Once again, I am trusting that something isn’t a spoof site. I am none too confident but conservapedia seems authentic. I mean it’s not THAT funny, if it’s a joke.

“A conservative encyclopedia you can trust. The truth shall set you free.”

Well, OK, that bit’s funny. It suggests legions of dodgy door-to-door salesmen trying to flog “untrustworthy” conservative encyclopaedias.

I have to share some of the gems, starting with its atheism entry:

Atheists often equivocate that they actually have a lack of belief in any God, as opposed to having the positive belief that there is no God. This equivocation stems from the fact that if they hold positive beliefs, then their worldview can be categorized as a religion.

(As I suspected, my standard Chambers dictionary defines equivocate as “to use doubtful words to avoid answering a question.” I am lost as to why they use the word here but I guess there is not yet a working conservictionary.)

See what I mean? It’s not really funny. But it can hardly be serious.

Don’t make me spell this out AGAIN….. (Bah, too late, I am wound up and impelled to do it.)

I am pretty positive that the coffee cup I am drinking from is not embedded in my PC’s hard drive (although the PC’s random behaviour might raise this as an acceptable explanation).
In fact, I could admit to being fully positive about this belief. But I am not going to build a religion round it.

I tried to find a topic to look. I was distracted by the debate over the front page Bible quote. It is indeed quite hard to understand why “Conservative” necessarily equals “Christian”. I guess Liberation Theology never made much headway in the MidWest.

It is interesting that the christian right seem able to hijack both Christianity and political conservatism to create a truly mind-numbing worldview. I would have to question my own bigotry if I found myself seeing all Christians as right-wing bigots and all political conservatives as fundamentalist nutters. But these people just seem to want to lie invitations to kneejerk bigotry on a plate. (Labelling theory in action, for any sociologists?)

When I say “mind-numbing worldview,” I am confessing my own inability to even focus on the rest of this stuff for more than a minute or two. Otherwise it brings on almost a panic attack relating to the future of the survival of the human race.

I can handle argument with people who disagree with me. That’s how we learn, surely, by questioning our assumptions. The Socratic dialogue, and so on. I would welcome reading arguments that were coherent and thought out and might make me reconsider my kneejerk “progressive” assumptions.

But there seems to be nothing there except repeating ideas that have handed down from one set of bigots to another, without any brain tissue being engaged at all, and with the folly getting concentrated over time.

There was supposed to be some sort of progression for our species, by the 21st century, surely? “Surely?”, she rages incoherently, shaking her fist at non-existent deity, in a Homer Simpsonesque way. Bah.

[tags]atheism, conservapedia, learning, logic, religion, religious-right, right-wing, society[/tags]