Post 2: Don't Sleep with Your Mother OR Your Father

Besides the obvious anti-incest feelings that Oedipus brought me, my brain was simply boiling as I walked away from class...



I have always struggled with the fate v. free will idea. I want to believe that I have the choice in my life to do what I want: that I am the one who chooses to eat the cake, that I am the one who decides to go to college and study said subject. I want to be the one that is taking my life in the direction that it is going, and not some higher power. At the same time, I can't help but believe that there has to be some preset line of events that every person must follow without realizing it. If not, how are there situations like the terrible things that happen to good people? Some might say that those people deserved the pain or suffering that they were forced to live with, but I do not agree. While some problems we may bring upon ourselves like a decision with terrible side effects like drunk driving for example, what about the people who get effected because of your drunk driving? Is that their fault? Did they bring that on themselves? Obviously not, so it must have been meant to happen in the larger scheme of things.

I managed to more or less ignore that problem in my head before now, but after reading Oedipus Rex, I am confronted with it more. However, I can't come to a single conclusion in my head. There is another alternative though: that while a person has a certain road to travel, that road can be branched off of or detoured from, but the person always comes back to that road. I guess this could sort of be like saying that Oedipus's original fate was to kill his father the King of Corinth because that is what he thought the prophecy meant. But when he tried to run from that fate, it changed so that he killed his father by leaving Corinth. It just gets confusing from there, which is another reason why I think this subject is so hard to debate. It's difficult to argue something if each person uses different words interchangably....

These are very unpolished thoughts, but pretty much what my mind debating with itself.