Thursday, October 08, 2009

Liberal bias

It's widely accepted that big media is strongly biased toward liberal agendas. That fact has led many people to begin analyzing the things they hear and read for the authors' bias - what worldview do the authors hold, and how does it color how they present their material?

But now, some people apparently believe the Bible is full of liberal bias.

Note that the link to the Conservative Bible Project page goes in and out - this is fairly new, breaking news, apparently. Even the Huffington Post put up a post - looking solely at the political slant of the project, naturally - on Monday.

The reasons the project gives for creating a new, liberal-bias free translation?

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning are, in increasing amount:

- lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ

- lack of precision in modern language translation

- bias in converting the original language to the modern one


So...they begin by saying God was incapable of using precise enough language to convey His meaning, move to calling the work of all modern translators sloppy and finish by insisting that modern translations have been motivated more by the intent to push a political agenda than by faithfulness to the original text.

I'm not sure whether I'm more amused or appalled. Definitely not surprised; in the last twenty years a plethora of really lousy "translations" of the Bible have been thrust upon us. Why not one that is politically motivated?

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.
2 Timothy 4:3 - 4


*One interesting note: I didn't run across this on any of the Christian blogs or websites I read, or even on any political site; the first reference I saw came from an open wheel racing forum I read. Have Christians become so inured to the constant efforts to distort the Word of God that they don't want to take the energy to respond? Or do they just not care - or worse yet, see the danger?

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