Cultural Conceptions of Time
Our personal metaphysical framework for the world significantly colors our perception of reality and influences our choices. We believe that while you are destined to make the types of choices you will make, that does not remove your responsibility for their outcome. Destiny is only about a person’s place on a timeline. When you look at yesterday from the perspective of today, all of the decisions you made then are already set in stone, yet you still had free will when you made those choices—from the perspective of Yesterday You. Truth exists outside the timeline and so, too, does destiny.
Our view of time means that you are personally responsible for the future your choices manifest. You are just as culpable for every child you might have had but ultimately didn’t have as you would be for painlessly erasing the existence and memory of those children if they already existed. Both decisions erase the existence of a person who would otherwise have existed.
Ours is not the only logically consistent view of time; it is just one product of the evidence we have on hand, modulated through our inherited cultural and religious tendencies. For example, someone with a secularized iteration of a Dharmic religion might be predisposed to see the universe as a cycle of constantly expanding and contracting realities (e.g., a Big Bang, a universe, and a big crunch leading to another Big Bang), as that metaphysical understanding of the world would be closer to a traditional Dharmic understanding of reality while not being any less aligned with the secular world’s understanding of physical realities than our own.