Predestination Quotes

“Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?

Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness.

We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.”
― John Calvin

“The whole struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been no moment of victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say he had delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged in unassailable freedom. Ransom could not for the life of him, see any difference between these two statements. Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heart on the subject.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

“This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream?”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.”
― Louis Menand

“That is what Reason can neither grasp nor endure, and what has offended all these men of outstanding talent who have been so received for so many centuries. Here they demand that God should act according to human justice, and do what seems right to them or else cease to be God.”
― Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will

“This doctrine of total inability which declares that men are dead in sin does not mean that all men are equally bad, nor that any man is as bad as he could be, nor that anyone is entirely destitute of virtue, nor that human nature is equal in itself, nor that man’s spirit in inactive, and much less does it mean that the body is dead. What is does mean is that since the fall, man rests under the curse of sin, that he is actuated by wrong principles, and that he is wholly unable to love God, or to do anything meriting salvation. His corruption is extensive, but not necessarily intensive. It is in this sense that man, since the fall, is utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, wholly inclined to all evil. He possesses a fixed bias of the will against God, and instinctively and willingly and turns to evil. He is an alien by birth, and a sinner by choice. The inability under which he labors is not an inability to exercise volition, but an inability to be willing to exercise holy volitions. And it is this phase of it which led Luther to declare that ‘free will’ is an empty term, whose reality is lost; and a lost liberty, according to my grammar, is no liberty at all.”
― Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination

“Free Will : "I made you think so."
Predestination: "I knew you had to.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“No one ever came to Christ because they knew themselves to be of the elect. It is quite true that God has of his mere good pleasure elected some to everlasting life, but they never knew it until they came to Christ. Christ nowhere invites the elect to come to Him. The question for you is not, Am I one of the elect? But, Am I one of the human race?”
― Robert Murray McCheyne

“I gazed up at the sky and let my eyes flicker from one constellation to another, to another, jumping between stepping stones. I thought of the heavenly bodies throwing down their narrow ropes to hook us. I’ve never believed the future was inscribed for each of us the day we were born. If anything were written in the stars, it was we who joined those dots, and our lives were the writing. But baby Garrett, born dead yesterday, and all those whose stories were over before they began, and those who opened their eyes and found they were living in a long nightmare, like Bridie and baby White, who decreed that, I wondered, or at least allowed it?”
― Emma Donoghue, The Pull of the Stars

“If anyone rises to power, it's not only because he could, but also because the stars were aligned in his favor. Many with apparent means to take it failed simply because they weren't destined for the honor”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“War between free-will and predestination makes
the idea of time travel is still too difficult to digest.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“... apparently sees some value in the antiquity of the doctrine of ... This means absolutely nothing to me, for whom the Scriptures alone are my sole doctrinal authority, beyond the fact that this is just one more error of the ancient fathers. I could fill pages documenting other errors that the ancient fathers held and espoused.

Response to The Classic Arminian View of Election, page 135”
― Robert L. Reymond, Perspectives on Election

“There was one thing, however, that I didn’t know: evil is a gift received at birth. There’s no acquiring it. Those of us who have not come to this world armed with spurs and fangs are losers in every combat.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“The cosmic battle being worked out between God and the Devil takes place in the lives of God's creatures, fallen though they are. They are His chosen instruments.
Were the Rohirrim destined to come at just that moment? Yes. Were they free people? Yes. Were they more or less free because they were stepping...into their destiny? More. If God has prepared good works for us to walk in, then it is a joy and a wonder to walk in them.
If God is working in us both to will and to work for His good pleasure, then it is our delight and our fulfillment to realize that we are doing exactly what was planned for us to do all along. ”
― Fleming Rutledge, The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien's Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings

“The centuries she had already lived had sobered her to the power of fate. There was a pervasive principle within which everything operated. As convincing as the idea of free will was, there was a constant, albeit subtle force directing events toward a particular end. She knew this intimately as she employed it almost every day: divination. Due to its complexity—as was also the case with other types of temporal magics— even she couldn't claim to know all its nuances. What she knew for sure was that there were different planes of consciousness and that the physical manifestation of the Triskai was one such realm, lying smack in the middle with some realms higher and some lower. Being so far removed from the highest plane of consciousness, people in the Triskai were always under the illusion that their thoughts and actions were made in real time when, in fact, they had already made those decisions in the higher, abstract realms. The decisions and actions simply cascaded down the tiers like a mental waterfall, presenting themselves as instantaneous deeds.”
― Asher Sharol, Bonds Of Chrome Magic

“The imagination is scarcely any better equipped to appreciate reversibility than the person who has never slept would be to appreciate dreaming. And yet we experience it in that electrocution of time we call predestination. The signs exchanged in the process are instant conductors unaffected by the resistance of time. Certain linguistic fragments run back along the path of language and collide with others in the witticism, dazzling reversibility of the terms of language. In this they fulfill an unexpected destiny, their specific destiny as words, conforming to the predestination of language.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Effort in the Calvinist doctrine had still another psychological meaning. The fact that one did not tire in that unceasing effort and that one succeeded in one's moral as well as one's secular work was a more or less distinct sign of being one of the chosen ones. The irrationality of such compulsive effort is that the activity is not meant to create a desired end but serves to indicate whether or not something will occur which has been determined beforehand, independent of one's own activity or control. This mechanism is a well-known feature of compulsive neurotics. Such persons when afraid of the outcome of an important undertaking may, while awaiting an answer, count the windows of houses or trees on the street. If the number is even, a person feels that things will be alright; if it is uneven, it is a sign that he will fail. Frequently this doubt does not refer to a specific instance but to a person's whole life, and the compulsion to look for "signs" will pervade it accordingly. Often the connection between counting stones, playing solitaire, gambling, and so on, and anxiety and doubt, is not conscious. A person may play solitaire out of a vague feeling of restlessness and only an analysis might uncover the hidden function of his activity: to reveal the future.

In Calvinism this meaning of effort was part of the religious doctrine. Originally it referred essentially to moral effort, but later on the emphasis was more and more on effort in one's occupation and on the results of this effort; that is, success or failure in business. Success became the sign of God's grace; failure, the sign of damnation.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“Predestination: a portentous, awesome word in theology, the cross of the brooding intellect, the terror of the apprehensive conscience. At first glance it appears to be a somber mystery, and seems to be the more so, the less its true supernatural and hidden character is understood. But as soon as it is moved back to the proper distance and is inspected from the right point of view, it stands before us, for all the obscurity of its secret nature, as a luminous and splendid truth. Although its ramifications are lost in dim and, to some extent, alarming regions, its shining core emits most cheering and comforting rays.”
― Matthias Joseph Scheeben, The Mysteries of Christianity

“Noah found grace amidst a perverse generation (Gen 6: 8)
Shem found grace within the family of Noah (Gen 9: 26)
Abraham found grace amidst a pagan culture (Gen 12: 1, 15: 7)
Isaac found grace within the family of Abraham (Genesis 17: 19)
Jacob found grace in the womb (Genesis 25: 23)
Israel found grace among the Nations (Deuteronomy 7: 6 to 11)
Judah found grace within the family (Genesis 49: 8 to 10)
David found grace within the tribe of Judah (2 Samuel 7: 11 to 16)
Solomon found grace within the family of David (I Kings 11: 12 & 13)
Rehoboam found grace within the family of Solomon (I Kings 12: 17)
Mary found grace among the women (Luke 1: 28)
The elect found grace among all the guilty sinners (Romans 8: 29, 30)

What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on GOD, who has mercy. (Romans 9: 14 to 16)

#You did not choose me, I chose you - Soli Deo Gloria!”
― Royal Raj S

“I suspect Scottishness is another name for predestination. It explains everything, more or less.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“To produce something new is always a gamble, and God’s creation of man in His image and after His likeness involved a certain degree of risk. It was not that He risked introducing an element of instability or shock into His Eternal Being but that to give man god-like freedom shut the door against predestination in any form. Man is at full liberty to determine himself negatively in relation to God — even to enter into conflict with Him. As infinite love, the Heavenly Father cannot abandon man whom He created for eternity, in order to impact to him His divine plenitude. He lives with us our human tragedy. We appreciate this risk, so breath-taking in its majesty, when we contemplate the life of Christ on earth.”
― Sophrony Sakharov, His Life Is Mine

“Másaw (Skeleton Man) added. “If the Blue Star dancer removes his mask the Fifth World begins. There is no stopping it.”
― G.G. Collins, Anasazi Medium

“Carnal reason doth oft inadvertently rebel against things which to us seem improbable, even if it was thus ordained before we e’er stirred in our mother’s wombs.”
― Mike IJzerman, The Broken Reed

“What I’m saying is . . . remembering feels like time travel, right? Dreaming works the same way. Well, what if that’s all we have in the first place? Thoughts arranged in time. And we’re free—if we can only learn how—to change those thoughts around all we like. So no predestination. One world. One ever-changing universe. And we can change it!”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“English: "The greatest known freedom is the freest known form of slavery."

Česky: „Největší známá svoboda je nejvolnější známý druh otroctví.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“English: "Belief in hard determinism is the most effective enslavement."

Česky: „Víra v tvrdý determinismus je nejefektivnější zotročení.”
― Sebastián Wortys