For those who think I exaggerate the problem

[valarltd]

Conservatizing the Bible

Apparently the Bible is too liberal for the fine people at Conservapedia. Check their rewrite guidelines:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[1]
Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
...
Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

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



Free Market parables. From a man who practically preached communism. From a religious movement that started as "Cast your lot among us and let us all have one purse." From a book of Law that decrees all debts forgiven every 7 years and everything back to the original owner every 49 years.

Wanna bet the adultress story comes under "liberal insert" while the Benjaminite's Concubine falls under "proper marital relations and hospitality?"

Comments

[montgomeryscott.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I think I'm going to cry, because of the pervasive influence people like these people, if not these actual people, have on politics and religion in this country.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Exactly. It's not my holy book, but 80% of Americans who believe it. And people like this, who want to rewrite it to reflect their own prejudices and political agendas scare me.

Of course, King James did the same.

[montgomeryscott.livejournal.com]

This is why I believe the world is going to fall apart not with a bang, but with a whimper. Every single time this happens, each time this type of influence gets a bit stronger, the world loses a bit more of itself.

It scares the living daylights out of me.

[jess-faraday.livejournal.com]

Free market parables?

Get those f&*Kin' moneylenders out of here!

This makes me ill and ashamed.

[revdorothyl.livejournal.com]

Free Market Parables?!!! Oh, for crying out loud!

The story of the adulteress in John 8 was pretty clearly a late addition to the text, but I always thought it was a conservative addition (after all, it takes two to commit adultery, and where was the male offender?).

And you're right, these same people probably relish the truly appalling story of the Levite's nameless and much-abused concubine and the near-destruction of the tribe of Benjamin in retaliation in Judges 19.

And the story of Jephthah's daughter in Judges 11 probably gives them a giggle!

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

The horror of the Concubine story is not JUST the rape. It's the fact her husband dismembers her...and we are never told is she dead when he starts that process!

Actually, these people don't really know the more appalling stories. If they do, they like to gloss over them.

I was always a big fan of Hosea myself. "See Israel, God loves you so much, he's like a man married to a whore who takes care of her even when she has left him to live with her pimp."

[revdorothyl.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry for not being clearer -- by "much-abused" I was trying to convey not only the events that happened just before her death and the horror of having her husband then finish her off and cut up her body to send out as some kind of perverse 'greeting card' to arouse the ire of the other tribes, but also the fact that she seems to have been treated as a non-person long before those events took place.

Hosea really lays it on the line, though I've always been really fond of Micah 6, as well, and especially 6:8 ("...what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?")

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

One of the brave commenters at beliefnet peeked in, and reports that they want to re-write John 1:1 as "In the beginning was the Truth". Do you have any idea Do you have any idea *why* they want to translate "Logos" as "Truth" instead of "Word"?!?

What immediately comes to *my* mind is that "Word" has intrinsically human associations; "Truth" is more likely to be associated with the inhuman truths (small T) of science. That is, that they are trying to re-write the Bible to be more science-y, or science-esque. But that may well be my biases.

[montgomeryscott.livejournal.com]

In light of watching "Jesus Camp" I'd say your theory is spot-on. They want to trump up their biblical case against science by trying to muddy the waters.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it occurred to me that logos is in a lot of science words: biology, geology, sociology ... they may be doing a kind of back-formation, where "-ology is for science, so logos must mean Knowledge which must mean Truth".