Popular Theme Predestination example essay topic

Enjoying 'Oedipus the King', by Sophocles Ed Friedlander web Predestination Long before we 'got civilized', ancient Europeans (Greeks, Vikings, others) were already talking about 'predestination'. If something was going to happen, it would happen and there was nothing you could do about it. Why would anybody talk like this? 1. Ancient people may have been impressed (or wanted to be impressed) by the fulfillment of prophecies. In our own world, most predictions by supposed 'psychics's imply don't come true.

But people want to believe in the supernatural, and people like to tell each other about the rare occasions when something happens that a psychic said would happen. So money-making 'psychics' make lots of predictions and keep them vague. People have such a strong desire to believe in the power of supernatural prediction that they even invent stories of psychic predictions being fulfilled. The most famous example (Nostradamus and the gray monk in Varennes woods) continues to be told, even though the tale of Louis XVI being disguised as a monk when he was captured there is just a lie.

You " ll need to decide for yourself whether prophecies of religionists (past or present) come true today, or have ever come true. Some Christians have taught that the Greek oracles were successful because they were diabolic, and that they went silent on the first Christmas (for example, Milton's 'Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity'). People want to believe in oracles. 2.

Believing in predestination frees people from worry. Talking about unalterable destiny is extremely popular among soldiers going into battle -- a powerful antidote to obsessive fear that would slow or distract a warrior. Soldiers tell each other, 'If the bullet has your name on it, you will die. ' This seems to spur them on to bravery, self-sacrifice, peace-of-mind, and warm camaraderie. Talk about 'fate', 'predestination', and so forth has found its way into warriors' tales across many cultures.

In the Iliad, even Zeus (? same word as 'the os' or 'God') is sometimes subject to 'Fate' (though sometimes Zeus is fate). We also see this in peacetime, whenever people face frightful conflict. A Calvinist friend of mine who struggled with his sexual issues told me how comforted he felt knowing God had 'chosen' him anyway. For some reason which I do not understand, he could believe in this.

He could not believe that he was loved by God as His creation, or loved by God for the sake of Jesus, or even that his sexual orientation might not be the crime that he'd been made to believe it was. Again, I'm no psychiatrist, but I'm glad he could find a formulation which brought him comfort. Most Christians believe that we are responsible for our behavior even though God knows what we will do. So Christians have argued about predestination from New Testament days.

Luke says that the people who chose Christ were predestined to do so. Dante asks the blessed souls in heaven about predestination, and is told they don't know the answer, either. Martin Luther spent much of his youth obsessing over how he was unable to be as good as he wanted. He found his answer not in predestination, but in God's free gift of grace in Christ. For him, this was a comfort and assurance. 'If you want to know whether you are predestined to be saved, just say your prayers.

Then you will know you are predestined for salvation. ' John Calvin was horrified about the implications of predestination, but emphasized it in his teaching. Other preachers like Jonathan 'Spiders' Edwards and the Wesley's taught that Christ had died for everybody and that everybody had a free choice. Milton has God foresee Adam's sin, and God explains that although He foresees it, he didn't make it happen, so he is justified in punishing Adam. Racine's 'Phaedra' marked a return to themes of Greek tragedy and people being the victims of cruel destiny.

Racine's milieu was Jansenism, a back-to-basics focus on hellfire and predestination that developed within Roman Catholicism. Boswell, who wrote the biography of Samuel Johnson, obsessed about predestination and became profoundly depressed thinking he could end up damned eternally. He's not the only person who's had this experience. In the US, the 'Free Will Baptist' denomination emphasized evangelization and need to work hard to bring others to Christ, against those who thought that God's predestination made this unnecessary.

Some Hindus and Buddhists have taught that a person's behavior in a past life predestines happiness or misery in the current one, by the laws of karma. Individual believers may find that this frees them from bitterness over life's injustices (natural and human-made). You " ll need to decide for yourself whether this is good or bad. Belief in karma has awakened social conscience and kindness to strangers in those who believe that 'what goes around comes around. ' The theme of predestination continues in secular literature. Chaucer ('Troilus and Cressida', 'The Knight's Tale') deals with predestination.

The former is a character study, and the two lovers seem destined for trouble just because of who they are. Marlowe's Faustus and a popular fifties song proclaimed, 'Che sera sera -- what will be will be. ' Ambiguous -- do we make our own decisions or not? Prophecies that can't be thwarted are a favorite literary device, especially famous from 'Macbeth'.

Ideas about predestination are parodied in 'Tristram Shandy' -- the baby is predestined to have a small nose and an ugly name despite the conscious efforts of the parents to avoid these supposed disasters. Today, fulfilled prophecies are a staple of fiction. Although the vast majority of psychic predictions in the real world are failures, they come true as plot devices on the Silver Screen. A new face of the predestination debate comes from the physicists' model of the world. At least in Newtonian physics, if you know everything about a closed system at one moment of time, you can predict everything that will happen in the future. If our world is really like this, then physical laws predetermine what will happen in our brains, and what we will think and do.

The laws of physics (ultimately) even determine our decisions about which side to take in a college bull session about 'predestination versus free will. ' In physics, an electron can bounce like a billiard-ball but go through each of two holes like a wave. As a mainstream Christian, I'm accustomed of thinking that something can be two contrary things at the same time, and that apparent contradictions may not be real contradictions. The Good Lord feeds the birds, but I know how birds really get their food. I give thanks to the Good Lord for the birth of a child, but nobody requests equal time for 'stork science'. I know how I get sick and how I recover, and thank the Good Lord for my recovery.

The bread and wine are Christ's body and blood -- I don't know how. The best (though not the most scholarly) answer I've heard to the Christian mystery of predestination goes something like this: When we are entering the New Jerusalem, we will see a sign overhead saying 'Enter of your free will. ' When we are inside, and look back, the reverse of the sign will say 'God chose us from before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1: 4) '. The folk tale of Oedipus has a popular theme -- predestination. Sigmund Freud and the 'Oedipus complex' aren't the subject of this site. Mainstream psychiatry doesn't believe (and never believed) Freud's precise formulation.

Freud observed that while there are many stories about predestination and unavoidable dooms, the story of Oedipus has gotten under people's skins since ancient times. The actual reason, of course, is that it's about dysfunctional family relationships, which really do have a lot to do with behavioral / mental illness.