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The Future Doesn't Suck. One of the most deeply embarrassing ideas humanity has ever come up with, embarrassing in the sense that it is shaming to belong to a species that is stupid enough to have seriously considered it, is the idea of destiny. We are not here for a reason, to fulfil a purpose. We are here because we were caused to exist. Come on people, think about what actually happened. The hand of fate did not make you. You exist because your parents engaged in sexual intercourse on a particular occasion. An almost limitless number of events could have taken a different course and you would not exist, either no child would have been created or your place might have been usurped by another brother, sister, half-brother, half-sister or perhaps even a pet. Pull back another generation and the possibilities explode exponentially. Believers in fate never make it clear over what sort of timescale they believe fate works. Does it live next Tuesday and direct things from there or is it sat on a higher perch thirty years in the future? Or does destiny work on the scale of the galaxies? In trying to ensure that Cinderella and Prince Charming live happily ever after does destiny have to ensure the creation of enough heavy elements to form a rocky planet for them by creating stars and waiting for them to die? Or perhaps I am being too small-minded, maybe the entire universe has been caused to come into existence by events which are to happen billions of years in the future. Maybe. But pardon me if I dismiss the entire notion of fate and destiny as absurd and contrary to everything we know about life, the universe and everything. Causation runs linearly. The present is shaped by the past, not the future. What is happening depends on what has happened, not on what is destined to happen, or still less by what was prophesied to happen. The notion of prophesy is even more absurd than the idea of fate. Some desert-dwelling beardie goes all wide-eyed and babbles some nonsense and credulous people write it down as if it was not so much a prediction about the future as what The Future Must Be simply because he has been witnessed saying it. If the guy could predict the future he'd be or at least work for a bloody successful merchant, surely, not by wandering about in the desert eating locusts or whatever prophets-in-waiting do. |
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