Those of us who don’t find religion that compelling can still find it fascinating. People believe all sorts of things, and tell you that you should too. That’s kind of fun, in an anthropological way. For example, back in the fifties, a nicely scrubbed pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses might appear at your door on a Saturday afternoon and ask, politely, if they might come in and save your soul, through Jesus. You might say no, thank you, it’s already been saved, or tell them to forget it, as you don’t have one of those. But that knock on the door doesn’t happen anymore – perhaps because radio then television then the internet moved saving souls from one-on-one interactions to a mass-marketing effort – from retail to wholesale. And as with all mass marketing the idea was to make it clear that everyone, or everyone who was sensible, right and in tune with things, and who mattered, was here – and you, you loser, were over there. Didn’t you want to be here, with the good people? It was easy. Get with Jesus. That sort of thing is best done through mass media, as it depends on establishing a sense that there is a critical mass of like-minded people. That’s the whole point.

And too, the door-to-door model has its drawbacks. These days you’d run into the wags and pranksters – you knock on the door, get invited in, and suddenly the person you intended to convert has had you sit down, has handed you a glass of lemonade, and before you can say a word about Jesus, is telling you about the wonders of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – who created the world, and pirates, and should be worshipped – and telling you all this with great fervor and serene joy. And they pity you, with great kindness, for not seeing the light, using all your best lines, the ones you planned to use. It’s not fair. No wonder most American religions do all their missionary work, that harvesting of lost souls, in Africa and South America and odd corners of the Far East. There’s far less trouble there, with cultures that haven’t yet developed a tradition of complex irony. Any culture that has not yet produced its own George Carlin will do. Americans can be a pain in the ass.

But there might have been another dynamic – the saved, or those who claimed they are, seem to have changed their tune. If you, you loser, weren’t saved, that was your problem. You were worthless, if not the enemy. They had no use for you. Now there is no point in knocking on any doors. Why deal with fools? And the radio and television shows, and the internet sites, are for those in the know. The idea is to exclude what is foolish and dangerous. More than enough souls have been harvested already, thank you very much. There is no room at the inn any longer, or at least no room for your sort.

But of course all religions are exclusive – they involve a claim to the ultimate truth, after all, for those who can see that truth, or if they cannot see it, surrender to it. Others are the heretics, or pagans, or apostates, or the misguided, or the lost, or the damned. Choose any religion, the message is the same. Get with us or you will die. And you do want to live forever, don’t you? The rest is the technicalities.

But the technicalities are the rub. They always are. See Carlene Bauer on the Christian evangelicals:

There was always a tiny voice inside me saying “That can’t be right” whenever I heard something that seemed to contradict who I understood God and Jesus to be from reading the Bible – all-loving, all-forgiving. For example: it had been made clear to me that Catholics were lesser, wrongheaded Christians because they worshipped Mary and the Pope and thought works would save their souls.

Yes, on the Protestant side there is the strong neo-Calvinist idea that doing good works is nice and all that, but silly – God decides who is the chosen, and favors them, so the thing to do is not piss Him off. Accept Jesus as your savior and do what you want. Once you’re right with Jesus, his father doesn’t much care what you do with your time.

But Bauer is unhappy:

The disparagement made it seem that unless Catholics recognized that they needed to accept Jesus as their savior (for the evangelicals you had to get down on your knees and make the overture in full awareness of your decision), they were going to hell. Now, my father, my grandmother and uncle were Catholic. My best friend at the time was Catholic. It didn’t seem right that God was looking down on them with arms crossed, shaking his head when they seemed sincere in their belief. Why would God allow there to be so many wrongheaded Christians?

That’s a good question. And such questions are troubling. You could write a book about such questions. In fact, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein did, and that is 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.

And she explains what she was up to:

Dinner party hostesses used to be warned to steer the conversation away from politics and religion. I used to wonder why, but I don’t anymore. There are some differences that reveal rifts so deep that dialogue breaks down. Among these are the current debates that have been raging between God-believers and the so-called new atheists. It often seems that people on one side can’t begin to grasp what the world is like, what it feels like, for those on the other side. When the person with whom one is conversing appears utterly opaque, then mistrust and contempt are easily aroused: How can he be saying that when the opposite seems so obvious to me? Is he stupid, dishonest, maybe just a touch evil? These are not the sort of suspicions that the gracious hostess wants intruding at her candle-lit dinner table.

Well, we do live in a country where everyone is always asking whether the other party is stupid, dishonest, maybe just a touch evil – it’s not just religion. Actually it’s just about everything. Olbermann fires salvos at O’Reilly and O’Reilly fires back. Beck claims Obama is incomprehensively evil and foreign, and Beck’s critics have concluded Beck is quite mad. The other side is always a deep mystery.

That’s why Goldstein decided the hardest of all topics, religion itself, could only be explored in fiction:

Arguments alone can’t capture all that is at stake for people when they argue about issues of reason and faith. In the end, I place my faith in fiction, in its power to make vividly present how different the world feels to each of us and how these differences are sometimes what is really being expressed in the great debates of our day on the existence of God.

And yes, the book is fiction, with a plot and everything:

After Cass Seltzer’s book becomes a surprise best seller, he’s dubbed “the atheist with a soul” and becomes a celebrity. He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum, “the goddess of game theory,” and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry. And he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his mentor and professor – a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism – and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius who is heir to the leadership of a Hasidic sect. Each encounter reinforces Cass’s theory that the religious impulse spills over into life at large.

That’s from the Radom House site, and it ends with this:

Using her gifts in fiction and philosophy, Goldstein has produced a true crossover novel, complete with a nail-biting debate (“Resolved: God Exists”) and a stand-alone appendix with the thirty-six arguments (and responses) that propelled Seltzer to stardom.

Well, maybe we can make sense of all this arguing about religion through fiction, and Edge magazine has posted an excerpt from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book – some of those thirty-six arguments that made the main character an international sensation as “the atheist with a soul” (it is fiction, after all). And here’s one of them:

Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn’t. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn’t have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary – he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good – and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not, just because I am me and you are not.

Got that? If God has reasons for what he does, and we see them as reasonable, what do we need Him for anyway? We have reason after all.

But it is notoriously hard to divine what God’s divine reasons are. You remember Alexander Pope:

All Nature is but Art unknown to thee;

All chance direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good:

And spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

Ah, that may have done just fine in the sunny eighteenth century (1734) – but it’s not good enough now. See Hanna Rosin and her long article on the Prosperity Gospel in Modern America:

Among mainstream, nondenominational megachurches, where much of American religious life takes place, “prosperity is proliferating” rapidly, says Kate Bowler, a doctoral candidate at Duke University and an expert in the gospel. Few, if any, of these churches have prosperity in their title or mission statement, but Bowler has analyzed their sermons and teachings. Of the nation’s 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity – Osteen’s, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett’s, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes’, in Dallas. In second-tier churches – those with about 5,000 members – the prosperity gospel dominates.

Overall, Bowler classifies 50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity. The doctrine has become popular with Americans of every background and ethnicity; overall, Pew found that 66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of “other Christians” – a category comprising roughly half of all respondents – believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful. It’s an upbeat theology, argues Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, Bright-Sided, that has much in common with the kind of “positive thinking” that has come to dominate America’s boardrooms and, indeed, its entire culture.

No wonder people run up their credit cards. They have faith. God will make them rich. If He doesn’t, they’ll pray more (or prey more) (or pay more).

This is curious, and Andrew Sullivan adds this:

It’s staggering really that modern American Christianism supports wealth while Jesus demanded total poverty, fetishizes family while Jesus left his and urged his followers to abandon wives, husbands and children, champions politics while Jesus said his kingdom was emphatically not of this world, defends religious war where Jesus sought always peace, and backs torture, which is what the Romans did to Jesus.

At some point these charlatans need to be chased out of the temple. Which these days means the Republican Party.

God is Republican? That seems to be the claim these days. But Rosin does mention this book – Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Barbara Ehrenreich, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt: New York, October 2009). And it’s a stunner:

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, positive thoughts were flowing out into the universe in unprecedented volumes, escaping the solar system, rippling through vast bodies of interstellar gas, dodging black holes, messing with the tides of distant planets. If anyone – deity or alien being – possessed the means of transforming these emanations into comprehensible form, they would have been overwhelmed by images of slimmer bodies, larger homes, quick promotions, and sudden acquisitions of great wealth.

But the universe refused to play its assigned role as a “big mail order department.” In complete defiance of the “law of attraction,” long propounded by the gurus of positive thinking, things were getting worse for most Americans, not better.

And that may explain the evangelical fervor we’ve been living with in America for the last several decades – God loves us, and will make us rich, and all we need to do is think positively, and think of Jesus, and things will fall into place, as they should. They didn’t fall into place. They got worse. So that calls for more commitment to Jesus. Someone up there is feeling neglected, if not disrespected. And this is far from what Alexander Pope was rhyming about way back when.

From the review of the Ehrenreich book by Susan G at Daily Kos:

Happy talk is killing us. Faux cheerfulness is blinding us. Optimism is making us delusional. And America is knee-deep in the happy-happy joy-joy, always looking on the bright side of life shtick, has been from the 19th century on, and Barbara Ehrenreich is, to put it mildly, so over it.

What really pushed her over the edge was a bout of breast cancer that exposed her to the modern American abyss of positive thinking. She recoiled from the resolute cheerfulness of the breast cancer community, so determinedly upbeat that patients end up buying into the guilt trip that any depressed thoughts they might harbor about their illness caused the affliction in the first place. Or the relapse. Or the bad reaction to chemo.

Insufficient optimism is always the problem, you see. But that is, in fact, the real problem:

The American compulsion toward optimism, she argues, clearly has more ramifications than just sending messages to ill individuals that their diseases are a result of not thinking positively enough. It’s a national compulsion with international consequences, few of which are good. “Positivity is not so much our condition of our mood as it is part of our ideology,” she writes, “the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it.” For America and her citizens, this tendency toward cheer fosters “reflexive capacity for dismissing disturbing news.”

And it gives us the Prosperity Gospel. And maybe it gave us the housing bubble. No one likes a sour-puss. Let a smile be your umbrella. Yep, you’ll get wet, but only because you deserve it.

On a related note, Andrew Sullivan writes this:

The struggle for the fate of Christianity – in motion since the earliest times – has often devolved into a fight about whether Christians should seek worldly power or eschew it. It is a question constantly faced by Jesus in the Gospels himself, and it is one always resolved in Jesus’ case by using love. Jesus had no politics. He sought no earthly power. But humans who live in a fallen world must live with power and under it. And in this fundamentalist age, where Christians and Jews as well as Muslims have embraced the power of government and law and war to reimpose their literalist beliefs, the battle is intense.

The defining element of Christianism is the pursuit of worldly power – which is why I refuse to give these politicians and operators the term “Christian.” The move into politics was a decision made by the Christianist right two generations ago. Its main vehicle is the Republican Party…

The rest is a discussion of how “The Family” is behind a war to launch new anti-gay laws in Uganda “that resemble legislation that preceded mass killings in Rwanda and Serbia in recent years” – and these laws are harsh:

The law would impose a sentence of life imprisonment on anyone who “penetrates the anus or mouth of another person of the same sex with his penis or any other sexual contraption.” The same penalty would apply if he or she even “touches another person with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality.”

The law requires a three-year prison sentence for anyone who is aware of evidence of homosexuality and fails to report it to the police within 24 hours. It allows for the prosecution of Ugandans who engage in homosexual acts in foreign countries. And it imposes a prison sentence of up to seven years for anyone who defends the rights of gays and lesbians.

And “The Family” is that group on C-Street, senators Coburn, Ensign, Inhofe and others, with their prayer meetings and all. Read the whole thing and follow the links if you wish. Sullivan says. “Rip off the mask and see what these people would do if they could.” This is also a long way from Alexander Pope.

Or see Mark C. Chu-Carroll on The Conservative Rewrite of the Bible:

I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Andy Schafly and his pals are working on a “new translation” of the Bible. They say that they need to do this in order to remove liberal bias, which is “the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations”. You see, “translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one” is the largest source of what they call translation errors, and it “requires conservative principles to reduce and eliminate.”

Plenty of people have mocked the foolishness of this. So many, in fact, that I can’t decide which one to link to! But what’s been left out of all of the mocking that I’ve seen so far is one incredibly important point.

What the “Conservative Bible Project” is doing is not translating the Bible. It is rewriting the bible to make it say what they want it to say, without regard for what it actually says. These people, who insist that every word of their holy texts must be taken as absolute literal truth without interpretation – are rewriting their Bible to make it say what they want it to say.

He says that even though he is just “a flaky liberal re-constructionist Jew” this is nonsense:

If you look at their explanation of what they’re doing, it’s not translating. Translating is going to the original text, which is written in some language X, and trying to convert it to language Y without loss of meaning. They don’t even pretend that they’re going back to the original sources. They’re taking existing translations of the original text into English, and then re-writing them whenever they don’t like what they say. They describe looking back to at the original text as a last resort “exception” (their word!) to their “translation” process.

What are they doing? They’re taking the King James Version of the Bible. Then they’re going to go through it, and whenever they find something that they don’t like, because it doesn’t match their conservative principles, they’re just going to change it. Not because analyzing the original text shows that there was a translation error. They don’t even pretend to care about that. They’re just combing through it and changing anything that, from their perspective, must be wrong because it looks too liberal.

Yep, that is clear from the item on the effort in Conservapedia (the conservative alternative to Wikipedia, or the on-line user-generated encyclopedia without all the liberal bias). They will “identify pro-liberal terms used in existing Bible translations, such as ‘government,’ and suggest more accurate substitutes.”

Chu-Carroll comments:

There’s no discussion of whether “government” is an accurate translation of the original Greek or Hebrew; it must be wrong, because according to their supposedly “conservative” philosophy, government is always bad, and so any passage in the text which says anything that might be remotely positive about government is, necessarily, wrong.

And they talk about that “liberal falsehood” is a verse from the New Testament – “Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’” They want that gone. They offer no reason, other than since it is only mentioned once, only in Luke, it must be wrong.

And Chu-Carroll notes this:

In their early efforts at translation, they’re trying to get rid of the word “Pharisees.” “Pharisees” is a very specific term; it means a specific group of people. It’s not a generic term for “bad people” or “liberal people” or anything like that. They were a group that was distinguished by, among other things, believing in (gasp!) the literal interpretation of the book of Exodus. They were also the grouping that included most of the high priests of the second temple. The Conservapedia folks have been suggesting replacing “Pharisee” with “self-selected elite,” “intellectual”, or (cutting to the chase) “liberals.” As a “translation” that’s absolute garbage. It completely ignores the meaning of the original text, in order to create the appearance that their political beliefs have some sort of divine support, even though the original text can’t support that interpretation.

Yeah, well – their aim is clear – “Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning” – and “Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story” – and “Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio.”

Yes, those of us who don’t find religion that compelling can still find it fascinating. And Amy Sullivan at Time adds this:

Passages like the story of the adulteress whom Jesus saved from being stoned with the famous line: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Conservapedia complains that liberals have used this story to argue against the death penalty. Plus, this Jesus character sounds like a radical moral relativist.

Also among the goals of the project: replace liberal words like “labor” with preferred conservative terms; use concise language instead of “liberal wordiness”; and – my favorite- – “explain the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning.” Jesus talks about economics more than any other secular subject in the Bible, so they’ve got their work cut out for them. I look forward to learning the free-market meaning of “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

But Rod Dreher argues this is simply an effort to “make sure the Lord doesn’t go all wobbly on us.” Yes, Dreher was laughing.

But it’s the people who aren’t laughing that you have to worry about. And they don’t bother to knock on doors these days.

Why are Conservapedia’s administrators (and – generally speaking – a large number of online conservative commentators) so scared of open and public comments? Are they really that scared of having to defend an indefensible position? Are their egos that fragile that the merest questioning of their motives and actions will send them to their beds with a case of the vapours?

In fact, for Geoff Plourde, who is an Administrator of an (allegedly) open wiki that constantly rails against perceived censorship, to openly declare that his talk page is out of bounds is, quite frankly, a sad state of affairs, but also indicative of the kind of people running it. These are people who deal with secrets, who prefer to keep things “off-site” because then there’s no witnesses to their deceit.

This is the same person, however, who closed down the only avenue available to editors who felt the administrators were exceeding their authority. Which was silly really, because CP administrators get off on exceeding their authority – and they answer to nobody but God. It’s couched in the usual spin: “Conservapedia no longer handles complaints of abuse on the wiki. This allows us to handle such matters carefully and professionally, and allows all parties to retain their dignity.”

In other words, we’ll sweep it under the carpet. You can send us an e-mail if you like, but there’s more chance of Jesus coming back to open the bowling for Australia, than there is of us actually replying to you.

Then again, he’s not the only administrator to lock his talk page:

• Terry Koeckritz’s is locked until February 2010.
• Andrew Schlafly locks his on a regular basis.
• So does Brian MacDonald (Karajou)

What a great bunch of people.

Half the fun with blogging lies in the research, the other half is in going off in a totally different direction to what you intended. Take this current example, for instance.

It started out with our friends at Conservapedia, defending a(nother) bullshit statement made by Sarah Palin. Now it would appear as if the Great White Moose answered a questionnaire put out by the Eagle Forum (that’s the home-schooling university thingy, set up by Andy Schlafly’s mum, Phyllis). One question asked, “Are you offended by the phrase ‘Under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?” to which Palin replied, “Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me and I’ll fight in defence of our Pledge of Allegiance.” (Bold in the original) Conservapedia – in an attempt to usurp St Jude as the patron saint of lost causes goes on to defend it – throwing up a very tenuous (but Schlafly approved) link between the phrase “under God” and George Washington… and thus by default *all* the Founding Fathers. Nothing new when it comes to distorting the truth for CP really.

(As a quick aside, Palin answered the question, “Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?” with, “Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.” One would think that little Bristol might have benefited from some sex-ed, ‘cos clearly “don’t do it, ‘cos God sez it’s bad” didn’t work. Conservapedia also takes time out from being a “trustworthy” encyclopaedia, to offer commentary: “Yet public schools still resist teaching abstinence and instead promote sexual behavior by teenagers.” Another blurring of the lines between blog and encyclopaedia appears. ) blogsurfer.us

But I digress. Admittedly, I’m not a Yank myself, so it took a bit of digging to find out what was wrong with the link between the Pledge and the founding fathers. Thank goodness for Google – because there is no link between the Founding Fathers and the Pledge. None. Nada. Fokol.

For a start, the Pledge was only written and used for the first time in 1892 (and published in a book celebrating another mistake – Columbus’ 400th anniversary of discovering America – notwithstanding the fact he never saw, let alone stood on, mainland America. I still don’t get why they hang onto that mistake so much. Maybe they really don’t like Vikings.), by which time George and the rest of the Founding Fathers were fertilizing cherry trees, or something.

It was written by a Baptist preacher called Francis Bellamy, who was influenced by the socialist ideas of his cousin, the author Edward Bellamy, who wrote the American socialist utopian novels, Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897). It’s also interesting to note that for many years the Pledge was accompanied by the “Bellamy salute”, which looked very similar to the Nazi salute (just sayin’), and was only phased out by FDR.

The original quote read:

“I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands: one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

No mention at all of “under God” – or the United States of America for that matter – very strange for those less-enlightened, God-fearing days. Let’s hear from the man himself on how he came by the wording:

“It began as an intensive communing with salient points of our national history, from the Declaration of Independence onwards; with the makings of the Constitution…with the meaning of the Civil War; with the aspiration of the people…

The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the ‘republic for which it stands.’ …And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation – the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches. And its future?

Just here arose the temptation of the historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity.’ No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization. But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all…”

Actually, the words “under God” were only added in 1954 during the McCarthy era – probably in an attempt to play down the socialist ideals of the Pledge during those paranoid times – and in effect, they turned the Pledge into a public prayer. Which means that if school kids are required to recite it, then prayer is allowed in American schools.

Oh a final word on this – Bellamy objected to the amendment in 1923 which replaced “my flag” with “the Flag of the United States of America” but his objections were ignored. He’d been forced to leave his church in 1891, because of his socialist sermons, and eventually stopped attending church altogether, because of the “racial bigotry” he found there.

Just another example of the historical revisionism (which is just a fancy way of saying “lying like a cheap rug”) you’ll find on Conservapedia – something firmly rooted in socialism must be linked to the Founding Fathers “because we say so” – and they have the blocking rights to back up their argument.

(Pledge history and info gleaned from here.)

Conservapedia editor John Patti has a high opinion of himself, describing himself as a “hardcore conservative contributor despised by liberals” in their self-congratulatory article on CP. Then again, I suppose if nobody else is going to blow your trumpet…

As always, it takes an outsider to bring a little reality to the little man’s world. Johnny baby, I hate to break it to you, but the only “liberals” who are even aware of your sad, little existence are those at RationalWiki, and we don’t despise you. We just think you’re a moron – something you’ve proven time and time again. There’s a difference, you know, although you probably don’t.

So Conservapedia, besides being “trustworthy” also tries to promote itself as a learning resource geared towards children and teenagers. I wonder what the parents of these children would make of the administrators of this site asking editors for their e-mail addresses (especially Terry Koeckritz), or even worse, their telephone numbers, in the case of Ed Poor? The latter case is especially worrying, given his seeming focus on matters sexual, as witnessed by his comments about “bulging vulvas”, “interstellar pimps” and a little sexual experimentation for our daughters. Then again, given that he is a Moonie, maybe it’s just his way of grooming impressionable youngsters for the next mass-matrimony ceremony.

All of that is, of course, hidden behind the scenes on users’ talk pages and is rarely seen by the casual visitor to CP. So it’s even more worrying when they blatantly display it on their front page.

Pinched from Conservapedia. Fair use for comment or parody (as they like to say).

Administrator Brian MacDonald has taken to creating a “Weekly Cartoon” – which is just the sort of thing an encyclopaedia should be displaying. (Oh, by the way Brian, I know you’re no Giles, but here’s a hint: a cartoon is supposed to be funny. After all, Jesus did invent comedy, according to Schlafly). It’s just more proof that Conservapedia is sliding from what could have been an interesting alternative to WikiPedia, to a blog for a very small, very isolated and very insane group of right wing nutjobs. When WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah thinks you’re a bunch of loonies, you know you’re pretty much out on your own.

Anyway, getting back to Brian. Remember, this is the man who is worried that PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) sounds like “penis”, has a Dolly Parton fixation and thinks that all “slutty girls” are prostitutes.

So how on earth does he come up with “Quim Parton” productions? Obviously, the Dolly Parton fixation is coming through, especially when you consider that there is one – and only one – possible definition for “quim”: “a vulgar term for a woman’s genitals, specif. the vagina.”

However, where it gets really fun – and thanks to Constant Reader Pi for reminding me of this – is when people dare to complain about it. Now, I’m not interested if they are genuine editors or not, I’m interested in the response of the administrators.

First up, we have JacobB. Now he might, or might not, be  parodist – it’s just that when newcomers latch on to Andy’s pet projects and virtually parrot Andy’s every word, I get suspicious. Either way, Andy Schlafly has deemed JacobB worthy of enjoying limited administrator rights, which makes him legit either way you look at it.

Now when I say parroting Andy’s every word, have a look at this reply and as anybody who knows Andy Schlafly will realise, he has to be taking the piss:

StClaire (see our naming conventions), I see you have two edits to the encyclopedia (both attacking young earth creationism) and seven (7) edits to talk pages, all crating controversies which didn’t exist before and demanding removal of cartoons written by established and respected users. I encourage you to contribute constructively, or leave. [[User:JacobB|JacobB]] 22:50, 17 November 2009 (EST)

He then goes on to spout the most ludicrous reason why the word “quim” should be allowed to remain in place:

just to end this argument once and for all, I’ve looked it up and “quim” is actually a short form for Joaquim, a Portugese  (sic) first name. Thus, the use of it as a proper name in the cartoon is not offensive and you are now a demonstrated trouble maker if you wish to continue the discussion. Satisfied? [[User:JacobB|JacobB]] 21:44, 17 November 2009 (EST)

Yes, in true CP style, he tries to stifle discussion with a combination of a lie and a threat. And you wonder why I think he’s a parodist? However, it doesn’t stop there. One of the complainants responds to the above drivel with a “Shame on you!”, which is a rallying cry for Andy himself.

Now remember, Andy is the “leader” of an educational resource for children that at the time of writing is proudly displaying the word “quim” on its front page. Would your (or any sane person, for that matter) response be the following:

I love liberal expressions of “Shame on you!”, because they are awkward attempts to make a conservative argument. Liberals don’t believe in “shame”! Try going to a liberal site and say “Shame on you! Shame on you!” and see the incredulous reaction. We don’t fall for that stunt here.–[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 22:36, 17 November 2009 (EST)

and

Stclaire, the answer to your demand for liberal censorship is this: “no”. We don’t cave in to demands for censorship, even when punctuated by repetitious “Shame on you!”

Ok, so asking somebody to remove profanity from his website is suddenly “censorship” – good to see that Andy’s persecution complex is still up and running on all cylinders.

One can only imagine what was on Brian’s mind when he drew this. What was on his mind when he posted it to the mainpage, for all the children to see, is quite another. Given the antics of some of Andrew Schlafly’s trusted colleagues, we wonder if this isn’t giving a whole new meaning to “home-schooling”? However, it must be said that at least – unlike Schlafly – Brian MacDonald realised he’d cocked up and deleted the offending cartoon. blogsurfer.us condron.us

The November 5-11 edition of the St. Louis Riverfront Times (RFT), contains a well-written article by Keegan Hamilton about Andrew Schlafly, fifth son of Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism. It seems that Andrew has decided to rewrite the Bible in order to make it more conservative.

States the RFT article, “’The book itself is not liberal. It’s the modern translations that are increasingly liberal,’ he [Andrew Schlafly] explains. ‘We’d been looking at how the English language has grown since the King James Version came out in 1611. We noticed a lot of new conservative words available to us now that were not available in 1611. We also noticed how each new translation was increasingly liberal, and so we decided to do our own.’” Schlafly particularly does not approve of the style of the gender-neutral New International Version, seemingly preferring the more traditional masculine-oriented versions of the past, the words of Galatians 3:28 notwithstanding (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” KJV).

The article is available at http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2009-11-04/news/hallowed-be-thy-name-member-schlafly-clan-lord-work-cleansing-bible-liberal-bias. It is important to read the entire article. Schlafly sees biblical scholars as liberals trying to make the Bible into something it isn’t. On the contrary, biblical scholars are very conscientious about producing a translation based on the ever-increasing understanding of ancient languages and history. Schlafly doesn’t agree.

The Conservative Bible project may be viewed at http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible. This is a work in progress and appears to be largely an effort to improve the traditional King James Version of the Bible, without including any liberal bias.

I am puzzled by at least one verse in Mr. Schlafly’s Bible. His Bible translates Genesis 1:27 as “So God created mankind in His image. In the image of God He created mankind; He created them both male and female.” God created male mankind and female mankind (a seeming contradiction) in His (God’s) image. If males are created in God’s image, and females are created in God’s image, what does God look like? And if God is both male and female, why do we refer to God as Him, He, etc.? Perhaps God is gender-neutral? Or perhaps God has been made in our image to make us more comfortable?

Can you believe it was 3 whole years ago that Conservapedia dragged its knuckles onto the internet?   Tempus fugit:

Conservapedia, launched on November 21, 2006, is a conservative, family-friendlyWiki encyclopedia. It was founded by teacher and attorney Andrew Schlafly with the help of several students from his fall 2006 World History class.  [...]

When a student handed in her paper using the date-markers “BCE” and “CE” from Wikipedia, Schlafly realized that Wikipedia, despite its claim of neutrality, contained bias against the achievements of Christianity and conservatism. Other occasions of liberal bias, including the reversion of factual edits about the 2005 Kansas Evolution Hearings, led to the creation and launch of Conservapedia.

Conservapedia:  celebrating three years of assuring wingnuts that they’re entitled not only to their own opinions, but to their own facts.

Yup, Conservapedia turns three today and looking back it’s amazing to see just how it’s gone from being an interesting project to one of the most bat-shit insane sites on the internet. Admittedly it is a site which has delivered many hours of laughs, including such gems as Bugler’s antics, the Lenski Affair, the Conservative Bible Project, Andrew Schlafly’s insane debate with the erudite Kate Sorenson and the wonderful “Liberal Style Word Counter” bot, created by the now-blocked Mark Gallagher (which just goes to show that even if you do suck up to Andy, Terry Koeckritz will still kick you in the balls).

And it’s about Terry that I’d like to write (once again) this evening. Anybody who’s been following CP for any length of time, will know that once upon a time, Terry was Andy’s right hand (probably in more ways than one!) boy. However, he tried his hand once too often in trying to usurp Andy’s authority – after all Andy is the proverbial Brother Leader of CP and his fellow sysops, rather than actually having a hand in making decisions, simply act as his echo chamber. Andy decided to strip… or rather remove the sysop rights from his poster boy for on-line thuggery and a rather nasty e-mail battle ensued.

In Andy’s opening salvo, he accused Terry of amongst other things:

• He antagonized and nearly drove away some of our very best editors, while contributing few edits himself.

• He blocked, without justification, many new editors, even after I warned him.
• In general, he simply seemed to constantly demand attention from many of us with little productivity.
• He claimed to know Jerry Falwell and Ed Meese; he claimed to dine with Mary and Jim Carville; he even claimed to have fallen on Nancy Reagan during an assassination attempt.
• He failed to answer simple, direct questions.
• He seemed to rely more on RationalWiki for information than our own site.
• Several Sysops insisted to me privately, with lots of alleged evidence, that TK was an enemy.

Needless to say, Terry came roaring back, with a reply which included such wonderful comments as

• I won’t embarrass him, for now,  for he is quite obviously not himself,
• What a stupid jerk I was to express simple human compassion to a man bent on doing me harm.
• Andy is so sick, misinformed, or really evil, he makes the bald-faced lie that I have had little productivity? (Actually Terry, outside of blocking people, what do you do on CP?)
• How can anyone be so twisted, so mean, to someone who has given him absolute loyalty?
• I do not know what I have ever done to deserve this massive disrespect, this slander, this smear and malice.  Vandalize Conservapedia?  Betray his confidences?  No.  All I was is trusting of him, and committed to his project.  Shame on me!   Shame on all of you for allowing this… shame on, and my personal disgust to, those of you who suggested to the others I would join up with RatWiki.

Ironically, the upshot of all this is that Terry immediately went on to join RationalWiki (where he was given pretty short shrift too) and went on to open the “behind the scenes” discussions of the sysops to all and sundry. So much for loyalty and betraying Andy’s confidences.

During the period, his former fellow sysops had plenty to say about the man.

As Rob Smith said, “TK showed no interest whatsoever in creating new articles, or improving existing articles, until I did first. And when I did, sought to publicly undercut my efforts, question “by what authority” I did such and  such, either acted directly contrary to advice I gave to an editor I was working with, or plagiarized.  And it is further interesting to note, these two events were virtually one day apart, and occurred simultaneously with the dates on Kevin Conley’s email.” (For more on the Kevin Conley e-mail, read this – it’s pretty illuminating).

Brian MacDonald: “To have him as an ally, he’s got to stop his bullying of others, and stop his lying.”

For some reason, Ed Poor, could see no fault in Terry, and even disputed the reason why Terry was eventually blocked. With no sense of irony, he said, “agree about the “attitude” TK manifests. He needs to learn some humility. A permanent ban won’t help, any more than a one-year ban,” to which former CP sysop Philip Rayment quite rightly replied, “If a permanent ban wouldn’t help, why do we give out so many of them?” With logic like that, no wonder his days on CP were numbered.

It’s easy to imagine, then, everybody’s (and I mean everybody’s) surprise when Terry returned to CP and Andy immediately began to grant him rights again. Who knows, maybe his was back to being Andy “right hand man” behind the scenes? When it came to decide who should be the new sysops, Andy overrode objections to Terry from at least three of his sysops – CPAdmin1 (TK is absolutely out of the question.  He proved his hate for CP already), Bill Bagot (do not believe it would be wise to promote anyone who has shown a disrespect for authority and Philip Rayment (I’d oppose Bugler, RodWeathers, and TK.) Interesting to see Philip lumped Terry in with the two parodists, Bugler and RodWeathers – very insightful.

Andy then strains credulity by stating, “TK has ruffled feathers on our side, but mostly on the other side.  He’s never vandalized the site and his self-initiated “double agent” work (which Philip documents in another thread) was merely that.  It was not a sincere effort to harm the site.  TK was defrocked by Conservapedia and yet returned to volunteer more, something very few people would do.  Our general policy has been to restore privileges to those who make a good faith return and request for them.  I’ve done that in the past as a matter of routine.  Given the strong support by several in this group for TK becoming a Sysop again, it seems appropriate.  It is needed to protect images.”

Now let’s look at that. “Strong support?” Really? At least 3 sysops spoke up against him. “Self-initiated double agent work?” Well yes, but double agent? He deliberately opened up the Special Discussion Group (whence comes my info, in case you were wondering) and only shut it down again after Andy threatened him with legal action. The “double agent” bit sounds about as credible as his saving Nancy Reagan. “Did not harm the site?” No, Andy, he’s only given us an opportunity to highlight just what kind of people you are and to warn others, especially those you home-school. And let’s face it – one thing Terry hasn’t done is protect images. Instead, he’s gone back to his usual ways of abusing and insulting editors and sysops alike.

I wonder just what kind of hold he has on Andy. People would like to know. Either way, they deserve each other – and it’s good for a laugh, even if we do get kind of frustrated now and again.

I’ve already mentioned that Conservapedia sysop Ed Poor has some strange ideas when it comes to what is and isn’t appropriate on Conservapedia (out = references to Jack the Ripper’s victims as prostitutes; in = an article on bestiality). It’s always refreshing to see new examples of just how his mind works.

Sysop Brian MacDonald (aka Karajou) would appear to be a fan of Tomb Raider and uploaded a copy of the first game’s cover to CP. Looking at the file name, and scouring Google images, tells me that the one shown alongside was probably the one he used.

I say “probably” because along came Ed (slow walking Ed Jones, slow talking Ed Jones… I love that song!) and deleted it, claiming it was “too slutty”. Needless to say, Brian was a bit worried about this and queried his Edness.

“Ed Poor, I uploaded the cover to the first Tomb Raider game, and you deleted it for being “too slutty”. Any explanation for it?”

Ed’s reply is a classic of our time:

“Voluptuous breasts and bulging vulva isn’t slutty?”

Now I’ve studied that image pretty closely, and I can’t see a vulva – bulging or otherwise. Clearly, neither can Brian, who – full marks to him – was probably also scratching his head at this point.

“First, there is no bulging vulva; the box art doesn’t show that. Second, large breasts does not make a woman slutty; if that was the case then we’d run half the women on earth to a jail cell for prostitution…and that would include Dolly Parton.
Third, Eidos will not allow nor tolerate any attempt to portray Lara Croft in a compromising position. They even sued the creator of the “Nude Raider” game patch and won.”

It’s ok, Brian, we understand. You were dealing with creepy “Uncle” Ed Poor, after all. And I also had a thing for Dolly Parton way back when, although your association of “slutty” with “prostitution” is a bit odd. Maybe it’s the girls you hang out with? You are a sailor, after all.

Now I know that being a Conservapedia sysop involves an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance (especially when you have to grin and agree with more of Andrew Schlafly’s daily insanity), but there are times when you can only laugh out loud at the things they say.

Take for example Brian MacDonald’s (sysop Karajou – so much for Conservapedia’s policy of “use your real first name and initial, which is a blockable offence if you don’t)  claim about Wikipedia’s sysops:

All I could think of when I read this was the fact that most of the “trusted” admins there reached that level by vitue (sic) of lying, bullying, falsly-accusing, acting like SlimVirgin, etc.

Ok, lying? Which is something Schlafly does on a regular basis. Not to mention Terry Koeckritz, with his claims of having met everybody from Lucile Ball to Nancy Reagan (Actually, apparently our Terry pushed her to the floor and covered her with his body during an assassination attempt. Always good to know CP sysops are more alert – and closer – than the Secret Service). But don’t take my word for it, as Andy Schlafly complained once before, “He claimed to know Jerry Falwell and Ed Meese; he claimed to dine with Mary and Jim Carville; he even claimed to have fallen on Nancy Reagan during an assassination attempt.”

As for bullying. Well one would have to say that CP is well represented in that regard. One only has to recall the high regard in which Andy held the obnoxious Bugler (who turned out to be a wonderful parodist, playing Andy like a cheap fiddle), over the objections of a number of his hand-picked goons.

John Patti isn’t really clever enough to indulge in bullying, and simply hides behind his ban-hammer. Terry Koeckritz, of course, is well known for getting sexual gratification from his online bullying, something he has perfected on sites such as Hot or Not (thanks for the info, by the way, but as promised, I won’t publish it), RationalWiki and Conservapedia, where even head goon Ed Poor is on record as saying he does not want Terry involved in their behind the scenes chat room, the Zeugloden Blues. Still, I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on Terry, he has made most of the discussions available once again.

Then there’s TerryH, the self-proclaimed custodian of the Conservative Bible Project (and apparently a qualified doctor). Not content with blaming the death of that Harry Potter actor on “multi-culturism” (maybe that’s why they’ve made it a blockable offence on CP – multi-culturism, I mean, not murder), he also launched into a quite incredible rant on somebody’s talk page (original here, let’s see how long until it gets burned), which started off:

Sir, you just called me a liar with regard to released Gitmo prisoners going right back to the battlefield and doing the exact same thing all over again that they landed at Gitmo for in the first place: killing Americans.

You had better do one of three things:

1. Provide a citation for your allegation that a significant proportion of Guantanamo detainees have turned out to be innocent of the war crimes imputed to them.
2. Retract your last comment and apologize to me.
3. Prepare to face blockage for contempt of the administration.

Blockage? Really? Is Conservapedia low in fibre? The conversation sort of went downhill from there.  Other gems (from the same discussion) include:

• mind your tone when you talk to me. I’m an administrator and you’re not.
• I ought to block you just for using words like “childish” even if it is on your talk page. Retract that remark right now or you will get blocked just for that.
• don’t you ever, EVER, tell another administrator what to do on this site.

Oh, what the hell, here’s a few more of TerryH’s specialities:

• I will not dignify that question with an answer. Besides, that question is incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.
• Cease and desist your obvious contempt for the administration, or risk a block just for that.
• Impugning [a sysop's] motives without warrant, and challenging his authority, are [blockable offences].

Then we get Brian MacDonald (he of the 20-year naval career, but no rank to show for it). Admittedly, it was resident cultist Mormon, Dean Slade, who coined the “Mind Your Own Business” block reason, but Brian is easily one of it’s most eager proponents, as per this example. He’s also gone on record for insisting that a editor (wait for it) go to the library, take out a specific book, find the passage in question and read it to Karajou, before he’s allowed to use it as a reference in an article. He’s also from the Andy Schlafly school that “If I make a bullshit statement and you query it, the onus is on you to prove me wrong, rather than me back up my insanity.” Here’s a good example.

Not content with sending editors to the library, he also wants them to engage in archaeological digs on his behalf. This is one of his more bizarre utterances, in defence of Noah’s Ark:

Tell you what, since he’s here to demand that we accept his viewpoint, I’m going to make a demand of my own.  Jamesmackenzie, since you came to this particular page with the intention of pushing your opinion that Noah’s Ark did not exist, I’m going to call you on it.  According to the Bible, Genesis 8, the ark rested in ”the mountains of Ararat”.  You, Jamesmackenzie, are going to scour the area once known as the Kingdom of Urartu, which now is occupied by eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran, and I don’t care how you do it.  You can use Google-Earth or take a jet to do some hiking, but you are going to go over every square foot of that ground ”before you carry on with your opinion in this website”. That is the only way I will accept from you the proof needed that the ark doesn’t exist.

They really are a nice bunch of people, aren’t they. In fact, most of them make SlimVirgin look positively angel-like.

…on the Andrew Schlafly versus Kate Sorenson saga.

(Block log); 10:39 . . Jpatt (Talk | contribs) blocked KSorenson (Talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 5 years (account creation disabled, e-mail blocked) (Negative personal comments: childish parthian shot)

Yup, when somebody who actually knows the subject comes along and tries to improve Conservapedia (in other words show Andy just how wrong he is and how little he knows), they get shown the door.

It’s also gratifying to see that Andy is such a “man”, has he has to get one of his acolytes to do the job for him.

Well done, John Patti, the “Trustworthy” encyclopaedia is proud of you.

Several years ago, friend-of-the-site RationalWiki posted a stunningly thorough side-by-side refutation of a Conservapedia article on creationism. Conservapedia, naturally, could offer no argument in defense, but happily threatened the site with a copyright suit, because if you can’t beat ‘em, sue ‘em, “fair use” notwithstanding.

Now, history is set to repeat itself. Another RationalWiki user has posted a thorough, well-sourced, compelling refutation of William Dembski’s latest attempt to ground creationism in science, and rather than engage in a debate on the merits, Dembski himself is now threatening to sue.

By means of background, Dembski is not a lawyer. But it’s common knowledge that U.S. copyright law explicitly preserves the right to excerpt a work, even substantially, for comment and criticism. See 17 U.S.C. § 107. Dembski’s complaint against RationalWiki is so wrong that no lawyer would take it; and if they did, they’d be laughed out of court. But it’s still further proof that (1) creationists can only protect their views by censorship and, (2) they’re willing to ignore established law when convenient, be it the Establishment Clause or federal copyright statutes.

Disappointing to be sure, but not surprising. Though the Bible may not be much for science, it does have some good insights on human nature. And as the author of Ecclesiastes would’ve put it, “there is nothing new under the sun” (1:9-14).

Clearly feeling the need for self-affirmation, Andrew Schlafly has just posted a word-salad called “Quantifying Order“. I’m not sure what he’s trying to say, but it’s something along the lines of “God created order and here’s some examples.”

The self-affirmation bit is clear as not only does he quote from his own bastardisation of the Bible, which  now renders the opening lines of John as “In the beginning was perfect order, and this perfection was with God, and this perfection was God.” (I kid you not), but he has another dig at the Theory of Relativity by stating:

“The theory of relativity developed to explain the then-observed shift in Mercury’s perihelion of 43 arc-seconds per century. Subsequently, however, more accurate measurements with more sophisticated technology have determined this precession to be 55 arc-seconds per century, nearly 30% off the number provided by relativity.”

In true Andy “I-pulled-this-number-out-of-my-ass” style, he doesn’t provide anything to back up this statement. – not to mention the hideous English of the first sentence. Enter our heroine, Ms Sorenson (who seems to work for NASA and is involved with the Gravity Probe B project, unless my sources are mistaken. Either way, this young lady knows her stuff). Quite respectfully and quite rightly, she asks Andy for a citation for his claim.

Does Andy provide one? Of course not. Instead we get another non-answer:

I’m urging you to look beyond what you’re taught. I went through the same physics curriculum as others, and it is what isn’t taught that matters. Earnestly.–Andy Schlafly 17:53, 14 November 2009 (EST)

It’s made for some wonderful discussion, with Kate poking holes in his statement and Andy replying with such rubbish as “Relativity pulls people away from reading the Bible and relativity is pushed big-time by liberals” and “The political grip on this issue is intense. In fact, to be honest, I would advise against your criticizing it in any way.” Here’s a capture of the talk page, as it stands as of Sunday morning (when CP’s night editing mode kicked in) because I have a feeling that sooner or later Terry Koeckritz or John Patti will do the conservative thing and delete it – and then it will never have happened, of course.

Clearly he has no proof, or else he’d provide it, in order to help her “look beyond what you’re taught.” Once again, in typical Andy style, he’s making up numbers to prove his own point. However, now he’s up against somebody who can’t be baffled by his bullshit – and who knows it too. “Okay. Let’s find a way of making that point without quoting an incorrect value for the Mercury anomaly then? Cause putting in a number that’s not actually supported by observations just to make a philosophical point seems kind of … I dunno. Deceptive?’ is a killer reply to his garbage.

How long will it be before Andy loses all credibility by blocking her, or will she – in a fit of frustration at his mindless debating technique – end up poking her head through her PC’s monitor? Time will tell, but we’ll enjoy Andy flailing wildly in the meantime.

Actually, now it’s getting interesting. Andy replies and says to Google “5599.7 Mercury”. I see he’s also calling her Kate now – is he reading RationalWiki again? Anyway, I thought I would type that into Google and see what comes up.

First up is Wapedia, which discusses the Perihelion precession of Mercury. I’m not going to begin to understand it, but they quote the following numbers:
Sources of the precession of perihelion for Mercury

Amount (arcsec/century)                           Cause
5025.6 Coordinate                                                 (due to the precession of the equinoxes)
531.4                                                                             Gravitational tugs of the other planets
0.0254                                                                         Oblateness of the Sun (quadrupole moment)
42.98±0.04                                                               General relativity
5600.0                                                                        Total
5599.7                                                                        Observed

They conclude by saying the exact opposite of Schlafly, namely, “Thus, the predictions of general relativity perfectly account for the missing precession (the remaining discrepancy is within observational error).”

Gravityspheres go one step further and claim that Einstein made two mistakes in his calculations, namely that the number assigned to gravitational tugs of the other planets is wrong, because the gravitational force fields would not reach Mercury from Mars, Uranus and Neptune. Secondly, that Einstein’s computations are based on erroneous  assumptions. Space does not curve, gravity does. Also, Einstein did not take into account the tug by the sbh at the center of our galaxy. However, this means that the actual precession advance is 45 arcseconds per century, giving a total as above of 5599.7 – matching the observed figure.

Finally – because I don’t like flogging a dead horse – Gresham College refers to it, in an article titled “Proving Einstein right. One can only assume that, as with Lenski, Andy’s habit of skimming articles has once again let him down.

For some reason, Andrew Schlafly doesn’t like Einstein, or his Theory of Relativity much – probably because he’s too stupid to understand it. So it always makes for interesting reading when somebody tries to insert some sense into any related articles. We also know that Andy loathes anybody with some sort of expertise, because they show just what an ignoramus he actually is. The Lenski Affair was a classic example of this. Another was a fantastic argument with his own brother on the Theory of Relativity. It’s at the bottom of the talk page, which in itself is worth a good laugh.

So imagine his reaction when somebody – in this case, a well-spoken and clearly knowledgeable lady by the name of Kate Sorensen, comes along and starts to inject some reason into the article on Black Holes. Faced with the possibility that somebody knows more than him and is about to (once again) hand him his ass on a platter, Andy reverts to his favourite method of argument – changing the subject.

For example, on her talk page, he says “More generally, this is not Wikipedia where liberal distortions of science dominate. We tell the truth here. The black hole entry is no exception.” Moving to the talk page of the article in question, we get to see a shining example of Andy in full cry. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems a bit ironic that somebody who’s standard mating call is “Open your mind!” steadfastly refuses to accept even the theoretical possibility that black holes might exist. He backs into his favourite corner, holding his hands over his ears and yelling “la la la la I can’t hear you!” whilst stating that because the General Theory of Relativity, and thus black holes, can’t be falsified, they aren’t science and thus don’t exist.

Then once again, changes the subject, saying, “Black holes are far too popular in science magazines and liberal publications like the New York Times to “go away” that easily.” Andy seems to be incapable of stringing more than 5 words together without at least one of them being “liberal”. He also uses another favourite standby, that she’s not being “concise” – his usual lame insult about a high word to substance ratio. Her comeback was a classic: “”You [aschlafly] make it so difficult to be succinct when there’s so much you don’t know.”

Kate, somehow managing to keep her temper, even tries to reason with the idiot, as he rails on about falsifiability. Quite sensibly, and clearly having an open mind to discuss all side of the question, she writes, “Aschlafly, if you want to expand the living daylights out of the “Controversy” section, I’ll be right there by your side, cheering you on and helping in any way I can. As long as your contributions aren’t misleading or incorrect. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but my gut tells me that EvanW and MarkGall would make the same promise. So why are we still bickering? Can’t we improve the article instead?” Now if Andy was in any way interested in promoting accuracy in his articles, rather than his own distorted world view, surely he would leap at that opportunity? Right?

Wrong. His replies include the following:

“It’s falsifiability that is at issue, and the resistance to that simple, logical concept is astounding. People can teach Popper all they like, but it’s clear that physics majors are not learning fully about falsifiability. String theory wouldn’t exist in physics departments if they were.” The last sentence is especially worrying. Yes, string theory is odd, with its dozens of required dimensions… but it’s just that – a theory. If new theories weren’t proposed and discussed then we would never move on and we wouldn’t have things like the Large Hadron Collider. Then again, Andy is probably pretty miffed that we’ve progressed beyond Newton’s theories… or the fact that a flat earth is the center of the universe.

Once again proving that no sentence is complete for him, unless it includes the word liberal, he tries to make a conspiracy of the whole thing, asking, “Why the big push for black holes by liberals, and big protests against any objection to them?” and then comes up with a classic piece of Andy’s debating skills:

“If it turned out empirically that promoting black holes tends to cause people to read the Bible less, would you still push this so much? Certainly there is no practical justification to pushing black holes; no one will ever be helped by them in any way.”

Ok, what? Suddenly believing in black holes will make people stop reading the Bible.  Really? Is their faith so fragile? For somebody who claims to run a “logical” encyclopaedia, and that the Bible is the most “logical” book ever written, that is an epic failing of logic, not matter how you look at it. Not to mention a question that’s impossible to answer. He’s almost implying that if Black Holes render religion obsolete, then the evidence should be covered up… or to use another favourite word of his… “censored”.

By now Kate has clearly realised that she’s dealing with a first-class moron here, and despite Andy’s plea to “Please, please open your mind, for your sake” decides to put him in his place with a few succinct comments of her own.

“Aschlafly, you seem to be more interested in arguing (now apparently about politics and religion of all things) than you are in improving the article. This is fine. If you want to contribute to the article in any way at all, I’ll be here to help however I can. I would ask you to please think carefully before adding a misleading assertion like “Einstein rejected black holes” (which doesn’t tell the whole truth) or “black hole theory is unfalsifiable,” because doing so would just hurt the article, misinform anyone who reads it and waste the time of any editor who feels like trying to fix it.

Let me say this one last time: I’m not arguing with you. This off-topic nonsense on talk pages has been a waste of everyone’s time, and I’m choosing not to participate in it any more. Please continue if you like, but understand that that’s my final word on the subject. I hope we can see eye to eye on this, and treat each other respectfully from here on out.”

All that remains now if for Andy to declare that liberals run away from logical arguments and for that insufferable c*nt Terry Koeckritz to rise from his sick-bed and block her. Like Richard Lenski before her, Kate Sorenson (whoever she may be) deserves a special mention for her actions. In both cases, without provocation, they have allowed Andrew Schlafly, through his own utterances, to prove to the world what a moronic, closed-minded, petulant individual he is.

The only sad thing is that nobody who matters will really read about it.

My friends, the end has come. The beast has risen, and its name is Conservapedia.

Now, for those of you who may be faithful adherents to this website, I do not profess to have seen all the content of their wiki, but I have seen with my own two eyes their “Conservative Bible Translation,” which mocks the Greek the New Testament was written in. Let me go through a few points with you:

1. The first two words of their main page are “Liberal Bias.” I think all of us can see where this is heading.

2. They outline three main “sources of error[]” in translations of the Bible:

• lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
• lack of precision in modern language
• translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

This part is especially laughable. Basically, these folks are claiming that since both languages are precise, neither can be relied on for a definitive meaning, and thus only Conservatives can bring out the “true Conservative meaning” behind the text. To solve this problem, these “translators” are working from the most definite language they can find: King James English. The accusation of a translation bias is also ridiculous, since this calls into question the merits and skill of the International Bible Society and the Wycliff Bible Translators, two of the most respected translation societies.

3. They offer ten guidelines for their work. Here are a few of the best:

• Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias.

They give no specific examples of this “liberal bias” here, but one can assume they are referring to the multiple hippies referenced in Scripture.

• Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other feminist distortions; preserve many references to the unborn child (the NIV deletes these).

Apparently, the idea of including humans other than men in the term αδελφος is a blasphemy unto God that has been inserted by feminists wishing to subvert the chauvinistic Christ.

• Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent;[4] Defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.

Still out to stop the Red Scare, I see. I wonder how the word “miracle” needs to be updated, and how “peace” might have been misinterpreted for 2,000 years.

This last one is my personal favorite:

• Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning.

Jesus apparently was content to let the market fix itself. Why else would he have come to earth, if not simply to give us a pattern for how our governments should structure their economies? I guess they missed the parable of the talents and Jesus’s “redistribution of wealth.” That part must have been a redaction by the liberals of the 1st century.

As a translator and scholar of these texts in their original form, this makes me laugh, but also makes me question the motives of those who profess to be “Christian.” Politicizing Christ in this way is akin to placing an eagle on the cross in the place of Jesus. The creators of this “translation” have made the error of the Jewish zealots; they understood Jesus as coming to revolutionize their government and free them from political oppression. In reality, the message of Christ is about freedom from spiritual oppression, and any political undertones that can be found in Scripture are all subordinate to His spiritual message and salvific work.

Check out their translation of the Epistle to Philemon for a good laugh.

Ok, so one of the questions that’s asked most often is “Just how relevant is Conservapedia?” Is the conservative movement hanging on Andrew Schlafly’s every word, or are they (most likely) hanging their heads in embarrassment.The general impression is that the internet is laughing at Conservapedia… something that has been proven to a degree when scouring the web for comments on Ken DeMyer’s offerings on “Atheism” and “Evolution“.

However, it would be interesting to see just who is referring to CP and in what way. Luckily Alexa can tell me that a total of 1,217 sites link in to CP. It might sound like a lot, but when you consider that “evil” WikiPedia has 415,776 sites linking in and even tiny RationalWiki has 322, it doesn’t look that great for the “trustworthy” encyclopaedia.

Now, the next step, to be undertaken over the next few days and weeks, is to visit said 1,217 sites and see what exactly they’re saying about Andy’s little blog. I’ll keep a running score as we go and hopefully by the end we’ll have a fairly good idea of just how important Conservapedia is to the web community in general.

Watch this space.

]]> http://cpmonitor.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/schalflys-sexist-shenanigans/ Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:00:42 +0000 cpmonitor http://cpmonitor.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/schalflys-sexist-shenanigans/

One thing about Andrew Schlafly – he’s consistent, if nothing else. Sadly, he’s just a consistent buffoon.

Not content with ripping off parents on the pretence of teaching their children economics – a task at which he, yet again, fails dismally – he then goes on to abuse and humiliate his students again, by setting different tests for boys and girls.

Now, Andy will defend his choice until he’s blue in the face, citing such rubbish as “he doesn’t want competition between girls and boys” and most famously, “chivalry”.

However, at the end of the day, all it means is that Andy see girls as being “different” to boys – and not in the sense that boys have winkies and girls don’t. Andy seriously sees them as inferior beings (to the point of writing most positive female references out of his Conservative Bible) and should only be educated to the bare minimum. After all, their sle purpose is to stay at home, cook the food and churn out the next generation of Republican stormtroopers.

The again, what would you expect from the spawn of Phyllis ‘Martial Rape Is Cool’ Schlafly?

This, proof that attending Harvard does not make you smart, will be our last “unbelievable” for a while. I’d like to be there when Schafly has lunch with the KJV-only guy.

New Conservative Bible will eliminate ‘liberal’ text: Version removes adultery story

If Andy Schafly has his way, there will be no socialists or snake handlers in the Bible. No woman caught in adultery. And, definitely, no Stephen Colbert.

Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia.com, wants to save the Scriptures from liberals with his latest venture, the Conservative Bible Project. He says translations like the New International Version have added socialist ideals to the Good Book. But his rewrite of the Bible has drawn criticism from biblical scholars, liberals and conservatives.

Schlafly, son of national political activist Phyllis Schlafly, says a conservative Bible should be masculine, for example, using the words mankind and man rather than more inclusive language. It also should shun terms like laborer or comrade. It also should put a free market spin on the sayings of Jesus.

Take Mark 10:25, where the King James Version says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Liberals have used that passage to attack the wealthy, Schafly said. The Conservative Bible substitutes “a man who cares only for money” for rich man.

“I don’t think Jesus is saying, ‘Let’s all be lazy so we can get to heaven.’ That’s not the message. And, if you translate the word rich as simply rich, some people are going to get the message that ‘I am going to be lazy so I can get to heaven easier,’” said Schlafly, who graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science and from Harvard Law School as an attorney, according to his Web site.

Click here to read the rest from a recent front-page story in The Tennessean—which is proof that Nashville needs a better newspaper.

Wow… this one of the stranger things to have come out of the whole Conservative Bible debacle, and I have to thank Joe Farah for pointing it out to me. Now, apparently Andy is teetotal, which I have nothing against and in fact I’m kinda grateful for. If he was on the piss, I’d hate to think what kind of insanity he would come up with.

Anyway, it seems that because Andy doesn’t drink, Jesus didn’t drink either… so all the references to wine that anybody who’s read the Bible should know have been replaced with… grape juice.I kid you not. So let’s see how this translation plays out when we swap “wine’”with “grape juice”.

During the Wedding at Cana, Jesus turned water into grape juice… not just that, but a better grape juice than what had originally been served. Maybe he dished up Grapetiser instead of LiquiFruit, who knows. The very fact that the whole issue about serving the best quality stuff first implies it had to be wine served there. What makes the whole thing even more ludicrous is the fact that Conservapedia’s own article on wine, contains the sentence, “Christ’s first miracle, performed at the wedding feast at Cana, was to turn six amphora filled with water into wine.” Once again, CP’s right hand knows exactly what its left hand is doing. Actually, reading their “translation” of John 2:9, I see they’ve left it as wine… for now. Maybe turning water into grape juice isn’t that a miracle, after all.

Matt 9:17 gives us an interesting twist on the old proverb, “Don’t but new wine into old bottles.” Now it’s “Neither do men put freshly squeezed grape juice into old skins.” Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it? Not to mention the fact that they’ve missed the point that the old bottles would break because of expanding gasses as the wine fermented. Then again, we wouldn’t expect these “experts”, to be too knowledgeable now. Just for consistency’s sake, in Mark 2:22, they decide to leave it as bottles and not skins for some reason.

Mark 12:2 gets a bit weird too. In the parable about the tenants who beat up the landowner’s servant, it talks about “grape season” instead of something sensible like harvest time. And in Mark 15:23, prior to getting nailed to the cross Jesus is apparently offered “grape juice mixed with myrrh”. Even though the original says “wine”, you’ll probably find it was closer to vinegar than grape juice.

Revelation, which is always fun to read (those desert mushrooms must have been strong around Antioch!) , doesn’t escape either. One of the stranger passages (Rev 6:6) reads, “And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.” Yes, you guessed it – wine becomes grape juice. Loses its impact just a tad, doesn’t it?

What about the Last Supper? Jesus holds up a glass of grape juice and says, “This is my blood, drink this in remembrance of me.” What? With grape juice? Hell, maybe he really was a meek little vegan hippie after all.

This is just the New Testament. I can’t wait to see how the Old Testament pans out. Noah gets drunk on grape juice should be an interesting one. And as for Lot’s daughters getting dad drunk on grape juice so they could get down to some incestuous rumpy pumpy… well, the fact that Lot wasn’t blotto on grape juice gives that sordid little story an even sicker twist.

It just goes to show – some things are best left well alone… especially by morons.

I’ve been waiting and praying (well, ok… just waiting) to see what the Right was going to say about Andy’s little project. I’ve already listed several examples in another article, but no doubt Andy would write those people off a liberals… even the happy-clappies on “Rapture Ready”. I’ve been hoping that an Ann Coulter or some other right-wing fundie would pick up on this and comment – one way or another.

My prayers have been answered.

Joseph Farah, of World Net Daily fame, has entered the fray. Now, there’s two things you need to know about Joe and WND. Firstly, this is the guy behind the “Where’s the Birth Certificate” billboards – in other words, he’s about as right wing and anti-Obama as Andy is. Joe is basically the Birther’s Birther. He also refers to Andrew Schlafly as, “the son of the heroic Phyllis Schlafly.” That alone should tell you where he stands, not to mention the fact he helped organise Mama Schlafly’s Take Back America clusterfuck.

Also, WND is not a mickey-mouse site – especially when compared to Conservapedia. Alexa tells me WND has a reach of o.045% (Conservapedia’s is 0.0041%) and a 3-month rank of 2,221 vs. 50,323. In other words, people read WND… a lot of people.

So, what does Farah have to say about the fruit of heroic Mama Schlafly’s loins and the fact that little Andrew has finally come out and put his politics before his religion?

I’ve seen some incredibly stupid and misguided initiatives by “conservatives” in my day, but this one takes the cake.

Because the Bible has been rewritten to conform with the agenda of “liberals,” a self-described “conservative” is spearheading an effort to rewrite it to his liking.

He also recommends cutting the adultery story in which Jesus says: “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at her.” What’s wrong with that? Well, apparently, Jesus was showing Himself to be soft on crime!

He doesn’t like the idea of the Bible talking about wine. He turns it into grape juice

It’s nutty.

I’m almost too embarrassed to write about this kind of trivialization and politicization of the Scriptures, but something needs to be said.

Rewriting the Bible to fit man’s ideas is always a bad idea – no matter who the man is or what his beliefs.

It’s also a profoundly dangerous practice spiritually.

There’s certainly nothing “conservative” about rewriting the Bible. The “conservative” thing to do would be to preserve, or conserve, the Scriptures as they were originally written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. blogsurfer.us

A plague on the houses of anyone and everyone who would tamper so frivolously with God’s Word.

So there you have it, straight from the mouth of somebody who technically should be Andy’s target market.

How does Andy respond? In typical style. “The article plainly misunderstand CBP and is so far “over the top” that I doubt a serious response is even necessary.  Suffice it to say that Mr. Farah should be criticizing the liberal rewrites of the Bible rather than a conservative preservation of it.”

Whoa!Wait a minute. This is World Net Daily – the source for most of Conservapedia’s so-called front page news articles. “Over the top”? Not worthy of a serious reply? Gosh… suddenly I get the feeling that even arch conservatives like Farah just aren’t conservative enough. But then again, he did criticise Andy, which automatically makes him (Farah, not Andy) a nasty liberal. Next thing is we’ll have Terry Koeckritz and Brian McDonald hanging around outside Farah’s office in order to show him the error of his ways.

Andy is incapable of wondering just why somebody might critisise what he’s doing. Instead it’s all Joe’s fault. That’s how Andy is – he never does anything wrong, it’s somebody else’s fault. And we all know petulant people like that – difference is, most of them are about 5 years old. Still, I wonder what Andrew’s mum, the “heroic” Phyllis makes of her son raping the Bible. Maybe I’ll drop her a mail and ask.

This guy thinks the Bible is too "liberal"...

At first, I didn’t believe it when I heard it.  Then, I did a little digging and now I must say that I am utterly disgusted.  I may not be a great Protestant, but I know wrong when I see it.  And the fact that Andy Schlafly is altering and omitting text from the Bible should be faced with outcry from both Catholics and Protestants.  The lack of outcry shows me how much both really feel about the “Word of God”.

Its bad enough that the Bible has the history that it does.  William Tyndale, amongst others, were charged as heretics for doing the unthinkable: translate the Bible from Latin to English.  Thus, this would allow for most people to be able to read the book for themselves.  Then, there was how the Bible was used to justify slavery in the South.  This is despite the fact that Ephesians 6:9 essentially states that God views the Master as no better than the Slave and Slaves should be treated as brothers.

There are those, including the late George Carlin, that contend that the Bible is a political document.  Yet all these actions by Schlafly do is affirm those suspicions and will only further drive people away.  Organized religion doesn’t need people like Schlafly to drive people away.  They do a good enough job all by themselves.

What modifications could be done you ask?  Here’s one: Eliminate unisex, “gender inclusive” language.  After all, women have no place in the Bible and are unworthy of any address, right?  Just look at Delilah or Jezebel as exemplary women.

Another one: Don’t Dumb It Down.  Isn’t the Bible meant to be accessible to people of all reading levels?  Are there not NIV, King James, and the Message for those to read the Bible at their own level?

Yet at the same time, there’s another modification: Eliminate Liberal Wordiness.  You don’t want it simplified, yet you don’t want it complicated.  You have NIV for simple.  King James for complex.  Message for laymen speak.  Pick the Bible that’s right for you!  And isn’t a wonder to have God be called by many titles, such as: “Yahweh”, “Jehovah”, “Lord”, “Shepherd”, “Branch”, “Stone”, “Father”, “Alpha and Omega”, “I Am”, “Word”, “Almighty”, “Sanctifier”, Strengthener”.  If that’s “Liberal”, then who WOULD want to be “Conservative”?

Next: Exclude Inauthentic Passages.  This means say goodbye to the adulteress story.  Yeah, cause Jesus would rather have had the prostitute stoned to hell himself since he was without sin.  Jesus was not the Prince of Peace, apparently.  He was the Prince of Pieces (of the 9mm and Glock variety).  He wanted sinners killed and would rather spit on tax collectors than be a “friend of tax-gatherers and sinners”.

Given the lack of attention by CBN or EWTN, or outcry from the Vatican, they seem just fine by this.  All the more evidence that the Bible doesn’t mean a thing to them.  Sure, I’m not much of a religious man, but what does that say of someone like me raising issue when the “Christians” and “Followers” condone such Orwellian-caliber treachery…

Don’t believe me?  Read’em and weep like Jesus did for Lazurus:

http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project

A laugh at the topic, courtesy of Stephen Colbert:

http://blog.sojo.net/2009/10/09/video-colbert-on-conservapedias-bible-translation-project/

It’s been around the blogosphere ten times already, but what the hell, being late for the party is better than staying home.

The Conservative Bible Project is an attempt to produce a Bible for Conservative (i.e., very far right wing) American Christians. It is championed by Andrew Schafly, the bright light behind Conservapedia.

The idea is to rid the Christian scriptures of foreign “liberal bias” according to ten Conservative guidelines:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
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.
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent; Defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”; using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Inauthentic Passages: excluding the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

Needless to say, professional biblical scholars, translators, committed Christians, bloggers and many more think the whole project is, well, stupid. Or evil. Or both.

For example, Jim West writes on “Bastardizing the Bible: Dilettantism at its Worst”  Steve Wiggins says “We Don’ Need another Bible”.

Wiggins has a podcast about it and you can listen in to see how good his Tina Turner impression is.

James McGrath gets it right (except for a wee little bit, but that can wait for a few paragraphs).

Don’t get me wrong: “rewriting” the Bible has a long and illustrious heritage. Chronicles retelling the story in the Former Prophets (or Deuteronomistic History, if you prefer). One Gospel retelling the story found in another. Midrashes and commentaries and Diatessarons and Targums and all sorts of other things. The only thing that bothers me is when people set about to rewrite the Bible but call it translation, or deny that rewriting the Bible is what they are really doing.

Beyond McGrath’s point about translation, I don’t have a quibble with the CBP. Not even ateensy little quibble. And even then, I’m not sure it is a quibble at all. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

On the one hand, as a liberal secularist who would hate to live under a CBP theocracy, one might think I would be worried about this project. But I’m not. I don’t really care one way or the other if the Conservapeople actually manage to pull this “translation” scheme off or not. Despite the huge Left-Right polarization in America (and increasingly in Canada), I don’t thing the CBP will be able to capture and retain a huge segment of the Christian Bible market.

Maybe I’m a bit of a naive optimist, but I think too many Christians across most of the theological spectrum of Christendom would not want to lose their church’s teachings on social justice that would be among the first things the CBP tries to excise. It’s not that all of the meek and the downtrodden will finally inherit the earth or find lasting comfort, but the message that people should work towards that ideal is not likely to die. And I’m happy about that. It’s a good ideal, regardless of where it comes from. In the end the CPB will fizzle although a relatively small group might canonize their Bible. And that is the interesting thing and brings us to the other hand.

Let me just say here that I think the Conservative Bible Project is wonderful from a purely academic standpoint. It is a great object lesson in how flexible a fixed canon actually can be to some people, and how revisionist programs are understood by their proponents as restorative actions. I assume the heroes of the “Conservative Reformation” actually believe in what they are doing, just as Martin Luther did when he wanted some slight emendations to the canon list of the church he “restored” to its original pristine purity. He apparently wanted Esther removed from the Old Testament and the Epistle of James from the New. He didn’t get his way but he tried.

As someone very interested in the hows and whys behind writings that become sacred, the CBP is a fascinating example of tendentious redaction (or is it “reduction”?). If my area of expertise was the history of modern biblical interoperation or modern religious/political discourses, I would be in the market for a new anthropologist’s hat and sending letters to the Project’s managers asking if I could sit in on their board meetings, just to see the process in action.

For as much as people want to discount and discredit the project (and on purely academic grounds as a scholarly “translation” it can be critiqued any which way you like), as an exercise in religious thought and action it stands above academic judgments of professional translators and scholars.

I think for Schafly and his people “translate” is as much a symbolic, mystified, religious concept as it is a purely linguistic one. Outsiders should not take its use in this context quite so literally, and this is my little wee quibble with McGrath. “Translation” for the CBP is the cargo-cultish production of an effigy bible intended to provide legitimacy for a religious viewpoint on the defensive by attempting to “fight fire with fire”. For the true believers, the end result will be regarded as faithful English rendition of what this group thinks are the authentic biblical texts. In that sense, it will be a translation to them, and not an emended KJV.

The project’s planners have a right to their religion, and scholars seeking to understand the religions that exist in the world have no right to tell these people what their religion should be.

“Sacred” texts have human origins, just like any other text. “Sacred” is a quality given by a person or a community to a book or other item. It is not a quality intrinsic to and inseparable from those objects. For thousands of years people have been inventing and reinventing religions, gods, myths and “sacred” writings. This is no different, except it is happening before our eyes. Cool.

What is going through Schafly’s head? Well, what was going through Joseph Smith’s head when he was “translating” the Book of Mormon? Can a secular scholar think anything other than Smith’s efforts bear a striking resemblance to “composition”? So how aware was Smith of the deceptions he was weaving as to the book’s purported miraculous origins? Did he come to believe his own story? I don’t know, but I suspect Schafly truly believes that he is restoring and not rewriting. And that is how scholars should approach the project. How much do political agendas influence religious belief? Apparently quite a lot in some cases.

Is religion really a phenomenon separate from politics? Many people would say that ideally it should be. But historically, it has not been and that, I think, is not likely to change any time soon.

It is easy to denounce the deliberate production of purportedly sacred or inspired documents, but let’s face it, the ancient literature now contained the various bibles of Christendom and Judaism  probably had as mundane of origins. People just writing what they believed or what they wanted others to believe. Some were great poet, some were boring hacks and some may well have been total jerks.

Many biblical scholars maintain that the book of Jeremiah was once edited by people with an pronounced ideological affection for the ideas and terminology found in the book of Deuteronomy. If this so-called “deuteronomistic redaction” occurred it changed the overall character of the book of Jeremiah which would be, in a number of sections, rather different if those allegedly “dtr” passages are excised. If Schafly is a crackpot, then why not the “deuteronomists”?

How do human made books (the only kind there is) get canonized? There is often no evidence. But will Schafly manage to get his Bible canonized (in some sense) in some churches? Perhaps. But will it be because of intrinsic qualities of the product or the sales job its producers undertake? Were there dtr spin doctors and pitch men?

Religions are always innovating, changing and evolving (I just had to get that word in!). Humans create them, consume then and then fiddle with them to make them better suited to their changing needs. Yet, religions are often portrayed as as timeless. A novelty quickly becomes the way one has always done things. Innovate like hell and do it conservatively. Nothing unusual there, Mr. Schafly. Carry on.

Technorati Tags: Conservative+Bible+Project, religion, Schafly,, religious, right,, Conservapedia, Bible+translation, reformation, canon

Several other bloggers have written great posts about this, and I haven’t until now. I’ve been trying not to do so. I read too much about it today, though, and as my blood boils I have to vent. Andrew Schlafly, the son of Phyllis Schlafly, is the brains behind what might be the most loathsome thing I’ve ever seen: the Corrupt … err, … “Conservative Bible Project.”

Yes, that’s right. Mr. Schlafly is tired of all of those liberal-sounding things in the Bible, and so he’s going to fix it once and for all. Whereas most Christians view the Bible (including legitimate translations) as the Word of God, Mr. Schlafly views it as a rough draft. Some of us wrestle with the Word, pray about its meaning, and try to work out what it means and how we relate parts that seem to conflict. Mr. Schlafly simply wants to remove or reword that which he finds challenging.

The Conservative Blasphemy … ummm, … I mean, Bible Project takes the King James Version and changes the language, edits out the undesirable parts, and proceeds with what they call a translation. Taken from the explanation on Conservapedia (the site Mr. Schlafly constructed because Wikipedia is too biased):

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:^[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
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]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent;^[4] Defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;^[5] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Inauthentic Passages: excluding the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

Most people who read this think that it’s a joke at first. I’m sad to report, it’s not. Andrew Schlafly has actually taken it upon himself not just to mis-interpret Scripture, which would at least leave room for discussion, but to change the actual wording of Scripture for his purposes. Note that his purposes are political in nature. He states very clearly that language problems are the minor source of difficulty. His use of the word “bias” seems to mean anything that seems to indicate a liberal-like message.

Clearly,  Mr. Schlafly believes that Jesus would be a Republican. Worse than that, he wants to strike out any evidence to the contrary.

As noted in the passage cited above, and on PJMiller’s blog, Mr. Schlafly has decided not to include at all the story about Jesus interrupting a stoning and saving the life of a woman being condemned for adultery. This removes from the Gospels the saying, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” and therefore we don’t need to spend any time worrying about whether we’re being overly-judgmental. Simply dismiss the passage as a fake! Doesn’t that make life easier?

At one point, the Conservative Bible Politicization … ummm … Project even committed the utter absurdity of calling the Pharisees “Liberals.” I do have to note that this has been fixed, but the idea that they would even consider this kind of nonsense is beyond infuriating. Caiaphus himself looks respectful of Scripture compared to these people.

Look also at what they want to remove and why. Listed as the first example of a falsehood, they go after one of the famed sayings from Jesus while He hung on the Cross:

First Example – Liberal-Promoted Falsehood

The earliest, most authentic manuscripts of the Gospel According to Luke lack this verse fragment set forth at the start of Luke 23:34:^[7]

Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Is this a corruption of the original, perhaps promoted by liberals without regard to its authenticity? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals, although it does not appear in the earliest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke. It should not appear in a conservative Bible, because in point of fact Jesus might never had said it at all.

The fact that the statement does not appear in any other Gospel is irrelevant. Many things appear in only one Gospel. If we are to ignore that which was reported by only one Gospel, then we’ll be missing quite a lot. Frankly, as this explanation goes on, we see the shallow thinking of the arrogant apostates “translators.” None of the persecutors knew what they were doing. Whether they should have is another question, but no one knew what was happening. Not one of them knew that they were killing the Son of God. The Romans, of course, would have virtually no access to the teachings of Judaism. As for the Jews, most of them didn’t get what was happening. They had thought that the Messiah was going to be a forceful leader to expel Rome the way Moses had led them out of Egypt. Even most of the disciples didn’t get what was happening … certainly the rest of the crowd had no idea.

Worst, though, they are simply removing a passage from the Bible because they don’t think it makes sense, and so they attribute it to bias. There is no need to reconsider one’s prejudices if this is how we look at the Bible. The Bible will simply be rewritten to say what one wants it to say.

Make no mistake … I’ve heard liberal theologians exercise some rather-stunning convolutions to try to explain how a teaching can possibly fit with the Bible. At least, though, they engage in that exercise. This leaves open the possibility of realizing a conflict and having to respond to it. Mr. Schlafly has declared powerfully that he simply doesn’t care. That which conflicts with his ideology will be removed.

If Mr. Schlafly chooses to print his final work, perhaps the cover should be emblazoned with a golden calf. It would seem an appropriate way to celebrate this piece of idolatry. Ironically, this means that Mr. Schlafly is engaging in the most liberalized Bible interpretation I’ve ever seen.