meanfreepathapdedia?

Wikipedia has certainly changed the way knowledge is gathered, shared, stored and retrieved. In fact, wiki is usually my first source when looking for information on a topic, and I'm sure many of you are the same. Of course, now it seems that every subject imaginable has it's own dedicated wiki site. It's really easy, too. Just set up a wiki and call it _____apedia and you are good to go. There's wookiepedia for you star wars fans, uncyclopedia for you satire (among other less sophisticated styles of humor) fans, even bulbapedia for you Pokemon fans.

But I have found a new one: Conservapedia. Now, I'm a somewhat conservative leaning person, but this site is the very definition of right wing nut job. As an aside, go there and search for liberal for a good laugh. However, there is a more serious concern that I wished to address. There is a project they have titled the Conservative Bible Project, the goal of which is to "re-translate" the bible to remove liberal biases. We have apparently gotten to the point where not even the Bible is conservative enough anymore. They claim that all current translations of the Bible suffer from a liberal translation bias. Now I would agree that it really is impossible to translate anything from one language to another with absolutely no translation bias, but it seems like translating the bible with the intent of making it more conservative is the very definition.

And by re-translate, the authors mean looking through the King James version and changing words and phrases they feel are too liberal into more accurate conservative ones. They're even nice enough to post some examples for us. My favorite is this line. "Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the "social justice" movement among Christians." Go ahead. Re-read that sentence. Yeah, it really does say that. Now I haven't actually read any of the re-translated version. I know, shame on me for criticizing what I haven't actually reviewed. But I feel the one example I shared is sufficient. Besides, this isn't really the point I want to drive at.

I guess the point I really want to make is this: we are probably all guilty of this very same thing ourselves. Not the whole re-translating from an existing version to fit your principles bit. But we can't help but put our own biases on what we read. It's human nature and we do it without even realizing it. It's almost impossible not to interpret what you read in order to fit into your world view and justify your actions. And one of the hardest things to do is to read the Bible and allow it to change your perceptions, your mindset and your life.

All of this reminds me of a quote from Shepherd Book. And I think I'll end with it.

"You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you. "