Saturday is the day many newspapers run articles about religion. A breakaway group of theologians are rejecting the notion of predestination. They are now being called post-conservative theologians. They are calling this notion by a new name Open-God Theology, or they are saying that God(s) can't always see the outcome of what we human beings screw up. The Gods created the universe and set us in motion to chart our own destinies. That is why people pray to the Gods to change the outcome: that means, not everything is set in stone. The Gods would be in charge of a whole bunch of Mannekins, otherwise. We would have no ability to reason or change. This is not a new idea. The reformed religion of the 1500's, the Calvinists, deigned to say that predestination is a crock. (So is idolatry, the clergy class, transubstantiation, etc.) And in the 1700's, the deists said basically the same thing. There is no such thing as predestination. Thomas Jefferson was a deist. So were a lot of founding fathers. Abraham Lincoln was an occultist. But I digress…
I think the article said some provacative things but it didn't go far enough.
I think sometimes the Gods see things coming around the corner like a freight train and say things very plainly to us but we choose not to listen because it's not always what we want to hear.
What's a God to do when that happens?
An example. I used to belong to a Kindred in Washington D.C. The Kindred hosts got the idea to bring non-Asatru people into the Kindred by going to national Pagan Day that took place on the Lawn where that big Washington Monument sits: you know, that big needle in the sky but the day of, just before they went, I got a cold chill down my spine and a shout out in my brain: DON'T GO THERE!! The message I got was clear: Don't go there, you will pick up some real undesirables you won't be able to get rid of. So I picked up the phone and called both of the kindred hosts: and told them exactly what I was told. They laughed it off. And the situation unfolded exactly as I was told. They went to the event and when the next time they hosted an event they had picked up a ravenous horde of locusts that ate and drank up everything in sight, never contributed anything, propositioned underage people, faked it in the circle, and they weren't able to get rid of them until they stopped hosting kindred events at their house.
How was I to know this was going to happen? I didn't attend the event. I didn't meet the people they met.