Get Thee Behind Me, Stoopids

Generally on these shores I avoid certain commentaries regarding the topic of faiths, as I have some readers who operate under Christian guidance yet retain the faculties of critical thinking and can cogently criticize the follies of the less enlightened among them better than I, mere heathen sinner.

I'm also ever mindful of the two topics guaranteed to start a bar brawl: politics and religion, and having provided more than enough of the former for the individual viewer to contend with, seek not another front on which to join the fray...as yet.

But this item, which has begat this, caught my eye and has compelled me to share a few thoughts.

One of the tenets of Christian fundamentalism (and similarly inclined sects of other religions with their sacred texts) is the belief that the Bible is the literal word of God...Not to be questioned, or subjected to interpretation but only to be honored above all and obeyed.

This is, and has been a somewhat artless ploy that permits the individual to fecklessly abdicate their responsibilities toward subjective free will and the rights of other sentient beings, while at the same time failing to accommodate the inconvenient truth that many human hands midwifed what we know in the modern world as the English-language Bible into being...Some prominent among them who, in spite of their piety and honorable intentions were charged with the spurious offense of heresy after crossing their regal employer and found themselves subsequently strangled to death and burned at the stake.
Modern ghostwriters of political 'autobiography', take note.

In spite of such a fractious creation, what we call the King James Version has remained with us to this day, with a revised 'New' version (having its own attendant critics) created in the 1970's.

And it would now seem that these versions are no longer sufficiently 'conservative' for some, in spite of the excruciating detail of near-prehistoric mores and horrendous penalties for deviance from same within.

Apparently these legions of faithful past and present who adhere to the narrow path and toil in penurious obscurity so that the Lord's word can be made available all suffer from the dreaded liberal bias. From the relevant Conservapedia entry:

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 of Christianity
* lack of precision in modern language
* translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

Of these three sources of errors, the last introduces the largest error, and the biggest component of that error is liberal bias.
Large reductions in this error can be attained simply by retranslating the KJV into modern English.

I have long suspected a genetic link among a psychological triumvirate of pride, historical ignorance and a predilection toward so-called 'conservative' thought (in modern reality, a mollycoddling of fascist impulses masquerading as faux fiscal prudence and choleric intolerance of social non-conformity)...and at last I may have my objective proof.

Even a cursory study of the provenance of the KJV would indicate to those not utterly blinkered by their secular ideologies that this 'liberal bias' of which they speak is light years from the root cause, if indeed being a factor at all in any conveyance of Biblical meaning, for the simple fact that such a thing as 'liberal bias' didn't exist for the masses in the 17th century ( a time of royal-borns and peasants, not ACORNs and pundits) and was certainly not a strong consideration in the revised version of the 1970's, given the contemporaneous vagaries of Baptist and conservative Presbyterian thought.

So just whom is this - call it what it is, politically filtered revisionism being aimed at, with their 'updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle"', their avowed dismissal of the Pericope Adulterae for its alleged 'liberal message against the death penalty', comparisons of 'economic parables with their full free-market meaning' and topsy-turvy garden of logical fallacies pretending to the definition of 'openmindedness'?

One can only speculate. But I'm certain that whatever other jingo-jangling occupies their downtime...they won't fail conservatism.

;>)

Jeremiah 14:14: 'Then the LORD said unto me, The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart.'