Sunday, August 16, 2009

Politics: The Bible is a Liberal Conspiracy

This just in from my favorite nuts over at Conservapedia – the Bible, apparently, is a liberal conspiracy (well, not all of it, just the parts that talk about compassion, and not judging other people). For those of you who haven’t heard of them, Conservapedia is the “conservative” and “trustworthy” Wikipedia (which is, of course, a liberal conspiracy). The truth, of course, is conservative, and so we must create a website dedicated to carefully censoring all information so that the public only gets the truth, unbiased by liberal lies. This is naturally the only way to be trustworthy. Now, I consider myself pretty conservative, so this kind of absurdity really get to me. It’s kind of like having an idiot sibling who always hits on the waitresses, only more embarrassing.

Anyway, on to this business about the Bible being a liberal conspiracy. This is not, first of all, the same as the King James only folks. That particular group believes the King James Bible is the only legitimate translation, because more recent ones have used as reference documents that were not available when the KJV was translated and have decided to remove a few verses as inauthentic. I happen not to agree with that group, but they’re not really crazy. The folks at Conservopedia, however, have decided to retranslate the Bible, and use as many conservative ideas as possible. These include “homeschool” for Jesus teaching his disciples and “rich” with “idle miser” (because stories in which Jesus admonishes the rich look bad for rich conservatives I guess…).

That business about the story of the woman caught in adultery being maybe not in the original gospel, by the way, has been known for quite some time, and really should be common knowledge, it’s in the foot notes of most translations of the Bible after all. There are however, very early copies of the story and its generally acknowledged that it’s a genuine story about Jesus that got later inserted into John. Of course, regardless of whether it’s genuine or not, there’s plenty of other verses about not judging other people which aren’t in question.

Now, I attend college, so I understand liberal bias (well, pseudo-liberal, there’s really nothing liberal about the way they think) but this is not the way to handle it. Conservapedia, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!!!