Fate

The view that each individual's life is determined by forces outside his own control. This attitude is common to religious and spiritual beliefs of most civilizations and is only superseded with the onset of a belief in individual freedom with the obligation but not the necessity to follow a particular moral path. It may be, nonetheless, that refusal to follow a moral path will bring retribution - the distinction is whether the individual is actually free to choose such a path or whether his apparent free will decision is actually forced upon him by fate. Destiny, the fate of a particular person, may in a sense imply a goal towards which that person must endeavour or it may be used to refer to fate as applied to some role he is obliged by fate to fulfil.

Particular examples of fatalistic belief are those based on astrology or omen, when future occurrences may be predicted and planned for or, in some cases, averted. In China, natural law implied an impersonal and ordered nature to which mankind was subject. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, fate is pictured as a ceaseless cycle of action and the results of action, although, through self-realization, the individual may escape this eternal treadmill. Judaism and Islam both have an element of fatalism, as does Christianity. The individual's life is seen as governed more by external events than by his own plans; this is demonstrated particularly in the inevitability of death. Again, fate can be transcended through free action from a position of total dependence on God; paradoxically, it is from the realization of obligation within freedom that freedom from destiny arises.