> [Original Message] > From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Date: 9/15/2006 11:15:17 AM > Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The Final Finger of Fate > > >>Most of fate is very much in our hands. > > > As is our ability to argue about what fate is. > > Okay, what is fate? Personally, I don't believe in fate. I believe in luck and coincidence. > Heraclitus in the old fragment 121: > > Character is fate. > And what forms character? > > Yet Bertie in _A Free Man?s Worship and Other Essays_: > > The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, > because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, > and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. > There's worshiping and then there's accepting. The fool denies. The rewards of denial are great until it all comes crashing down. Case in point, among many: Iraq. Maybe there needs to be a happy middle between slavishly worshiping the inevitable and kicking and screaming against it. ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html