Please explain to me what "It's God's Plan" means.

[Dees]

A chosen religious road map planned by a deity? Is it on a day to day basis? A blueprint for an entire lifetime for each individual? I hear the phrase continually and yet I'm just totally bewildered by it. Apparently some plans are of higher quality than others.

[Protagoras]

1. God's plan = I know God

and he tells me that whatever I believe is according to his plan.

It's really a rather nice and tight circle.

If something good happens to me, it's because it's God's plan.
If something bad happens to you, it's because of God's plan.
If something Bad happens to ME, you screwed up God's plan.

[rzemanfl]

3. Perfect explanation, covers it all. n/t

[adwon]

2. It's catchall

It's very contextual.

[scarletwoman]

4. It means "You are forbidden to attempt to interpret this event

for yourself."

sw

[cidliz2004]

9. Perfectly Put!

It's like who are we to know God's intentions? We are nothing that is why we need to have faith and to constantly work to make our faith stronger. We shouldn't ever try to second guess why this or why that, there is no use, because we #1 should never think that we could be on a level that would enable us to equate our thinking with his and #2 Our faith is meant to carry us through these unknowns and as long as we continue to try to develop our faith we are on the right track.

[Kelvin Mace]

5. "It's God's plan"

is another way of saying "I take no responsiblity for what happens in my life.

[Dees]

8. Such as "It's in the almighty's hands"?...n/t

[K-W]

6. It's pretty much self explanitory.

Replace the word God with anything you want. It means God has a plan and this is part of it. This is supposedly reassuring, because this God who's plans we dont know is sure to be helping us.

[Dees]

7. Are independent choices and thoughts

a part of the plan or is that a deviation. If you choose path X how can you tell if it's a part of the plan or a deviation. I dunno.

[Protagoras]

10. No matter where you go...

there you are

:D

[Selteri]

11. The real meaning - Shit happens, we just attribute it to God.

[ultraist]

12. Different religions have different views on "destiny"

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05791a.htm

Fatalism is in general the view which holds that all events in the history of the world, and, in particular, the actions and incidents which make up the story of each individual life, are determined by fate.

The theory takes many forms, or, rather, its essential feature of an antecedent force rigidly predetermining all occurrences enters in one shape or another into many theories of the universe. Sometimes in the ancient world fate was conceived as an iron necessity in the nature of things, overruling and controlling the will and power of the gods themselves. Sometimes it was explained as the inexorable decree of the gods directing the course of the universe; sometimes it was personified as a particular divinity, the goddess or goddesses of destiny. Their function was to secure that each man's lot, "share", or part should infallibly come to him. Consequently, free will is a central fact in the Christian conception of human life; and whatever seems to conflict with this must be somehow reconciled to it. The pagan problem of fatalism thus becomes in Christian theology the problem of Divine predestination and the harmonizing of Divine prescience and providence with human liberty. (See FREE WILL; PREDESTINATION; PROVIDENCE.)

Moslem Fatalism

The Moslem conception of God and His government of the world, the insistence on His unity and the absoluteness of the method of this rule as well as the Oriental tendency to belittle the individuality of man, were all favourable to the development of a theory of predestination approximating towards fatalism.

Modern Fatalism

The reformers of the sixteenth century taught a doctrine of predestination little, if at all, less rigid than the Moslem fatalism. (See CALVIN; LUTHER; FREE WILL.) With the new departure in philosophy and its separation from theology since the time of Descartes, the ancient pagan notion of an external fate, which had grown obsolete, was succeeded by or transformed into the theory of Necessarianism. The study of physics, the increasing knowledge of the reign of uniform law in the world, as well as the reversion to naturalism initiated by the extreme representatives of the Renaissance, stimulated the growth of rationalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and resulted in the popularization of the old objections to free will. Certain elements in the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and in the occasionalism of his system, which his followers Malebranche and Geulinex developed, confining all real action to God obviously tend towards a fatalistic view of the universe.