Controlling deities, or the forces of fate, at work

If you check out some ancient Greek dramas some time, you will quickly gain the sense that fate is at work, and everything in life is inevitable.

So when Oedipus's father learned his offspring would kill his father and marry his mother, he took the actions necessary to make sure the son would not stay anywhere in the vicinity and was sent away.

Fate being fate, the son eventually returned, killed his father and married his mother - not knowing in either case that they were his real parents.

Fate? Believers in astrology may still believe in it, at least to a point. Where religious believers are concerned, some 2500 years on from the Oedipus myth, you would surely not expect a commitment to fate though, would you? Christians in the main push this "free will" stuff as an excuse for the evil in the world. God doesn't want it usw.

OK, try the comment from Republican candidate for the US Senate, Richard Mourdock. To quote from the Guardian online today, Mourdock apparently claims that "pregnancies from rape are "something that God intended to happen"".

Which sounds like God is responsible for every single act of conception on the planet. There is in fact no human responsibility at all, it is all God's will - except of course when we stray from the path, then it is free will - or am I getting confused?

Carry this logic one stage further it almost sounds like that God sent the rapist to impregnate the woman.

OK I am an atheist, but a socially responsible one (as most atheists are incidentally). But I have known Christians (including both my parents) who would have considered this whole line of thinking absurd. In their view humans are getting on acting according to their own free will, and God is sitting up in Heaven with his ledger, ticking and crossing every action taken in line with the moral rules that he established.

No decisions upon who should be conceived and how. If he is involved in the decision, the consideration of right and wrong where the rapist's actions are concerned fly out of the window. God decided that he should impregnate the woman, that way the child would be conceived, and thus THE RAPIST IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS ACTIONS. He was driven to carry out the action by a force beyond his control.

Even by Christian guidelines, as most of us know them, this surely must be mistaken. And the person pushing the agenda is either extraordinarily confused where his own logic is concerned, or believes that fate is an actual force that controls our actions.

This may have been fine where the ancient Greeks were concerned, but surely in the societies in which we live across the Western world, it doesn't really make any sense any more. Or does it?

And if it does please let me know - intelligent answers, well explained and elucidated, please. Not dogma or the usual "believe it or else" nonsense!