Providence
In this season of providence we are greeted by politicians who claim God is validating them. I cannot think that this can be anything but a convoluted selectivity. You pick favored facts, your people suppress the rest. Recent pronouncements from the attained heights of our highest office holders (and such applicants who aspire to such offices) that Divine Presence smiles on their personal opinion and desire; has placed them on their seat of destiny or paves the path of such aspiration, requires some moments thought from the rest of us. Public displays, gratuitous public displays of religiosity are rarely more than abject exercises in egotism Online NewsHour: Analysis | Debate: Religion in Politics | December 24, 2007 | PBS.
 The principle of destiny in general tends toward egotistic presumptions that destroy any now built of moments of realistic complexity. Imagining you were able, at some former interval, to look up the course of life the same way you look down at it. With its sense of inevitableness and completeness intact, causes some to overestimate their ability to will things into (or out of) being. To overestimate determination and reward. To discount loss and suffering.
Decisions form a branching tree structure many lines extend from where one started. Many paths between A and Z. In simplified terms people tend to regard that any decision they make could go one of two ways. A choice "A" they want to make. A false choice "D", a straw-man, conjectured only to make "A" look good. Choices "B" or "C" actually existing in equipoise counterpoint to "A" fade from mind. Any kind of complex decision making is like pushing a line of pennies across a table. you don't move the tenth anywhere surely, pushing on the first. Pressing on the eighth or ninth perhaps. The chain of causality contains no stronger links. No journey's completion is obvious at the outset.
At the same time. At every junction. Our decisions reveal who we are at that moment. Literature and opinion condemn choices made obsessively against the pressing of past desire. This is largely unnecessary. Desires of the moment are not inclined to allow themselves to be overcome.
Whether we attribute our fortune to providence, or our own perfected wisdom and resolve. What is most called for is an understanding of how limited our knowledge of self and place is. I am struck continually by the sense that the only thing we know with any clarity is the effect of how we treat our immediate and important others. It is the only thing we do truly deliberately, or follow the outcome of closely. On this rides our aggregate destiny.
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