Classical Spin

Rantings and ravings on politics, philosophy, and things that fall into the ether of 'none of the above'.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Conservapedia

Oh, America. Apparently, Wikipedia (which, uh, anyone can edit) is helplessly biased towards liberals. Thankfully, now we've got Conservapedia! For example:
Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation", even there there are far more American than British users. Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.[3]. Enter "Hapsburg" (the European ruling family) and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been "Hapsburg". Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.
Uh. Yeah. Sure. (the Habsburg family, apparently, went out of power sometime in the mid-1800's, if you're wondering).

From their main page:
Did you know that faith is a uniquely Christian concept? Add to the explanation of what it means, and how it does not exist on other religions.
...what? No, seriously - what?
The concept of faith is also strongly emphasized in other major religions, although this is by no means true of all major non-Christian religions.
Same can be said for the concept of organized worship. So?
While faith is mentioned 229 times in the Bible's New Testament, the concept is mentioned only twice in the Old Testament (KJV) which forms part of the basis for the Jewish religion.
Because A) of course there's no chance this could be a translation error, and B) because that particular word isn't used, obviously it's not an important concept.

Their entry on atheism is actually not as bad as I'd expect. Probably because in the past day or two the site's been 'discovered' by bloggers and I'm sure plenty of editing is going on.
Atheist morality is based upon emotion, experience and empirically derived ethics, such as those promoted by secular humanism. Atheists hold that the Bible cannot be our source of morality as it contains countless calls for immoral behavior such as killing any who try to convert you, stoning homosexuals and adulterers to death, and the institution of slavery. Instead, most Christians actually rely on their own innate philanthropic sense (which has evolved as a necessary element of communal living over millions of years) to cherry pick the pleasant parts of the Bible and ignore the rest.
Yes, of course every atheist everywhere thinks that the bible can't be used as a moral compass. And all Christians "cherry pick" bits and pieces out. (Wouldn't that be called hypocrisy?)

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