Conservapedia hurts cause by rewriting Bible
Posted October 8, 2009 at 8:30 pm in Opinion
These days, not even the bible is immune to an overly enthusiastic editor’s pen.
This is the case with Conservapedia, a wiki-based online encyclopedia designed with a pro-American, conservative Christian ideology in mind. Citing liberal bias in current translations, the site recently started a project to retranslate the Bible.
Self-heralded as “the watchdog of the internet,” Conservapedia was originally created to offset the perceived liberal bias of Wikipedia, or the rest of the “homosexual and atheist loving” information media for that matter. According to the front page of their website, the Conservative Bible Project attributes liberal bias and errors in the modern bible to three sources: lack of precision in the traditional language, lack of precision in the modern language and translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.
The members of Conservapedia and supporters hope to remedy these errors by relieving the Bible of “liberal” words such as “government” and “gambling,” and even entire verses which they claim were either “later inserted” or simply too liberal to include.
Not only is rewriting the bible an exercise in hubris, it does little to fight the widely held stereotype that conservatives are easily offended. The Conservapedia movement needs to face the fact that many revered and ancient teachings of the Bible are liberal in nature. The folks at Conservapedia want to “express free market parables” in their retranslation, but, in terms of economics, Christianity is definitely more geared towards the socialist idea of bringing up the poor than it is to the Republican attitude of a free-market economy.
The Bible was translated by religious institutions with great care and deliberateness; a confluence of both traditional and modern languages have brought the work to its current state.
Since Obama took office, a few active members of the right wing have been involved in some rather extreme rhetorical outbursts, notably accusations of Obama being a fascist dictator with foreign interests.
Rather than being grounded in satire and exaggeration like most overboard political discourse of the past, these expressions of anger have actually been meant to be taken literally for the most part. Retranslating the modern Bible to conform with conservative beliefs, however, introduces a whole new level of arrogance and extremism.
Those unhappy with the unfavorable reputation that conservatives have had of late should stop placing blame on liberals or the media, and focus it more on initiatives such as these.
Gokul Agrawal is a sophomore majoring in business administration.
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I’d say that editing translations they “don’t like” gives them NO credibility.
And this after I’ve heard christianists arguing for years that the Bible says what it means, and means what it says. Even in the many instances when it is flat-out wrong (bats = birds) or contradicts itself as in the dueling verses dealing with dead brothers; one version says it is an abomination to marry your brother’s wife and the other says a brother should marry his widowed sister-in-law and do the nasty with her.
Bonus liberal points for getting off-track and using the nutty members of a website nobody’s heard of to smear mainstream conservatism. Double bonus liberal points for trying to argue that the Bible promotes socialism and disdains freedom.
Back on topic, Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air has a good discussion of what’s wrong with the Conservapedia Bible-editing project. One of the dumber things they’re doing is trying to correct what they see as a translation bias not by going back to the original text, but by editing the English translations that they don’t like. That right there costs them a lot of credibility.
Agreed that this exercise in Bible rewriting is lame. However, Mr. Agrawal repeats a common fallacy: “Christianity is definitely more geared towards the socialist idea of bringing up the poor than it is to the Republican attitude of a free-market economy.”
Actually, Jesus Christ did not particularly concern Himself with how GOVERNMENTS treat the poor, and that is what discussions about socialism/capitalism etc. involve. Christianity is about YOU the individual, and how YOU are situated in regard to your poor neighbor (widow, orphan, etc.). It is DEFINITELY not about you telling me how to take care of the poor, or me telling you. Christianity, with its emphasis on a personal saving relationship with God, is ultimately about your individual choices, your individual life, and what you choose to make of it. Further, it could certainly be argued that the “Republican attitude of a free-market economy,” as Mr. Agrawal so awkwardly puts it, has been a greater friend to more people, economically speaking, than socialism could ever dream of.