Yesterday I washed the floors of the kitchen and the bathroom, long over due, but done nevertheless. Next are the sinks and maybe some dusting of forgotten spots. My daily entry was posted and I am reading in the last chapter - Exile from Exile - of Schama’s ‘The story of the Jews’.

It deals with the goings on in Spain from around 1200 AD until the expulsion in 1492 of all Jews. Schama mentions the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Turks ca 1350, which put the whole of Christian South East Europe under threat of the Islam.

Even though Schama does not make the connection explicitly to a threat in Spain, he does show that the Jewish culture was much interwoven with the Arab culture. You can kind of sense that the Christian Spanish - freshly re-conquered on Islam - did not want to risk its possible resurgence through the Jewish connection.

In our world today we can observe a similar fear of the other as the various cultures meet on our crowded planet. I recall last fall’s Al Jazeera’s interview of a Bangkok Buddhist taxi driver who refused Muslims a fare, because he felt they are a threat to his culture.

It is through the way that Schama writes, showing the social interconnections of the cultures, that I as reader develop an understanding of that expulsion. I well knew about it from the history accounts, but those always concentrated on power relationships and not on the social ones. At the time the voice of the people expressed this underlying fear in otherwise hard to understand conduct that was cruel, emotional and barbaric.

We will have to be careful today as well, in that we must pay attention to such underlying emotive forces that will surge when too many conflicting situations are allowed to come together. The present situation in Ukraine is just one of those. Too much too soon, leads to self preservation behaviour and the term ‘self defence force’ should be adequate warning to politicians in power at this moment.

I located the reason for my html ul-attribute problem. It is indeed in my own style sheet, where I style this attribute as invisible. I’ll have to examine what a working solution can be, because the style sheets are in an include file. This means I’ll have to be careful, since changes will affect all my daily entries.

I want to relate an interesting dream fragment from last night. In this scene, I am in discussion with a youth friend who explains to me that people are inadequate and are in need of salvation. I reply to her: “I know those teachings and they are wrong.” I then proceed to explain why saying that, if a person fails at some set goal, it may just not be the right way for him or her to go.

I know those teachings and they are wrong.

After this, the scene trails off and switches to my meeting people coming out of church and my wanting to make some kind of donation to that church. I am told that this should be made to the parent church. So far the dream report.

What strikes me from this dream, is my resolute rejection of the old and familiar teachings about inadequacy and salvation, proclaimed by this youth fiend of respect to me, in my dream. This is a very strong statement for me to let go of those old, but familiar teachings, which I may still be hanging on to more than I realise. Hence this dream!

While I was getting up and ready for breakfast, three criteria surfaces into my awareness. These were as follows, adequacy, robustness and comprehensiveness, arising in association with ‘belief framework’.

These three criteria are old to me in that I have held them for a long time, as criteria that a belief system should meet. Now that I am busy with just such an activity - see yesterday’s formulation of ‘Framework for Human Experience’ - these recalled criteria make a very timely appearance!

So, now I’ll have to lend some content to these criteria by means of examples and the dictionary, and apply them to the frame work that I outlined yesterday. This robustness, comprehensiveness and adequacy will be used when I start fitting the ten frame work points - see 2014-04-30 - in the three fundamental categories of the Human Experience Framework of yesterday.
<9:41am writing, after coffee and edit 10:22am~