Week 6 - Choice: Destiny, Fate or Damnation?

"I think, therefore I am." - Rene Descartes.

Destiny is a rubbish idea, and so is free will, and so is setting up a dichotomy between the two.

All the information in the world and nobody knows how to use it. In Joan of Arcadia (2003), Ryan Hunter, played sensationally by Wentworth Miller, newcomer to the town towards the end of series two, explains to Joan that he, too, has conversations with God. As a child, he created an imaginary friend after his parents divorced. Then the friend was suddenly real. Unlike Joan, he’s not impressed with God’s creation. If God were God, Ryan contends, he would have scrapped the free will idea, making us all intelligent and capable, but not free. Destiny, perhaps?

“We don’t have to be bossed around by some love-starved deity. My life is a gift? Uhh, ok, thanks. You can’t ask for it back.”

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) doctrine teaches that Lucifer fell from heaven because his plan for humanity involved us having no free will. So free will is a good thing, but they – along with most every religion – demand that you exercise your free will in making the choices that they, on behalf of their deity and doctrine, tell you to make. I've made the choice to risk damnation by rejecting this.

Christopher Hitchens (2001) famously finds vicarious redemption repugnant. Lines from Baron Fulke Greville's play Mustapha (1609) elucidate it thus:

                   Oh wearisome condition of Humanity!
                   Born under one law, to another bound,
                   Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
                   Created sick, commanded to be sound:
                   What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?
                   Passion and reason self-division cause.
                   Is it the mask or majesty of Power
                   To make offences that it may forgive?

Destiny is garbage. Religious thought makes an obscene middle ground between destiny and free will, by setting humanity up to fail: with one hand it says we have free will, but on the other we must use it to obey them or burn in hell. Choice has power - it's always decisions that matter. The beautiful part of loving someone, be they friend, family, or lover, is that you choose to do it. You choose that person to be everything that makes your life worth living, despite all their flaws. You don’t idealise them; as William Blake (1793) says “he who has suffer’d you to impose on him, knows you.’ 

As much as I hate (as I have discussed elsewhere) the scapegoat for disavowal and irresponsibility that The Matrix’s Neo is, he at least had it right in one thing: The problem, the solution, and everything in between, is choice. John Connor at any stage in the Terminator saga could have chosen to take the mantle offered him; Jesus could have handed off the cup of his crucifixion to someone else. Choice goes hand in hand with a sense of self, one's beliefs, and capacity for empathic responsibility (Rifkin 2009), because there are always consequences; we live in a causal universe.

I disagree with Plato in that we are imprisoned by the shadows on the cave wall that are our senses and experience – rather, this is all we have, and so we should use and celebrate them. We create our reality just because we are in it, much like Ryan Hunter created God. Believing is seeing, not the other way around. Circumstances don’t matter, only state of being matters. The use of the word matter is a double entendre: circumstances don’t create reality (‘matter’), state of being does. Everything is beautiful if you make it so. Everything is pain if you make that so. We’ve got to be the ones to craft and choose our dream. Believing and state of being create the matter that we see. Rational, empirical thought can be as divorced from these truths as can the machinations of religious dogma.

In the end, there’s an old maxim that is eminently and critically relevant – “Don’t think, but do – in other words, do, so you don’t have to think.”

References.

Blake, W. (1793).  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Retrieved from <http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/prose/Blake_-_Proverbs_of_Hell.html>

Greville, F. (1609). Mustapha [Theatrical Play]. Act V, sc. 4.

Hall, B. (Creator). (2003). Joan of Arcadia [T.V. Series]. Season II, episode 22. Barbara Hall Productions.

Hitchens, C. (2001). Letters to a Young Contrarian. Basic Books, New York.

Rifkin, J. (2009). The Empathic Civilisation: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Penguin Group, New York.

Wachowski, L. & Wachowski, A. (Writers & Directors). (1999). The Matrix [DVD Film]. Warner Brothers. 

Pictures obtained from:

http://sharetv.org/shows/joan_of_arcadia/episodes/258162
http://www.divine-inspiration.org.uk/holy-histories/4-fulke-greville-man-of-mystery 
http://www.youthblog.org/2006/10/