deciphering the louisiana purchase expostion

That article on the Israeli and Palestinian former soldiers was so interesting.

I think it's also significant in light of Courtney's earlier post re: "identity" ... and how these former fighters who are supposed to have so much of who they are be formed out of what they hate (defining themselves as "not Palestinian" or "not Israeli" etc ...). I think that here in America we are so isolated from other nations that we dont necessarily define ourselves according to nationality (on a regular basis), but there are still so many ways that we do do it (race, class, neighborhood, education ... to name a few).

Back to Courtney's comment about Identity in Christ, i think that that's something that is hard to release oneself to do. We are so used to defining everything according to ourselves and our actions (God doesnt finish our papers, God doesnt give our presentations), so trying to switch over to giving God the credit ... and even further defining oneself by God, is a huge step in the "wrong" direction ... it literally is the opposite of what we should be doing (if we're going to play the "humanist game").

Anyway, it's a very interesting article, and all should read it. Here's an exerpt that i thought was really good:

"It's a paradox," he says. "You hear a man talking about how he shot, killed, damaged your neighbor's house. But you feel empathy for him. You realize that we are all from the same background, but just from different sides. The soldier wanted to protect his people, and so did we. But we've all discovered we were wrong in how we did it."