Now I remember why I was an independent all those years.

[ih8music]

Ha! A friend sent me a link to the Conservapedia site today. I think there are a handful of valid points going on here. But I think it's hilarious that a group who by and large believes the Bible is the glorified and unchanging word of God want to revise it to square with their views. They may make some valid points, but even bringing up this discussion discredits a Fundamentalist view of the Bible.

I think they would have a lot more credibility if they were going back to the original Greek/Hebrew/etc. texts and doing their "correct" translation from those... but from what I can tell, they're basing everything off of the King James version and wordsmithing passages here and there to fit their ideology. That's not translation, that's re-interpretation of a translation.

[Sir Stewart]

That is actually not their fault - for whatever reason, whenever I cutty-paste something to this board lately, the spacing is all focacta.

 

Yup. Same here.

[Good Old Neon]

According to those fucking liberals over at the limp-wristed Wikipedia, Conservapedia was founded (by Andrew Schalafly) as a teaching aid for home schooled children.

 

From Wikipedia:

 

Schlafly, a social studies teacher for the Eagle Forum University educational program,[11] created Conservapedia as an instruction tool for homeschooled, high-school-level students whom he taught.[4][12] He felt the need to start the project after reading a student's assignment written using Common Era dating notation rather than the Anno Domini system that he preferred.[13] Although he was "an early Wikipedia enthusiast", as reported by Shawn Zeller of Congressional Quarterly, Schlafly became concerned about bias after Wikipedia editors repeatedly reverted his edits to the article about the 2005 Kansas evolution hearings.[14] Schlafly has expressed hope that Conservapedia will become a general resource for American educators and a counterpoint to the liberal bias that he perceives in Wikipedia.

 

Link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia

 

The entry on Dinosaurs alone constitutes a form of child abuse.

 

http://www.conservapedia.com/Dinosaurs

 

I’ve always sort of labored under the delusion that encyclopedias exist to educate, however, a few minutes spent on Conservapedia has pretty much demolished that long held belief. The site is so deluded and so misinformed, that users may as well employ Star Trek, Planet of the Apes and The Land of the Lost as factual teaching tools. Strangely enough, the only career this site would prepare a child for, is politics – running the country and shit.

 

Reality doesn’t fit with your view of it, screw it, rather than adjust, just branch off and create a separate, make believe reality. What a winning life strategy. It might get you into a make believe heaven, but until then, outside of those fortunate enough to land a job as a senator or a president, enjoy your job as a Walmart greeter.

[JUDE]

So Wikipedia is now considered an acceptable reference source on par with other published encyclopedias?

[caliber66]

So strawman is now considered an acceptable rhetorical device on par with arguing the point the poster is actually making?

[JUDE]

Believe it or not Mr. Caliber I was genuinely asking when Wikipedia became an accepted reference source for research papers and the like, not using a strawman argument.

 

To me this is much like debating the validity of information presented in Metal Edge vs. HM Magazine; I probably wouldn’t cite either on a paper about hard rock music.

[Duck-Billed Catechist]

That common era format is difficult to explain to chilluns without first explaining the anno domini system. It's an easy mental switch for someone who grew up with the latter, but learned to use the former. If you don't know anything about either of them, though, you have to start with anno domini so far as I can tell. That makes CE somewhat unwieldy and pointless imo.

 

The preceeding was a tangent and was not meant to support conservapedia or any such nonsense.

[Guest Speed Racer]

So Wikipedia is now considered an acceptable reference source on par with other published encyclopedias?

 

a ) I don't really think of encyclopedias as acceptable references for anything other than coversations and messageboards;

 

b ) Most of what I use Wikipedia for is current events or popular culture phenomena that won't make it to published encyclopedias for a good long while; and

 

c ) Who on god's green earth has held a published encyclopedia in the past seven years except to prop up their laptop on something?

[Guest Speed Racer]

Nothing wrong with being Christian, but this makes me gag. Like somehow I'm a bad person because I don't believe what they do.

 

There's nothing bad about being anything, really, unless you're into making people feel bad for having different opinions and beliefs. I went to school with a LOT of fundamentalists and devout Christians - even roomed with one my freshman year, which was REALLY funny at times - and I only had a problem with one or two that would have been assholes regardless of whether they were religious or not.

[caliber66]

Believe it or not Mr. Caliber I was genuinely asking when Wikipedia became an accepted reference source for research papers and the like, not using a strawman argument.

 

To me this is much like debating the validity of information presented in Metal Edge vs. HM Magazine; I probably wouldn’t cite either on a paper about hard rock music.

Did somebody suggest that Wikipedia is an accepted reference source for research papers?

[Good Old Neon]

So Wikipedia is now considered an acceptable reference source on par with other published encyclopedias?

 

For all its detractors, Wikipedia is just as accurate as the books published by the folks at Britannica according to several studies.

 

http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm

 

And, unlike the hard copies, mistakes and inaccuracies can be corrected in real time. So, in some ways, Wikipeida is superior to a big honking set of expensive laptop proper uppers.

 

Edit: With that said, as others have noted, it is generally not accepted as a source for research papers, term papers, etc. However, it often serves as an excellent jumping off point for further inquiry. Whereas, if Conservapedia is to be believed, you still have a pretty good shot at witnessing a dinosaur in the wild – but I wouldn’t go booking that expensive vacation to Loch Ness just yet.

[bjorn_skurj]

Lebron James wrote a bible??

And it prophecizes an exodus to a garden, a square one, after the next coming season!

[JUDE]

Did somebody suggest that Wikipedia is an accepted reference source for research papers?

 

 

Sorry, I guess in my simple mind I took GON’s comments about what constitutes child abuse and the “I’ve always sort of labored under the delusion that encyclopedias exist to educate…” comment and made the jump that he was upset that Conservipedia might be used for some sort of scholarly purpose.

[Guest Speed Racer]

Sorry, I guess in my simple mind I took GON’s comments about what constitutes child abuse and the “I’ve always sort of labored under the delusion that encyclopedias exist to educate…” comment and made the jump that he was upset that Conservipedia might be used for some sort of scholarly purpose.

 

Whether they are used to educate and whether they are reputable sources for research are two entirely different things.

 

Routinely in elementary school my classmates and I were instructed to do reports on countries, animals and people using encyclopedias. Our teachers were teaching us simples facts about our world that encyclopedias are more than equipped to present, but also teaching us how to research. In fourth grade we were told to start adding books and other anthologies to our sources, and in middle school we were no longer allowed to cite encyclopedias as references.

 

Edited again: We were usually told to no longer use encyclopedias as sources because they were too general, and written at a level below our own comprehension ability. Back in the day when we were told to have FIVE WHOLE SOURCES for a paper, they didn't want us using Britannica as one of them. Encyclopedias should serve as honest sources for general information, and I think Wikipedia excels in that regard, but that does not make it a good reference for a research paper.

 

Edited to add: GON's comments, if I may be so bold, refer to the fact that homeschooling parents might ask their children to do a report on, say, evolution, using Conservapedia, wherein they discover that evolution is a made-up instrument of the Liberal Agenda - the same Liberal Agenda that wants to cut living humans from your or your wife's womb when you grow up. That is not right, on many levels.

[caliber66]

ok.

[Edie]

Some evolutionary scientists assert that if human bones aren’t found with dinosaur bones, then dinosaurs and man didn’t live together.[43][44] Creation scientists point out that this is a false assumption; if human bones aren’t found buried with dinosaur bones, it simply means they weren't buried together.[43]

 

Evolutionists point out that radiometric dating of rocks containing dinosaur bones shows them to have formed between 65 million years ago and 250 million years ago, whereas rocks with human bones in them are dated as being much newer (less than 5 million years old). Young Earth Creationists believe that these methods of dating rocks provide false results, and therefore reject this argument.

 

Basically, "I say it's wrong because I think it's wrong."

[bjorn_skurj]

Basically, "I say it's wrong because I think it's wrong."

And, "I don't understand the scientific method. At all."

[Guest Speed Racer]

An article from this Sunday's Washington Post Outlook titled, "Is Conservativism Brain-Dead?" and a transcript from a live chat with the author, Steven F. Hayward, a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Haven't read the article or the transcript yet, but I will soon and thought I'd pass them along.

[bleedorange]

An article from this Sunday's Washington Post Outlook titled, "Is Conservativism Brain-Dead?" and a transcript from a live chat with the author, Steven F. Hayward, a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Haven't read the article or the transcript yet, but I will soon and thought I'd pass them along.

 

Interesting article. I was about to post something about the absence of mention of Mark Levin, but he addressed it in the chat.

[bobbob1313]

So here's something I'm noticing a lot when I happen to listen to a Hannity or a Limbaugh on the radio:

 

I've heard numerous times from numerous people about how this new health care plan will "Destroy medicare". I find this fear on their parts to be completely fucking ridiculous since they've all seemingly spent the length of their careers trying to destroy medicare and now they are all worried about it.

[ikol]

The reality is that it would just make health care for everyone else more like Medicare, which would be a huge disaster but wouldn't destroy Medicare.

[bobbob1313]

The reality is that it would just make health care for everyone else more like Medicare, which would be a huge disaster but wouldn't destroy Medicare.

 

I heard both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity in recent days say that a reason why the health care bill is a bad thing is because it would destroy Medicare.

[ikol]

That doesn't surprise me since they're both idiots. If anything destroys Medicare, it will be all the Baby Boomers refusing to die. But even that will probably destroy the rest of the government before it destroys Medicare.

[Moss]

[Gobias Industries]

And it prophecizes an exodus to a garden, a square one, after the next coming season!

OH NO YOU DINT