Destiny: Encyclopedia II - Destiny - Different concepts of destiny and fate

Destiny - Different concepts of destiny and fate

Destiny may be envisaged as foreordained by the Divine (for example, the Protestant concept of predestination) or by human will (for example, the American concept of the nation's Manifest Destiny). Something that's great in your future. Good things come from your destiny. Nobody knows what will happen in the future, but we do know that we have a fate or destiny.

In Ancient Greece, 'Fate' was invincible and even the gods had to accede to it, as the Oracle of Delphi insisted. In The Urantia Book man's eternal destiny is to find God through the choices he makes throughout life, but man's temporal fate is alterable according to his own willful decisions good or bad.

Fate may be personified as a god or goddess. In Greek culture it is personified by the three Moirae (called the Parcae by the Romans). The remorseless goddess Nemesis for early Greeks like Homer personified the pitiless distribution of fortune, neither good nor bad, simply in due proportion to each according to his deserts. In the time of the Hellenistic monarchies, after the death of Alexander the Great, the image of Tyche, crowned with a mural crown of city walls, embodied the fortunes of a city, which struggled to keep afloat in the chaotic violence among the Successors, as Alexander's heirs were called.

In Norse mythology the Moirae have a counterpart in the three Norns. The "doom of the powers" in Norse mythology is Ragnarok, the battle which even Odin must inevitably face, at the end of the world.

A sense of destiny in its oldest human sense is in the soldier's fatalistic image of the "bullet that has your name on it" or the moment when your number "comes up." The human sense that there must be a hidden purpose in the random lottery governs the selection of Theseus to be among the youths to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. Many Greek legends and tales teach the futility of trying to outmaneuver an inexorable fate that has been correctly predicted.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Different concepts of destiny and fate", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki