The morning coffee and the fall foliage
It turns out that the bible may have been mistranslated. It might not actually say that God created the heavens and the earth. What will the young-earth creationists do now?
The Tomahawk Story features Alec Guinness and Grace Kelly, and is awesome.
Halloween is around the corner. The town of Bobtown, PA has banned it because they are crazy, overprotective and irrational.
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Categories: morning coffee
re: bible sotry. but she’s obviously a liberal obama loving academic so its not like creationists will care. just like they want to interpret pharisee as liberal or ‘intellectual-elite’ becuase they want to interpret Bible the ‘right’ way. i forget if you posted that (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/group-of-us-conservatives-rewrite-the-bible/article1319247/) i can’t remember if i got that off googlereader or you site as i get all my fun links from you now
@Liz:
I read that, but didn’t post it here — you must have got it from someplace else. In any case, I refuse to believe that Conservapedia accurately depicts the Young Earth Creationist movement. We like to believe that they are dumb, blind and dogmatic, but that encompasses our personal biases — we are enlightened, they are not.
They believe the same thing about us — that we follow whatever the scientists tell us, unblinkingly.
I would like to believe that, as a group of people who believe everything written in the bible to be fact without any allegory whatsoever, the actual meaning of the original text would be important. Van Wolde is reputedly a first-rate biblical scholar, so her words should carry weight.
It is importnat to remember that Conservapedia is a political movement, not a religious one. I would be surprised to learn of churches abandoning their own versions of the bible for one written by a website owner.
In the article you link to, he says The trouble is, new translations of the Bible are done by professors at liberal universities who overwhelmingly voted for Obama. I believe that the most popular translation is the King James version, which was not produced at a liberal university. New versions that are under widespread use are from those such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons. I do not think these were developed at institutions of higher learning, either.
Moreover, I believe that this man has no clue how biblical scholars vote.
I can certainly see an argument that they are part of the intellectual community that overwhelmingly supported Obama over McCain. I can also see the argument that they are likely high earners (as American university professors) with an attachment to religion. The religious and rich tend to vote to Republican. Which is the bigger factor? This man doesn’t care.
In any case, I choose to believe that Young Earth Creationists aren’t stupid. Misguided, perhaps. Uneducated, probably — at least in regards to certain areas of science. Indoctrinated: clearly. But none of this makes them stupid, individually.
Rebuttals such as this one are fantastic and relevant. There is no reason for them to plug their ears and close their eyes.
There is a certain segment of American society that chooses to believe that academia is evil. These are foolish people, who end up following the lead of people trained in academia who choose to fool them.
The Conservapedia guy went to Princeton and Harvard. Bush went to Yale. Cheney has an MA and started a PhD. Cheney’s wife has a PhD in Literature. Best not believe a word that Cheney couple has to say. People with graduate degrees in the arts are notorious for their left-wing bias.
But I have digressed.
Otherwise intelligent people who believe that the bible is the word of God and wholly true, to the word, will find this important regardless of the disrespect highly educated right-wingers pay to intellectuals. It is people who have never read the bible but insist that the world is 6000 years old, evolution is a lie, and that American healthcare is better because it’s American that won’t believe a word of it because somebody intelligent said it.
But why care about them?
@Liz
hee. you made a blog post in that reply.
i doubt that young earth creationists will pay attention to the call to edit the bible among conservapedia’s lines but at the same time, i can’t see them paying attention to biblical criticism/history/interpretation unless it comes from their own circle of universities. they just aren’t that into outside ideas; they have formed their own churches, schools and entire publishing industry to compensate for the fact that they are out on their own little branch.
when studying this last term, they all use circular arguments. stating ‘oh look at all these publications on the fact that we are proper academics, scholars, scientists, and theologians’ when all their credentials stem from their own set up and paid for agencies. outside interpretations are not welcome, really. i get a bit flippant, i suppose, in these replies but its hard to take them seriously.
the thing with conservapedia though, they are co-opting a very powerful medium. the democrats vs republicans now good vs evil sort of light. its not like there aren’t enough nutjobs who pick and choose, or take out of context, arguments and quotes for their own uses. now conservapedia can give them a millenarian, good vs evil, platform to throw into the mix as well. hooray for them.
@Liz
The internet gives everybody a platform, and an easy way to find others who think the same way. The dark side of the internet is that it makes people more insular, rather than broadening their horizons.
We gravitate towards ideas that are similar to our own, to people who think the same way we do. This is the wonderful and frightening thing about Conservapedia.
Those who believe its contents already will read it and nod their heads. Those who do not, will laugh at it and browse away — if they find it at all. They are not co-opting a medium, it’s not powerful, and they don’t shed (or block) any light from being shone on any issue.
The dark side of it is that people will have these beliefs reinforced, rather than challenged. And we — who disagree — do not get our beliefs challenged by the conservatives out there. I’m certainly not wading through the creationist opinion of dinosaurs on the off chance that the editors who allowed it also allowed a nugget of truth or insight elsewhere.
The internet is a surprisingly polarizing force. Certainly not something I anticipated ten or twelve years ago, when I was studying its potential impact on society.