The picture of Venice is just a residential “street”, meaning a residential waterway, showing three different buildings all connected to one another, and all in the natural brick – so you can see how things used to be covered up by old construction, how some parts have been added on or repaired, and how the water level has changed over the years.
I’ve never really come down very hard or comfortably on either side of the various flavors of deity versus nature arguments, mostly because there just seems to be something missing. Two things make me think of that – the cover story of the latest Wired, and this picture of Venice I made the wall paper of my desktop. The Wired story is about how these anti-evolution folks have come up with some new scheme to explain life, the universe, and everything that requires a Supreme Being – they call it Intelligent Design. I haven’t read the article, but it sounds like they are hawking emergent self-organizing autonomous systems as something that is neither natural nor evolutionary. The picture of Venice is just a residential “street”, meaning a residential waterway, showing three different buildings all connected to one another, and all in the natural brick – so you can see how things used to be covered up by old construction, how some parts have been added on or repaired, and how the water level has changed over the years. I guess My though here is that things happen – how they happen might follow some discernible rules, but why they happen is either a derivative of all those rules acting together, or it’s not. Caprice isn’t evidenced by anything I know of. Ok, sure, now you can roll out all the examples of why bad things happen to good people, why this guy is on a plane that crashes into a building, but the guy who’s office it crashes into is stuck in traffic.
You could do that, but the bottom line is that there is no reason that will explain why something global happens to a particular person. To think otherwise is to have the characteristic of human beings who think too highly of human beings. We aren’t special, just different, and so just like there is no particular reason why a certain fish ends up as dinner for you while another ends up as dinner for an orca, there is no particular reason why in a catastrophe the majority of the players are there. That is a hugely broad brush of my point, but it is the essence.
So what does that mean? It means that when you are all discombobulated about your life sucking, there are only two categories of cause – things you can directly effect and things you cannot. That is it. And just because you have the ability to directly effect something doesn’t mean you have the capacity to act on all of those abilities. Energy and resources are finite, so we have to pick and choose what we do. Sometimes we pick well, some times we pick poorly, but most of the time our decisions are mediocre and have little or no effect on the bigger picture. It seems to me that I am happier when that ratio between meaningful and meaningless decisions is closer to one that zero, but that isn’t the same for everyone.