” if it had existed back [redacted] years ago.
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Speaking for my own experiences: I do not believe in God; Satan is a *whole* other story….
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Weber’s “March to the Sea” books have a fun little fillip where one of the major religions is the Church of Satan, whose dogma states that the other angels are holding God hostage and acting in His name for evil purposes (which is why the universe is such a mess) and Satan is opposing them. His bad reputation is merely Angelic propaganda.
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On a different view of fate: A friend reminded me of a talk we had about “fate” back last February. We’d been shaking our heads over the news about the Titanic Memorial/Commemorative cruises, and how the ads promised that the ships would be at the site where the Titanic sunk on precisely the 100th anniversary. My friend (US Army reserve) observed that, “You know, there’s a difference between tempting fate and walking up to her, b*tch-slapping her, and running away while yelling ‘neener, neener, neener’.”
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My spouse asks, brightly, “Are they going to bring a giant ice machine, too?”
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“[I]f absolute chaos were lightning, [they’d] be the sort to stand on top of a hill during a lightning storm wearing wet copper armour and shouting ‘All gods are bastards!'”
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Good and bad luck happen to everyone. It’s just chance, after all. It’s random.
What’s not random is what we _do_ about it. How prepared are we to roll with the punches, when things just go badly for reasons outside our control? And conversely, how prepared are we to exploit the unearned opportunities that drop periodically into our laps? (Most people aren’t even prepared to _recognize_ them!)
Some folks opine that “some day, my ship will come in”. I’m always tempted to respond with “well then, why aren’t you packed? And when was the last time you went to the pier to check? How do you know your ship didn’t come in last week, and then leave again without you, because you were too busy sitting on your butt and fantasizing?”
Most people with what seems to be a noteworthy imbalance between good and bad luck, persisting over their lifetimes, are really just unable or unwilling to recognize and exploit the good turns when they come.
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