Catholic Fundamentalists understand that an important part of The Programmer’s work involves the transfer of energy in ways that we human programs generally lack the ability to fully understand. Generally, energy flows from areas that He has programmed to produce large amounts of energy to areas of low energy. Human users of light bulbs, for instance, duplicate, in a tiny way, God’s Sun Program, and use devices that turn energy into light and use it to illuminate places where there’s less light.
Water in the atmosphere flows in more complicated ways. Water, in liquid form, generally flows downhill. In its magnificently complicated program, it can also exist in a gaseous state, during which it flow upwards, downwards, or sideways. In its solid form, ice generally moves downhill. (What started as a simple entry was made more difficult by a short road trip on snowy roads from which I just returned. A couple of hours ago, I think I inadvertently ran over a squirrel that I thought had moved out of the way of my car. After turning around and coming back the way I’d gone, I saw by the tire tracks in the snow that I had accidentally run over it. It had made it through a summer without getting eaten by a hawk, fox, or parasite, and had gotten halfway through a very cold, rural winter. I feel so bad about having run over it that I can hardly concentrate on this.) But, as I look out my window (still thinking about the poor squirrel, another of which was running through the woods with an ear of corn the two of them had probably planned to eat, and realizing, with relief, that it was already dead before I ran over it, which is why it didn’t get out of the way as I thought it would, since I was going less than 10mph.), I see snowflakes swirling upwards, downwards, and sideways, seemingly less affected by gravity, at least in the short term, than by air flow.
Flows are complicated, and sometimes reversed, by friction with the surfaces that contain them. Along the sides and bottoms of rivers, a surprising amount of water remains stationary, and some actually flows upstream in the innumerable eddies that are characteristic of all laminar flow, whether in pipes or rivers.
As Catholic Fundamentalists, we know we are always living in nations in various stages of collapse. Picturing the river eddies that move upstream, or remain stationary, we may picture a way to avoid being swept downstream and pray to find such a place where we may be safer from being washed away.
While the residents of Jerusalem were being wiped out by a flow of God’s energy focused against them by His agents, Vespasian and Titus, the early Christians found a place to escape the annihilating flow by moving to the tiny backwater town of Pella.
