Lo and behold, the Bible has gotten too liberal, according to a group of conservatives. And it needs a little editing.
That’s the inspiration behind the Conservative Bible Project, which seeks to take the text back to its supposed right-wing roots.
So how can the Bible be conservatized? The group has proposed a Wikipedia-like group editing project. Some of the ideas would only bring the translation closer to the original. But others would fundamentally change the text.
Among the words to be eliminated: “government.” A conservative columnist at Beliefnet described the effort as “just crazy … like what you’d get if you crossed the Jesus Seminar with the College Republican chapter at a rural institution of Bible learnin’.”
Golly-gee, I remember the good old days when the Bible was considered the immutable word of God.
And I cannot imagine how much venom Ann Coulter would spew if the Left vowed to make the Bible more liberal.
The Bible has been edited, re-edited, translated, re-translated, re-edited some more, ad nauseum. It’s amazing people still follow it, and still believe it’s a reliable record of history.
The trouble is, extreme-Right OR extreme-Left interpretations of the bible are both up the spout. In real terms,God’s way is usually the MIDDLE path BETWEEN extremes.
Trouble also is that it’s like an iceberg. What we see in plain text isn’t the whole story. And if you don’t have the other 6/7ths, you end up with the faults of the last 1800 years.
Then again, it’s the story of one people…and for some reason we haven’t seen much of the rest of their story for 2000 years.
In real terms,God’s way is usually the MIDDLE path BETWEEN extremes /// Hah, hah. Good one.
It’s on a word processor now so it should be pretty easy to make changes.
Suggestion:
– Global replace “Eve” with “Steve”
– Replace “abomination” with “a bomb”
Hmm i thought that in Revelations 22:18 it said
“I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. 19And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.”
If they are going to go to all this effort they could at least start by re-enstating the name of god which they have slowly eliminated over the last few centuries…
What about right-wing Bible literalists? How can they have the temerity to edit God?
This is a tiny little group of people that most conservatives would find idiotic if they knew about it.
Yet another distraction from actual news….which JCD constantly accuses the mainstream media of doing.
Umm,
There are people in this world that can NOT live with out ORDER and RULES to live by. When they THINK they dont have enough, they make MORE, and MORE and MORE..
With those RULES they can GUIDE themselves to “What they Beleave” to be the OUT COME they wanted.
This is as bad as Teaching your child about WHY school is good for you, and ending up with a CHILD that wants to sleep at school and be raised by a Teacher/educator. Its not a bad thing, but not Always a good thing.
Finding truth in RULES and LAW is stupid. They are NOT FACTS. They are Agreements of a group that you MUST live this way. TRUTH is that if you Kill someone, its NOT a good thing, others will be upset(probably) and MAY want to do you harm in return.
Can we ship these folks over to the taliban?? Where 1 mans interpretation of History is LAW.
If you really want to go back and live by the PAST, then let them read the Jewish beliefs.. Let them become Orthodox.. THEN lets cut their lights off, Let them pump their OWN water, let them NOT eat ham, and TRY to find kosher foods.
I wish you would stick to non-secular/non-political stories of interest and leave the childish religion/partisan rants to Air Radio/Glenn Beck.
I could not be any further to the right. This is insane you cannot change the words of God. If there were written mistakes like in the NIV, ESV, and a few others that is great to get it back to the original version. Which the King James is almost word for word. So I don’t think this is needed.
Also you are supposed to shape your world view around the Bible. Not shape your bible around your world view. Because one is God inspired word the other is something you’ve come up with.
9. Miller wrote: “I wish you would stick to non-secular/non-political stories of interest…”
Yeah, because completely uncontroversial blogs about boring topics get so many readers. Let me guess, you watch CBS, right?
7. Windowsgeek wrote: “This is a tiny little group of people that most conservatives would find idiotic if they knew about it”
And that’s why I called them “right wing nuts” instead of “mainstream republicans.”
“Yet another distraction from actual news…”
You consider this posting a “distraction” but yet you actually wasted your valuable time to write and post a comment about it?! Let me guess, you live in your mom’s basement and you’ve never actually kissed a woman before.
#10, Eric, if you think ANY version of the Bible represents what the original authors said or meant, you are truly deluded. They have been edited and translated to death.
And even if the exact words were kept intact after so many centuries, that STILL leaves them open to interpretation. Remember, Shakespeare wrote in English, and scholars STILL can’t agree on what he meant.
Hey, yeah, that “Kingdom of God” thing… A Government.
Hang on. Since when was the bible ‘the words of God’? How did he write it down? Did he dictate it to his secretary?
At least the Koran has a reasonable origin, in that its the word of God as spoken by Mohammed the Prophet. It is, of course, much more modern than the Bible.
In any case wasn’t the bible first translated by Jerome from a variety of sources? Its always been a mishmash or material from all over the place. Anyone who takes it literally is deceiving themselves.
16. Hugh Ripper wrote: “Since when was the bible ‘the words of God’”
Is this your first day on earth? You’ve seriously never heard the Bible called the “word of God.” Searching for “word of god” with quotes on Google brings up over seven million sites. And this is the first time you’ve heard of it?! God….
Welcome to earth dude. I hope you enjoy your stay.
In my mind, the Bible long ago was demoted from “the Word of God” to “the Word of some occasionally unstable Middle Eastern types”. So, I’m not deeply concerned that anyone change it, as long as the older versions are clearly differentiated from the new.
#1 – I believe every word in the bible!
/was written for people with imaginary friends to make big money. Build mega churches and water slides! You would not believe all the fuckers I’d like to drown in that big holy water punch bowl.
Most people who complain about the Bible don’t read it or understand it’s value.
It’s literally the owners manual for the human race. It tells you how to avoid or handle most every problem you are likely to run across in life.
It teaches you right from wrong.
Granted it doesn’t go into detail about curing sickness and disease. Why that is I can only guess, but as Jim Morrison once said, “No one gets out alive.”
Arguing about fairy tales is such a colossal waste of time.
#21, yeah, it also tells me I sell my daughter into slavery and do all sorts of other wacky things.
This is the big elephant in the room when it comes to the Bible; it can’t be interpreted correctly. You say it’s an owner’s manual for the human race. Others say it’s an excuse to kill non-believers. Nothing can be interpreted the same way by everyone, unless it’s written in legal-ese. Even then there are loopholes.
–You consider this posting a “distraction” but yet you actually wasted your valuable time to write and post a comment about it?! Let me guess, you live in your mom’s basement and you’ve never actually kissed a woman before.–
Har Har, worn-out used-to-be-funny snarky comeback deployed. Try and be original next time, Junior.
I posted the comment to, oh, I don’t know, give feedback…because I’m tired of these FARK-like filler pieces when there are massive financial ripoffs occurring almost daily that the mainstream media is doing its best to ignore. DU seems to be following the same playbook while claiming to talk about the news no one else will.
#17 SN
I realise that many call the Bible the ‘word of God’, but there seems to be no explanation of how the word of God became the Bible.
I’m pretty ignorant of the goings on in the god botherer community. Most of us Aussies are agnostic or, at best, passive believers. Americans seem to be in general much more religious. It still surprises me that people regard the Bible as the word of God.
#23-fpp2002-Nothing can be interpreted the same way by everyone.
It is easy to corrupt the meaning of something taken out of context making it justify anything you want. Even ministers and preachers do it for selfish purposes. I believe Jesus had the same problem in his time.
People are people then and now which makes the Bible helpful and timeless.
a) There are no original sources. Where exactly are any of the original books of the bible, written in the hand of the person that they are attributed to? Considering that fundamentalists deeply are about the context of each word and punctuation, there is no real basis for biblical literalism.
b) The existing bible is the result of millennia of changes of the type that these people are proposing. “We don’t like what the bible says here… let’s redact it” or “This is what they meant, let’s clarify it” Again, without the original source, claims to the legitimacy of the writings of the current version of the bible are unsupportable/
c) The bible deeply reflects the needs and knowledge of those that wrote it, in the context of the society in which they lived in. It also reflects the utter ignorance of those that wrote it, attributing all sorts of things that they did not understand to the supernatural and magical, or just making up stories to teach lessons.
d) Only the old testament could be the “Word of God” because supposedly it was dictated to Moses by God. The new testament is a testimony about Jesus, written from memory by the followers of Jesus’ followers. It is full of discrepancies. Nothing in the New Testament that does not tell Jesus’ story directly is the word of God, it is the thoughts, desirtes, teachings and fantasies of those that followed Jesus. It is like if we lost all copies of the US Constitution, and then asked a small group of US Senators to rewrite it from memory 100 years later. No bias to be expected there, would there be?
Revise all you want! The bible has no real authority since it has no literal basis.
What GOD???
Yet more confirmation that religion is a mental illness.
Did it take you long to come up with the headline? LOL
OMFG
too funny.
(God’s name was not injured in the writing of this post and no commandments were broken).