Conservapedia reports on "The Conservative Bible Project," a translation project to rid the Bible of 'liberal bias' and that would, among other things, 'debunk the pervasive and hurtful myth that Jesus would be a political liberal today.' (I have this image of Jesus as Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck--with Ann Coulter in the role of the whore who's been savéd by them, natch--because you just know that Jesus would be some kind of fat clod who's lying to preserve The Truth.)
The premise is that they're going to start with the King James Version as their baseline (does anyone spot a First Flaw already?) and they're then going to just... translate it into contemporary English. They've eschewed the use of people with educations and backgrounds, as in this quote from the main page:
The committee in charge of updating the bestselling version, the NIV, is dominated by professors and higher-educated participants who can be expected to be liberal and feminist in outlook. As a result, the revision and replacement of the NIV will be influenced more by political correctness and other liberal distortions than by genuine examination of the oldest manuscripts. As a result of these political influences, it becomes desirable to develop a conservative translation that can serve, at a minimum, as a bulwark against the liberal manipulation of meaning in future versions.
There are also comments about the need to remove "socialist" elements from the translation and to "Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning." There's also a goal of avoiding "dumbing down" of the text so that it's at a higher than 7th-grade reading level. Funnier still is that not only have they missed their audience again, but that bullet is followed by a bullet that starts with the classic misuse: "Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms."
It's really kind of fun to see so much ignorance flying a flag, you know? It's a shame that the whole goal is to rewrite the Bible into something that's even easier to use as the baseline for fascism and stupidity. The idea that translating the text might actually require historical context is lost on these yahoos, as is, well, almost anything except their own agenda of being unhappy with anyone having an opinion they don't like.
One wonders if the dicta about killing witches and about wearing coats of two fabrics will be kept. You can just bet that the comments about homosexuality are going to be bannered somehow.
Amazing. I can see this whole website as an argument against ever teaching the peasants to read; it keeps giving them ideas above their station.
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