Readings week five

I wanted to start off by talking about the presentation and how much I did not understand or even realize about Jerusalem and the situation. For some reason I just did not know that people were literally being taken out of their own houses and pushed onto the streets. That was really my moment of oh man this is what is happening today and why people are fighting to extremes now. I was sort of stuck in the past and caught up in all the history of Jerusalem and that film made me realize like its 2010 and there is still destruction and its not just reading from a history book about way back when. I think that the exhibit will be extremely interesting and am going to go. On another note as I traveled to Washington D.C. this past weekend I was unable to go to the Palestinian center there but there was randomly when I was walking I saw the people from the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, and seeing the world Israel stopped to listen. Well it ended up being an extreme group and was interesting to listen to their very opinionated views but were more focused on the flaws of other religions than whatever the message they were trying to portray which I was unable to exactly understand from what I watched.

Getting into the end of Armstrong book, I found it almost amusing when it was pointed out how Christianity and the other religions in getting the main idea of things had failed in Jerusalem at portraying the “charity and loving kindness” of the faith. I also like how Armstrong used the term “biblical archaeology” I believe that is the best way to put trying to use religion off of fact based places and buildings when religion is mostly compromised of faith for people in general. To see how people who are unfamiliar with the area try to come in and want to allow three faiths to live in peace seems like wishful thinking but if people were just more willing to listen to others, or understanding then maybe it could be possible. To read how the city was transformed from an Arab city to a mostly Jewish city was also interesting. It seems that no matter what people are going to fight for the area of the city but things have just gotten out of hand. To read of groups and extreme measures that are taken just distort the image of Palestinians and propaganda is created to fuel the fight between the two sides. In the book when they mentioned Hamas the group I had previously come across that group in a children and war class and seen some of their training videos online and the atrocities that they encouraged were horrible. I liked Armstrong’s quote “One of the inescapable messages of the history of Jerusalem is that, despite the romantic myths to the contrary, suffering does not necessarily make us better, nobler people. All too the often, quite the reverse.”