Do you believe in predestination?

I don't think it is a matter that we need to be concerned about since we do not have the ability to tell what we are predestined to! I think its just a topic (like many other) that is driving christians away from each other and starting new cults and denominations

Yes I do and as I told a friend not to long ago I think of life as a road map with a blue dot where I was born and a red one where I would die. There is a major highway leading straight from one to the other but unless I am perfect it is a straight short ride from one to the other. Mine is filled with byways, detours, traffic jams, the occasional accidents, parking tickets, etc. but eventually I fi reach the red dot after a wonderful journey through life. Corny Huh!

You must have noticed that predestination mentioned in the Bible, only tells within the lineage of God's people. There is not one of Israel's enemies whose future the Lord ever bothered to tell. A world leader about to come may only be touched, it it will have great bearing in the lives of the Israelites. Do not be misled therefore, that if you have become a doctor, you were predestined to become one. No, you became a doctor because you wanted to become one, you worked for it, strove for it, and spent some money, too. If, while a student, you changed course and pursued law instead, then you became a lawyer. Life is a matter of choice for most of us. Bear in mind that the Bible teaches will power. We have the will power given by God, to enable us to gear our lives the way we want it to. Predestination is only unto the very few chosen ones like Jonah, God's prophet, God gave him no choice but to go where God had him go to - Nineveh.

I think I have to believe to predestination. Because I believe that God knows what will become of us before we were born.

I don't believe in that. If we had that ability then we would have prevented world war 1 and world war 2. It's like fore-telling the future but instead of telling events were were knowing who are the people involved to create that event. Destiny will always be a choice. If your father will tell you that you will become a doctor someday and you believe him and you did your best and ended up being a doctor, that was by choice. What if you didn't end up a doctor and wound up in a different profession!? What then? Free-will and the responsibilities that go along with it have always been given to us. It's a right.

That is a defeatist way of looking at the world when it comes to human actions. It presumes that someone or something is calling all the shots. If we believe that god is in control and everything happens according to his/her will, why bother doing anything? Don't wear a seatbelt, you will only die in an accident if it is god's will. Or could it be that the volitional act of wearing a seatbelt has the effect of keeping you alive in an accident where you would otherwise have perished? Christianity has struggled with this issue for millenia. If god is all knowing and all powerful, he/she must know exactly what will happen and things must necessarily happen in that way. If god doesn't know what will happen, then god isn't all knowing. The notion of free will was then advanced to say that man has the volition to change things. But that then seems to mean that god still can't know what humans will do next, and so all knowing is out the window again. All of that said, I do believe that many things happen to people because of the actions of others. There is a chain of events that gets set in motion at times. I am in a car accident because someone else was drinking and driving. I get lung cancer because my parents exposed me to second hand smoke. Not so much fate as just a logical and rational chain of events.

I don't think it is a matter that we need to be concerned about as it doesn't really affect our behavour and our decisions since no one knows what the have been predestined to... Do you agree? So even if there is predestination we still make our own decisions...