The Teetotal Bible

Wow... this one of the stranger things to have come out of the whole Conservative Bible debacle, and I have to thank Joe Farah for pointing it out to me. Now, apparently Andy is teetotal, which I have nothing against and in fact I'm kinda grateful for. If he was on the piss, I'd hate to think what kind of insanity he would come up with.

Anyway, it seems that because Andy doesn't drink, Jesus didn't drink either... so all the references to wine that anybody who's read the Bible should know have been replaced with... grape juice.I kid you not. So let's see how this translation plays out when we swap "wine'"with "grape juice".

During the Wedding at Cana, Jesus turned water into grape juice... not just that, but a better grape juice than what had originally been served. Maybe he dished up Grapetiser instead of LiquiFruit, who knows. The very fact that the whole issue about serving the best quality stuff first implies it had to be wine served there. What makes the whole thing even more ludicrous is the fact that Conservapedia's own article on wine, contains the sentence, "Christ's first miracle, performed at the wedding feast at Cana, was to turn six amphora filled with water into wine." Once again, CP's right hand knows exactly what its left hand is doing. Actually, reading their "translation" of John 2:9, I see they've left it as wine... for now. Maybe turning water into grape juice isn't that a miracle, after all.

Conservative Bible Project - The Conservatives Speak

I've been waiting and praying (well, ok... just waiting) to see what the Right was going to say about Andy's little project. I've already listed several examples in another article, but no doubt Andy would write those people off a liberals... even the happy-clappies on "Rapture Ready". I've been hoping that an Ann Coulter or some other right-wing fundie would pick up on this and comment - one way or another.

My prayers have been answered.

Joseph Farah, of World Net Daily fame, has entered the fray. Now, there's two things you need to know about Joe and WND. Firstly, this is the guy behind the "Where's the Birth Certificate" billboards - in other words, he's about as right wing and anti-Obama as Andy is. Joe is basically the Birther's Birther. He also refers to Andrew Schlafly as, "the son of the heroic Phyllis Schlafly." That alone should tell you where he stands, not to mention the fact he helped organise Mama Schlafly's Take Back America clusterfuck.

Also, WND is not a mickey-mouse site - especially when compared to Conservapedia. Alexa tells me WND has a reach of o.045% (Conservapedia's is 0.0041%) and a 3-month rank of 2,221 vs. 50,323. In other words, people read WND... a lot of people.

Liberals By Numbers

One thing I've learnt from watching (and working on) Conservapedia is that they never fail to amaze me. Just when you think they've reached new levels of paranoia, hate-speech or plain insanity, they manage to crank it up another notch. Here's a prime example... one that should be one of the best parody ploys ever, but probably isn't.

A user, calling himself Mark Gallagher, signed up in June of this year and has been pottering around the site ever since. He almost made the mistake of trying to edit the various mathematics articles, which as we all know is the easiest way to step on one of Ed "If I don't know it I delete it" Poor's crazy toes. He did have a brief run in with manchild administrator, John Patti, over CP's use of the US flag in their logo, calling it a "flagrant show of disrespect... somewhat appalling for a site of this nature." Amazingly, he escaped with a simple "Ridiculous statements" and no blocking from lil' Johnny boy.

Maybe he was heartened by all this and decided to move on to bigger things. He turned to Andrew Schlafly, the bastion of conservadom, with a request to run a bot on CP (something that has always been anathema, because they don't know how to program a bot and they can't control it) which would essentially "detect liberal wordiness and other recognized traits of liberal style." I kid you not.

Conspiracy Theory Redux

I've been speculating a bit about just what lies behind Andrew Schlafly's animosity towards President Obama. Seeing as it goes way beyond simple party politics, I can only surmise it has to do with their time together on the Harvard Law Review and more specifically around the time that Obama became HLR President.

I'm pretty convinced that Andy ran for HLR president against Obama and it all stems from his resentment at being beaten by an "affirmative action appointment". I've been in touch with both the Boston Globe and the HLR,  trying to get some clarity on who the 18 other candiates were, and although the replies were promising, nothing definite has come to light. However, you need to remember that there were 19 candidates out of something like 60 editors, so that already gives Andy a 1-in-3 chance of running. Add to that his own sense of self-importance (remember this is a man who has already run for Congress and then created his own personal fiefdom and echo-chamber at Conservapedia) and the chances are pretty good that he was in the running.

Conservative Bible Project: Schlafly's "Liberal" Translators

A user, now banned, popped up on the talk page for the Conservative Bible project and posted a list of name (as shown below) These are people who have worked on Bible translations in the past and I assume the author was making the point that Andy is calling these eminent scholars "liberal" (then again, the new user might have been unaware of Andy's view on Professor Values). Even so, this list makes for impressive reading:

Conservative Bible Project - Andrew Schlafly Stands Alone

So the collective internet has finally woken up to Andrew Schlafly's Conservative Bible Project. I'm not usually one to blow my own trumpet, but just remember, you read it here first. (Well, actually you would have read it on Rationalwiki first, but you know what I mean).

Needless to say, Andy has been basking in the sound of the entire internet laughing at him. Now I know it's easy to point fingers and say that it's the liberal media doing it - especially since the Colbert Report featured his lunacy, which resulted in his minions descending upon CP like the wolf on the fold. I see new account creation is still turned off. Yup, the site is growing rapidly.

Conservative Bible Project - The Biblical Bimbo

(h/t to RaoulDuke for pointing this one out)

I've already mentioned Andrew Schlafly's attempts to "Conservatise" the English Bible, and I must admit that so far it's providing more laughs that the Lenski affair did. One has to remember that Andy - who is no linguist - isn't going back to the source material and translating from the original Greek. Oh no - he's simply taking the KJV and changing words so that they fit his conservative view of the world.

We've already had the case of the Pharisees suddenly becoming "intellectuals", but Andy's latest offerings are not only hysterical, but proof once again that we couldn't make this stuff up.