Stumble it!Conservapedia: Correcting the Wrongs
posted in Education, Society by themaiden |Not Saussure (a linguistics reference, maybe?) brought to my attention a few entries in Conservapedia, an online encyclopedia apparently intended to counter the liberal bias of such sources as Wikipedia.
Thanks to Not Saussure, whose source is an article at Jon Swift, I learned a few things. I learned about the uselessness of Einstein’s relativity. I learned about about kangaroos on Noah’s Ark. I learned that “The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times, which provides an unimpeachable de facto argument for their once having been in existence.” Unicorns were probably on the Ark, too. I noticed that pictures needn’t be related to the text. Interesting concept. I was also fascinated by the article on the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Tree Octopus.
Overall, Conservapedia articles are agonizingly short and tend to be painfully trite, like for example, the entry on tobacco.
Tobacco is a plant used for smoking and medicines. It was discovered by Native Americans and sold to Europeans. It was exported by John Rolfe (husband of Pocahontas). It became know as a Cash Crop.
That’s it. Arguably one of the more important, for good and ill, crops ever cultivated by man, and that is it. For the most part, I can look at an entry title and, based upon the root words, make up something every bit as enlightening.
I did find an article on Intelligent Design, but frankly it has to be heading for deletion. I’m not sure if the article is genuine or wicked lib’ral evil prank, but if it is real, it gives away too much of the game.
Proponents of Intelligent Design generally adopt the ‘argument from incredulity’. They argue, essentially, that the complexity of living organisms is such that it could only come from an intelligent ‘designer’, without much justification other than their own inability to understand how evolution could create the same complexity.
The other major argument in the Intelligent Design arsenal is a variation of the incredulity argument, in that supporters frequently mischaracterize evolution as being a wholly random process, and that random processes. Intelligent Design proponents misunderstand, or at least seem to misunderstand, the effects of the iteration of natural selection in a particular environment over hundreds or thousands of generations.
The theory of Intelligent Design has little or no support outside the United States, because most other developed nations are too far down the path of un-Godliness and anti-Christianity. However, Intelligent Design is also very popular in Turkey, even though the Turks are Moslems.
As someone at Jon Swift commented, “As one who is unapologetically Christian — even an evangelical — I am nevertheless embarrassed at times and, as I said on my own humble blog, there are too many times when we are our own worst enemies.”
As another commenter said, “Very Scary. I am extrememly worried about the future of this country.”
Amen.
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