NY Mob Jared/Ivanka and American Evangelical Mob John Hagee Well Represented at New Synagogue of Satan aka US Embassy in Jerusalem

NY Mob Jared/Ivanka and American Evangelical Mob John Hagee Well Represented at New Synagogue of Satan Opening aka US Embassy in Jerusalem.

Tomb of Jesus - Shrine of Venus - Jerusalem

Stealing the Goddess – Temple of Venus Jerusalem

Discounting all the retro fitted stories of Saint Helena in her eighties digging up the true cross, intact, with accessories, nails, unrusted, three hundred years after Jesus supposedly used them, what you have left is an architectural monstrosity, exterior at least, of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. 

This church covers the area both not only of the most sacred site in Christendom, the empty tomb of Jesus, but also the site of the crucifixion, and throw in a real tourist bonus, the actual tomb of Adam, the first man. 

There have been spotty repairs over the centuries after the earthquakes, fires, crusaders, etc. 

But the truth of the matter is that this holy place/tourist trap is so busy 24/7, nobody wants to close it down for even a day for a good washing let alone some serious repairs and restoration.

It is shared on the clock with three Christian sects, the Latin, the Orthodox and the Armenian Churches.  Fist fights break out regularly if the collection boxes are not turned over in time on a daily basis to the next time share owner.  Sweet Jesus Marie.

Can’t shut the cash cow down long enough to keep it from falling down on tourists one day when the centuries of spotty repairs will finally give way in some future earthquake. 

The story is that Helena, sparing no expense, tore down Hadrian’s temple of Venus to build a new shrine to her newly discovered Christian relics and burial spot on the very site of this former temple of Venus.  

And why is that? Because Hadrian, the god of gods of the Roman Empire was so jealous of the strength of the new Jewish Jesus god, he buried the site of his crucifixion and resurrection under dirt and built his temple of Venus over it to hide the Christian truth.  Yeah right. 

Truth be told, Helena's son Constantine was broke or close to it.  Spending his money on arms and being in constant warfare to keep his throne, what you have really IMHO is a recycled Temple of Venus, the round part of it at least, and with and by coincidence the tomb of Jesus in the exact center of Venus’s old ongoing never torn down temple.

And of course, Hadrian's Temple of Venus in Jerusalem was no doubt round, exotic and beautiful like Hadrian’s Pantheon in Rome and Hadrian’s, slightly smaller, Temple of Venus in Baalbek Lebanon. Hadrian it would seem liked to build, copy, rebuild and improve on designs he admired most in his personal obsession, megalomania, concerned with places of worship.

The rest of the present church is more or less a lean to hodge podge of styles hanging onto the old Temple of Venus, with a slapped together handyman process by crusaders and others, pasting back the pieces of the place after the latest earthquake or burned down by the local Muslim in charge to rid himself of an annoying tourist trap, eyesore, in the middle of his tranquil domain.  (Daily fist fitting among the monks over the collection boxes etc. –  Muslim tolerance can only go so far.)

There is an incident recorded in the early nineteenth century of four hundred pilgrims getting killing in one of these daily monk fests for Christ in Jerusalem.

Going back to budgets.  There is all this crap about digging out what Hadrian supposedly had hidden and replacing it with the basic part of the present structure.  But as I said earlier, I do not think that the money was there.  I also do not think that the creative spark and energy of the Roman Empire of two hundred years previously, under Hadrian, was still there.

(above) So called original plans of Saint Helena’s church or merely modified plans, add ons – basilica, courtyard - right, for a recycled Temple of Venus – left?

History, propaganda, has Constantine as some great force in the West.  I can see where his splitting his empire in two in terms of administration might have made sense.  But he was totally writing the west off. 

Only brute force, such as his army, was the only glue keeping the old empire together.  That and his, designer, centralized, under the command of the army, new religion. 

His building a new capital city in the east was merely building a lifeboat for those who could afford a first class ticket on the Titanic. 

Anyway, getting back to the surviving to this day, but occupied by a zombie worship cult, Temple of Venus in Jerusalem.

The present so called Sepulchre of Jesus, covered by a falling down garage like looking structure (can't shut the tourist cash cow down long enough to repair it), is probably, merely, the carved out stone pedestal of the old, long gone statue of the goddess Venus that once stood where Jesus never lay. 

The Orthodox Church celebrates the Dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on September 26 (Gregorian), the same date as the ancient Roman festival of Venus.  Some coincidence.  Right?

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2011/09/stealing-goddess-temple-of-venus.html

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Decoding the Middle Class Bible – Baptism and John the Baptist

A pattern emerges as I look at the objects of my youth. A thought occurs to me as I look at the discarded by the RCC the once sacred objects of my youth before they are decommissioned from the so-called “sacred” thing and sold as scrap or recycled into other churches. 

That the death of my childhood parish and its church is not unlike the death of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Hebrew Temple in the year 70 C.E..

And like the Jews who only had one Temple, I only had one church building / temple and once destroyed I have to reassess the purpose of faith as learned in that temple in Philly. That what ended up from humble beginnings time traveling to the present, transpired into what is now generally called “Christianity” in the final form as authorized by the Emperor/God Constantine circa 325 C.E..

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I also cross reference this with two of my blog articles, one about the parable of the mustard seed and a quick mention of an Internet “News” item about the science and the domestication of camels in the bible.

The article about Camels generated a spam like comment from a fundamentalist type that is doing damage control regarding the article about the timeline of domesticated camels not being in Palestine at the time that Abraham and Jacob and such were supposedly using them in standard bible stories. I say spam like but since the comment was polite enough and had a return e-mail address I did not delete it. I welcome all reasonable comment even if I disagree with it.

I incorporated my own bit of personal opinion in response to the comment on the camel which with a displayed link (not connected), it was a fundamentalist argument that there were petroglyphs in Palestine at the so called timeline of Abraham and Jacob proving that the bible is written by a singular author labeled “God”.

Problem with the petroglyph argument is that objects like petroglyphs can be forged and I am not certain if they were also trying to use science regarding carbon dating in that argument. Using science when convenient and not always is unsound methodology or use of the science thingy.

My own bit of personal opinion to that comment was an article regarding the Parable of the Mustard Seed,that with a little bit of research had me conclude that that parable was written from a middle class Greek or Roman point of view and local to Rome or Athens and not one of an honest street view of the historic time and person of Jesus.

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Getting back to the loss Saint Joan of Arc Parish in Philly in favor of Holy Innocents Parish, the political parish with some off street parking for the Archdiocesan officials to visit and inspect with their Wharton Global Spreadsheet to determine what parish gets boarded up and torn down and which once survives in bland modern functionality. Whatever.

Now that the only lost temple or church I count as important in the culture of my life and progeny, I looked at a picture of the baptismal font from pictures of the Last Mass at Saint Joan of Arc before they board up the place and turn it into a tire warehouse or such. Can you imagine Caesar trying to turn Herod’s temple into a parking lot for chariots before 70 C.E.?

Well looking at that font, I am reminded that it used to be in a side out of the way room with stained glass, the baptistery. That in the decades since I attended services there, they had apparently moved the baptismal font out into the open of the church and amidst the congregation and out of the dark forgotten room of the old architectural design.

That baptism cross referenced with John the Baptist and he baptizing people in the river Jordan put me into mind of the middle class Greek and or Roman writers of the Greek and or New Testament.

That in all probability John the Baptist is ideally depicted in the midst of crowds, mostly middle class, in the countryside doing the Jewish cleansing with water thing.

That there are purifying bathes all around the Jerusalem Acropolis and the Temple building but I would imagine such baths required a fee and maybe a good second suit of clothing to go play holy on the mount and be seen by your other middle class neighbors doing their holy stroll around an Easter Sunday Fifth Avenue local like setting so to speak.

That much of the fire of the historic Jesus is a man, a day laborer, preaching to street people, poor farmers, in their only set of clothes etc. That John the Baptist is more like catering mostly to poor people in the heartland. These poor wanting a place at the table of the God Creator thing and John did not charge much if at all with a diet of grasshoppers etc.

That aside from a handful of curious tourists, John the Baptist like Jesus that followed him, was a preacher to the poor and disaffected and not the Middle Class people in the big city of Jerusalem.

That many of the paintings coming down to us from the Renaissance had John pictured with a middle to upper class of clientele.

While this level of poverty reached by John the Baptist’s mission is not verbally specific in the bible, not codified by middle class writers in Alexandria, Athens or Rome, the truth of the situation seems much clearer to me.

That even too with the visual media of stained glass etc. from the middle ages onward, the most readily available means to tell a bible story, that the story in the visual form could be interpreted and or have the message hijacked away from that of the poor multitudes down to vested middle class elites. 

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Mark Rylance, British – Considered the Best Stage Actor of his Generation on both sides of the Atlantic

"Olivia" in Twelfth Night

Stephen Fry, the British actor, writer, director making reference in a YouTube piece stating that Mark Rylance was the greatest living stage actor on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Jerusalem"

Richard III

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Jerusalem - Wm. Blake

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Stealing the Goddess – Temple of Venus Jerusalem

Discounting all the retro fitted stories of Saint Helena in her eighties digging up the true cross, intact, with accessories, nails, unrusted, three hundred years after Jesus supposedly used them, what you have left is an architectural monstrosity, exterior at least, of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

This church covers the area both not only of the most sacred site in Christendom, the empty tomb of Jesus, but also the site of the crucifixion, and throw in a real tourist bonus, the actual tomb of Adam, the first man.

There have been spotty repairs over the centuries after the earthquakes, fires, crusaders, etc. 

But the truth of the matter is that this holy place/tourist trap is so busy 24/7, nobody wants to close it down for even a day for a good washing let alone some serious repairs and restoration.

It is shared on the clock with three Christian sects, the Latin, the Orthodox and the Armenian Churches.  Fist fights break out regularly if the collection boxes are not turned over in time on a daily basis to the next time share owner.  Sweet Jesus Marie.

Can’t shut the cash cow down long enough to keep it from falling down on tourists one day when the centuries of spotty repairs will finally give way in some future earthquake.

The story is that Helena, sparing no expense, tore down Hadrian’s temple of Venus to build a new shrine to her newly discovered Christian relics and burial spot on the very site of this former temple of Venus. 

And why is that? Because Hadrian, the god of gods of the Roman Empire was so jealous of the strength of the new Jewish Jesus god, he buried the site of his crucifixion and resurrection under dirt and built his temple of Venus over it to hide the Christian truth.  Yeah right.

Truth be told, Helena's son Constantine was broke or close to it.  Spending his money on arms and being in constant warfare to keep his throne, what you have really IMHO is a recycled Temple of Venus, the round part of it at least, and with and by coincidence the tomb of Jesus in the exact center of Venus’s old ongoing never torn down temple.

And of course, Hadrian's Temple of Venus in Jerusalem was no doubt round, exotic and beautiful like Hadrian’s Pantheon in Rome and Hadrian’s, slightly smaller, Temple of Venus in Baalbek Lebanon. Hadrian it would seem liked to build, copy, rebuild and improve on designs he admired most in his personal obsession, megalomania, concerned with places of worship.

The rest of the present church is more or less a lean to hodge podge of styles hanging onto the old Temple of Venus, with a slapped together handyman process by crusaders and others, pasting back the pieces of the place after the latest earthquake or burned down by the local Muslim in charge to rid himself of an annoying tourist trap, eyesore, in the middle of his tranquil domain.  (Daily fist fitting among the monks over the collection boxes etc. –  Muslim tolerance can only go so far.)

There is an incident recorded in the early nineteenth century of four hundred pilgrims getting killing in one of these daily monk fests for Christ in Jerusalem.

Going back to budgets.  There is all this crap about digging out what Hadrian supposedly had hidden and replacing it with the basic part of the present structure.  But as I said earlier, I do not think that the money was there.  I also do not think that the creative spark and energy of the Roman Empire of two hundred years previously, under Hadrian, was still there.

(above) So called original plans of Saint Helena’s church or merely modified plans, add ons – basilica, courtyard - right, for a recycled Temple of Venus – left?

History, propaganda, has Constantine as some great force in the West.  I can see where his splitting his empire in two in terms of administration might have made sense.  But he was totally writing the west off. 

Only brute force, such as his army, was the only glue keeping the old empire together.  That and his, designer, centralized, under the command of the army, new religion. 

His building a new capital city in the east was merely building a lifeboat for those who could afford a first class ticket on the Titanic.

Anyway, getting back to the surviving to this day, but occupied by a zombie worship cult, Temple of Venus in Jerusalem.

The present so called Sepulchre of Jesus, covered by a falling down garage like looking structure (can't shut the tourist cash cow down long enough to repair it), is probably, merely, the carved out stone pedestal of the old, long gone statue of the goddess Venus that once stood where Jesus never lay.

The Orthodox Church celebrates the Dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on September 26 (Gregorian), the same date as the ancient Roman festival of Venus.  Some coincidence.  Right?

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Constantine the Great's Pwned Sarcophagus

If you tier down to my amateur historian level and try to find something available on the net and not yet available from all those ivy weed college libraries and their ancient, in the last century, bound hardcopy research materials, you start to see some really blatant lies and or chasmic sized discrepancies told by both the Catholic church hierarchy and misc. degreed, vested, meal ticket, publish or perish, historians.

Like after Constantine decriminalized Christianity in 313 C.E. with the Edict of Milan, then you have all these stories about his illiterate mom who he hid away through most of his career. Constantine, being born out of wedlock to a Roman soldier and an inn keeper’s daughter, you then have mom running around the empire nearly eighty years of age finding all the one true relics of this or that member of saints’ bodies and or of course the one true cross. 

The Vatican museum has the above pictured sarcophagus listed as Saint Helena’s final resting place.  Reading around and you get all sorts of PR nonsense about how the sculptures on the stone box represent a hunting scene and that it was intended as Constantine’s own Sarcophagus but mom died first and he shoved her into it because in her old age he had not already planned ahead or built the old lady any resting place. Yeah right.

This Sarcophagus pictures war scenes and torture of prisoners on their way to death and or sacrifice at the hands of Constantine’s secret Sun God Mithra/Serapis army cult religion?

The old lady, who goes to Jerusalem for Sonny to find the true cross in a shape that did not exist in Pilate’s time and nails, then orders the destruction of the Temple of Venus over the site of the Holy Sepulchre and then orders, pays for one of the trashiest, slumfest-e-ist looking monuments in the history of western civilization.  Give me a break.

The Muslims never tore this trashfest architecture down. It got burned down when the candles started a fire and the Muslims paid to rebuild it to insure domestic tranquility. 

The propaganda got turned around and we had the First Crusade.  Sweet.

The old lady gets attached to unsubstantiated male created urban legends, myths, PR lies and such like Mary, the mother of Jesus. She gets recruited to near god like sainthood and evangelistic fervor and non-intelligence promoting Sonny’s new Roman Empire religion as the typical go along female doormat misogyny for men’s mischief and “tradition” (lies). Zzzzz.  Anatomy is destiny or is it merely human politics?

RIP Helena.  You can’t choose your parents and you certainly can’t predict the course of the lives of your children or the institutions they found.

Saint Peter's Tomb in Jerusalem

The Vatican has perhaps been sitting on this story for close to sixty years.

Something Pius XII conveniently ignored?

Apparently they found an ossuary with the inscription of “Simon bar Jonah”, Simon son of Jonah, in Jerusalem in 1953. They also found other bone boxes in close proximity marked Mary, Martha and Lazareth among others. Small world ain't it?

Of course these are all common names in ancient times. As we saw with the “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” ossuary of some recent years back, if it is profitable to fake a relic, then it happens. Shit happens. And profits too, especially if rich old ladies like Helena, the mother of Constantine, wants to materialize relics in her hobby involved with a new exotic eastern Christian religion.

James Ossuary

The James Ossuary sparked some documentaries, in that if genuine, it might be a real link to the past, Jesus and the gospels etc. Bottom line is that the “brother of Jesus” part of the inscription in Aramaic was a modern forgery added onto an ancient box.

Which leads back to this Peter ossuary in Jerusalem.

The Case of the Ossuary of Shimon bar Jonah

In 1953, two Franciscan monks discovered hundreds of 1st century ossuaries stored in a cave on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem. The archaeologists claimed to have discovered the earliest physical evidence of a Christian community in Jerusalem, including some very familiar Biblical names. The name inscribed on one ossuary read: "Shimon Bar Yonah" - Simon, the Son of Jonah, the original Biblical name of the Disciple Peter.

The 43 inscriptions discovered in the Dominus Flevit cemetery between May 1953 and June 1955 were published with photographs by P. B. Bagatti and J. T. Milik in 1958. The inscriptions on the ossuaries also included the names Jesus, Joseph, Judas, Mathew, Martha, Mary and Mariame - with the inscriptions of the latter two names being written in Greek.

It does make sense that Peter, the apostle of the Jews, stayed just that and never went to Rome, the center of the gentile world.

The makes for some interesting reading and food for thought regarding the formation, cut and paste method on parchment, of Christian scripture and the direction and or detour of the Jesus message over the centuries.

Benedict XVI and the Self Hating Gospels

 In an attempt to soften his own roots and contributions to recent European history, Joe the Pope aka Joe the Scholar has let the Jews off the hook for the execution of Jesus in his forthcoming book, Jesus of Nazareth – Part II.

Pope Benedict: Jewish people not guilty for Jesus death

The Jews as a collective body are not directly responsible for the politics of the Jewish “Aristocracy” and or Temple hierarchy that plotted with the Romans to get rid of one minor Jewish Sect/Cult leader in first century Palestine.

Surely Josef Ratzinger was dragged screaming and kicking out of his youthful house and forced to join the Hitler Youth. In a very loose sense, he might be referred to be a self hating German. But the Germans do not really take responsibilty for the Holocaust in their hearts. They have paid some reparations to survivors and built a few monuments and passed a few laws outlawing anti-Semitic discourse in public view. This false sense of mea culpa, of wished for self hating Germans, by the German people for the collective acts of WWII was imposed on them by their conquerors in 1945.

True contrition by individuals can only be experienced by individuals who directly took part in their own little sliver of war crimes during the Nazi regime. Group guilt and group punishment is quite a different matter.

Anti-Semitism is I am told a nineteenth century term. If you go back to the first century the proper term is perhaps anti-Judaism. We again go back to the mysterious dividing line between Jewish Jews following the teachings of Jesus and the half Jews and full Gentiles that morphed a Jewish sect/cult into mainstream Roman pagan culture and Jesus into a god status.

As I have stated before the four Gospels were probably written after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.. In deed the language of blaming the Jews for Jesus' death in those gospels reeks perhaps of self-hating Jews as authors. So, if it comes down to logic, you can see that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses or in some cases by real Jews, Jews that Jesus knew in his lifetime.

How many generations from the believed death of Jesus around 30 C.E., to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., to the Kitos diaspora wars 115-117 C.E., and the final destruction of Jewish resistance by Hadrian in 135 C.E.? Somewhere along that time line, Jesus and his very Jewish mission got turned into Mac and Cheese with Beef Gravy (not kosher).

Benedict XVI scholarship I believe will limit itself to the four anit-Judaic gospels. It is very limited flawed post WWII German scholarship at best for a possible “self hating” German to discount the writings not of first century self hating Jews but rather mid second century Jew hating Gentiles outside of Palestine.

The true message of the Jewish prophet Jesus was, is Love. Anything less, like many passages in the New Testament, just does not cut the mustard.

Third rate hack Roman scholarship seems to have changed little in nineteen hundred years.

And so it goes.

In the Shadow of the Kaaba – 130 Liberty Street NYC

I recently saw a YouTube of some Saudi VIPs walking around the inside of the Kaaba, an ancient and sacred building covered in a black silk veil, in Mecca. The doorway to heaven is supposed to be above this building that existed in Mohammed’s time.

The interior of the Kaaba is not like a place of worship as we in the west would understand it. It seems to me from historic comparison to be more like a Holy of Holies from the ancient second temple era in Jerusalem.

As such, I look and see that Islam has a different concept of sacred than the west. While this place is certainly sacred in culture, it is still just a building. People have different feels for sacred around the planet.

We in the west with its traditions of sacred and secular have a mental picture of what is and what is not sacred. The West’s idea of secular is perhaps too off the scale for Islamic cultures or too close to the money. Some of their mosques have grandeur and beauty as architecture.

If you look at the grand mosque in Cairo it has a grand plaza within the complex walls. As such in the middle of crowded city, mosques have much more of the secular feel of the original Roman empire basilicas as all purpose all weather public buildings.

But away from far away - We in America have our own Kaaba in America. It is in a sense sacred. It is part of the original World Trade Center complex. It did not have many valubles in it that day of 911 except mere people. So it still stands.

Eight and one half years and three hundred million dollars later, the “Black Widow” of the WTC (a dark building wearing a veil of mourning for over eight years), still stands and almost refuses to yield its final hours.

At the present rate of incompetence of the businessmen, bureaucrats and unions it will take another two years and probably another hundred million dollars to bring the grand dame finally down.

I worked in that building for six years once upon a time. I won’t bore you with those details now. But because I am sensitive to the energy of the building in question, I sometimes feel that it is not so much cursed as let down by America.

We were all let down on 911 in a way. We have not recovered yet. The taking down of 130 Liberty Street sliver by sliver and crumb by crumb is symbolic of failed American Enterprise and Ingenuity. As other projects and buildings are delayed waiting for the grand old dame to come down and make way for a ramp for underground parking, the old lady is telling a story of American Greed, Incompetence and possible Redemption.

I named the building “the American Kaaba” in another blog "ghosts-of-911" but eventually deleted it because the message I was trying to interpret out of that construction site was hateful toward the people who brought down the World Trade Center.

The old lady sits silent but is still telling a story as time drones on. She tells the story of the failure of the whole American Way as displayed in the failure of Americans to heal our wounds at the old World Trade Center. The WTC is a government boondoggle’s boondoggle for city, state and federal money to be wasted over and over again like water while the rest of American starves in the Great Recession.

There was a time when they said that they were going to take the 39 story building, clean it up, take out the asbestos, recycle it (how green) and redo the building as office space. But no. That was six years ago and two hundred million dollars ago. Why stop when the money well keeps flowing for the elites - New York Real Estate Moguls, a socialist crony class just like their Wall Street brothers. More money Uncle Sam! More Money! Mo' Money!

And the corruption goes on and on! Unlike the Mecca Kaaba that is only secular and just a building, 130 Liberty Street and the whole of the World Trade Center’s gaping wound is Sacred because it is all made of money - the only god some people worship.

I, at one point, thought that where it is at 24 stories, that maybe the last ten stories could be left in place and the remains turned into a much cheaper museum for vistors to memorialize the dead of 911 and still be part of the original fabric of that lost WTC.

At this point I would recommend that it, now clean as a baby’s bottom after a bath, be imploded to speed up the process of the new World Trade Center, bureaucratic nightmare that it is.

The old lady – the “Black Widow” - deserves a better ending than she is getting at the hands of 21st century American moronic business class thinking and full of disrespect.

I dare say Obama could send the Army Corp of Engineers in to coordinate private contractors to implode 130 Liberty Street within a few weeks. Onward America! Dare I dream???

I am reminded of an article from the Huffington Post before Christmas and the advice of Arron Zelinsky in the context of the Maccabbees and the spirit of renewal and rebuilding as part of the Chanukah story – and his advice to our Prez.

Judah the Maccabee's Five Lessons for Barack Obama

3) Rebuilding symbolic structures matters. The literal meaning of Chanukah is "rededication." Josephus recounts that Judah found the Temple in ruins, defiled and destroyed by Antiochus's military forces. Judah recognized the spiritual and political imperative to rebuild the Temple as a symbol of strength and unity. The Maccabees quickly rededicated the Temple, giving the holiday its name.

In contrast, our desecrated buildings are now but four stories tall. It has been eight years since the destruction of the World Trade Center. Freedom Tower could have been a symbol of our resilience and confidence, but has instead become a model of bureaucratic inefficiency and political bickering. Rededication of symbolic structures is not easy, but it is essential and it must proceed faster.

130 Liberty Street is symbolic of all that is wrong with America at present. It is also perhaps the touchstone of the future, of our redemption from sitting on own asses in these past thirty years of gluttony and consumption.

We can get back on track and get back to the common sense of our ancestors.

Forward America! Dust (from implosions) be damned!

Bless the Spirit of our Founding Fathers.

We need that Spirit now in America!

Temple Mount / Noble Santuary Compromise

With all the current bloodshed in Israel/Palestine these days, I am thinking of the future. Where do two cultures, political states, religions go from here?

I do not wish to document past hopes or failures. I wish to consider how hard it will be for both sides to sit down and negotiate in good faith for the future of the immediate nation state and the greater region. Examples about the end of the cold war between the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. or the falling down of apartheid in South Africa are not good examples to use or learn from. Those scenarios fit other times and places in other parts of the planet.

I have pondered this situation and think that some symbolic gesture(s) by both sides could pave eons of highways to the future. I use one example here. I am certain that those directly responsible will have better and more practical ideas than my own. That is okay. The important process is the beginning of visualization of a peaceful, prosperous Israel/Palestine in the future by all parties concerned.

I do not wish to intrude on the two cultures and religions but I have some observations. I do not think that a bi-cultural country is immediately possibly. In a global village sense, maybe a hundred years from now nobody will care who your neighbor is across the street in terms of culture or religious background. In an immediate sense I see a divided geography perhaps with walls but a reduction of violence and an escalation of trust between all parties of the region. A successful peace in Israel/Palestine will deflate political agendas in the region and hiding behind religious masks at the present time.

Picture Israel/Palestine or Palestine/Israel whichever way you want to look at the coin. Picture joint economic ventures, common public utilities, high standards of living.

The thing that sticks in a lot of Israeli throats is the division of Jerusalem with a joint political state sharing a joint capital. This is something nobody from the outside can impose. This is something the two parties have to agree upon and work together on to make it work. It is not impossible but it will be extremely difficult to maintain if the current levels of friction and mistrust continue.

I say take the Temple Mount or Haram-esh-Sharif (noble sanctuary) and borrow a page from the wisdom of Solomon. If there is to be a divided capital of Jerusalem then I think that this elevated property gets cut down the middle. The price for peace for the Palestinians should exact a price or such. They at the moment do not have the upper hand in the military equation of the situation. The Israelis are looking at their enemies, though in facts their neighbors, getting up front and personal in a very ancient symbolic piece of Israeli identity in the form of the city of Jerusalem.

This is not easy. But what if the Palestinians say okay, cut Harem-esh-Sharif down the middle if that is what it takes to make a permanent, stable, universally recognized state and capital for Palestine. I think that the Palestinians will opt to keep the half of Temple Mount that has the most symbolism in a structure for them, the Qubbat al-Sakhra or Dome of the Rock. If that happens, then the plain structure or Al-Aqsa Mosque is now on Isreali territory. I do not think that the Israelis will stop the function of this mosque but what if in the terms of binding eternal peace treaty Israel can turn the mosque into a synagogue or even tear it down to build a Third Temple.

A lot of hot points here. Al-Aqsa mosque is the big work horse mosque of the Noble Sanctuary area on Temple Mount.

Israel, if you look close enough, is more a secular state than a theocracy that it had ideally been in the ancient past. A Third Temple is only a dream for a handful of the extreme religious community. If we cannot do these things mentioned above, what can both sides do to show good faith, both literally and symbolically.

I believe that the two mosques could stay in place. A joint police force in the city of Jerusalem could administer control the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary and - and somewhere in the middle of this joint historic site, archeology and research could start on a small scale, a few square meters a year, and could go on for decades and fill a yet to be built museum for artifacts found that touch the history of two nations, two cultures, and two religions on common ground - the Earth.

It is just a thought for a possible win-win compromise for peace to accidentally break out and spread throughout the region and on to the planet as well.