How much of a "Divine Plan" or "Divine Script" is there to life? (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Saturday, April 28, 2012, 04:53 (386 days ago) @ Brian Coyne

Mulling a bit further on this...

As I've been mulling on this week's discussions in preparation for Saturday's email, I've been wondering how much is there some Divine Script or Divine Plan to life? You see it in some people whose lives have been "successful" — "successful" in the sense of making a huge pile like Rupert Murdoch, or bishops, politicians, business people, academics or journalists who rise to places of enormous power — who seem to believe their "success" came about because they found the "right formula" or the "divine formula" if they happen to be religious. What increasingly comes across in all I've been reading about, and seeing of Rupert Murdoch, in the past few days is that he wants to impose his "formula" on the rest of society.

Whether it is his forays into education revealed in his Witness Statement to the Leveson Inquiry (as well as his verbal comments offered directly at the end of his examination) or the observation I quote below from Robert Manne's essay on Rupert Murdoch's desire to influence Australian politics and life through his flagship newspaper in this country, The Australian, Rupert wants to impose his formula on society.

"In the guise of a traditional broadsheet newspaper, the Australian has turned itself into a player in national politics without there being any means by which its actions can be held to account. It claims that it is held accountable by commercial reality. [A claim Murdoch himself repeated at numerous times in his examination before Lord Justice Leveson.] According to those who understand such matters, its financial situation is altogether opaque. Ironically, even though its core value is the magic of the market, it is very doubtful if it could have survived in the past or could survive in the present without hidden financial subsidy from the global empire of its founding father, Rupert Murdoch, for whom the Australian has offered the most important means for influencing politics and commerce in the country of his birth." [Robert Manne, Bad News: Murdoch's Australian and the Shaping of the Nation, Quarterly Essay 43, September 2011, http://www.quarterlyessay.com/issue/bad-news-murdochs-australian-and-shaping-nation]

In one's journey through life you come across many people who appear to believe they've got life "all figured out". They are sure that if everyone followed their formula, or script, then everyone could be as "successful" or as "happy" as they appear to be. You also meet others who appear to have been "successful" or "happy" and they appear to be a little more reserved and see their "success" or "happiness" as some form of luck, or "good fortune", or "Providence". You also meet others for whom life seems to have been decidedly "unsuccessful" or a "continual struggle" from birth to death and there seems no rhyme or reason for it. (In recent times I've related the story of two of my mother's sisters, my aunts, one of whom "breezed through life" with seemingly few hassles and her sister, who seemed just as bright and intelligent as the "successful sister", but whose life was just one continual tragedy and failure after another. There seems no rhyme or reason, nor a God, to explain the difference. In fact, in that particular example, my observation was that the "unsuccessful" sister was more religious and a greater believer in the Divine than the "successful" sister.)

I remember when I was a lecturer at a film school back in the late 1970s and early 1980s and we used to have almost a game as the staff in the selection process of students of trying to predict which students would become "successful" or "famous". (It was a course where there were many applicants and only a few could be chosen each year.) In the end it was almost impossible to predict. I'm sure most teachers of long standing have experienced this sense of being quite stunned at the different life courses taken by various students they taught. Some of the ones they predicted would be great "successes" in life didn't fulfil the promise and some of the most unlikely did achieve enormous "success" or "fame".

It might be claimed that one of the most enduring myths of the Western civilization we're all a part of is that "through hard work and diligence and frugality and careful saving" every person can be successful. Just look at Barack Obama (as a gifted example) or George W Bush (who would not seem to have been especially "gifted" at least intellectually) and how they rose to become Presidents of the most powerful nation on earth.

The question I'm really pondering, and putting up for discussion here, is whether or not you believe there is a "Divine Script" or "God's Plan" for life? In the video we have just seen there seems this "direction" how the cells keep dividing and gradually form into the various arms, limbs, eyes, heart, brain and all the parts that make up a human person. In the recent video we featured here from Professor Brian Cox "The Wonders of the Universe" he showed how science has a direction in the Law of Entropy and how glaciers fall into the sea and we never see the sea rising up to become glaciers from the sea. On the other hand we are mindful that Jesus Christ warned that the "success" he offers is not of this realm. Do you think there is a "Divine Plan" to life — some "formula", like going to Mass on Sundays and obeying the Ten Commandments, OR perhaps obeying your own conscience (the "voice of God Within"), that leads to some kind of "success", or "happiness", or "peace of heart" in life? The myth in our (Western society) seems to be that we all have it in us to become as "successful" as a Barack Obama or a Rupert Murdoch — I'm not sure that the myth also extends to us "having it within us" to become another Albert Einstein, or an Olympic gold medalist, and you might want to throw that into the mix as well — what do you believe about this idea that there is a "plan" or "script" for each of our lives?

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]