Conservapedia!

[CountDeMoney]

http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project

Jesus of Nazareth as Dick Cheney
Leonard Pitts Jr.


So we may soon have ourselves a conservative Bible. Besides Fox News, I mean.

This new Bible is from Conservapedia, a Web site that bills itself as a conservative alternative to the perceived liberal bias of Wikipedia, the user-edited online reference.

You may judge Conservapedia's own bias by reading its definition of liberal: "someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing."

For the record, Wikipedia defines conservative as a word referring "to various political and social philosophies that support tradition and the status quo, or that call for a return to the values and society of an earlier age."

Now, having protected unwary Americans from - ahem - Wikipedia's bias, Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly (son of Phyllis) tackles perceived bias in the Good Book. He proposes to correct the Bible by creating a new translation based upon 10 principles, including concision (as opposed to "liberal wordiness") and an emphasis on "free market parables" and the exclusion of "liberal passages" he says were inserted into the original text. One such would be the well-known story of the adulterous woman brought before Christ by a crowd eager to see her punished; Jesus says the one without sin should cast the first stone.

As biblical scholar Bart Ehrman demonstrates in his book "Misquoting Jesus," that passage and others were indeed inserted into the Gospels - by copyists whose transcriptions were once the primary means by which Bibles and other books were disseminated. We're talking about the era before the printing press - i.e., pre-15th century - so apparently "liberals" have been at this a long time.

Of course, conservatives are not the first folks to recast the Bible in their own image. Oxford University Press was justly ridiculed in 1995 for a PC Bible whose touchy-feely innovations included gender-neutral language so as not to offend women and a ban on phrases like "the right hand of God" in deference to southpaws.

But if Oxford's excesses resulted from a misguided attempt at inclusiveness, the forces guiding Mr. Schlafly are less benign. He is part of an ongoing crusade to delegitimize any institution, any information source, any inconvenient "fact" that contradicts conservative beliefs. Rather than trust those beliefs to stand or fall in the free market of ideas, some conservatives now apply a kind of intellectual protectionism. So now you have your conservative newspaper, your conservative radio station, your conservative university, your conservative "facts" and, apparently, your conservative God, and you may build yourself a conservative life in a conservative bubble where you need never contend with ideas that challenge, contradict - or "refine" - your own.

But here's the thing: When no authority can be regarded as unimpeachable by both right and left, when no fact can be universally accepted as such, when anything you prefer not to believe is automatically dismissed as a product of "bias," you impoverish intellect and render informed debate impossible.

You may think Dwyane Wade is the best there is and I may prefer Kobe Bryant, but if we can't agree they both play a game called basketball, if you say it's basketball but my conservative dictionary tells me it's actually checkers, then we can't even have the debate; our assumptions are too fundamentally incompatible. We live in different realities.

As in the recent spectacle of Americans shouting past each other like Martians and Venusians arguing in Farsi.

Conservapedia's effort to remake Jesus of Nazareth in the image of Dick Cheney suggests a future filled with more of the same. A conservative Bible?

Lord, have mercy.

[CountDeMoney]

[Valmy]

Just on a whim I looked up World War I on Conservapedia and it seems it was caused by Charles Darwin.  I am so glad I am not a Conservative so I do not have people like this claiming to speak for me.

[CountDeMoney]

Minors under 16 years old use this site. Posting of obscenity here is punishable by up to 10 years in jail under 18 USC § 1470. Vandalism is punishable up to 10 years in jail per 18 USC § 1030. Harassment is punishable by 2 years in jail per 47 USC § 223. The IP addresses of vandals will be reported to authorities. That includes your employer and your local prosecutor.

[FunkMonk]

Just on a whim I looked up World War I on Conservapedia and it seems it was caused by Charles Darwin.  I am so glad I am not a Conservative so I do not have people like this claiming to speak for me.

Darwin and Marx: The catch-all for society's ills

[Habbaku]

The IP addresses of vandals will be reported to authorities. That includes your employer and your local prosecutor.
 

Did you tell them that our local prosecutor already has us covered?

[Darth Wagtaros]

Just on a whim I looked up World War I on Conservapedia and it seems it was caused by Charles Darwin.  I am so glad I am not a Conservative so I do not have people like this claiming to speak for me.

Darwin and Marx: The catch-all for society's ills

Yes.  I had Michael Savage going in the background and he had some jerk on to read this long, rambling thing that started out about OBama and became this indictment of liberalism as 'faith based', that is, faith in science and intellectualism as a religion.

He just went on and on, citing Darwin, Marx over and over again. Freakin boring.

[CountDeMoney]

I looked up my main man John Brown and found this:

In May 1856, Brown and several other men (including four of his sons) attacked the homes of slavery supporters near Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas and killed all of the inhabitants with swords.

That's simply not true.  He did not kill the wives or underaged children.

[CountDeMoney]

Further Reading:
Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (2006) says Brown was justified in practicing terrorism

LOL, no he didn't.  Why do I know that? I READ THE BOOK.

[DGuller]

Is this a real thing or a spoof?  It's even harder than usual to tell these days.

[CountDeMoney]

Is this a real thing or a spoof?  It's even harder than usual to tell these days.

No, it's the real thing.  Welcome to the logical evolution of conservatism.  Oh, wait, I meant the creationism of conservatism.

[Neil]

None of these people speak for Me.

[DGuller]

I think I'm going to flag a couple of articles for lacking neutral tone.

[Valmy]

Is this a real thing or a spoof?  It's even harder than usual to tell these days.

I only wish it was.

[The Brain]

Ante-bellum hippies? Thanks for that mental image.