Olivia Strittmatter - From Nature to Creation Ch3

Blog Post 4 - Class Readings 2

Week 4

    This blog post is going to be about chapter three of From Nature to Creation by Norman Wirzba. I found this chapter particularly interesting because it talks about the problems of perception. Our lives are so intertwined with technology that we’ve lost touch with our true reality. We have started to believe that your perception can be changed, and that there is a perfect way to be perceived. Humanity, for the most part, has lost the part of us that is deeply connected to a specific place. In this day and age people don’t see the value in being rooted in one place, and having a personal connection with your environment and community.

    Wirzba writes about how we have to perceive god’s existence and energy in the world. That humans have changed with the technological boom of the past few decades and we believe now that we are allowed to, and deserving of, manipulating our technological reality to be surrounded with things that are useful or fulfilling to us rather than things that surround us in the real world. He talks about how we have to see the beauty in the natural world around us, and understand our relationship to it.

    I liked this chapter because it stood out to me compared to the others because it talked about our perception of the world, and how modern technology is changing how we perceive the world. We’re able to go online and see the Aurora Borealis, or see fossils of long-extinct organisms, or read philosophy from ancient Athens, and it opens up whole other aspects of the world to us. At the same time though we are able to manipulate our cyberspace to only see things we want to see; we’re able to block people who post things we don’t like, we can filter our search results, or we can choose when to communicate and with who we do. Those examples are all just with the internet, but then there’s so much technology in the real world that we are able to use to alter our perception as well. If we don’t like the city we’re living in or the people we’re living with we are able to just get up and leave. If you don’t like your school you can transfer to another or drop out. I liked how Wirzba talked about how we need to realize the beauty in the world around us, the world we can’t control. I think we all need to get out and explore nature more, that it would be really good for all of us.

    I don’t think we'll ever be able to get back to a culture where we have deep roots in a certain place or culture. I think that having those kinds of roots is quite restricting, and people are better off being able to change how they perceive themselves and their lives. If someone hates their job and the place they’re living, it would be better for them to leave and start somewhere else. If they had those deep roots they wouldn’t be able to move onto better things for them, and that’s counterproductive when we are all just trying to make our lives better for ourselves. The problem I find with this is that when people hop from place to place they lack the connection with the ecosystems that surround them. Having a relationship with nature is very important and people are losing that connection because of hopping from place to place, altering their reality, and not settling somewhere and exploring the nature and area around them.