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by Anonymous on October 9th, 2006

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Can coincidences happen by fate? or is fate, fate...and coincidence, coincidence?

Are they impossibly different? never to be used together

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Answers. 3 helpful answers below.

  • by Ullyses on October 9th, 2006

    Ullyses

    Fate is like religion - If you believe in it then there is no other right road. There is no room for coincidence because Someone/Something has it all covered.

    Coincidentally, fatalistic people tend to live longer because they are less stressed. Weird.

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  • by Stableboy on October 9th, 2006

    Stableboy

    There is a lot of mythology and magical thinking lurking in our beliefs about this.

    The principle which underlies all of reality is causality, or more accurately "dependent origination". Things happen because the conditions are present for them to happen. These conditions are in turn caused by the previous set of conditions, and so forth.

    There really is no room in that view for anything "magical" to happen, as in something which violates the principle of dependent origination. However, the conditions and their effects can be extremely complex, so that its very difficult to isolate specific conditions as causes, or specific events as effects.

    This is what makes reality seem chaotic. Since we are predisposed by evolution to want to understand things (understanding helps us to control and act), we really do not like chaos. We impose order on the chaos mentally by building conceptual models of reality which make everything fit into a neat little system. This relieves our anxiety about the chaos.

    One common feature of some conceptual models is the notion that "all things happen for a reason". This is true (because all things arise in response to conditions), but when we say that we really have a more anthopocentric meaning to it: we mean "all things which affect us happen because of something that is meaningful and important in our lives". And that's what we call "fate". Its an illusion, of course -- we're interpreting the chaos in a self-centered way.

    But there's another twist to this as well: our own actions must be included when considering the conditions which produce outcomes. We are not only affected by dependent origination, we affect it as well. Its a circle of cause and effect, a circle which has no beginning or end. So our actions particpate in the process of determining the future, and the definition of an unwise action is something which is likely to produce a bad outcome. In that sense, we create our own fate, at least to some degree.

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  • by EL1 2 on October 9th, 2006

    EL1 2

    I don't believe in fate. Therefore, coincidences are merely coincidental. I think that if I did believe in fate, I wouldn't believe in coincidence, and thus everything that happens would be "destiny". I cannot see how both coincidence and fate can coexist.

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