Let there be darkness!

This is just too good. The assorted fruit and mixed nuts of the American religious right are unhappy with Wikipedia for its bias towards a reasonable middle ground and tendency to favor evidence supported consensus over truthiness. And so was created Conservapedia, an online encyclopedia dedicated to advancing lunatic opinion in an environment unencumbered by scientific knowledge or inconvenient reality.

As John Swift points out 'Conservapedia is based on good conservative Christian values while Wikipedia, as you can tell from its name, is based on Wiccan.' Would love to see Jimbo Wales face when he reads that one.

As far as I know this is the first time there has been an online creationist encyclopeadia which you can edit. From the entry on Kangroos:

'Like all modern animals, modern kangaroos originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood. It has not yet been determined whether kangaroos form a holobaramin with the wallaby, tree-kangaroo, wallaroo, pademelon and quokka, or if all these species are in fact apobaraminic or polybaraminic.

After the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land - as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart - or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.'

Since word of this broke on the blogoshpere it seems everyone and their creepy uncle have been contributing to articles. In the comments over at scienceblogs.com Steevl writes:

I'm having tremendous fun. I edited the article on Atheism to point out that it leads to pedophilia and bestiality. I checked back an hour later expecting my edit to be gone, but no: they didn't remove it, they added citations.

Round of applause for that man. Good-natured vandalism aside, here's a quote from the Google cache of an older and apparently serious article:

“Jesus said, ‘Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.’” (Gospel of Thomas 114) “Jesus is not suggesting a sex-change operation, but is using 'male' and 'female' metaphorically to refer to the higher and lower aspects of human nature. Mary is thus to undergo a spiritual transformation from her earthly, material, passionate nature (which the evangelist equates with the female) to a heavenly, spiritual, intellectual nature (which the evangelist equates with the male).” [link]

It had never occurred to me to consider whether Jesus would want his girlfriend to have a sex change operation so that she could be elevated from her sub-human female status, guess I never assumed Jesus thought about women that way. But apparently the fundies have pondered it at length and arrived at an important theological message for the world.

Life is so much fun.

Wikipedia results for Fuck

Update: Jon Swift said...
Regrattably, it appears that some mean-spirited liberals have been committing mischief at Conservapedia and administrators have been forced to shut down new registrations for the time being. It may take them a while to sort out legitimate entries, such as the article about the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus, from hoaxes perpetrated by liberals. All of the citations in my piece, however, link to versions by trusted conservative authors. You can also be certain that any version by Aschlafly, that is, the founder Andrew Schlafly, are genuinely conservative and of the highest quality.

Created 2007-02-27 01:49:07 by 194 and filed under stupid

Comments

E writes...

And watch the crazy, rather grumpy looking, sleep-deprived chic sitting at the pc in the corner of the labs laugh out loud till she falls off her seat...

Which is exactly what the *entire* lab is doing right now...

Much, much thanks for the wonderful laugh.
You rock!

posted: 2007-02-27 08:13:47