STRAIGHT OUTTA’ DENVER

You’re probably familiar with statements such as, “we don’t GO to church. We ARE the church.” There are similar ones that go something like this: “Church is not what we do when we gather on Sunday mornings for an hour or so. Church is not a place or a building. It’s what we are OUT THERE.” Well, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and, although there’s some truth and some wisdom in these statements (which I’ve spoken myself), I’m no longer so sure about them on the whole.

This kind of thinking has developed enough steam over the last few decades that I think you could fairly call it a “movement.” I’d suggest that its full name is the “anti-church-as-an-institution-or-building” movement. It’s also quite opposed to all forms of regular, traditional (and, especially) LOCAL churches. I attended a pastors’ convention in June in which a youth pastor preached one of the workshops. According to his senior pastor, this particular young pastor was being greatly influenced by his buddies in the International House of Prayer (IHOP) movement (which may or may not be influencing him in this area). Anyway, the main thrust of his message was that “we need to get free from the local church” and “we’ve got to get away from local church kind of thinking and get out there and be the kingdom.” Naturally, I couldn’t help but notice that he was saying this in a local church that paid him a nice salary, etc., but I digress.

In the past year, one of my good friends whom I deeply respect – a thoughtful Christian with a PhD in philosophy – dropped out of the local church. He, like many others, thinks that it would be better to simply be a follower of Christ “OUT THERE,” meeting with various close friends in various settings, committing oneself to a group of fellow disciples who meet in various contexts. Frank Viola and the late, great Internet Monk (Michael Spencer) have written books in support of this line of thinking. Another man I respect, Wayne Jacobson, a former pastor in my hometown of Visalia, California, has now dedicated his life to these ideas and to this “anti-church” movement. He and his partner are the guys who formed Windblown Media – the publisher of THE SHACK. Speaking of the SHACK, I’m one of those people who enjoyed that book and recommend it to folks struggling to understand how God can be a good, loving, and gracious God in the midst of unthinkable tragedy and suffering. I think it’s a helpful book on several levels. Its main weakness, in my opinion, is one that’s not often mentioned. I think that the book (and its author, I presume) presents an extremely weak, if non-existent, ecclesiology. For our English speaking friends, I’m saying that the book subtly presents a very low view of the importance and significance of the local church. Barna put out a book a few years ago charting this anti-church phenomenon and called it a REVOLUTION. Keven Miller, in his critique of Barna’s book called it an ABDICATION. For reasons that I will outline below, I’d have to agree with Miller and go with the “abdication” theory. Miller wrote, “Barna’s enthusiasm for First Church of the Individual raises troubling questions.” To my mind, that would be quite the understatement.

I will say that I’m not alone in my apprehensions about this “non-church” and “anti-institutional” movement. I’d like to mention two of my allies, Eugene Peterson and P.T. O’Brien. I’ll begin with O’Brien and his article on “church” in IVP’s “Dictionary of Paul and His Letters.” A friend of mine, Steve Bryan (one our church’s “missionaries” who earned his PhD in New Testament from Cambridge) suggested that I read (or re-read) O’Brien’s article. I did read it – and I am sure glad I did. My suggestion is that everybody give it a careful reading. This is a brief summary (at least, as I read them) of O’Brien’s findings:

1. In the centuries before the New Testament, the term ekklesia was used for political gatherings, the assembly of “full citizens” of the polis. Ekklesia only existed when it actually assembled.
2. In the LXX (the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), ekklesia NEVER referred to Israel as a national unit. It always referred to an actual assembly or gathering of people. “It did NOT designate an ‘organization’ or ‘society.’”
3. Ekklesia is used 114 times in the New Testament – 62 times by Paul. Paul does not use the term as a metaphor. To Paul, it is descriptive of an actual object. Unless on the rare occasion when he uses the term for the “heavenly” church (i.e. the “future” church, the heavenly kingdom of God on earth), he only applies the term ekklesiato an actual gathering of people. “It is doubtful whether Paul (or the rest of the New Testament) uses ekklesia in a collective way.” The primary use of the wordekklesia as a gathering of actual people predominates overwhelmingly in the NT.
4. The local church (each local church) is not part of the church of God nor a church of God. Each local church is THE church of God – the only form it takes in this present age. Each local church is a reflection and manifestation of the “future ekklesia” (the completed, fulfilled Kingdom on earth – which will, indeed, be a universal gathering when the whole universe becomes the dwelling place of God, the holy of holies). The church (each local church) truly is an outpost or a colony “from the future” – that is, each church is an eschatological church, the kingdom in advance and in locale.
5. Christians were reminded and admonished (Heb. 10:25) to assemble in local congregations here on earth, for this was an important way in which their fellowship with Christ was expressed. When they met like this with each other, they also met with Christ himself who indwelt them corporately and individually.

Well, that’s my interpretive summary of O’Brien’s excellent article. Others can read it and reach their own conclusions. I turn now to my second ally. Eugene Peterson, in his book, “The Jesus Way,” writes:

It is interesting to note that Jesus, who in abridged form is quite popular with the non-church crowd, was not anti-institutional… Those who followed Jesus, followed him into buildings, into religious institutions… We sometimes say, thoughtlessly I think, that the church is not a building. It’s people. I’m not so sure. Synagogues and temples, cathedrals, chapels, and storefront meeting halls provide continuity in place and community for Jesus to work his will among his people. A place, a building, collects stories and develops associations that give local depth and breadth and continuity to our experience of following Jesus. We must not try to be more spiritual than Jesus in this business. Following Jesus means following him into sacred buildings that have a lot of sinners in them, some of them very conspicuous sinners. Jesus doesn’t seem to mind… A spirituality that has no institutional structure or support very soon becomes self-indulgent and one-generational (pp. 230-232).

In saying all this, however, I should probably say what I’m NOT saying. I’m not saying that much of the critique of the anti-institution and no-church movement isn’t valid. The reasons for dropping out are often legitimate and real. Churches, especially the ones that I’ve encountered in the North American evangelical sub-culture, are often awash in all kinds of assumptions, blind spots, and ways of doing business that are in great need of reform. I’m not saying that local churches never hurt or harm people or groups of people. I’m not saying that churches shouldn’t do everything possible to avoid the superficiality and trivialization of worship that is all too common. I’m not saying that we should endorse the depersonalized, functionalized, market-driven approach so prevalent in many of our churches. Finally, I’m not saying that following Christ isn’t a “24/7” all-encompassing calling that does, indeed, involve all of our lives “OUT THERE,” nor that we don’t have much in common with fellow believers (and non-believers) as we work and play, live and love, in our everyday lives.

What I AM saying is that even with all that valid critique, we, like Jesus and his first followers, should think long and hard before walking out on the local church to which the Holy Spirit appointed us. To me, most of the New Testament’s instructions about elders and deacons, Baptism and Holy Communion, singing, elders who work hard at teaching and preaching, about “coming together as a church,” and all the “one anothers” (about loving, forgiving, accepting, welcoming, encouraging, rebuking one another, etc.) make no sense in Barna’s revolutionary “no church” world. Speaking of Barna, I’d like to end this thing by returning to Keith Miller’s critique of Barna’s book, REVOLUTION:

Want to become a revolutionary? Here’s my counsel. Trade your copy of Revolution for Life Together, the manifesto written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the dark days of Nazi Germany. Then, to do heroic and revolutionary exploits, stay committed to your local church – something 20 million people no longer have the courage to do.

We are proud to announce that this article had been featured on Clarion Journal as well as Brian Zahnd’s blog.

0 comments.

Don’t vote, Do something!

Posted on February 18th, 2010 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, War, Law, Orig. Literature, Philosophy, Media, Economics, Local, Cultural.

So how about I say a little about myself before everyone around here gets the wrong impression of me. I was one of your average run of the mill conservatives supporting the usual conservative view of the world and I still do hold true to most if not all of the typical conservative way of thinking. And that’s an easy thing for everyone around here to confirm, all you have to do is take a good look at my posts here about two years back and you’ll easily see that I had all of the talking points set and was committed all the way to the conservative cause. I’ve even been accused by Bieren of being the poster boy of conservatism and I was honored to receive that supposed cut down by Bieren (I still don’t consider that to be a cut down). I used to listen to talk radio at least 8 hours a day to the greats like Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager. And just like all of them, I still do think that Obama is just about the worst president we have elected in quite some time even though I do like the guy, I just never thought he was right for the job and with how the events have unfolded recently, looks like I was very much right about that. Along with all of the rest of the good conservatives, I fought hard to get McCain elected even though none of us wanted the guy but that we thought he would just be slightly better than Obama, and he did make us all happy with nominating Sarah Palin and calming our fears that we would just get pushed to the side once the election was done. But we didn’t win that one, and now I do find as least for myself that it was a good thing that McCain didn’t win. Not because I enjoy seeing this country going to shambles whenever I briefly have a look at the news but that I did get the chance to completely rethink the whole idea of the conservative movement and for that matter I started to find a problem with our entire political system as it is. The truth is: this system is completely unsustainable and impractical right from the time that we (as a country) started capitalizing on the industrial revolution. The unfortunate truth is that when we (as a country) started making capitalism the reason for why we exist then that’s when it started to no longer be one nation under God but rather one nation under the mighty dollar. As we keep on making the dollar and this entire system work for us, we keep finding ourselves enslaved to this system and even start finding ourselves enslaving other countries to it as well. Sooner or later something has to give, and the more and more our economical crisis continues, the more and more likely people around the world are going to be demanding more world government and more world economical integration. It’s not really a question of if this will be, it’s much more a question of when. The idea will keep looking and sounding reasonable on paper but if we start calculating the realities of human nature you’ll find that it’s just going to persist this problem. So may I suggest an alternative? How about an opt out plan?

The bureaucratic issue
We have a big issue going on in this country today! It’s just the fact that this country’s government is swollen with way too much bureaucracy that’s just sucking out all of the real freedom around here. In reality we are not much of a free country at all. We can elect a completely different group of people who say the exactly opposite thing but yet the same things just keep on happening. For example all of the people that really wanted us to stop all the wars and get out completely, they just do things the proper way and gather up support for Obama and push all the way to win the election! And Obama didn’t quite do as he promised by moving Iraq and instead did the same exact thing in Afghanistan that Bush did in Iraq! So may I ask what really is the difference here? They both say opposite things only to do the same actions. They both spend way too much money on things that don’t work and all these governmental programs just keep failing. So why exactly are we spending all of this money on things that don’t work? Why are we spending all of this money on a system that doesn’t do what it’s suppose to do?

Now it’s an easy argument for a conservative to say “well that’s because the liberals have abandoned the constitution and start making up their own law!” Now to an extent that is true because it was a liberal president named Franklin Delano Roosevelt who started a trend to nominate supreme court justices that would do as the president pleases rather than rule on what the constitution says. That sort of judicial ruling has showed up all over the country in situations like when California had used it’s supreme court to put same sex marriage in place despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of citizens in that state voted against same sex marriage. So ruling like that one have effectively made voter initiatives practically obsolete in this country. However, liberals would argue that it’s the big business in this country that’s tearing this country to shreds and that’s also true. With how financially irresponsible that most all of the larger corporations have been, it’s lead to the financial collapse that we see today. The large banks around this country liked making all of that money they were getting off of the bad loans they were handing out so much that they didn’t check to see what would happen if the housing bubble would pop. Thus, there were a lot of people left out in the cold when they couldn’t pay the loans they had. So there is plenty of blame to go around and most certainly lots of people around the country have been making sure they push that blame out there. All you need to do is turn on the news and you’ll see somebody (no matter who it is that’s on) blaming someone else for all of the problems of the country. This problem gets so absurd that certain people have made t-shirts saying “pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8.” Now that doesn’t sound so bad until you look up the verse and see “May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership.” Well that’s not very good sportsman like conduct there and I find anyone who would use the bible in such a manner utterly detestable. So Why do we have to put up with this failed system? But still we’re not a the root cause of what’s wrong here.

The Irony of it all
You can actually trace all of these problems back to the American Civil War and even further back to the founding of our nation. The question here is why exactly did that war start in the first place? Considering that every southern state left the union because of slavery, that does mean that we started off as a nation living in violation of one of our most core values: that all humans are created equal. In order to change this Violation, we required a Civil War so that we can remove the inequality from our nation, but have we really started to live as our principals say that we should? So that we could win the civil war Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus allowing him to detain confederate soldiers without trial so that things could operate more smoothly and allow for a victory. Lincoln had also spent money that was not approved by congress yet and kept pushing all to win the war and never held back. While I’m not wiring this to demonize Lincoln, what he did had corrected a great injustice in our society that should not have been allowed to exist in the first place but yet to correct that problem we ended up having to throw away most of our principals to win. This did create a sense of pragmatism that’s created a false mindset in this nation: that we will go to any length to achieve our objectives no matter the rules that we have. This is an American problem that both political parties adhere to and this is shown in every element of our society from the way that it spends it’s money to the way that we talk. Everything is geared to making America the bright shining city on the Hill without thinking of what’s truly the right thing to do. The political talk is always about what is best for America rather than what is the right thing to do. Just as Lincoln had done in the past, so too, every president had continued following his example up to the present day in some from by placing America before all other concerns. As a result, we have ended up wiping out most of the native Americans, we have imprisoned Japanese without cause, we detain people of middle eastern decent and we keep people from coming into our country when it is not to our benefit. We demonize groups of people when they don’t line up with our core values when we have a political difference or a cultural difference. We place that we are first, right in what we believe and anyone that sees it differently is then someone who needs to change their perspectives to our view for things to come out right. We decide that we must implant our culture into other societies, regardless of the cost to them, because we are the ones who live right. We place blame on others when things don’t go right when they are not the problem. The true problem is how we think. We are a country that holds to the ideas on individualism and we think that each of us individually can make it on our own without any help from the people around us, other countries or even God Himself. We say “yes we can” prove that we are the great thing in the world when this is not true. We are arrogant.

A deceleration of dependence
In our founding document, The declaration of independence, the defining words are “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” At the time that was written, it was intended to convey to England that they do not have the right to take life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness away from us and that is a true statement. However, as we have aged as a nation, that statement has evolved even further to mean that our government must provide these things for us when our government can not provide. In order to provide life for our citizens then that means that we must go abroad and take life from others to ensure that we have it. In order to ensure liberty for our citizens then we have to take it from our own people so as to not trample on others rights. Finally, to create the possibility of the pursuit of happiness then we create a system that leaves many loop holes and allows for people to get caught up in and they never find what they were looking for. Most of the wars that we have fought were because other people were living in a way that we did not like rather than because we had to fight that war so that we would survive as a nation. The only two wars we have fought where we would not have continued existing as a nation if we had not won was the revolutionary war and world war two. With all of the wars that we keep on fighting, it only continues to keep fueling the hatred for our nation because we fight every war with the assumption that we are right that may or may not be the case. Thus, we continue taking life so that we can provide it for others. We enforce copy write laws to ensure that people to do not take someone’s work and use it for a profit when they themselves have taken that idea from someone else. There is nothing on this earth that is truly new and in reality, everything is just a recycled idea applied in a different way like having an internal combustion engine replace a horse or replacing a mud hut with wooden and steel houses. We stop certain people from releasing a song because they have certain words that are the same to another that may be right or may not be right. Or we take the house of another person so that we can build a highway to move people faster around the country. Thus, we take the liberty from others to ensure it for others. We have created the market economy so that the people that work the hardest are the ones that reap the most reward out of this nation but yet what it all comes down to is blind luck. Everyone in the housing market was making millions of dollars and was working really hard to get there only to find that we built too many houses and no longer needed so many thus causing them to loose out on what they worked so hard on. While at the same time a kid who has never worked a day in his or her life can just get all of the money their parents earned and just waste it away. At the end of it all, I keep finding that the most ambitious people in the world are also the most unhappy. So to ensure the pursuit of happiness usually ends up creating our own unhappiness. We don’t follow what we preach in this country!

Let us take a step back for a moment and realize certain truths of this world that we can not change. Life is not ensured because at any moment you can die in millions of different ways. So in reality, the very fact that you take another breath is actually a gift because you may not take another. Liberty is never ensured because anything that you want can become something that controls your actions and thus you end up enslaving yourself to your desires. To truly be independent of everything means that all of your actions must be devoid of all passion. Happiness is something that things can not provide for you but it is something that you have to choose to be on a daily basis despite what this life brings you. So the more and more that we keep on focusing in on how to fix problems that are part of a world that we can never change, the more that we will keep spending and fighting and working we keep on pushing ourselves into slavery. Every single person on this planet is a slave to something and your only choice is what you choose to be a slave to. So given all of this, what can we possibly do about our problem here? The only answer here is to take everything that we have in this world with gratitude and live the best that we can and allow forces that are greater than us to correct what is wrong in this world. We need to push aside our arrogance and admit that we don’t know everything and that we can’t correct everything in this world. We need to live a little simpler with our minds set on where we are truly headed all together as a whole. We need to realize that everything in this world is a gift and that we are only still living by grace that this world have not taken our lives yet. We need to stop thinking of what we are entitled to but rather what we can do to celibate the fact that we are still living. We need to declare that we are dependent on each other and need to keep focused on the people around us rather than focusing on things that we can not change. I propose that we change the way that we think.

Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do despite your country
We are a country were most of the population clams to be Christan but yet the funny thing is we rarely act like Christians in this country. So it’s really quite funny to see every president tout their Christaness about when they never do things that are “Christan.” For one, Jesus was never concerned about popularity and in fact usually said things to purposefully drive people away when He would start to get popular. Also, He never cared much for government workings and in fact usually attracted hatred from government officials. However, for the purpose of this post I am not talking of evangelizing people, that is a subject that I have talked about and will spend a lifetime talking about but for now I’m focusing in on how we act and think. For example, our founding fathers had the Boston Tea Party where we destroyed the property of the British to make our point that we didn’t like the taxes England was placing on us. But on the other hand, England was paying for a costly war that we had benefited from and they had bills to pay. Now was it right for England to be placing all of the high cost on us and enforcing the control on us? No but we were also not right in destroying what was not ours. And we constantly keep doing this by butting our heads into conflicts that are not ours to deal with. So why didn’t we go about this another way? Why didn’t we work off the dept that we had accumulated for that war and then continued on living our lives as if the king of England didn’t matter to us? But we can’t change what happened in the past so we can’t possibly know what would have happened if we had followed that course. So let’s just fast forward 234 years to the present and ask the same question, why don’t we live as if the federal government doesn’t matter? Well then that means that we won’t be worried at all about who’s in office and might not even bother to vote at all. That doesn’t mean that we keep ourselves out of the loop and not know what’s happening but instead of worrying about the things that we can’t control, we keep focused on what we can control. We can’t control what Washington is going to do but we can control what we say and what we do. So if we live life with the principals that government is by about and for the people (even though it’s not) then that means we don’t have to stress ourselves over everything the government is doing. We can better focus on the people around us and our local communities if we’re not worried about government. We don’t have to waste our money on a system that’s completely broken and almost useless. We don’t have to keep fixed into the 9 to 5 work week and then go home and quickly lock the door to make sure the neighbors are thous scary terrorist that we keep hearing about. No, we can get to know our neighbors and actually find out for sure if they actually have bad intentions. We can turn off the TV and and just not care about all the useless hype that we have going around the country. We can instead look to helping out the people in our own back yard instead of relying on a system that doesn’t the people that it hands out checks to. May I suggest that we stop relying on the government.

Now don’t misunderstand me here– I am not suggesting that we start another revolution or march on Washington and demand changes. No, I really mean pretend that it doesn’t matter. Not that we decide to not pay our taxes or anything illegal like that but just that we live without the government in our heads every day. So in order for us to start moving us forward in a manner that allows for us to correct our local problems despite what the government is doing I have a few points to think over.

1. First things first– smash your TV! or at lest stop watching the political news and hyped up television that will have you constantly griped by by the culture. All of the constant reports are just things that will keep you worried over one thing that you can’t change to the next thing that you can’t change and so it’s just something that’s just going to keep draining you out. It’s wise to know what’s going on in the world but news papers and other such media formats are less intrusive and allows for deeper thought than TV news.

2. Find a community– Churches or your local temple of your religious believes are by far the best places to go for this or if you happen to be atheist or agnostic then I suggest you try one, it might just be a good experience for you. And pay close attention to the people there, find out what they are like and what they need and help out if you can. Don’t look at it like it’s a place for getting good and services like your local market but more like a second home with people that you can help and can help you. Let it enrich your life with cares that have nothing to do with the government.

3. Form a new identity– We all have been living in a culture of being Americans first that overrides everything else in this life and we need to break from that habit. We need to care more about the people around us and the world at large rather than our country or creed. America is not the most important thing in this world and someday it will fall just like all of the empires and countries in the past have also risen and fallen but the world keeps on going on despite that. So don’t let that trouble you! Instead, try loving the people around you just as you love yourself and place more value on being part of your community rather than a citizen of America and this also goes the same for all of you living in other countries as well.

4. Work with others– Start living a little simpler with what you have! Instead of rushing out to buy that nice car you always wanted, find one that meets your needs. Don’t rush out to buy the big nice house but find one that meets your needs. With the excess of money that you save here then you can pour it into your local community to help out with others helping build an establishment that you all can benefit from. It’s easy to tear down but it takes generations to build up places of shelter and comfort. As you work and commit to a place to build up, you start to leave good traditions in your children and the people around you.

5. Take joy in your life– None of us was given the choice to be born into this world and none of us has the choice on when it will end. So take hold of that! Live your life as if it were all as song of praise for all that you have been given. Yes, you will have pain in your life and yes you will be hurt and will hurt others, this is inevitable but your only other option is to end it prematurely. But that would be a horrible same for you to do such a thing! If you have people around you that love and care for you, then take hold of that for that’s more precocious then all of the finest gold in the world. Fame will fade in time and countries will eventually die out but the people that you encourage and love will turn around and bless others. That’s what changes societies!

None of what I suggest is going to be easy but if we are to move forward in this country then we are going to have to start learning how to straighten out our priorities. We have lost our way completely! We no longer do what is right in this country but rather what is more expedient and easy to do and that’s caught us in a terrible snare. Life will go on despite what this country does, so why should we let us control us? There’s so much more out there than this country has to offer.

0 comments.

ADX Florence

Posted on March 15th, 2009 by Bieren Skidels.
Categories: Political, Crime, Local.

No, this isn’t a review of a recent punk album, nor is it the name of an Italian rail line. This is the name of the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado - the only Supermax prison - in fact, it’s usually referred to as “Supermax”. Most of this post will be quotes and links - it’s an experiment in how simply observing or reflecting upon the technical facts or stories about a structure can be emotionally impacting (without even thinking much about the particular humans involved). Here we go:

Of course, here is the wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Correctional_Institution,_Florence

“ADX Florence was constructed as a response to an incident that occurred on October 22, 1983, in which two inmates murdered their accompanying guards at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. Relatively lax security procedures allowed each prisoner, while walking down a hall, to turn to the side and approach a particular cell so an accomplice could unlock his handcuffs with a stolen key and provide him with a knife.”

After the murder of the guards, the Marion jail went into “control” lockdown. Basically, every inmate is under permanent 23-hour lockdown. These events led to the design of Supermax. Built in Florence, Colorado - the prison was welcomed as a provider of jobs to a failing economy:

“ADX Florence opened in November 1994. The residents in Florence’s surrounding area, Fremont County, welcomed the prison as a source of employment in a time of economic hardship. At the time, the county was already home to nine existing prisons. However, the lure of between 750 to 900 permanent jobs, in addition to another 1,000 temporary jobs during the prison’s construction, led residents in the area to raise $160,000 to purchase 600 acres (2.4 km²) for the new prison. Hundreds of people attended the groundbreaking construction of ADX Florence, which cost over $60 million.”

Supermax houses the most famous and dangerous prisoners in the United States. It is built around the 23-hour lockdown:

“About 22% of inmates have killed fellow prisoners in other correctional facilities; 35% have attempted to attack other prisoners or officers. As a result, most individuals are kept for at least 23 hours each day in solitary confinement. They are housed in a 7 ft (2.13 m) by 12 ft (3.66 m) room, built behind a steel door and grate. Their free hour is spent exercising alone in a separate concrete chamber. Prisoners seldom see one another, and the inmates’ only direct human interaction is with correctional officers or other prison staff. Visiting from outside the prison is conducted through glass, with each prisoner in a separate chamber. Religious services are broadcast from a small chapel.

Part of the prison is a “stepdown” program, designed to encourage less antisocial behavior and eventually transfer prisoners out of the ADX and back to the Maximum Security population. The program is three years in length each year allowing more freedom and social contact with other inmates. Any violation during the program means participants revert to year one.

Most cells’ furniture is made almost entirely out of poured concrete, including the desk, stool, and bed. Each chamber contains a toilet that shuts off if plugged, a shower that runs on a timer to prevent flooding, and a sink missing a potentially dangerous tap. Rooms may also be fitted with polished steel mirrors bolted to the wall, an electric light, a radio, and a television set that shows recreational, educational and religious programming.^[4] These privileges can be taken away as punishment. The 4 in (0.10 m) by 4 ft (1.22 m) windows are designed to prevent the prisoner from knowing his specific location within the complex because he can see only the sky and roof through them. Telecommunication with the outside world is forbidden, and food is hand-delivered by correctional officers.

The prison as a whole contains a multitude of motion detectors and cameras, 1,400 remote-controlled steel doors, and 12 ft (3.66 m) high razor wire fences. Laser beams, pressure pads, and attack dogs guard the area between the prison walls and razor wire.

Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber, lamented in a series of 2006 letters to a Colorado Springs newspaper that the ADX is meant to “inflict misery and pain.”

Consider, this short list of a few of the prisoners in Supermax:

This list displays prisoners assigned to Florence due to political reasons, along with those assigned because of problems in other facilities.

Name Details

Omar Abdel-Rahman Islamic terrorist, nicknamed “The Blind Sheik”; involved in 1993 World Trade Center bombing

Anthony Casso Mobster and former underboss of the Lucchese crime family

Wadih el-Hage Conspirator in the 1998 United States embassy bombings

Matthew F. Hale White supremacist leader; convicted of soliciting the murder of a federal judge

Larry Hoover Leader of the Gangster Disciples Nation based in Chicago

Jeff Fort Co-founder of the Black P. Stones gang in Chicago, and founder of its El Rukn faction

Theodore Kaczynski The “Unabomber”

David Lane (deceased) Neo-Nazi leader, involvement in the murder of Alan Berg

Juan Matta-Ballesteros Drug trafficker, co-conspirator in the Enrique Camarena case

Zacarias Moussaoui Conspirator in the September 11, 2001 attacks

Terry Nichols Oklahoma City bombing conspirator

Richard Colvin Reid Islamic terrorist, nicknamed the “Shoe Bomber”

Eric Robert Rudolph Christian Identity^[7] terrorist; 1996 Olympic Park bombing

Dwight York Leader of the Nuwaubians; convicted for child molestation, racketeering and financial reporting charges

Ramzi Yousef Islamic terrorist, 1993 World Trade Center bombing

Timothy McVeigh (deceased) Oklahoma City bombing (executed on June 11, 2001)

Kenneth McGriff Drug trafficker and organized crime figure

H. Rap Brown Former civil rights activist convicted of murdering a Fulton County, Georgia, deputy Sheriff

Thomas Silverstein Convicted of murdering Federal Correctional Officer Merle E. Clutts

Luis Felipe Founder of the New York chapter of the Almighty Latin Kings and Queens Nation

Howard Mason Drug trafficker who ordered the murder of police officer Eddie Byrne

Barry Mills Leading member of the Aryan Brotherhood

Charles Harrelson (deceased) Texan hitman, convicted of murdering federal judge, father of actor Woody Harrelson

Jose Padilla Convicted of aiding terrorists

Michael Swango American surgeon and serial killer; convicted of 3 fatal poisonings, with many more unproven

Mahmud Abouhalima Islamic Mujahideen leader, 1993 World Trade Center bombing implication and conviction

Richard Lee McNair Convicted murderer and escape artist

Robert Hanssen former senior FBI agent serving life for espionage

Name		Details
Omar Abdel-Rahman		Islamic terrorist, nicknamed “The Blind Sheik”; involved in 1993 World Trade Center bombing
Anthony Casso		Mobster and former underboss of the Lucchese crime family
Wadih el-Hage		Conspirator in the 1998 United States embassy bombings
Matthew F. Hale		White supremacist leader; convicted of soliciting the murder of a federal judge
Larry Hoover		Leader of the Gangster Disciples Nation based in Chicago
Jeff Fort		Co-founder of the Black P. Stones gang in Chicago, and founder of its El Rukn faction
Theodore Kaczynski		The “Unabomber”
David Lane (deceased)		Neo-Nazi leader, involvement in the murder of Alan Berg
Juan Matta-Ballesteros		Drug trafficker, co-conspirator in the Enrique Camarena case
Zacarias Moussaoui		Conspirator in the September 11, 2001 attacks
Terry Nichols		Oklahoma City bombing conspirator
Richard Colvin Reid		Islamic terrorist, nicknamed the “Shoe Bomber”
Eric Robert Rudolph		Christian Identity^[7] terrorist; 1996 Olympic Park bombing
Dwight York		Leader of the Nuwaubians; convicted for child molestation, racketeering and financial reporting charges
Ramzi Yousef		Islamic terrorist, 1993 World Trade Center bombing
Timothy McVeigh (deceased)		Oklahoma City bombing (executed on June 11, 2001)
Kenneth McGriff		Drug trafficker and organized crime figure
H. Rap Brown		Former civil rights activist convicted of murdering a Fulton County, Georgia, deputy Sheriff
Thomas Silverstein		Convicted of murdering Federal Correctional Officer Merle E. Clutts
Luis Felipe		Founder of the New York chapter of the Almighty Latin Kings and Queens Nation
Howard Mason		Drug trafficker who ordered the murder of police officer Eddie Byrne
Barry Mills		Leading member of the Aryan Brotherhood
Charles Harrelson (deceased)		Texan hitman, convicted of murdering federal judge, father of actor Woody Harrelson
Jose Padilla		Convicted of aiding terrorists
Michael Swango		American surgeon and serial killer; convicted of 3 fatal poisonings, with many more unproven
Mahmud Abouhalima		Islamic Mujahideen leader, 1993 World Trade Center bombing implication and conviction
Richard Lee McNair		Convicted murderer and escape artist
Robert Hanssen		former senior FBI agent serving life for espionage

Supermax was designed by the DLR group. Go to their website: http://www.dlrgroupjustice.com/

Here you will see a very tasteful flash presentation, opening with birds flying thorugh a jungle scene. It then proudly proclaimes

” listen.Design.deliver.

DLR group unites talent from diverse locations to design places that last with commitment to our clients, the environment, and design excellence.

Celebrate the experiences of everyday living. We design to make the ordinary extrordinary. Connecting personal, social, and commercial relationships.

Foster a lifetime of living. Our design inspires a students mind, body, and spirit to achieve all that is possible and more.”

Here you can see pictures of Supermax: http://www.dlrgroupjustice.com/#/3.12.2/

The following was written by a CNN reporter who visited Supermax:

Bureau of Prisons officials stressed that 95 percent of the Supermax prisoners are the most violent, disruptive and escape-prone inmates from other federal prisons, and they were transferred to ADX to help control those other facilities. At ADX, every prisoner has his own 86-square-foot cell.

Despite the brutal nature and violent history of most of the inmates, not a single major assault against a corrections officer has occurred since the first inmates arrived in 1994.

The one-on-one killers who slashed or strangled other inmates, earning a trip to Supermax, are the inmates one would most worry about. Contact with others comes only after the inmates have adhered to a strict program for group recreation. Two inmate-on-inmate homicides have led to even tighter restrictions.

I was allowed to briefly talk at random to a few of the inmates. One man who identified himself as Jack Stancell of South Carolina told me he’s doing time because, among other things, he’d stabbed somebody and murdered somebody else. He’s been in prison for 33 of his 65 years. He says Supermax is actually better than some places he’s been.

“You get used to it,” he says without emotion.

5 comments.

“He didn’t even stick up for me.”

Posted on January 22nd, 2009 by Dark Poet.
Categories: Prose, Local, Parental Advisory.

I went out to my car to get a couple of books for stuff I am going to work on for school. As I went back I heard a woman crying on the shoulder of her friend, saying that “He didn’t even stick up for me…” *sob > sob > sniffle > sniffle*. I immediately began to criticize the guy. “He doesn’t even know what he stands for, so how can he stand up for you?” I should of said to her. But that would have pointing the finger at him went it should be pointed at me;
It was childhood, but maybe the some of attitudes of that time went on and on through the years. Darth B’Strad was fighting and losing to the neighbor’s boys a couple of doors down. Instead of standing up for him, I parked myself at the fence. Dumb fucking move. Years of torture for my brother could have been avoided if he KNEW I got his back, rather than me saying I got his back (when and if I really would have done got his back). I am truly sorry, please forgive me.
In truth, in many ways I am becoming what I really am: unreliable. If is not somewhat obvious at this moment in time, then, I assure you, the attitudes are there and festering more and more. But talking about only me is not the point of this post.
‘Strad, I want to become a big brother to you, to see you succeed, grow, and develop your own unique way. Money is bull squash for proving I got your back, so I want more to prove so you KNOW I got your back. I feel somewhat bad for breaking the promise to our Arizonian bro, that I would go snow boarding with him. I worked the 4 am instead. I was planning on working the 4 am on the 8th; FUCK ‘em bitches, I’m taking a personal holiday, calling in, or just not showing up for work.

10 comments.

SOD celebrates 500th post and a new year

Posted on January 2nd, 2009 by Bieren Skidels.
Categories: Local.

You notice that little “p=” in the address bar? Well it started with the first post on Nov, 19th 2006… for that first post p=6 . Now p=505, making this post the 500th post almost 26 months after the first and right at the beginning of 2009. This post is mainly a post for posters:

In the year of 2007 we had got 13,400 visits, in 2008 we got 20,500, a 53% increase. Also, 20% of our traffic is from outside the U.S. Search Engines have been paying about 10 times as much attention to the site as they did last year (in fact, searching google for our most popular search term “nasal snuff cancer” puts us in the top few results). Indeed the old snuff article is still the most often searched or linked to article. I’m proud to note that our site is not an IE site, with over 60% of hits coming from firefox browsers. As for other sites linking into ours, facebook is still #1 - however, some interesting other ones like the zionist site tammybruce.com which linked to an old B’strad article on sherman and petreous… oh my haha

Looking back, I think the existence of this site has mattered - maybe it will matter in the future as well

p.s. I have a request from a friend that writers keep others identities (names) secret unless they have permission to use their actual name

2 comments.

Repiecing the shards of My Broken Mirror

Posted on December 1st, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Ethics, Philosophy, Creative Writing, Christianity, Local.

As of late I have been going through a sort of mental breakdown, per se. That was something that I have allowed myself to get into by letting down my guard and allowing the things of this world redefine me. While we as Christians are called to actively engage this world we also have to remember that there is a spiritual realm that we also have to fight in as well. This is a battle within our own minds and it is one that can be extremely destructive and even deadly. There is a devil, and he does seek for your weakest spot to look for a way to destroy you. These are battles that we all have to fight and yet we never can really pull away from them. Even people with the strongest faith sometimes have the strongest attack on their very being. I have just had to struggle with this, and thank God that He pulled me on through this challenge. Still the key is to place your trust in God at such times but even more so to learn discernment on what is from God and what is from the devil. The devil is an evil being who does have power, especially in lies and he will even use scripture to twist things into a lie that if we believe in it then we will be lead down a path of destruction and my resent challenge came close to death.

The devil is an evil being!
One of the things most desired by the devil is to kill off the faithful Christians in this world or to reform them into people devoured up by this world as just another ordinary person. But we are not ordinary people because we have been given a power that very few can understand. Most wouldn’t call it a power at all but it’s there. We been given the Holy Spirit and that’s something that helps us discern what is truth and what is a lie. However the devil can use many truths that we know and twist them up into a lie. One example was put right here on this blog by me. I a fret of much confusion I was trying to push through my last post and I was in a intense stage were I was trying to gain understanding from all of the vast information that was running wild in my head. I was losing clarity in my thoughts and I was trying to gain some clarity on it all. I had allowed my confusion to be twisted into a great lie that I was buying into and I wrote it up here. The line was “The first is to accept all of the sufferings that I have endured as all my own fault.” That’s a lie and what I had did here was allow a bunch of truths to be twisted and I didn’t look a second time to reword it. One important part of what Dennis Pager’s theory on happiness is that we decide to be happy and that happiness has nothing really to do with our circumstances. Not that happy people do not feel pain or even suffer less than the unhappy but we find that the happy still find a way to be happy in every circumstance and the unhappy are still unhappy in every circumstance. Something that I was forgetting as of late. In fact that line most likely has much more to do with my state of mind at that time, I was blaming myself for everything going wrong when in reality the one thing that I should have been blaming myself for was that I was making myself unhappy. But there are many things that are well out of our control and one key to happiness is understanding what what we can change and what we can’t. Heck, if I didn’t struggle with this like the rest of you out there, do you think that I could write about it? There were many things here that I was improperly blaming myself for and many other things that I wasn’t properly blaming myself for. Oh, that girl doesn’t love me the same why! Well, I can’t change the feeling of another so you can’t blame yourself for that! There’s another girl that decided to take off on a destructive path for her life and she didn’t listen to me. I had been blaming myself for that one as well but I really couldn’t do much of anything about it. However what I should have properly blamed myself for is letting it enclose myself and keep me alone. That’s were the devil has the best place to attack you and that’s where I had placed myself. There is a reason that Paul called us a body in Christ. It’s because we do need each other to help bolster each other up so that we can resist such attacks. I actually find it really hilarious that I somewhat had intentionally placed myself in that position just for the fact that I could make an example of this point. Well, I kept on feeling during this time that there was something that was just starring me in the face but I was just so much on the charge path that I just couldn’t see it. However while I was on a frenzy looking to bring together all the opinions that I was changing to fit this new world view I was forming I was enclosing myself so that I could figure it out. That was a dangerous place and the devil took full advantage of it.

A night that could have been
I was still struggling now that I had realized what I had done wrong in that last post and it was tearing me up. I had set out on this blog, around two years ago, to be a clarifying force in a world too full of lies. However in the past month I had lost that clarity that I had one had. In that struggle to reclaim it, I felt almost as if I really just wanted everyone else to feel just how I felt on the whole situation. So I had written that last piece intentionally to confuse so that others would also feel it. I was at work that night and I was just starting to be filled up with fear of what I was becoming. I had never been much of a manipulator in my life (or at least I wasn’t ever intentionally trying to manipulate) but now I was feeling the real urge to start really looking for thous sort of situations. I hated that feeling! I felt like I was starting to become some sort of cult leader and was using my own confusion to make my way. That’s how the devil does it! He looks to make fear over what you are. He tries to make you afraid of the changes and tires to make you manipulate the situation so things say the same. Now that certainly doesn’t mean that all change is good by any sense of the word but we shouldn’t be afraid of it. We need to be capable of adapting to the situation instead of drawing away from it. But I was drawing away. I was scarred of it! So then the devil brought his biggest temptation of all to me. You can stop all of these bad things from happening if you just kill yourself! He made it so desirous that I could actually feel my arms trying to swerve my car into a charsh on my way home from work (I don’t even know how I stayed on the road!). Then I just decide to try to sleep it off but while there I could feel the knife on the kitchen table at my neck cutting through my breath. Now that was freaky! But even though he made it sound so good in a real horrible sense, I still didn’t buy it! I still knew that wouldn’t really be a good solution and that his lies really weren’t all what they were cracked up to be. A good verse to remember at such times is this:

Jeremiah 29:11
For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.

Well I knew this plan wasn’t from God! It wasn’t good in any sense, it was of disaster! And this plan had no more future and hope in it so this was not in God’s will. So I instead got right up and walked right into that kitchen (when that knife was sitting right there) and I instead sent out an e-mail back to everyone telling them how sorry I was for the way I have acted and how I really was feeling. That might have been a really dumb idea in retrospect but I just didn’t know what else to do! Then I just went and laid down and struggled with that demon (as I like to call it) for the rest of the night till I could finally fall asleep. As I began a new day, then the help and encouragement began to come back to me. I was able to start recommitting myself back to who I was again. I took a similar title from a previous post of mine because this series was something I still feel was defining for me. So I return to it again:

We are all given a mirror when we are born. When we grow and learn about the world around us and we start to see and start understand differences in the world then we are soon confronted with our mirror. With it we see our selfs perfectly and everything that we are and will be is there. But we don’t like the refection that it shows; it’s nasty and full of selfishness, greed, hatred and pain. So as the foolish kids that we all were we all decide to toss that mirror into the fires of hell and shatter it down there. As we keep growing in life our demon finds us and starts whispering his lies in our ear. And as we start to believe thous lies we stumble on events and slip into our hell. We all have to spend our time here for that is the doom that we all forced on our selfs when we through away our mirror. However, despite that fact it’s still not without hope for in the distance we see something twinkling. It is a shard of our broken mirror placed at a moment in our life so that we my see our selfs a little bit more clearly. Now we have a choice, to ether keep that shard and go looking for more or ignore it and keep wandering. If you ignore it you will remain in ignorance still not knowing why bad things are happening to you.

And as I went through telling some more stories in that post I came back to this conclusion about my mirror:

As I start to piece together the shards of my broken mirror I see two sides to the same person. On one side I see someone who is reflective and marred in constant thought and on the other I see someone who is outgoing and wishes to meet new people and learn about their lives. I want to help thous in my generation to also find their shards to their mirror. However I can’t do it for you, this is something that you are going to have to accomplish for yourself but I will help in any way that I can. Reconciling these two sides for me is hard but I find that the more that I feed ether side I can start to make it all one person. If it’s anything that I have shown these past posts it’s that I am also a messed up human being in desperate need to chain my demon, climb the rope of trust and piece together the shards of my broken mirror. Doing these things are hard because our demon tries to lie to us. It’s hard because the rope of trust is long and there are hard ridges to climb. It’s also the hardest to confront the shards of your broken mirror. By assembling the shards you cut yourself on it and still the picture is unclear. But when we do that, it has the power to put our soul at ease.

Now I have to say, again, that we never can fully see the picture clearly as we assemble that mirror. We can never really see our selfs fully and even at times we can forget that we do need to have a look back at that mirror to remind our selfs of what we truly are. While I may have found a new piece to my mirror, the reflection isn’t really all that different but it will never really quite be the same anymore. As we go though our lives and find new pieces, we can’t forget all of the rest of the pieces that also have made us the person that we are. We all still have to struggle with our selfs, in our own minds to fight of the temptations that our demons bring to us. As I keep going on in this life I start to really understand more and more what Paul was taking about when he said:

2 Corinthians 12:7-10
even though I have received such wonderful revelations from God. So to keep me from becoming proud, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger from Satan to torment me and keep me from becoming proud.

Three different times I begged the Lord to take it away. Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me. That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

God always has His ways of just smashing my pride whenever I start to feel that I deserve any praise. Sure, in the normal sense I do deserve some praise for the things that I have accomplished but that’s still only due to the fact that God has given me these abilities and they would fail me if I ever lack in trusting God. So I much rather talk much more openly about my failures and what I have done wrong in my life so that I can boast about the many times that God has saved me. For if an absolute fool like me can find a way to still trust in God, then how can it be impossible for anyone else to do it? I’m nothing special at all! I’m actually quite strange and I never have quite fit in anywhere. However the Lord still chose to use such a failed being as me, for reasons that are still beyond me to understand.

Isaiah 55:9
For just as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so my ways are higher than your ways
and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

However now that the devil tried to make me afraid of myself, but I think it’s wholly appropriate of me to start retuning the favor. Instead of being afraid of what I will become, I’ll start putting that fear in God and if it’s anything the devil is terrified about, it’s Him!

Psalm 27
The Lord is my light and my salvation—
so why should I be afraid?
The Lord is my fortress, protecting me from danger,
so why should I tremble?
When evil people come to devour me,
when my enemies and foes attack me,
they will stumble and fall.
Though a mighty army surrounds me,
my heart will not be afraid.
Even if I am attacked,
I will remain confident.

The one thing I ask of the Lord—
the thing I seek most—
is to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
delighting in the Lord’s perfections
and meditating in his Temple.
For he will conceal me there when troubles come;
he will hide me in his sanctuary.
He will place me out of reach on a high rock.
Then I will hold my head high
above my enemies who surround me.
At his sanctuary I will offer sacrifices with shouts of joy,
singing and praising the Lord with music.

Hear me as I pray, O Lord.
Be merciful and answer me!
My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me.”
And my heart responds, “Lord, I am coming.”
Do not turn your back on me.
Do not reject your servant in anger.
You have always been my helper.
Don’t leave me now; don’t abandon me,
O God of my salvation!
Even if my father and mother abandon me,
the Lord will hold me close.

Teach me how to live, O Lord.
Lead me along the right path,
for my enemies are waiting for me.
Do not let me fall into their hands.
For they accuse me of things I’ve never done;
with every breath they threaten me with violence.
Yet I am confident I will see the Lord’s goodness
while I am here in the land of the living.

Wait patiently for the Lord.
Be brave and courageous.
Yes, wait patiently for the Lord.

A Commissioning, Straight outta’ Denver
So this is my call to my fellow bloggers: to move down the charge path of exposing truth wherever we can find it! If there’s anything this society lacks most, it’s truth. We need to keep shining the truth we know more into a world that’s looking for darkness. So I have some suggestions for us moving forward. Now, none of these are intended to block any of you in but to suggest areas where we can develop where I think each of you has talent.

Bieren Skidels
You have been my closest friend for the longest time and I am very grateful for you. I have no idea how I would have made this transition of living on my own without your help. You’ve been the most challenging person to me, and you have challenged everything that I think. But I need thous challenges to that I can think more clearly. We have seen the result when you have pulled back, so I ask you to start moving back into that position of pushing me to become better than I am. However I also ask that you would also recognize that you can not shape me into the person you would like to see but that I’ll have to move myself forward. But I will do the same for you because we need to push for better that what this world has to offer. I just want to encourage you to keep on looking for thous odd articles and keep looking for what we can learn from them. You passions here have made this an interesting place to visit and I think you should keep it up. Out of all the other blogs I have seen, ours is the only one that doesn’t have any generic look to it. That’s all due to your insight and making things look good. It’ll be great to see what more things we can develop here.

Pacifist Muse
Out of all my friends I would have to say that there is no other one that I fought more tooth and nail with than you. But yet we have still remained very close. That makes you my most prized friend! For you have always showed me the value in differing opinions and you have kept me from getting too rigged in my own thinking. Now I see that there are less and less ideas worth dieing for. Now I toss aside the will to make the world right by making my country right, and instead, I’ll trust that God will set things right in His own time and I just have to do as He wills. You’re a man of adventure and I want to see you keep that up. All I suggest is that while on you travels that you would still drop a line here. I think some of thous e-mail that you have sent out, belong here. But you have a lot on you plate so don’t feel pressured here. Just let us know some of your stories.

Dark Poet
You’ve always seemed to find a completely different beat in the world that no one else hears. But that is because God has gifted you a gracious heart and I want to see you develop it further. You definitely have an interest in computers and such things. So I suggest that you continue in that vain and look to how we can use these things to better our lives. Start bringing thous things here. Tell us what you have been learning in your schooling and how that’s useful. You never know what we can start to learn here if you just start to speak up. Let others see what you have to offer and that will give us all more hope for a better future.

Distinguished Bean
You have been a bit of a jack of all subjects here and that’s always a good thing. However your poetry has been the thing you have shined most about! We could always use much more beautifully worded poems to light up our lives. But what is a song worth singing if it is not given up to the Lord. So I suggest that you do look to making more of thous poems up to God. I think if you start getting in this then you’ll find it had to pull away from it. Start reading up in the psalms and the old prophets and see how they written up their psalms (especially Isaiah). In a day and age where selfishness is supreme, someone who writes psalms to God is something to behold, and God is pleased when His people brag about Him.

Invot
Despite the fact that we come from two different backgrounds, we have still found a great friendship. One that will not go away. God has placed you here for a reason and while I am still unsure of exactly what that means, you still do have a big role to play in the future. You have came here to us and immediately shown us your ability to tell stories that have good value. Sometimes a story is far more effective than a sermon! So my dear friend, please keep it up. No matter where this world will take us you’ve won a freind for life.

Soy EsteBomb
We brought you on as our music man, so get to analyzing music. Start showing us how the songs you like can teach us about the things in life. You have a long way to go but remember that God holds you future in His hands. And music is His gift to us, so that we can fill our soul with the joys of this life. But music can be used to sooth the soul or to fill it with chaos. So my challenge to you is to start discerning what songs has what effects on people and why. Start looking for that and I am sure God will bless you in this search.

Upsidedown lightbulb
You are our newest member, but yet, your still the one that I am most optimistic about. In some whys, how you’re starting here looks quite a bit like how I started. So I suggest that you start becoming our main political blogger here. I’m going to start moving away from that subject more so that I can concentrate more on my theological studies, but that just gives you a clear opening. Just start by finding a interesting article and reading it through. Then you start you post by linking that article and quotes (learn how to block quote well). Keep working at it and eventually you’ll be able to start linking many different article and be able to weave them all into one great point. But remember that name calling gets you nowhere. Actually start looking for things that you can praise of your political opponents and that will give you more credibility when you criticizes them. Look for clarity rather than looking for agreement! townhall is a good place to look for conservative commentary and the new republic is a good place for liberal commentary. Just keep working at it and I know that you can do it.

For the better part of a year I had been running a one man show here but now I see this blog coming to life! Seeing all of the rest of you start joining up here and start making good post is really start to take this blog to a whole new level. Just remember that our first goal here is to first make a good post for our self’s then for the rest of us blogger and then finally the rest of the world. So there is no need to rush any posts around here, take a lesson from me and read it over a few times before posting. Let’s make this a place open to criticism but not chastising (although we still need some more poking fun at each other too so we don’t take our selfs too seriously).

It’s been a time of reflection and rethinking of my entire goal in life but I have still come down to this: I will do whatever I can to serve my God. We must place our trust in Him before we can move forward in His will.

John 21:17-19
A third time he asked him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

Peter was hurt that Jesus asked the question a third time. He said, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.”

Jesus said, “Then feed my sheep.

“I tell you the truth, when you were young, you were able to do as you liked; you dressed yourself and went wherever you wanted to go. But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and others will dress you and take you where you don’t want to go.” Jesus said this to let him know by what kind of death he would glorify God. Then Jesus told him, “Follow me.”

God may take us to places we don’t want to go, but to keep on fighting Him will just cause more hardship for our selfs.

19 comments.

Religious Right: RIP -> “DONTVOTE”

Posted on November 15th, 2008 by Bieren Skidels.
Categories: Political, Local.

or so says Cal Thomas on townhall.com:

check it out here.

Basically, he says that the religious right has *wasted* 30 years and millions/billions dollars worth of effort to form the country morally through politics. And obviously this has not had much of an effect - so why spend all our resources trying to change the world through politics, when we already have a very straight forward model for changing the world in the Bible.

As for how effective such a “moral” political movement can be - consider this question:

Does the secular left, when it holds power, persuade conservatives to live by their standards? Of course they do not. Why, then, would conservative Evangelicals expect people who do not share their worldview and view of God to accept their beliefs when they control government?

Ultimately my answer is the “DONTVOTE” movement. Currently I am the movement - but maybe others are too and I just don’t know about them. I should post on this in detail… but just a few tidbits:

a. “DONTVOTE” doesn’t mean “never vote”

b. It assumes the descending order: familial, community, city, region, nation, and last global…

c. It embraces the reality of human limitation

d. Idealistically, love trumps all

e. It is agnostic to all other “ideals” in order to allow them freedom to develop

2 comments.

Amendment 47: The kill the Union Amendment!

Posted on October 19th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Law, Local.

Every union has to be trembling in fear over this one! This one is pretty much going to break th strangle hold power of the unions in Colorado! This one makes it so that you don’t have to be in the union if you don’t want to. You can decide to not be part of the union if you don’t want to and that goes for any job you work for. This is really good here! With how bad the teachers unions have been lately, I’d like to see how this will effect them? maybe they’ll have to actually do their job for once and convince teachers that their worthwhile to be apart of rather than just forcing them in just because they think they own the place. Breaking the union stranglehold will help out a lot especially in this economy. Not to mention that it may make them use their money to do what they were intended to do rather than just funneling that to Democrats to keep the bureaucracy going. Yes!!!!!!!!!!!

Here are the Amendments.

Update: For the benefit of my friend rm here I’ll just make sure you all know here that this one is to make it so you don’t have to pay the union. You can always leave the union but if you work at a certain place you still have to pay them. So that pretty well makes you forced into the union even though you don’t get the benefits. So for most people they might as well be part of the union because they’re paying them anyway. This will make it so you don’t have to pay them and keep that money for yourself. So now unions will actually have to prove their worth by getting to the job they were meant to do: looking out for the best for workers and not just trying to ensure every job.

4 comments.

Amendment 55: The no BS Layoff Amendment!

Posted on October 19th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Law, Local.

This one makes it easier for someone to bring up a law suit to a company they’ve worked for if they feel they’ve been fired without “just cause.” That being defied as “specified types of employee misconduct and substandard job performance, the filing of bankruptcy by the employer, or documented economic circumstances that directly and adversely affect the employer.” So no you can’t sew if the company is going under or if you’re doing something stupid. All the company has to do is document everything so that such a case will get thrown out. However we’re living in a sue happy country at the moment. Do we really need to start giveing people another reason to sew over? Just think of all the things that we can’t do now! You can’t let a teacher give a student a hug cuse that would be sexual harassment! We’ve have to slap on “caution hot” warnings because people keep on sewing to try to strike at rich! Don’t these things start to really get annoying? So ordinarily I would say no to this. However there is a key line in this amendment: “allowing the court to award attorneys fees to the prevailing party.” aka– Loser pays! Thus people trying to just get some settlement from a company because it’s cheaper for the company to do that, will get slapped down with with the lawyers fees. So the people just looking to strike at rich aren’t getting it here while people with legitimate claims can get compensated. I think this will be a good little experiment into the loser pays idea and it will work. Works great in England (well that’s one of the few things the Brits do right!) I’ll have to say yes to this one!

Here are the Amendments.

2 comments.

Amendment 48: Another Crack at Banning Abortion

Posted on October 15th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Abortion, Law, Constitutional Law, Local.

Quite clear and simple on this one: this is going to force the Colorado state Government to look at every unborn child as a human being. In theory this should ban all abortions in the state of Colorado. However I don’t think that should it pass that abortions will actually get banned in our state. More than likely our state supreme court will just throw this one out like they did to our vouchers amendment. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt to see what could happen here. For all we know the national supreme court could also pick this up and reopen the debate there! I signed the petition to get this one on the ballot and I’ll vote yes on this one.

Here are the Amendments.

1 comment.

Local

The Authors

Categories

Articles

Bieren Links

Darth B'Strad Links

invot's Links

Index for posts concerning Local

On Going to Church

Don’t vote, Do something!

ADX Florence

“He didn’t even stick up for me.”

SOD celebrates 500th post and a new year

Repiecing the shards of My Broken Mirror

Religious Right: RIP -> “DONTVOTE”

Amendment 47: The kill the Union Amendment!

Amendment 55: The no BS Layoff Amendment!

Amendment 48: Another Crack at Banning Abortion