Satan is Real. And, a man should have the courage to lay down his life for his family.

I was outraged and shocked, reading the details of this horrific crime. Here are details of this home invasion and brutal murder of a family by two white men, Hayes and Komisarjevsky.

However, the more I chewed it over in my mind, the more agitated I was at the husband, Dr Petit.

1) He did not act like the leader of his family. He could have marshaled them together to fight the intruders, call 911, anything...
2) After he was tied up, he got free, and simply ran away to a neighbor's house - which is why he survived.

On the other hand, his wife went back to the house and was assaulted and killed. She had more concern for her family, if not foolishness in not waiting for police at the bank to catch Hays who was with her.

Satan is real. He enters a person granting them temporary invincibility to do monstrous evil. This happened wth Judas Iscariot in the Bible, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and to evil criminals like these two murderers.

The other striking thing is, if you are not under God's protection - under the blood of Jesus - you are vulnerable. The Bible says that Satan "prowls like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour".

Our society brings us up to think of survival of ourselves. A man should have the courage and recognition ahead of time, that he will lay down his life for his family. Dr Petit should have fought to the death. I pray that when faced with such a situation, I shall make the correct choice.

In fact, I was anguished to find that the killer said exactly that in a journal,

Hayley was the fighter of the family, according to Komisarjevsky, who claimed the father was "passive" toward saving his family.

"If you don't want to defend your family, then take your chances with the criminal while police sit outside and follow protocol," wrote Komisarjevsky
"Mr. Petit is a coward, he ran away when he felt his own life was threatened," Komisarjevsky wrote. "Time and time again I gave him the chance to save his family."

William Petit, who has attended every day of the the court hearings, sat stoicly through the accusation.

May pastors start exhorting men to be leaders in their homes. May pastors preach correctly that self-defense and defending your loved ones is required in the Bible.

Idea: progress bar for eBooks

Watching video or listening to audio, you have a progress bar or time line. Reading a book, you can hold the book sections in your hands to get a feel for your progress. Even a cassette tape player has a progress window. Unfortunately, with an eBook, there is no progress bar for a chapter.
Why not have a new widget - a progress bar for Wordprocessors? MSWord, Acrobat...
In the header, simply put a progress bar widget for the chapter. So if a chapter has 100 pages, each sheet has a progress bar ----->------------ Of course, the '>' represents your position in the chapter.
Or how about --------34---------100
If that is hard to generate, then simply write (say) "page 34 of 100"
Another way would be to have the scroll bar set to the size of the chapter (and not the entire book). 

Hmm... I dont find a 3rd party plugin here (http://www.adobesystems.ca/special/acrobat/pluginfinder.html) - perhaps I should write my own?

Was the Cross from God, or Satan?

As an icon among Catholics, and even in evangelical Christian worship songs, the Cross is venerated and held dearly.
However, I believe that the cross as the means for Jesus' death may actually have been from Satan. Here are some supporting reasons, and one opposing.

The Cross was from Satan:
God abhors cruelty.

• The entire book of Nahum in the Old Testament was a condemnation of Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria. God condemned them for their extreme cruelty in war. My NIV Bible text note says that they would erect piles of chopped heads of the inhabitants of the cities they conquered. They would torture the leaders to death.

[TODO add more verses to support:]

The cross was an instrument of torture. It was a slow and painful death stretching over hours. Before crucifixion, Jesus was flogged with a Roman cat-o-nine tails. This multiple pronged whip contained shards of metal and glass and shredded a victims flesh and often itself caused death. On the cross, the victim was nailed at the forearms and shins to the wooden beams. To breathe, the victim had to raise himself (or herself) on his nailed arms and legs. Every breath was agony. Eventually he or she was exhausted and died of suffocation.
Jesus was the lamb of God who died for the sins of the world. In Jewish custom, the Passover lamb was slain humanely by slitting its throat. It was not tortured to death. God would have picked a humane way for his Son to be sacrificed.
When you read the book of Job in the Bible, you see Satan wanting to test Job's devotion to God. God allowed Satan to choose the means of testing. Satan used evil means including killing Job's children in a storm. Yet, God imposed boundaries on Satan - limits on what evil he could choose to do. God is not the author of evil.
Many of the Old Testament books of the Bible pointed to the Messiah and his experiences. I believe the book of Job points to Jesus' crucifixion. Just as Satan was allowed to choose the instrument in Job's disasters, so was Satan allowed to choose the instrument for Jesus' death.

The Cross was from God:
God prescribed stoning as a means of execution. I do not know why He allowed it because it seems cruel and horrific to me - yet, God is not a cruel God. Perhaps God hated sin so much that He prescribed this as a deterrent.

Conclusion: We must glorify the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross - not the cross itself.