I'll Have To Designate A New More Moronic Kind Of Moron To Categorize This

Yikes! Conservapedia Launches Effort to Translate the Bible Into Conservativespeak

There's a verse in the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus enters a synagogue on the Sabbath and finds a man with a withered hand. "And they watched him," according to the King James version of the Bible, referring to those in the temple, "whether he would heal him on the sabbath day; that they might accuse him."

But a new—and still evolving—conservative translation of the Bible prefers a more populist, Glenn Beckish take: "The intellectuals watched Jesus to see if he might catch and accuse him of healing on the Sabbath."

The new translation is part of the Conservative Bible Project, sponsored by Conservapedia, a Wikipedia for the right. "Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations," the project's home page explains.

You've got to be kidding me. Oh, don't get me wrong, there are some silly things going on with modern translations of the Bible (like the constant neutering of God), not to mention an almost pathological dislike of beauty and poetry. Richard John Neuhaus put it this way:

Back in May 2001, I wrote in this space, under the title “Bible Babel,” about the translation that is the unfortunate New American Bible (NAB). It is a subject that should not be dropped. Not, mind you, that I expect anybody to do anything about it any time soon. But some day, please God, there will be a real reform of the misguided reforms of recent decades, and the NAB (along with the Revised NAB and the Amended Revised NAB and whatever version of the NAB that crops up in this Sunday’s Mass guide) should be on the agenda. Robert Louis Wilken has written wisely that the Bible is the lexicon of the Church and the liturgy is the grammar of the Bible. Among Catholics subjected to the NAB, and all are now subjected to it, the lexicon takes a terrible beating.

Everyone who has sung or listened to Handel’s “Messiah” knows the words: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6, KJV). Magnificent. Here, as of this week’s amended Missalette, is the New American Bible: “For a child is born to us, a son is given us; upon his shoulder dominion rests. They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.” Try singing that.

Absolutely right. So, I'm certainly not against curbing the excesses of the soul-less translations that abound.

But attempting to read Smith, Hayek and Friedman back into the Bible is just plain nuts. And, yes, that is exactly what they want to do. Among their "guidelines":

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

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which 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...

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

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

As I said before.... yikes!

Others on this:

The Anchoress: This is where I get off the boat.

Rod Dreher:

More seriously, the insane hubris of this really staggers the mind. These right-wing ideologues know better than the early church councils that canonized Scripture? They really think it's wise to force the word of God to conform to a 21st-century American idea of what constitutes conservatism? These jokers don't worship God. They worship ideology.

Ed Morrissey:

... if one believes the Bible to be the Word of God written for His purposes, which I do, then the idea of recalibrating the language to suit partisan political purposes in this age is pretty offensive — just as offensive as they see the “liberal bias” in existing translations. If they question the authenticity of the current translations, then the only legitimate process would be to work from the original sources and retranslate. And not just retranslate with political biases in mind, but to retranslate using proper linguistic processes and correct terminology.

All good thoughts, but I'd add this; No conservative, someone who had read (and understood) Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshotte, would have even begun such a process. A real conservative would have honored the tradition and not attempted to pervert scripture to suit the partisan aims of a given day. After all, for the conservative, our role in this world is to pass on to future generations those things that are good we have received from generations past. We don't get to mutilate them first.