"...Now don't start that again!"

         Choices happen to be a huge part of life. Everyday you have to decide to wake up. You decide what clothes to wear, whether or not to smile to a stranger or say hello. You can decide or have trouble deciding, like the vultures in the movie the Jungle Book, what to do next. You can be faced with small choices, silly choices, or life-changing choices (like reading the rest of this blog). Well maybe not that, but in all actuality the concept of agency is one that is as worth pondering now as it obviously was for the ancient Greeks. 

         Coming from an LDS perspective, we believe that God is Omniscient. He knows, hears, sees, all things and because of this he knows what happens in the future. The Greeks very similarly believed that their Gods knew all things and because of this they developed the concept of fate. Could you/can you escape your fate? If God knows all when something bad happens is there or was there anything you could have done to escape that punishment?

         Many heroes and characters of Greek tragedies would tell you "Yeah right! Go ahead and try. We sure did and we failed miserably." Take ill-fated Oedipus for an example. Doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, he ran away from what he thought were his parents only to find out that he did exactly what the Gods prophesied he was to do. He couldn't out-run his fate. 

        But if you ask Zeus, well, he made it very clear, "Ah how shameless-- the way these mortals blame the gods./From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes,/but they themselves, with their own reckless ways,/ compound their pains beyond their proper share." (The Odyssey, Book 1 lns 36-39)  He tells us that we can choose to escape the miseries of fate. He gave the option of choice. Man could escape the follies of destiny but we often follow our foolishness rather than our reasonableness.  

       So who do you believe man or God? In my own opinion, I think that we are very much accountable for how we choose but Homer certainly evokes quite the philosophical 'what if' which could certainly make this blog post go on and on.... Personally, I think I'm going to choose to cease my musings.