Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing …

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing …

Oh, they know what they’re doing. They’re trying to further shape the sheep. It’s not a new thing. This is what organized religion does.

Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

I can only express my response to this in punctuation. Even then, it’s tricky. I will get back to you all once I have figured out the exact best combination of question marks and exclamation points to employ.

Priceless John, thanks!

You go to hell with the sins you have, not the sins you wish you had.

The bible so that American Conservatives can understand it? But it’s already been done!

http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Genesis_1

Still a bit librl though.

Geez, even Joseph Smith settled for just footnoting the KJV.

I really like this one, which has ratings already assigned:

http://www.thebricktestament.com/

The talk page is interesting. Andy Schlafly is all over it.

http://conservapedia.com/Talk:Conservative_Bible_Project

Must be a spoof. Consider the following…

“3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]”

and

“updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word””

Genius.

did some browsing on Conservapedia because of this, and found this brilliant list for questions about “open-mindedness”:

1. Do you resist admitting the possibility that a conservative approach to education is far more effective for students than a liberal one?
2. Do you resist admitting that something you accepted for over a decade is, in fact, completely false?
3. Do you resist the possibility that Hollywood values result in significant harm for those who believe in them, and to innocent bystanders?
4. Do you think it is impossible that increased gun ownership reduces the rate of crime?
5. When President Ronald Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, did you think that it was impossible for the Berlin Wall to be torn down?
6. Did you think, or still think, that the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) is impossible?
7. Do you think that it is impossible that the Shroud of Turin is authentic?
8. Do you think that there must be a material explanation for remarkable homing and migration behavior of birds and butterflies?
9. Do you think that it is impossible for the speed of light to have been different in the past?
10. Do you think that it is impossible to measure openmindedness?
11. Do you think that evolution [2] must have occurred?
12. Do you think that is impossible for the power of 2 in Newtonian gravity, whereby the gravitational force is proportional to 1/r2, to be more precise with an exponent that is slightly different from 2, such as a gravitational force proportional to 1/r2.00000001?
13. Do you resist admitting that some things taught to you in school are completely false, and even known to be false by some responsible for the material?

It must be a spoof.

updating words which have a change in meaning, such as … “peace”

“Slavery”, “freedom”, “ignorance”, “strength” will be updated in due course.

Do you think that is impossible for the power of 2 in Newtonian gravity, whereby the gravitational force is proportional to 1/r2, to be more precise with an exponent that is slightly different from 2, such as a gravitational force proportional to 1/r2.00000001?

I — um — er —

What the fucking fuck?

I think that’s something to do with Conservopedia’s strange dislike of Einstein’s theories.

Well, he was a Jewish soc!alist. (Kind of like Jesus.) So how could he have been right?

Conservapedia is jsut the Andy Schlafy show, I think. IIRC he and his students are the main contributors; to a first approximation it’s just a reference site for his homeschool program. I’d be wary of assuming this represents any larger trend.

I’m with Jeff (#4) – Conservapedia is just too much every smart-ass fun-at-wingnuts pocking liberals wet dream to be true.

It is amusing, but it’s not just Republicans who do this. Recall the Jefferson Bible, the Tolstoy Bible, the 4-color Bible, …. Curiously, the authors all tend to find that the real Jesus agreed with them. Here we go again.

The Conservative Bible Project is the rebirth of the Bible Retranslation Project. That totally failed to get off the ground, possibly because an actually knowledgeable person DeniseM got involved, and started asking Schlafly questions which he is plainly unequipped to handle, such as “How do people want to transliterate אֲחַשְׁוֵרוֹשׁ?” or “how do people here render ויהי בימי אחשורוש הוא אחשורוש המלך מהדו ועד כוש שבע ועשרים ומאה מדינה?”. To get an entirely fair and balanced impression of Schlafly, read some of the discussions on the previous project’s talk page. For instance, the conversation he has about teenagers.
I already did some ranting/gloating about the new project, and how it spells the end of the Republican Grand Alliance, on my blog.

LP, I did your test. Of a dozen random pages, two were created by Schlafly and one was a homework page for the students. So, it’s not just a Schlafly project, but it’s certainly not a large-scale collaboration like Wikipedia.It’s apparently ranked #37 for traffic among conservative sites between Powerline and Redstate

http://newsjunkiepost.com/2009/10/07/top-50-conservative-websites-reveal-alarming-patterns/

Did y’all see the discussion of the question:

How can we protect Conservapedia by distinguishing real conservative encyclopedia articles from satires written by liberals?

It seems they’re only redoing the New Testament. I guess even Conservapedia feels the Old Testament doesn’t have enough liberal bias to worry about. Or maybe its because “Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages” would otherwise apply to the entire NT.

Yes, it’s hard to believe it’s not a joke. I mean, you try really, really hard to figure out a way it could make sense, and then you look again, and sadly, no.

And yes, on the Interwebs “open-minded” now means being willing to reject all the librul stuff they teach in schools and universities (except–presumably–Notre Dame). If it’s a home-schooling thing, that’s news to me, but I guess it isn’t surprising either, since propagandists aren’t likely to identify themselves as such.

also, I noticed on the talk page Nick Barnes linked to that andy schafly’s first comment was on xmas day. Surely a good christian like him should be doing something else on xmas day?

…the six guys who had wrecked the modern world—Wellhausen, Einstein, Freud, Keynes, Marx, and I can’t remember the other one.

Kinsey? Given the Conservative preoccupation with Teh Gay, and sex in general, I can see why they might think Al was bad news.

FWIW, they’re idiots, but the title of the post quotes Luke 23:34, which really is a dubious verse — Codex Vaticanus doesn’t have it, for instance. Non-wacky translations like the NRSV note this.

… Now, the idea that there were Bible-emending “liberals” in the fourth century A.D. requires some ‘splainin’ ….

(Luke 23:34 exculpates the Roman soldiers who actually crucified Jesus, so it looks very much like the kind of verse that a persecuted church trying to make nice with the Roman authorities would slip in … or, contrariwise, the kind of verse that some angry victims of Roman persecution would omit.)

This is hardly new

This is somewhat more inartful than the standard fundamentalist approach to the Bible, in that the intent to fix the text around the pre-existent bias is made more explicit and programatic than is usually the case. But it is in no other way unusual. And the fundamentalist approach to the Bible has already met this objection, at least to its own satisfaction, so this criticism will be like water off a duck’s back. The problem is that they don’t experience their pre-existent biases as anything but a manifestation of God’s will.
Fundamentalists believe that there is straightforward, unambiguous moral order in this world. The Christian branch of the tribe believes that the Bible is, as they themselves put it, “The Owner’s Manual for the Soul”, the set of specific instructions for how we all need to live our lives in this world given to us by God. As sort of a backup source of order, and an aid to understanding the manual’s prescriptions, God also gave us each a conscience, which the fundamentalists believe tells all of us the same thing, and what our consciences tell us all to do is the same as what the Bible commands. How could it be otherwise, from a God who wants His order to reign on earth as it does in Heaven? How could He not make His Bible-written commandments for how He wants us to live both complete and sufficient to please Him, and also completely compatible with His commandments as written in our hearts?

So, of course, every unexamined prejudice written in the hearts of the fundamentalists must find its expression in the Bible as they understand it. Modern self-styled Christians hate fags, therefore that passage in Leviticus about sleeping not with a man in a womanly bed has got to be about the filthy and disgusting practices of gay men. It doesn’t matter at all, it doesn’t raise the least suspicion in their minds that they are distorting the text to fit their prejudices, that generations of ancient Jewish commentators, who, at least by the time of the Maccabees, were almost certainly fairly homophobic themselves, failed to see a condemnation of homosexuality here, failed to understand WTF the passage refers to, in fact. Similarly, the Sodom and Gomorrah story just has to mean that homosexuality was the Sin of Sodom, no matter that Talmudic scholars did not read this into this story either, no matter that such a reading makes Lot’s offer of his daughters to the mob in place of the angels distinctly comical. What — he’s lived among them 50 years, and hasn’t figured out that his neighbors are gay yet?

If you’re a movement conservative, you have to believe that there’s this thing called Liberalism that is basically the root of all evil. If you’re also a fundamentalist Christian, you have to believe that God wouldn’t endorse liberal positions in the Owner’s Manual that He wrote for us. If conservative principles are a true guide to right living, then the Owner’s Manual, the One True Way, must, if propperly translated and interpreted, endorse conservative principles and deny liberal ones. Therefore anything in the Bible that seems liberal is either a mistranslation, or at the very least poor wording that creates the impression that liberal positions are not uniformly anathema. They wouldn’t see as at all distortion of the Bible, a project aimed at removing what they would see as the detritus and dross allowed to grow over the underlying, movement conservative, truth of the Bible by translations that were either intentionally biased by those liberal academics who produced them, or at least were produced in earlier eras that were not as perspicuous about wording things so as to prevent misunderstanding of the Bible as promoting liberalism.

I predict Guideline 11: Keep every sentence under 140 characters.

What Would Jesus Twitter?

six guys who had wrecked the modern world—Wellhausen, Einstein, Freud, Keynes, Marx, and I can’t remember the other one.

The closest google match is Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave Dave Breese. Paperback 235 pages. Moody Press, 1990.

“The seven men are Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Julius Wellhausen, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, John Maynard Keynes, and Soren Kierkegaard. Needless to say, these are men who, in Breese’s estimation, have influenced society for the worse. Because of this categorization, an eighth man given space in this book, Albert Einstein, is not listed with the other seven. Breese contends that Einstein did not deliberately attempt to influence society adversely, but others misconstrued his theories.”

I’m still trying to figure out the thing about inverse-square equations.

I honestly haven’t been able to stop chuckling over this translation project. As one raised in evangelical Christianity, I’ve known for decades that bible translation is routinely twisted by those seeking to defend otherwise indefensible positions.

I just never thought I’d see anyone be so up-front about admitting their agenda. When people like this say what they really think is where insight–and humor–arise.

actually, i thought the question about the inverse square law was (possibly) pretty interesting.

i mean–i take it that the fact that gravity happens to work via an inverse square law in our universe is a nomological necessity, but a metaphysical contingency. it could have been an inverse cube. (lots of other physical relations go by an inverse cube).

so i’m happy to say that i do *not* “think that is impossible for the power of 2 in Newtonian gravity, whereby the gravitational force is proportional to 1/r2” to be the power of 3, for instance. of course, it’s actually 2. but it could have been 3. that sounds right to me.

and given that, i don’t see why i shouldn’t say that it could have been 2.0001 or whatever they say. sure; that would have been a less elegant world. but the elegance of the world is not a necessity; some of it (at least) is contingent.

(would the physical relation that obtained in this alternate scenario still be *gravity*? i’m inclined to say “yes”, provided that it still attracts masses to each other, still varies with the masses, still bends light, etc. but maybe others will want to argue that it is essential to gravity–our gravity–that it should go by an inverse square rather than by a cube.)

now–i don’t think this line of reasoning is what the conservapedia nuts are on about, because they phrase it in terms of whether it is “impossible…for it to be more precise” as 2.000blahblah rather than 2. that’s a claim that 2 might be an imprecise measurement of our own, actual gravity. that’s more an epistemic question; is it possible that we are wrong in our current measurements? well, yeah; sure.

but that conversation would take us in the direction of, say, experimental evidence, data, measurements, etc., and i’m pretty sure that the schlaffers don’t want to go there, either.

oh–and on the right-wing hatred of einstein: there’s a great quote from jacobo timerman about how the torturers in the argentinian junta told him that everything was the fault of marx, freud, and einstein.

Since the conservative answer to each of the “open-mindedness” questions appears to be no, I’d surmise that some deviation from the inverse-square law is required by a particular creationist theory, just as a variable speed of light is required by a 6,000 year old universe. These guys probably do have a beef with Einstein, but I’d bet that all they know about relativity is its name. Some of them even have a beef with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle notwithstanding its originator’s gentile ancestry.

Whenever Conservapedia comes up I feel compelled to point out that Schafly was Barack Obama’s classmate at Harvard Law.

Hilariously, whilst the torturers of the Naval Mechanics’ School were at work on Timerman, up the road, Argentina was frantically building a gaseous diffusion plant to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. Einstein! (In fact, as came up on Armscontrolwonk earlier this week, they never got it working and had to buy from the Soviet Union to fulfil their contract to supply the Tehran research reactor. The things you learn from blogs.)

Anyway, what really horrifies me about this is that they want to start with the prose of the King James version and monkey it down to the standards of Pastor Swank.

From the talk page. These people are classic. They even have their own language, “conservative language” and liberals don’t use the word “truth”.

I wonder if they have watched “A Few Good Men” too many times, and imagine conservatives as hard bitten realists who know the “Truth” is too difficult and all the woolly liberals have to hide from it?

… an alternate-universe genuine shroud wouldn’t be the Shroud of Turin (although they might call it that in that universe).

False.

When I googled Andy Schlafly to see if he was in fact related to Phyllis Schlafly (he turns out to be her son) I was impressed at the number of wiki “encyclopedias” that came up. This is probably the only search I’ve done where more than one such wiki encyclopedia came up in the first page of results. It starts with Wikipedia and Conservapedia, as one might expect, but continues with Rationalwiki, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Wikiality, and Uncyclopedia, among others. Can anyone come up with another search term that brings up a similar list of earnest and/or satire encyclopedias on the first page?

I’m seeing Yul Brynner as Keynes, James Coburn as Darwin, Robert Vaughn as Kierkegaard, Steve McQueen as Freud, Charles Bronson as Marx…

Ha! Ajay couldn’t remember Brad Dexter as Willhausen! I win!

I agree with them, in the sense that any translation of the Bible will inherently contain the bias of whomever was charged with reconciling the language barrier. Obviously, their translation won’t be any better (well, obviously to us). I think I’ll footnote this exact instance next time I’m called upon to explain my agnosticism.

On an unrelated note, if they’re still looking for a title, I nominate the Revised American Translation, Standardization And Supervised Selection.

“I’ll personcott…”

*Sigh*. An eponym is a terrible thing to lose…

Since we’re talking Wikis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott

Wow. Gotta feel for the poor kid.

She has another son who is arguably even more unfortunate.

Minute deviation from the inverse-square law is indeed a modern attempt to accommodate dark energy, but it’s nothing new (an entertaining and accessible history of the deviation-from-Newton’s-laws problem is here.)

Example research dealing directly with the topic: a 1999 paper titled “Deviations from the 1/r2 Newton law due to extra dimensions” by A. Kehagias and K. Sfetsos, and a 2003 paper titled “Correction terms to Newton law due to induced gravity in AdS background” by Masato Ito, are two papers I found interesting (and more or less readable). They’re findable on ScienceDirect for those with access.

I don’t know if this paper and a few others like it, which I’ll be spending the rest of my afternoon making sense of, qualify.

I’ll be honest, from my far-more-naive-than-it-ought-to-be perspective, deviation from the inverse-square law in extreme cases seems about as inevitable as deviation from F = ma in extreme cases.

Schlafly also believes there was no genuine humor before Christ.

(Because, really, nothing gets a room laughing like a good scourging and crucifixion, amirite?)

That business about tiny deviations from the inverse square law is an old obsession of
Andy Schlafly’s. He argued about it endlessly on usenet (sci.astro) some years ago. He
wanted to adjust the exponent so as to explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury without recourse to General Relativity.

Any also has strong opinions about pure mathematics. He seems to hate the Axiom of Choice for some obscure reason.

Conservapedia is fully for real (though probably not all of the articles are). Andy Schlafly fought his own personal culture war on Wikipedia for many years until he finally got sick of the other editors’ inability to recognize the truth of his writings, and started his own site where the correctness of his ideas was the guiding principle.

He seems to hate the Axiom of Choice for some obscure reason.

Liberal names! “Axiom of Life” would clearly be superior.

“He seems to hate the Axiom of Choice for some obscure reason.”

So he can’t swallow the Banach-Tarsky paradox. What’s so odd about that?

So he can’t swallow the Banach-Tarsky paradox. What’s so odd about that?

I confess to having thought, in response to Robert P’s comment, “eh, as opposed to the straightforward reasons the rest of us are vaguely bothered by it?”

Wikipedia is delightfully incisive about this: “The existence of nonmeasurable sets, such as those in the Banach–Tarski paradox, has been used as an argument against the axiom of choice. Nevertheless, most mathematicians are willing to tolerate the existence of nonmeasurable sets, given that the axiom of choice has many other mathematically useful consequences.”

Willing to tolerate sounds about right — granted I’m just an apprentice at this point, but that seems consonant with folks’ feelings. Isn’t the purpose of axiom selection to maximize the mathematically useful consequences we can achieve, under the constraints of parsimony and consistency?

So, they are taking the KJV as authoritative and “re-translating” the NT from it? Wow. That indicates a stunning degree of ignorance, as anyone with even a small degree of competence in koine greek knows that the KJV is not a very good translation to begin with. (Not their fault, really.) Well, maybe I should say it’s not a very reliable translation, but it is a good translation—with “good” including things like literary merit.

BTW, Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired is a pretty good history of the King James bible.

Given that the context here is supposedly “scholarly”—that is, Conservapedia intends to be some kind of reliable authority—I think it is extremely revealing that they would even contemplate a bible translation outside of competency in the language of the original texts. This makes it clear that they are intellectual frauds.

At least a lot of evangelicals attempt to learn some koine—my experience is that they tend to be much less competent than they think they are, but still—and so it’s not as if Conservapedia couldn’t enlist people who have at least a small clue about what they’re attempting. But then, of course, any knowledge of the original texts would tie their hands to some degree, wouldn’t it?

@CJColucci Me too

Sounds like Constatine all over again, only on steroids. If you look at the history of the Bible, you will see that this has been done before, to emphasize authority and the rule of “betters.”

So, will they take out the Sermon on the Mount, with lines like “Blessed are the peacemakers” which seem pretty liberal to me?

@ajay — assuming you know that John is not responsible for the Dewey Decimal System.

The key question viz. library classification is why the Library of Congress puts the Bible under BS.