A Conservative Bible?

This is just unreal. Perhaps you've already heard about this as its been recently highlighted by Steven Colbert and dozens of other media outlets, but the people of Conservapedia have committed to create a new, conservative translation of the Bible, that eradicates all the so-called liberal "translation bias" that exists in every existing English translation. Talk about "remaking Jesus in their own image." Rob Dreher at beliefnet.com depicts it best: "It's like what you'd get if you crossed the Jesus Seminar with the College Republican chapter at a rural institution of Bible learnin'."

The absurdity of this project is unimaginable, and the flaws in their logic, mindboggling. They seek a new translation that is without bias, as if they have no bias of their own. They seek to create a translation that avoids the "wordiness" and "ambiguities" of liberals (such as those updating the NIV) but is also not written at a dumbed down reading level (such as the NIV. How are they going to do that without using big words?). They seek to obtain an accurate translation of Scripture by resorting back to the KJV rather than original texts (and if you read any of what has already been translated, it basically reads like the NIV which they abhor), making it a translation of a(n) (outdated) translation. They state that one of the benefits of this project is that it will force the liberals who criticize them to read the Bible (but if they're the ones translating the NIV, wouldn't that mean they have not only read it, but quite closely?).

They claim terms such as "laborer" and "comrade" in the Bible are signs of socialism--but this political view didn't exist in the time the KJV was written--and propose substituting contemporary conservative terms instead, as if the authors of the Bible had 21st century America in mind when they were writing. They want to highlight the "numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning" (as if parables are meant to be literally interpreted...). And worst of all, they suggest excluding certain passages such as John 8:1-11 and Luke 23:34 because they are supposedly "later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic" (as if those who purportedly inserted these texts in the 2nd and 3rd centuries were left-wing radicals!). How is arbitrarily deleting passages considered conservative?

Really, I'm quite dumbfounded. When one is so right-wing leaning that even the Bible is now deemed "liberal" (whatever that means), something is definitely wrong. But this is a good reminder for all of us, no matter the lens we use to read Scripture (which we can never fully remove), that Ernesto Tinajero from Sojourners points out: "if you read the Bible and it does not challenge you, then you are reading yourself and not the Bible." If the Bible is not provocative, if it does not force us to rethink the way we live our lives and view the world, than we are not really reading it.