The Conservative Bible Project

[Count Chocula]

Not to mention the little, awkward passage "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s (Matthew 22.21)." The faith is not the state, IOW.

Oh, and the other awkward little fact that the government of the United States was developed by men who were largely Christians or Deists, but who specifically excluded religion from playing a part in the United States government's functions, including the economics of the government and the several states. Oops. Schlafly fail.

[phred]

This is priceless

The Conservative Bible is the product of the Conservative Bible Project. This is uniquely built on two bedrock principles:

* online translating using the collaborative wiki software improves the final result if guided by good rules
* the rules guiding this translation are to use and be informed by conservative insights and terminology

To the best of our knowledge, this project is the first to utilize either of the above principles in translating the Bible.

Here lists the 66 books of the Holy Bible to be translated in this project, with the ones having links already being works-in-progress:[1]

For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:

And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

You have been warned.

They admit that they're changing the bible to fit their worldview, then put up the scripture about cursing people who add or subtract from the words of the book.

[Surlethe]

Not to mention the little, awkward passage "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s (Matthew 22.21)." The faith is not the state, IOW.

The Bible is so full of contradictions you can make it want say whatever you want it to. For example, a Dominionist would charge that the Old Testament laws are an accurate reflection of God's character, and God is changeless, so God's vision of the world is a theocracy.

Oh, and the other awkward little fact that the government of the United States was developed by men who were largely Christians or Deists, but who specifically excluded religion from playing a part in the United States government's functions, including the economics of the government and the several states. Oops. Schlafly fail.

But the federal government does not disallow the states from making their own state religions!

[Ericxihn]

Again, these are neocons.

A bit off topic, but I don't think you know what that words means. Yet you keep using it.

Neoconservativism is not simply an amalgamation of everything you happen to dislike; there is a very specific definition. Neoconservativism is the movement that supports the United States using its military power to spread Democracy around the world, especially the middle east and to defend Israel. It says nothing about domestic policies, though many of its adherents will support free market capitalism, a limited welfare state and Christian Fundamentalism, but not neccesarily. Prominent neocon, Paul Wolfowitz, for example is Jewish.

There are many conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan, who are strongly opposed to neoconservatives and are sometimes called "paleoconservatives'.

I get the feeling that the guys behind the Conservative Bible project, operating under the belief that King James I was godless communist hippie and that Ancient Greek and Hebrew aren't capable of expressing the nuances of Christian thought, might be in the latter category. They also might be merely stupid.

[Zixinus]

Neoconservativism is not simply an amalgamation of everything you happen to dislike

No, I just thought they were the new conservative movement that is ultra-religious while simultaneously advocate Reagen-style free market economy. Hardcore Republicans that sincerely believe that Fox News shows the raw truth. They certainly fitted that bill. The repeated use of the word "conservative" was also hint to me.

I dislike a lot of things, and not every one of them applies to neoconversatism (according to your definition anyway), so please don't try to misinterpret what I said.

I concede your correction either way, because I do not claim to be familiar with the nuances and connection between layers of American politics.

[Simon_Jester]

There's a weird amalgam that comes out of the intersection of neoconservatism, supply side economics, and Christian fundamentalism. I'm not sure there's a word for it yet, but the Conservative Bible Project could never exist without all three. Hell, Conservapedia couldn't, either.

[Yona]

There's a weird amalgam that comes out of the intersection of neoconservatism, supply side economics, and Christian fundamentalism. I'm not sure there's a word for it yet, but the Conservative Bible Project could never exist without all three. Hell, Conservapedia couldn't, either.

Several words come to mind, "brain dead" is one,... sorry, two.

There isn't enough space for the rest.

[Junghalli]

How can they not see how brazenly Orwellian they're being? It's absolutely incredible. I mean, look at this, it's pretty much how Winston would've described his job in the Ministry of Truth, or to an extent how Symes would've described newspeak to someone:

The same thing occurred to me. The best part is they probably don't even realize what they're doing, or rather deep down they do know it but they deny it to themselves. They're not changing the Bible to suit their ideology, they're removing the liberal distortions that have crept into it, because their ideology is founded on the Bible and economic ultra-liberalism so the idea that the two might be incompatible would require them to re-evaluate their entire world view, which they don't want to do, and so it's a thing not to be considered. Doublethink!

It's what happens when the basis of your ideology has an inconsistent basis.

[bobalot]

Most Christians do this type of thing anyway. They "reinterpret" bits of the bible to fit their world-view.

At least these retards are being honest and open about it.

[Broomstick]

However, I know a lot of Christians who fully accept and acknowledge that the Bible contradicts itself and really can be reinterpreted or ambiguous. Not every Christian believes in a literal approach to the Bible.

And Jews... well, they're famous for arguing about everything in the Bible.

[Simon_Jester]

There's a weird amalgam that comes out of the intersection of neoconservatism, supply side economics, and Christian fundamentalism. I'm not sure there's a word for it yet, but the Conservative Bible Project could never exist without all three. Hell, Conservapedia couldn't, either.

Several words come to mind, "brain dead" is one,... sorry, two.
There isn't enough space for the rest.

Nah; if they were brain dead they wouldn't be moving around and doing things, and their policy decisions would be better.

However, I know a lot of Christians who fully accept and acknowledge that the Bible contradicts itself and really can be reinterpreted or ambiguous. Not every Christian believes in a literal approach to the Bible.

Also, a lot of people who selectively ignore bits of the Bible because they don't think those bits can be taken literally are at least ignoring, for lack of a better term, the right bits. The bits that actively encourage them to do evil things, like own slaves or beat adulteresses to death with rocks. So on some level they're passing a basic human morality test by ignoring those bits. While they don't necessarily get points for doing so, at least they don't lose points.

Whereas these guys think the Bible would be better if they took out all that namby-pamby stuff about love and mercy and not being a prick. So they fail the morality test.

[Instant Sunrise]

There's a weird amalgam that comes out of the intersection of neoconservatism, supply side economics, and Christian fundamentalism. I'm not sure there's a word for it yet, but the Conservative Bible Project could never exist without all three. Hell, Conservapedia couldn't, either.

The phrase you're looking for is "prosperity theology." Which basically says that if you give money to the church, God will reward you materially on Earth. (never mind all the stuff that directly contradicts that, but okay) Conversely, prosperity doctrine argues that if you are financially UNsuccessful, than it is because you have not given enough money to the church.

Please note that I am not making this up, prosperity theology is a real doctrine that is practiced in many churches in the US.

[Simon_Jester]

That's a piece of it, but it's not the whole picture either. Versions of prosperity theology have been kicking around at least since the early days of Calvinism. Originally, the argument was that God would reward good people with success, so that wealth was a sign of personal virtue. The idea that you can obtain personal virtue directly by handing money over to the church is an unusually greedy modification of this idea on the preacher's part.

But, once again, there's more to it than that. Because you couldn't easily get something like Conservapedia unless you combining the "fundamentalist Christianity, cult of wealth subtype" with American exceptionalism... which is what the neocons bring to the amalgam. That's where these people get the idea that their own special brand of wealth cult is a new, unique, special thing in the world, that George Bush is the great hero of the age, and so on.

That's what convinces these people that "conservatism" (their name for their own ideology) is a special thing full of brilliant insight that can be brought to bear on all subjects.

[Yona]

There's a weird amalgam that comes out of the intersection of neoconservatism, supply side economics, and Christian fundamentalism. I'm not sure there's a word for it yet, but the Conservative Bible Project could never exist without all three. Hell, Conservapedia couldn't, either.

The phrase you're looking for is "prosperity theology." Which basically says that if you give money to the church, God will reward you materially on Earth. (never mind all the stuff that directly contradicts that, but okay) Conversely, prosperity doctrine argues that if you are financially UNsuccessful, than it is because you have not given enough money to the church.

Please note that I am not making this up, prosperity theology is a real doctrine that is practiced in many churches in the US.

Isn't that sort of like the emails you get telling you you'll get a FREE "whatever" by sending this to 20 people because they are tracking the email and will reward those who pass it on?

Look how many fall for that nonsense.

[Simon_Jester]

Slightly different, because you're talking to people who already believe in the entity that you say is tracking them.

It's more like saying that if you use the right key words on the phone, the NSA's monitoring systems will pick up on it, identify you as a Good Guy, and put your name on a list of people who get preferential treatment from government agencies.

Paranoid and weird, but at least vaguely plausible to people who don't fully understand how all the relevant bits of the system works.

[RedImperator]

Interesting blog post about this project from Slactivist (a liberal evangelical whose magnum opus is a page-by-page deconstruction of the Left Behind series):

Author Tom Sine tells a story about his first encounter with Ron Sider's book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. It made him mad.

Sider's book suggested that money was a major theme of the Bible. Tom knew better. He had read the Bible. He read it every day. Like any good evangelical, he had committed big chunks of it to memory. It might mention money a handful of times, but mainly it was about other things, stuff like sin and lust and idols and praying and what not.

So Tom went back to his Bible, angrily, setting out to disprove Sider's claims. And suddenly he noticed something he had never noticed before. Money is a major theme of the Bible. It's everywhere in that book. And the Bible, it turns out, has far more things to say far more often about the poor than it does about, say for instance, sex.

This was a revelation. One biblical word for such a revelation, such a pulling back of the veil, is "apocalypse." That which had been hidden is revealed and the whole world is changed, remade, replaced, reborn.

Tom Sine had the grace to welcome this apocalypse, to embrace it. But not every reader is receptive to such revelations.

I suspect that a similar apocalypse lies behind the creation of the Conservative Bible Project. Someone caught a fleeting glimpse of what that book has to say when read without the filtering lens of what it is expected to say. It may even have been, as in Tom Sine's story, an angry attempt to disprove what some radical prophet was claiming it said. However it happened, for a moment the veil was lifted and there it was -- the law and the prophets, the sheep and the goats, the stark binary clarity of 1 John and that pervasive, terrifying, overwhelming insistence that nothing else matters to God if we fail to respond to neighbors in need with a tangible expression of love.

This revelation was unwelcome.

The folks at Conservapedia wanted no part in the new world promised by this apocalypse. Their response to it, instead, was something like a scene from Douglas Adams:

They flew out of the cloud.

They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned round.

"It'll have to go."

The folks at the Conservative Bible Project caught a glimpse of something too big to accommodate in their tiny little comfortable framework and so, unable to accept it or even to allow or recognize it, they've set about turning it into something else.

It's an audacious project for a group of people who self-identify not just as Christians, but as "Bible-believing" Christians (that is, Real, True Christians) -- people who proudly differentiate themselves by declaring their "high view of scripture." The only way to reconcile that sense of identity with the project of rewriting the Bible is to pretend that their problem is not with the Bible itself, but with the supposed distortion of it perpetrated by evil, feminist, intellectual, tree-hugging, gay-loving, baby-killing, liberal translators.

Correct that distortion and the problem will go away and that scary glimpse of whatever it was they thought they saw there for a moment when the veil was lifted will cease to haunt their sleep. A bit of "retranslation" and they can be rid of that liberal notion that loving one's neighbor encapsulates the whole of the law and the prophets.

Among the many humorous aspects of this undertaking is the CBP organizers' confidence that this project will be easy. They hope to harness the power of wiki to quickly produce a new translation. An army of homeschoolers, they are convinced, should be able to accomplish this in a matter of months.

Some of those footsoldiers may well work as quickly as they imagine. The gruntwork of the Berlitz barbarism they have in mind as "translation" doesn't require much thought or care. And this project is easier than most translation, because the translators already know ahead of time what it is they're going to make the text say.

But I also think that army of homeschoolers is going to have more than a few deserters. I suspect this project will, for many, become a matter of a little learning being a dangerous thing. Alps on alps arise, and apocalypse upon apocalypse. The text will speak for itself. It's not going to lose this fight. The Conservative Bible Project, I suspect, will come to work as a subversive virus, creating far more converts from than to its cause.

Source.

[CarsonPalmer]

Yay! Somebody else here reads Slacktivist! The deconstruction of Left Behind is fantastic, and I like his take on the CBP, although I'm sure that many people here will believe, with good reason, that he's too optimistic about the Bible's impact on its translators.

[Darth Hoth]

One of the irony's is that the KJV was the "plain English" version when it was published. For a book of its length it contains surprisingly few different words. Of course, the language has changed considerably since then.

My apologies if this is a late call, but as the thread is still being posted in . . .

As I read it, the Authorised Version was actually written in a style that was deliberately made to be somewhat archaic, even at the time. It was, in fact, one reason that it was more successful than the Geneva Bible, which used a more contemporary language and thus went out of fashion as the language shifted with time (though of course there were important political reasons for their relative popularity as well).

[Broomstick]

I always thought that "slightly archaic" meant the equivalent of writing something today without use of slang, jargon, and in a formal manner. Care was taken to make the text accessible to people. That people read, understand, and have great fondness for it 500 years later would indicate that the attempt was successful. However, I am not authority enough of the matter to dispute it with anyone.

[The Dark]

I have to ask, if I am allowed to go a bit off-topic: which is the most true translation of the bible, post-finalising (I know it had a fancy name for that, but for the life of me I can't recall it) and in English? It will probably only be understood with a good history book about ancient times, but still...

For academic work, I was required to use a New Revised Standard Version for my theology degree. It's among the better ones for translating the languages, and good ones include footnotes when the meaning of a particular word or phrase is unclear.

[And_Atom_JT]

I happen to be a Christian and I think this is as stupid as Creationism. No, stupider, because while Creationism can be chalked up to ignorance, this is politically motivated and religion + politics rarely, if ever, ends well. However, thanks to these idiots the majority of Christians who are not sanctimonious assholes will be painted as such. Again.

[Pelranius]

However, I know a lot of Christians who fully accept and acknowledge that the Bible contradicts itself and really can be reinterpreted or ambiguous. Not every Christian believes in a literal approach to the Bible.

And Jews... well, they're famous for arguing about everything in the Bible.

One of the reasons why religions have been so central to apocalyptic revolts and the like is that you can usually get a holy book to say whatever you want it to say, given how long those things are.