According to Phiten’s Web site (http://www.phitenusa.com/t-about.aspx):

Through dedicated research, we have developed a number of unique wellness technologies and products. Accordingly, we’ve won the trust of many consumers and increasing numbers of athletes use our products. We are building on this trust to offer new products, adapting and applying our technologies to a wider range of uses to support your health and well-being.

Curiously (riiiiight), there is no mention in the actual product developer’s web site as to what this research actually was, or the results thereof – like the comments in the Scienceline article.  Which gets me to thinking – do the people who use them believe they actually work?  I doubt it.  Because if they believed it really worked, they’d believe it was cheating because it made use of some sort of artificial means to enhance their abilities.  If substances like steroids and HGH are banned partly because of the unfair advantage they give to their users, then a magic necklace should be banned also… the reason why they’re not banned is because they aren’t believed to work.

So, why do so many MLB players wear them?  They cynical part of me attributes it to the marketing deal that Phiten struck with MLB in 2007. I mean, if a company paid me to wear something in order to enhance its exposure, as long as I didn’t have some sort of objection or aversion to it, heck, I’d probably wear it.

Now that the World Cup is over, time to reflect.  I don’t have any huge cohesive commentary on the tournament as a whole, but rather some bite-sized tidbits regarding some positives, negatives, and indifferents about particular notables.  I’ll score these as “+” for positive, “-” for negative, and “0″ for neutral.

• 0: Team USA.  Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, Tim Howard and the crew were good, not great.  Everything was just as I expected: one of the top 2 teams in their group and lose in the first knockout round.  Team USA is not an elite side, and it would have taken more than a little luck to get as far as the quarterfinals.
• +: Jabulani. The ball looks better than the previous Cup balls that looked like they were decorated with feminine products. And the flight? Sure, it dips and swerves, but that’s attributable to physics rather than to ball design.  You who complain about the ball dancing around and through the goalkeepers aren’t the same ones who complain about low-scoring games, are you?
• 0: South Africa. Too much was made of “the host country”. Too many 30-second and 30-minute commercials touted the wrong thing: the site and support of the spectacle rather than the teams and players.  I have nothing against South Africa, it’s just that the country is a location, a stage, not an integral part of the event.
• -: People who aren’t soccer fans telling you why they’re not soccer fans. Again. I get it – you don’t have the attention span to appreciate a game in which scoring is rare.  Just because the score doesn’t increase rapidly doesn’t mean there’s no action or intrigue.  Scoring a goal is incredibly difficult for a team to do – doing something hard 0-6 times in 1:45 isn’t any less exciting or interesting than doing something much easier 150-220 times.  I don’t watch basketball and complain about it; you don’t have to watch soccer and complain about it.
• +: Italy and France both going out in the first round.  I don’t hate the French, but their performance and attitude was disgraceful, not to mention the way they got the the tournament in the first place.  Italy was flat, and and kept up their tradition of rolling around on the pitch grabbing their shins at the slightest touch, fortunately for only 3 games this year.
• -: The whole continent turned against Luis Suarez in the 3rd place match, booing his every touch.  His hand ball saved what would have been a goal by Ghana, putting Uruguay rather than the African nation through to the semifinals.  He committed a foul and was red carded for it, giving Ghana a penalty kick.  Many are making it out to be more about “robbing Africa” of a trip to the semifinals than Ghana just not being able to score more goals in the preceding 120 minutes.

2 cups cornmeal
2/3 cup flour
4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp chipotle chili powder
1 1/3 cup milk
2 eggs, beaten
1 large fresh jalapeño, de-seeded and diced
1/2 can (or 1 small can) whole kernel corn, drained
1/4 cup corn oil

The Process:

Preheat oven to 450°. Mix all dry ingredients together; stir in milk and eggs until thoroughly combined; stir in jalapeño and corn; stir in oil.  Thoroughly grease 9×13″ baking dish; pour the batter in and bake for 20 minutes.  Let it cool for at least 10 minutes before cutting into it.

Understand that I’m not trying to school a non-Christian on Christian doctrine, but I’m trying to address the issue of Christians who are political liberals agreeing with arguments like this, possibly because he’s on the same side politically, rather than matching up what he says with the truth we find in Scripture and observe in human behavior.  He’s way off theologically, which is excusable, but what’s inexcusable is for Christians to agree with some of the theological errors.  If you read my former post, which you really should if you haven’t already, you will know that this response follows on the heels of a flurry of comments on a Facebook post.  A few lines at ta time isn’t enough of a platform to state my case, so I figured I could ramble on for as long as I wanted on my own blog.

So here’s a collection of logical and theological fallacies I thought I’d expose:

• “If that [not being religious or thinking about religious stuff] sends one to hell, at least I’ll be there with a lot of my favorite people.”
  Sarcastically saying that he prefers to spend eternity in despair based on his company, without the God Who is the source of all joy and significance, demonstrates that he has no concept of, or maybe no regard for, the teachings about hell that are in the bible he claims to know “pretty well”.
• “Conservative Christians’ primary argument regarding Jesus and politics is that all he cared about was spiritual matters and an individual’s relationship with God.”
  False and absurd.  I am, hang around with, and am taught by Conservative Christians, and we all know that He is concerned for peoples’ physical well-being, as well as economic and cultural status.
• “…if you actually read the Gospels, it is clear that Jesus’ main concern in terms of the people whose fates he cared about was for the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast.”
  Blatantly false.  If you actually read the gospels, you will see Him demonstrate that He cares for all people regardless of their socioeconomic status.
• His “serious class warrior” paragraph is all over the place — this could be a whole separate post.  “[Jesus] didn’t seem to like rich folks very much.”  So when Progressives spew their mantra about loving everyone, they mean everyone except rich people?  “In Matthew 6, he focuses on the love of money as a major problem.”  The love of money applies equally to people who have it and don’t have it.  “In Luke 12, he says that the wealthy who store up treasure are cursed by God.”  That curse is a consequence of misuse, not of being successful.  “…it is the poor who will get into heaven.”  Even if his beliefs aren’t as extreme as what he writes, we all know that getting into heaven doesn’t depend on a low economic status – if we thought so, we would try to keep poor people poor and make rich people poor in order for them to have a better chance of getting into heaven.  “He chases the wealthy bankers and merchants from the Temple.”  Presumably Lux is talking about Mark 11, which says nothing about the merchants being wealthy, and even if they were, that’s not why he drove them out.
• One of Lux’s favorite passages is the end of Acts 2.  But this passage talks about an individual church of faithful believers, not about a larger society – these people are bound together by their identity in Christ, not by being under some governmental authority.  Moreover, this small-group communal sharing is voluntary, not orchestrated by government.
• The thesis of his diatribe is that Conservatives do not do what Jesus taught about having compassion for the poor, because conservative politics are antithetical to His teachings.  Yes, the bible is loaded with passages about helping the poor, but contrary to what he wants us to believe, Christianity is loaded with conservatives who put this into practice.  Somehow pretending that it’s the political conservatives that are not doing the Word of God in this regard is just plain ludicrous, and propagating this nonsense is just plain irresponsible.

So we see that Lux is incapable of handling and applying the biblical text.  Not that he should — after all he’s not a Christian and has no regard for biblical authority.  That’s what disturbs me about Christians citing this article as a “great article” — how can an article that’s logically inconsistent and full of falsehoods and mischaracterizations be “great” to anyone?  How can an article that mischaracterizes God and misquotes and misapplies His Word be “great” to any Christian?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/how-do-christians-become_b_570361.html

The title of the article is “How Do Christians Become Conservative?”, and the meta description that Facebook extracted to display is “Jesus may not have been primarily concerned with politics, but for what politics he did have, it is virtually impossible to argue that he was anything but a progressive thinker.”

Knowing that “progressive”, just like “moderate”, is a code word for “liberal”, you’d think that this is another article written by a liberal Christian telling everyone that God is a liberal and that if you’re a Christian you should be liberal too.  And you’d be right.  Except for the Christian author part.  It’s an article written by a non-Christian, trying to explain why he’s bewildered that any Christian can be a conservative.

If you haven’t read the article, do so now.
If you still haven’t read the article, do so now.
If you’ve read some of the article, and skipped over it because you liked it or didn’t like it or whatever, finish it now.

If you still haven’t read the article in its entirety, I encourage you to read on anyway through my comments, because they’re useful, but if you don’t get the complete context it’s your own fault.  What a terrible intolerant conservative thing to say, I know.

Here are Facebook comments I posted in reply to the original post, after some commenters said things like “nice article” and “great article”:

What a terrible article – a non-Christian taking his best shot at explaining the nature of God, Jesus’ mission and teachings, the content of the Bible, heaven and hell, the church, etc. is bound to miss the mark on many counts, and he sure does. I can excuse him for not knowing what he’s talking about, but I can’t excuse a Christian for accepting his false assumptions and being dragged along to some of the places he goes.

As expected, there were responses.  I would like to thank pretty much everyone who commented for being civil.  I hope the others can say the same about me.  A guy, I’ll call him “Ivan”, said:

So you have issues with the article. Fair enough…but you didn’t mention what any of them were. And you can’t accept a christian….I’m assuming a friend of yours…..from pondering this subject? Pondering, questioning….is a good thing. People should do more of it. God forbid someone might have a different interpretation. <name of unknown person>, help me collect some rocks so we can “stone” <Original Poster> when he comes to work. =)

I should have known.  Yeah, I did have an arm-length list of issues I was typing, but I didn’t want to be the guy who monopolized the post comments.  So I replied:

Ivan – I started to list my disagreements, but it was just too long. Look for Plan B, my own blog post, where anyone can make a comment.
What I said is that I can’t excuse a Christian for accepting false assumptions about the Christian faith from a non-Christian … friends included, friends especially. Pondering, questioning is indeed a good thing – I do so from one direction just as others do from the other.
<Original Poster>, I don’t want to stone you. My beef is with the content of the article and certain thought processes, not with you as an individual. I would like to caution Christians not to use the arguments Mr. Lux uses to arrive at  his conclusions. If you arrive at a similar place and can justify it properly, that’s one thing, but not the way he does it.

I listed out some example “issues I have with the article” and said I’d follow up with a more appropriate way to expound on them, to write as much as I want to without being too intrusive into someone else’s Facebook page. So here is is:

What I originally wanted to say and had to prune it down is this:

Mr. Lux says “I am always puzzled by how people who claim to be followers of the Jesus I read about in the Bible can be political conservatives.”  There are many who would say “I am always puzzled by how people who claim to be followers of the Jesus I read about in the Bible can be political liberals.”

What a terrible article – a non-Christian taking his best shot at explaining the nature of God, Jesus’ mission and teachings, the content of the Bible, heaven and hell, the church, etc. is bound to miss the mark on many counts, and he sure does.  I can excuse him for not knowing what he’s talking about, but I can’t excuse a Christian for accepting his false assumptions and being dragged along to false conclusions.

He uses his thoughts about God and the Bible to support the notion that political liberals care for the poor and outcast, while political conservatives don’t.  Hogwash.  The trend is this (not absolute, but a trend): Christian political liberals advocate empowering a government to deal with the poor and marginalized, while Christian political conservatives advocate taking personal responsibility for such.  Why the conservative perspective?  Because when God says to care for people, he isn’t talking to a centralized government – he’s talking to individual believers.  Not surprisingly, Mr. Lux doesn’t communicate that.  Pagans can feel good about pooling their money to give to some societal entity to distribute as it sees fit and believe they’re being altruistic, but if Christians do that, they’re being irresponsible.  I don’t want to beat up on liberals (because, honestly, some conservatives weaken the conservative position by doing so) but rather offer some challenging food for thought: if we really want to help the people who need it, we should take responsibility for it ourselves — a responsibility God explicitly gives to individuals — instead of passing it along to an impersonal entity.  I say impersonal entity to be purposefully general — this could be local or state governments, a federal government, a charity or cause that’s funded by government or businesses, whatever.

If the resources over which I have stewardship aren’t taken by a government to be mismanaged, some of which gets to the people an impersonal entity determines need to be helped by it, then responsibility falls on me to use those resources to help the people I personally am determined to help.  Do I embrace that?  Do I like that?  Not necessarily, admittedly, and less than I should, but that’s the way it should be.  God mandated it.  When He (in the person of the Father in the OT through the prophets, and in the person of Jesus in the NT) tells his people to care for others, he’s talking to “me” and “you”, not to the unbeliever or to “society”.  There are a lot of issues in play – here are some that come to mind:

• Even the most socialist liberal wacko will agree that governments are wasteful and inefficient.  If the US government collects $1.00 from me to help people, how much has already been spent because we’re trillions of dollars in debt?  Answer: all of it.  But let’s put reality on hold and pretend that the government isn’t in debt: How much of that dollar is eaten up by overhead?  You have to pay government employees to process those resources, pay their benefits, pay for the buildings and air conditioning, etc., not to mention some of it undoubtedly swallowed up by corruption (arguably more in a socialist government), overspending.  If 43¢ of the $1.00 I give is absorbed in overhead and 16¢ in mismanagement, that leaves 41¢ to go to the recipients.  If I distribute that myself, it’s the whole $1.00.  If the process is managed by a small or concentrated private group, there is incentive to be more efficient.  If that organization is Christian, the incentive is directed by the Holy Spirit.  (If you’re not a Christian, I lost you on that one, but Mr. Lux’s article is explicitly addressing the Christian perspective, so I am too).  If I find a good reputable organization that uses 17¢ in overhead and loses 6¢ in mismanagement, that leaves 77¢ to go to the recipients.  If I truly care about people, I’ll pray really hard and ask God if he wants the poor and outcast to get 41¢ or 77¢ of His $1.00 that He’s entrusted me to manage for Him.
• As a Christian, if you embrace the responsibility to help people yourself through your own social network, you target where your resources go.  So if you have a particular affinity or desire to minister to a focused group of people like Muslims or single moms or the elderly or photographers, you interact with those people and understand their needs on a personal level, and are more able to determine their needs than someone who sits in a building in Atlanta and processes a check to send them every month.  Does that mean you don’t care about Buddhists or jobless fathers or children or painters?  Of course not, but you are making your best effort to care for a group of people you have in your sphere of influence, investing resources including money but also including prayer, time, materials, social connections, and other things an impersonal entity is ill-equipped to provide.
• Speaking of targeting resources, if a “society” pools its resources and a central entity determines who needs what out of that pool, there is the very real issue of those resources used in a way that individuals don’t agree with.  From the conservative Christian perspective, if those resources are ultimately used for <insert heinous immoral filth here>, the control and responsibility of those decisions has been taken away from the individual.  The point here isn’t which things are bad and which are OK, the point is that individuals and focused groups are the right ones to make those determinations, not politicians and lawmakers and agency officials.

There is a whole lot more to being a Christian liberal or Christian conservative than helping the poor and outcast, but Mr. Lux (thankfully) doesn’t go into that in his article so neither will I.  Staying on-topic: certainly, the conservative is in danger of being a hypocrite by hoarding wealth as his own rather than using it to further the kingdom of the One who entrusts him with it; conversely, the liberal is in danger of being a hypocrite by substituting ‘society’ for a personal faith and integration within a community of believers.  Shamefully, Mr. Lux and others are quick to point out the former but ignore the latter.

So in terms of “helping the poor and outcast”, the political conservative approach is more than compatible with God’s will, and I would argue, even a better fit than political liberalism — assuming that either is wrapped an authentic biblical Christian worldview.   In the spectrum of political conservatives, it’s obvious that many are to some degree heartless, uncaring, ruthless, tyrannical, profit-oriented, oppressive, immoral.  You’re fooling yourself, however, if you believe that the same doesn’t apply to many political liberals.  What’s at issue here is, assuming one is a Christian, how does that Christian worldview inform the political philosophy you have regarding care for the poor and outcast?  To further narrow it down, what if you are a Christian and have a decent biblical perspective on the nature of God, sin, and the person and work of Jesus, and are at least trying to do a fairly good job of obeying His Word?  If that’s where you start, where I believe I am, then the mandate to care for the poor and outcast is to be embraced on a personal level (the political conservative approach), and not on a societal level (the political liberal approach).

Furthermore, I believe that the societal approach does a discredit to Christianity by divorcing the meeting of needs from the gospel.  Mr. Lux wouldn’t agree with me here, but I frankly don’t care: the purpose of a Christian showing love and mercy and care for people who need it is to demonstrate God’s provision connected with the gospel message, not to make them more comfortable — this isn’t to say that God doesn’t want you to be more comfortable, it’s to say that God wants you to realize that true comfort is by His provision, not by the provision of “society” or an intangible “goodness”, or a pagan deity or impersonal “spirituality”.  If we take the societal approach, we give the impression that humanity’s greatest needs are solved by governments and institutions and programs rather than by a personal God interacting personally through His people.  If the problems are addressed on a personal level by Christians, that personal interaction will (should!) include an introduction to the God who cares enough about the person to interact personally.  The societal approach sends the message “society cares”; the personal approach sends the message “God cares”; the personal approach coupled with a proper perspective on God and the bible sends the message “God cares, and by the way, let me clarify what I mean by ‘God’”.  Yes, you can fall on either side of the political spectrum and still be engaged in the personal approach, but I would argue the conservative side is no less biblical, even more so, because if the resources a person is using aren’t dumped in to society’s pot, the individual — on whom the responsibility lies –  can better target their use.

Whoa, this post is quite long.  But quite good, if I do say so myself.  I have a slew of particular logical and theological problems with what Mr. Lux says, but in order to break things up a bit I’ll make another post about them.

What I think of the changes:

• The game will always have a Designated Hitter — historically, the DH has only been used in American League parks.  Not a good move.  Not being a big fan of the DH, I would like to see it being used nowhere rather than anywhere.  What?  That means no Big Papi? Unemotionally, I say yes, that means no Big Papi.  In the mid-2000s, he has undeniably contributed (though much less so recently) to the game insofar as he provides that offensive weapon late in the game.  But, one of my main criticisms of American Football is that there is only a small handful of players who have ever played both offense and defense; so to be consistent I can’t count a Major League Baseball player All-Star worthy who doesn’t play the field in a game where his defense is supposed to be one of his key strengths.  If the always-a-DH idea is good enough for the All-Star game, why isn’t it good enough for both leagues, including for the World Series?  It’s not – that’s why both leagues don’t have the DH.  The best way to compromise is to alternate.
  [I can see one merit of the always-a-DH rule, though.  If you're going to concede that pitchers just can't hit and that's OK because they're paid to pitch, then there's some merit to getting him out of the lineup in favor of a star hitter; this also lessens the likelihood of an injury.]
• “No pitcher who competes for his team on the previous Sunday will be allowed to pitch in the game.”  As I read the entire article, it becomes apparent to me that this is a misquote.  It only applies to starting pitchers — good thing.  Even so, this should not be a rule imposed, but rather left up to the players and managers.  If the pitcher himself and his manager and the All-Start team manager all agree that it’s best for him not to play, fine; but if all want to give him an inning or so, that should be fine too.  I hope that team managers and pitching coaches will plan ahead and make sure that their All-Stars have a day off that previous Sunday — shouldn’t be that difficult.
• Each team now has 34 players, up from 33.  Sure, OK, no problem.  At some point it will be too many, but 34 seems fine.
• A player can re-enter the game if he was pulled out earlier, but only if another player’s injury necessitates it.  No problem.  I think it would suck if Albert Pujols played 3 innings and was pulled, then got to go back in to pinch hit in the 9th with a man on 2nd for strategy reasons… but in case of injury or maybe even for other reasons, OK by me.

But the most significant change is absent.  That stupid, ridiculous business about the winning league’s team getting home field advantage in the World Series is just a farce, should never have been put in place, and should be revoked immediately.  Let the game end in a tie.  It’s an exhibition.  There doesn’t have to be a winner.  Sure, it’s exciting to have the prospect of a game-saving catch or a walk-off in the 12th inning, but at some point if the rosters are spent and it’s been a good game, it can just end.  I wasn’t upset in 2002 when the umpires, commissioner, and both managers agreed it was time to be done.

But even if you make them play the game out till one team wins, that victory should have no bearing on who gets home field advantage in the World Series.  If a Diamondbacks pitcher has a bad 7th inning in July and gives up 3 runs on the way to a 6-5 AL victory, that shouldn’t mean that a team with the 4th best record in the AL gets home field advantage over the best team in the NL in October — that’s just stupid.  I usually try to see both sides and refrain from just calling something stupid outright… but in this case, this is just stupid because there’s no way to see the merit of other side’s position.

So, I kind of turn my nose up at Wednesday’s announcement.  A couple changes are OK, a couple aren’t, and the one that would make all the difference was skipped over again this year.