Yet More Evidence the Bible is Being Edited Even Today

One of the most popular posts I’ve made on this blog was about how the Bible has been edited in recent decades to promote a specific political agenda related to abortion. Since writing that post, it has become even more clear that the Bible continues to be edited in order to promote a very modern, right-wing, and fundamentalist worldview. What’s more is that those engaged in this effort, namely those paragons of intellectual honesty and virtue at Conservapedia (where they believe that Einstein’s physics theories are a “left-wing conspiracy”), are openly admitting what they are doing. But don’t take it from me, read what they have to say on their very own page for their Conservative Bible Project:

The Conservative Bible Project is a project utilizing the “best of the public” to render God’s word into modern English without liberal translation distortions. A Colbert Report interview featured this project. We completed a first draft of our translation of the New Testament on April 23, 2010.

Already our translators have identified numerous pro-abortion distortions that omit or twist clear references to the unborn child.

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning:

*lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
*lack of precision in modern language
*translation bias, mainly of the liberal kind, in converting the original language to the modern one.

Experts in ancient languages are helpful in reducing the first type of error above, which is a vanishing source of error as scholarship advances understanding. English language linguists are helpful in reducing the second type of error, which also decreases due to an increasing vocabulary. But the third — and largest — source of translation error requires conservative principles to reduce and eliminate. [emphasis in the original] …

So there you have it. The folks at Conservapedia abandon all pretense and openly admit their political agenda; no doubt the phrase “best of the public” refers only to those people who share the fundamentalist worldview of Conservapedia’s authors. But what about their so-called claims to be addressing “lack of precision in the original language” and “translation bias”? Well, this article has some interesting info on that…

Right-Wing Group Seeks Help Rewriting the Bible Because It’s Not Conservative Enough

The King James Bible and more recent translations are veritable primers of progressive agitprop, according to the founder of Conservapedia.

… Don’t know Aramaic, Hebrew or ancient Greek? Not a problem. What they are looking for is not exactly egghead scholarship, but a knack for using words they’ve read in the Wall Street Journal. They have a list of promising candidates on their website— words like capitalism, work ethic, death penalty, anticompetitive, elitism, productivity, privatize, pro-life—all of which are conspicuously missing from those socialist-inspired Bibles we’ve been reading lately. …

Uhhh, yeah. Because ancient societies totally used the word “capitalism”, despite the fact the word didn’t even exist until the mid-19th century. But wait, it gets better!

… To give a sense of how to go about your own retranslation, here are some examples of changes the editors have already made.

Take that story where the mob surrounds a woman accused of adultery and gets ready to stone her, but Jesus intervenes and says, “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone” (John 7:53-8:11). It might have been a later addition that wasn’t in the original Gospels, according to some right-thinking, or rather right-leaning scholars. So the editors have excised this bleeding-heart favorite from the Good Book, and they’ve also removed Jesus’ words on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

“The simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing,” Schlafly points out, proving that, “Jesus might never had said it at all.”

Another thing Jesus might never have said at all is, “Blessed are the meek.” Change that one to, “Blessed are the God-fearing,” the translation’s editors advise, which is far less touchy-feely than the King James version.

Where Jesus teaches that, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:24) our mentors at Conservapedia recommend that we scratch the word “rich” and replace it with either “fully fed and entertained” or, if you prefer, “idle miser,” which have none of the Occupy Wall Street-ish sour grapes of the better-known translation.

When Jesus greets his disciples with the blessing, “Peace be with you” (John 20, 26), the editors cleverly change the wording to, “Peace of mind be with you,” so that nobody gets the wrong idea and thinks Jesus was some kind of lilly-livered pacifist.

Likewise where Jesus says, “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but to save it” (John 3, 17), they change “world” to “mankind,” so it is clear the Christian savior is not advocating environmentalism here. Hey, you can’t be too careful!

Finally, when Jesus admonishes hypocrites to, “Cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye,” the conservative Bible replaces the word “hypocrite” with “deceiver,” since hypocrite is often “misused politically against Christians.” Good point! …

I think you get the idea.

However, there is one overwhelming fact that should be emphasized in all this: regardless of what the “original Bible” (an oxymoron for many reasons) did or did not say, what this whole fiasco proves, without a doubt, is that the Bible – like all religious texts – are the work of humans! The fact that the folks at Conservapedia are doing what they’re doing in such a blatant manner shows that they are, like all religious believers, I think, simply projecting their own beliefs and value systems onto what they believe to be an all-powerful god.

And therein lies one of the great ironies of the entire thing: so many right-wing fundamentalists have justified their worldview in the past by pointing to the Bible and saying “See? It says so in the Bible!” Yet now we see a bunch who are so wedded to their right-wing political worldview that they are openly changing the Bible (which they often claimed is inerrant and unchanging) to be more in line with that worldview.

If this isn’t evidence that those espousing this right-wing ideology and religion are doing so in a blatantly subjective and relativistic manner, I don’t know what is.

It also makes you wonder just how many times in the past such holy books have been edited to promote a specific, and wholly human, agenda, doesn’t it?

Convergence/Skepchicon Day 3: Women as Skeptical Activists

On the third day of Convergence/Skepchicon, I attended the “Women as Skeptical Activists” panel discussion.  On the panel were Rebecca Watson (moderator), Maria Walters, Jennifer Newport, Debbie Goddard, Carrie Iwan, and Pamela Gay.  Especially since I’m a board member of the newly-formed Women Thinking Free Foundation (WTFF), I found the discussion especially interesting.  Read on…

Women as Skeptical Activists

What does it mean to be a woman as a skeptical activist?  What does it mean to be a woman in a subculture which is predominantly male?

The Importance of Being Wrong

I was initially planning on titling this post “The Importance of Being Right” – but then I thought that we all pretty much already knew that. We all know that if you don’t do the engineering calculations correctly, for instance, the car engine doesn’t work. Or if you don’t really know what you’re doing with biochemistry, the drug/vaccine/antibiotic you’re making doesn’t cure disease effectively. Clearly, because the universe functions according to a set group of natural laws we must make sure that our science & technology fits with those laws. To insist the universe adhere to our own preconceptions while ignoring how it really behaves is a sure path to self-delusion. Taken to its logical extreme, such thinking leads towards solipsism – also known as the philosophical idea that “My mind is the only thing that I know exists.”

Aside: I like to ask those espousing solipsism whether or not they look both ways before crossing the street – strangely enough, the answer has always been “yes.” The following cartoon also illustrates the silliness of taking solipsism too seriously…

So, we all know that because there is an external reality beyond our own mind that functions independently of that mind, the importance of being right is unquestionable.

But what about the importance of being wrong? I will tell you this… it is very important to not only be wrong (to a certain degree) but, more importantly, how to learn about why we were wrong. I had the idea for this post because I was at my martial arts dojo today, and I was trying to help a less-experienced student with a technique which is a defense against mae-giri, also known as a front kicking attack. As I attacked him, he had a hard time avoiding my kicks, and he grew frustrated that he wasn’t able to perform the technique easily. I responded by telling him not to let it bother him, because he’ll do it wrong 100 times before he gets it right once. Hopefully, throughout the process of doing it wrong so many times, my junior student will learn how to do it correctly. We learn by making mistakes.

It is no different in my classroom – I’ve dealt with many a frustrated student who was having trouble learning how to do a physics problem or attempting to work their way through a lab. Only with constant practice, and by making a plethora of errors, can most students effectively learn what not to do. As I tell my students, the reason why I’m so good at physics is because I’ve had so many experiences making mistakes! 🙂

There is another issue – many students are stuck on always getting the “right” answer in science class, and sometimes teachers (myself included) are guilty of overly reinforcing this attitude. But to get the process – and not merely the facts – of science across to our students properly, I think we have to walk a fine line as educators. And this is where the importance of experimental lab work in science classes cannot be overstated.

In my classes I require my students to do a lot of lab work. Many times I purposefully set up scenarios in which the students are to draw conclusions from their data. A perfect example is when I ask them to make a series of measurements on the period of a simple pendulum, and they are to isolate three variables in the process – mass of the pendulum bob, amplitude of the swing, and the pendulum’s length. I then ask them to, based upon their data, determine how (or even if) each of these variables affects the period of the pendulum as it swings to and fro.

The responses I get from my students are interesting, because despite the fact that they’ve collected the data, many answer the question incorrectly. Many will say that the more massive the pendulum bob or the smaller the amplitude, the shorter the period of the pendulum. And this is incorrect – under controlled conditions, the period of a simple pendulum is only affected by its length! That is, the longer the pendulum, the longer its period, and the mass & amplitude don’t affect the period.

Often, when I point this out to students, they don’t believe me at first. But then I point to the data which they collected, and then they see it – they allowed their preconceived biases of how they thought the pendulum should behave to creep into the scientific process. In so doing, they were giving me what they thought ahead of time to be the “right” answer, instead of gleaning out the proper answer from their data in a non-biased manner. Their conclusions were wrong, but when it comes to such a lesson I want them to understand why they were wrong – experimenter bias.

I mention all of this because it should be noted that science cannot be done in a vacuum – this is why we often speak of a scientific community. Scientists are just as human as anyone, and we all come to the process with our own biases & preconceptions, and – just like my students – we sometimes see what we want to see. But the scientific endeavor is different from all others in one critical way – peer-review. Peer-review is necessary in science precisely to make sure that our biases, preconceptions, mistakes, and sometimes outright fraud do not unduly influence the results of our explorations. Through peer-review we often catch each others mistakes, we demand that proposed hypotheses be falsifiable, we insist that experiments be repeatable and verifiable. As such, we get things wrong all the time in science, but we figure out why we get it wrong – and this puts us closer to the path of getting things right. Through this rigorous peer-review process, we see that science is self-correcting.

And that is a major distinction between science and pseudoscience. The scientific community does peer-review, learns from its collective mistakes, and employs a largely self-correcting process in its search for our understanding of the universe. Pseudoscientists of all stripes – astrologers, homeopaths, creationists, and conspiracy theorists to name a few – make this one fatal flaw: lacking adequate peer-review, they don’t learn from being wrong. Rather, they insist upon molding the universe to fit with their worldview, and in so doing they delude themselves & others. This cartoon illustrates the point rather well…

Now I’m off to grade some exams. Hopefully my students have learned from earlier mistakes.