It's up to God

 Commodification of everything is the biggest problem of how things are run these days, in my humble opinion! 

For (Heraclitus), reality is not a constellation of things at all, but one of processes. The fundamental ‘stuff’ of the world is not material substance but volatile flux, namely 'fire,’ and all things are versions thereof (puros tropai). 

Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but a continuing flow; the sun is not a thing, but an enduring fire. 

Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change (panta rhei). Not stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world. 

We must at all costs avoid the fallacy of materializing nature.

—Nicholas Rescher

Thanks to Love is a Place blog.

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For me I've been considering how scientifically thinking people approach problems so differently than religiously thinking people.

My maintenance man put a new part in to replace the crumbling one in my air conditioner. I said but what about the cause of the problem? Can you fix the thing that made it crumble in the first place into rust particles?

He mentioned we live in a rain forest. He apologized for saying he was going to be religious (a nice touch.) And then he said it's up to God. 

I said it needed to be born again!

This is what it's like to live in a red community...a right wing Christian neighborhood, while many of my friends are Democratic liberals. I never realized it would extend to the approach to repairing things!

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So while looking at machines which fall apart and those who fix them just pray about it, I'm considering the process rather than the thing itself.

This process for me is cause and effects. Try this or that, if it works, then the way has been found. A process.

For my maintenance man, he only goes to the thing that works...just replace the broken part, and don't even think about what caused it. All causes in his mind are to a great force beyond all understanding, to which he prays, I'd imagine, regularly.

Which brings me to climate change.

Many neighbors have experienced some drastic events here in western North Carolina, with the hurricane last September changing the faces of many valleys and mountain-sides. Some of them just cope with what needs to be done (food, water, shelter) and say it's God's will. 

They actually find comfort when someone dies, has unfortunate circumstances, or even does something illegal...to say God is the answer to your questions...He wants this to happen this way.

I can't approach any of this in this manner, excuse me very much. I have too much faith in a scientific process, to figure out what things might be done by us to change the results of what's happening in nature, so we can still survive and maybe thrive, a few generations coming along. This also requires my owning responsibility for much of climate change...and looking at men (generic I mean) who have caused it.

So we're responsible. We're able. We can change our behaviors. We can support ideas that might offer solutions to problems. OK, I've gotten off on a tangent here.

But my concept of a divine force isn't that I can just let it do it's thing, and I don't have to do anything.