God said let there be mortals engulfed in a mystery and that was the origin of life!
Life is all about decisions. Everyone is making some sort of decisions every second. Take an example: you decide to wake up in the morning alarmed by your decision to pay attention to the irritating sound of that alarm clock in which you decided to put an alarm the night before, because you had decided earlier that you need to attend a particular class early morning today. Heck, four decisions already. If you try to delve into a deeper level, you’ll find more decisions. You decided to rely on that lucky alarm clock, gifted to you by your father who became its owner due to a decision made by your great-great-grandfather may be 60 years ago, that it would be able to wake you up. You decided about the time at which it should start ringing. Is it not an awful lot of decisions to make just to decide the way you wake up!! And then there is your (wise) decision to read the stuff you are reading. :)
Now if I were a scientific philosopher, which thankfully I am not, I won’t really hesitate while taking the trouble to “define” life as a set of carefully - or may be not so carefully - chosen set of actions with the choice being made entirely by you depending upon various factors.
Mortals: Yay! the oracular mystery of life is solved. Do we have a eureka moment?
God: No buddy. Not so soon.
Mortals: Hmm, so it’s not that easy.
And then God smiled.
Now, if there are so many decisions all around, it is worth giving some time to think about how one really makes a decision. Decision making is more than usual a difficult task. You have a situation in front of you and you’ll have to make a choice of opinions that you should/ ought to/ have about it. Try to think of the way you make choices. You might say: The most important factor to consider while making a choice is the consequences of your choice and even more important is how that choice is going to affect you (if you are selfish) or people around you (if you are not a part of that bunch of self caring people). But all this works fine till the decision is about you. Forming an opinion about some other person (which again is a decision) is different because when we are talking about people it’s easy to get biased. Judging someone has a prequel in the form of a loss of the free righteous flow of thoughts which leads to a bias.
When it comes to judging people, one normally takes the easier way. People prefer to keep their nice souls in a safe comfort zone and presume that what’s right for them is right for everyone, and that everyone ought to do what they are doing. Everyone should follow the same path as theirs. The more difficult way, on the other hand, is not to presume the being-judged person’s ideology to be wrong. Think about that.
So, in conclusion:
YOU, not your neighbor, decide your life.
The available choices of decision are constrained due to external factors.
While deciding about people, one gets biased and hence does not make a true judgment.
And then God let the mystery continue.