Hello, Mr. McDonnell. For this week’s blog post, I am going to talk about the introduction to our Judaism and Christianity unit. Before that,  I would say that I am semi-religious. My cousins and extended family are more religious than my immediate family and me. I celebrate most of the Jewish holidays, but only with my relatives, and even then it is more of a family gathering than a religious ceremony or anything like that. I also celebrate Christmas and Easter and some Christian holidays, but again, not super religiously. I also do not go to Church or Synagogue. So even though my family is slightly religious, I still did not know anything about Judaism and Christianity, surprisingly. I knew bits of pieces of things, like Jesus being crucified, and big things like that, but I didn’t even really know the story of Jesus, so it was pretty interesting to hear the bits and pieces of stories that I have heard finally come together. One thing that surprised me was that Christianity stemmed from Judaism, as well as Islam. It is also surprising how much more Christianity took off than Judaism. Christianity now makes up 31% of the world, whereas Judaism only makes up 0.2%. This is a very, very significant difference and to think that the larger of the two stemmed from the smaller is wild. I was also very intrigued as to the reason many people, men, in particular, converted to Christianity. They were not willing to be circumcised, which is a Jewish tradition you could say. Obviously, it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to be circumcised if they didn’t have to, but making this the driving factor as to why you change religions is surprising to me. Compared to some of the things that some other people do for their religion, I’m surprised these ancient people didn’t think the same way. People today will still not do any work every sabbath, every week for their religion. I am not trying to be disrespectful, but this seems like a big burden or at least just an inconvenience. And to do this for your entire life? This seems like a lot to give up. Maybe not equilivant to a painful procedure in which you have your foreskin removed, especially as a grown man, not even a baby, but still. A question I have, and this may be a dumb question, is whether Jesus was a god or not. I am sure this has been explained in one of our readings, but I’m still confused. I know he rose from the dead three days after being killed from our reading last night, and this seems pretty godly to be, but he also just led a human life, not really doing anything god-like until his famous resurrection. I also remember you saying in class that he was a man, but also a god, and you just have to accept that he was both but also one person. If you ask me, the whole thing is pretty confusing and hard to follow, but still very interesting.

Hello, Mr. Mcdonnell. For this week’s blog post, I want to talk about my finished Silk Road project and how it felt to complete it. after finishing the project, I feel pretty good about how it came out. I think my partner and I put a lot of time and effort into the presentation, and hopefully, it shows. I also think me and Hillary did a good job pacing ourselves and keeping up with the work. Because of this, we didn’t have to cram a bunch of hours in on Sunday night, we were able to basically just turn it in after a few things. We were able to do this because we did a little bit each day and did not let it pile up, which worked very well. My partner and I split up the work to do, so we both did the same amount. If I had to rate this project out of ten on how much I enjoyed it, I would rate it a 7 out of 10. The fact that it could have possibly replaced a big unit test, like the one that the other blocks had, brings it up to maybe an 8 or 9 out of ten. If I put aside and look past the big project and stress aspect of this project, I actually really enjoyed learning about the Silk Road. The silk road is one of those things that I have always heard about, but never really knew what it was until this unit. It is a very interesting topic and there was plenty to write about after I found my sources. the site that you recommended and the one Hillary and I used to make our presentation, Emaze, was a little difficult to use. For one, it is kind of laggy. There also isn’t that much flexibility with the formatting as another site, such as google slides or google earth. I feel like our end presentation is not that much different from google slides, and we could have done the same project on google slides. Emaze also is not great because both partners can’t work on the project at the same time. I understand that is just how the site works, but it was a little inefficient. We were still able to make it all work on Emaze, although I am not sure if our promo video works. When I was editing the assignment, it said there was an error every time you tried to open the video, so I deleted it out of the presentation and re-embedded it in, but the same thing happened. If it still does not work when you try and open it, I will just email it to you separately. This was another thing with Emaze, a few of the features did not work as intended which was not ideal but again, we just worked around them. All and all, I think Hillary and I did well and I’m happy with our project. That’s it, Thanks!