“This is the way the muslims think,Dear Brother!”
:) This mentality, apparent in some Western Christian thought, has been commented upon before and not just here on FR. Of course, despite the denials of many in the West, especially here in America, Mohammedanism is at base the most successful of the Christian heresies in the Church’s existence, far more so than those before or since. Bibliolatry is a similar phenomenon. Personally, I find it difficult to believe that this particular thread in Mohammedan thought, among others, did not influence non-Latin, non-Orthodox Christian thought as it developed in the universities of Western Europe after say 1500.
I agree,and would also add that this thought has lead to atheism in intellectual circles,especially in our universities of today.
KOLO And Kosta .Does the following from New Advent agree with Orthodox teaching?(I assume it does)
CATHOLIC TEACHING
According to Catholic teaching, God, who is the Author of the universe, has made it subject to fixed and necessary laws so that, where our knowledge of these laws is complete, we are able to predict physical events with certainty. Moreover, God's absolute decree is irrevocable, but, as He cannot will that which is evil, the abuse of free will is in no case predetermined by Him. The physical accompaniments of the free act of the will as well as its consequences, are willed by God conditionally upon the positing of the act itself, and all alike are the object of His eternal foreknowledge. The nature of this foreknowledge is a matter still in dispute between the opposing schools of Bañez and Molina. Hence, though God knows from all eternity everything that is going to happen, He does not will everything. Sin He does not will in any sense; He only permits it. Certain things He wills absolutely and others conditionally, and His general supervision, whereby these decrees are carried out, is called Divine Providence. As God is a free agent, the order of nature is not necessary in the sense that it could not have been otherwise than it is. It is only necessary in so far as it works according to definite uniform laws and is predetermined by a decree which, though absolute, was nevertheless free.
Moreover, in the case of miracles, God interferes with the ordinary course of nature; and the supposition that, at certain periods of the world's evolution, such, for instance, as when man first appeared on the earth, there have been other providential interpositions involving new departures in the world-process, provides for certain facts in the region of organic life an explanation not less scientific than the opposite assumptions of the materialists. St. Thomas distinguishes fate from Providence, and calls it the order or disposition of secondary causes according to which they act in obedience to the First Cause.
It follows from what has been said that, in the Catholic view, the idea of fate—St. Thomas dislikes the word—must lack the note of absolute necessity, since God's decrees are free, while it preserves the character of relative necessity inasmuch as such decrees, when once passed, cannot be gainsaid. Moreover, God knows what is going to happen because it is going to happen, and not vice versa. Hence the futurity of an event is a logical, but not a physical, consequence of God's foreknowledge.