Either you get this or you don’t.

Wrap-up on the season:

Roger Clemens — 18 games — 6-6 record — 4.18 ERA
Joe Saunders — 17 games — 8-4 record — 4.05 ERA

Let’s see — Saunders had a better record in slightly fewer games and a slightly better ERA.

Oh, one other thing — Saunders cost Anaheim a bit less than 1.5% of what Clemens cost New York.

But hey, Clemens did strike out 5 more batters than Saunders.  So I’m sure that’s worth the other $25+ million.

(To be honest, most of my “theological rants” are accurately named “rants”, as they are about something that ticks me off. This one moreso just disturbs the living snot out of me.)

As I’ve noted before, I grew up around some startling legalism, particularly in my elementary school. An instance of that occured to me earlier this week on two different occasions. Not wanting to blame God for any stupidity on my part, I won’t say that “it seemed good in the Lord” to write this, but it did seem like the right thing to do, Wilford.

In Exodus 17:1-6, we read of one of the times when the Israelites were wandering in the desert and did not have water. God told Moses to strike a rock and water would flow from it:

Another time when this happened is recorded in Numbers 20:1-11. This time, God commanded Moses to speak to the rock and water would flow from it. But Moses did not speak to the rock; he was cranky and so he struck it:

As you can see, God allowed water to flow from the rock, anyway. But in light of this event, God did not allow Moses to enter the promised land.

So how were these stories (and their outcome) explained to us? We were told that Moses’ striking the rock was a symbol of Christ’s death, and that the water was a symbol of the life that Christians derive from it. Both quite possibly true — the Old Testament is over-flowing with symbols of things that occur in the New Testament (case in point: it’s taking us forever to get through the second half of Exodus in my church’s Wednesday night Bible study, as there’s so much in the tabernacle that points to Jesus).

It was further explained that God’s command to speak to the rock the second time was symbolic of prayer, and that Moses’ act was symbolic of Christ having to die a second time, which He obviously doesn’t have to do. So it was rationalized that God barred Moses from Canaan for symbolizing a falsehood of a vital concept.

Only one problem with that: It’s a lie!

The only explanation that I can figure is that this school (and the church that ran it) were so utterly Romophobic that they were using this as an illustration to argue against transubstantiation.

While eisegesis seemed to be the sport of choice for “proving” one’s point at this school, this wasn’t a case of mere eisegesis, but absolute denial of Scripture. Why? Well, there’s the issue of that pesky next verse (emphasis mine):

What’s more, this same reasoning is repeated in Hebrews 3:16-19, particularly the last verse that says (referring to Moses and the children of Israel):

And so we see a case of symbolism exalted to the level of doctrine, which is not merely sad, but borders on the heretical.

Like I said at the beginning, two things brought this to mind. One is the fact that we are studying Hebrews on Sunday mornings at my church. The other is an unfortunate repeat of this wrong thinking.

Jeremy Archer is a Christian in Minnesota (the cold in that state is so foreign to me, that I nearly consider it to be a mission field, but I digress . . .) You can read his entire story here, but allow me to sum up.

(It should be noted that neither Jeremy nor the elders are being catty about this. But catty or not, the elders are wrong.)

This whole situation raises more complications than merely Jeremy’s desire to join this church, but they are not relevant to my point. Baptism by immersion is consistent with Romans 6:3-4 and Colossians 2:11-13, and gives a good picture of Christ’s death and resurrection. But nowhere in Scripture does it state the specific tie between immersion and what it has come to symbolize.

Rather, we have another case of symbolism being elevated to an unnatural level. And because of this undue attachment to what is merely extra-Biblical, the elders of this church are telling Jeremy that he is not welcome among them. While their stance is not a lie (like the first instance that I described), it is still — at best — eisegetical.

And undue emphasis on an extra-Biblical belief is in grave danger of producing anti-Biblical fruit.

As I noted yesterday, Marc Ecko bought the ball that Barry Bonds hit for home run #756, and is polling the public to determine what should be the fate of the ball. My vote was to launch it into space.

I saw Ecko interviewed on ESPN yesterday. He had to crowbar into the interview that the poll that ESPN was holding regarding this situation was not related to the voting on his site, the former being merely opinion, while the latter would determine the fate of the ball. We know that ESPN is totally obsessed with Bonds, but would they deliberately try to confuse the situation and dilute the vote by “stealing” traffic from Ecko just to make Bonds look better?

By the way, in case you don’t know the answer to that question, I would advise that you research ursine defecatory practices in forested areas.

I can’t even think of a clever title for this post. The situation just has me shell-shocked.

Just got off a weekly conference call. Although there are a lot of paper-pushers on this call, it is actually one that usually needs to be held. Thankfully, it’s only booked for 30 minutes, so there’s not a lot that the paper-pushers can do to hear themselves talk. Except this week.

The business of the call this week was 99% done in 12 minutes. But, the call didn’t end for another 13 minutes. The reason?

Well, someone deemed it necessary to tie up this call with a discussion of why it was important to discuss a totally unrelated issue on another  totally unrelated call, and why it was important that certain people be on that other call.

When I was a kid, I first heard the paraphrase, “For God so loved the world, that He didn’t send a committee.” He also didn’t hold a conference call.

Marc Ecko, the guy who bought Barry Bonds‘ #756 home run ball has launched a web site allowing the great unwashed (that’s you and me) to vote on what he will do with the ball. The choices are:

There’s no way that ball belongs in Cooperstown unscathed. Minus the juice, who knows what number home run that’d be? (i.e. in reality, it’s just another piece of horsehide)

But if option #2 was chosen, I’m afraid they’d find a way to display the ball such that the asterisk wouldn’t be visible.

So for me, the final frontier was the only viable choice. If you want in on it, you gotta hurry though. Polls close on September 25.

UPDATE: Bonds has weighed in, calling Ecko “stupid” and “an idiot”. Mr Kettle, Mr Pot is on line 2.

Been working on this off and on for months. Finally got a set that I like. This comes out to a bit over 76 minutes (just about fills a CD).

Yeah, I know it’s Petra-centric and WhiteHeart-centric. So sue me. I’m old.

I’m just gonna point out this one video, and then I gotta get my stuff done.

My high school’s baseball field didn’t have a home-run fence in left field. A bit beyond where we would have a fence was a 30-foot slope going up to some woods. The ground rules said that if a ball hit the slope on a fly, it was a home run. It was very rare that this happened anyway, as most of our sluggers batted lefty and pulled the ball.

One game, the head umpire didn’t like that ground rule, and so before the game he said that a ball would have to land above the slope to be called a home run. We weren’t really happy, but figured it didn’t really have an impact on us, so the coach’s protest was short.

In his first at-bat, our 5′0″, 110-lb third-basemen got his first extra-base hit of the season — 20 feet into the woods.