Enterprising Italian inventor Luciano Marabese has developed an automatic holy water dispenser to be used until fears of Swine Flu (the H1N1 Virus) have abated. Many churches, including Milan’s cathedral, had suspended use of their holy water fonts following 15 deaths in the nation, so Marabese has been inundated with orders for the device.
I sure bet Sam and Dean would like one of those in the back of the Impala.
Returning from an Xbox 360-enforced hiatus (having gotten one just after Christmas), it’s entirely appropriate I finally post the following story (and no, it’s not about alien religions in Mass Effect). Aaron Linne from Christian company LifeWay has developed a multimedia Bible app for the Xbox 360: Bible Navigator X.
The move from printed to digital text is hardly a revolutionary one (especially for this blog) but its location on the Xbox 360 is particularly interesting from a social point of view. Gamers are a strange bunch, and the multiplayer gamers who can find Bible Navigator X on Xbox Live are more known for their head-shots and trash-talking than their bible-thumping.
The video also features the initially-innocuous but rather stunning admission from Linne: “I’m more comfortable with a controller in my hand than I am with a book in my hand.” I hardly see this sort of thing as the next step in religious evolution, but the jump he’s made over the keyboard and mouse is conspicuous by its absence. I also wonder how many gamers have those gamepads with keyboards…
Some of you may have already heard about Conservapedia’s ‘Conservative Bible Project‘ (CBP). American “Conservatives” (who, like conservatives in Australia, are often the most radical) have begun a wiki project to rewrite the Bible free from “liberal distortion”. Their problem with current translations is as follows.
As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:
Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other feminist distortions; preserve many references to the unborn child (the NIV deletes these)
Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level
Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent; Defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”; using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
Exclude Later-Inserted Inauthentic Passages: excluding the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story
Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”
I won’t draw attention to such hilarities as their intention to “Express Free Market Parables” or “Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness”, but instead point out at least one inconsistency they already suffer. Their second guideline is for a bible that is “Not Emasculated”, but consider the parallel ‘translations’ of the creation of Adam in Gen. 2.7 from the KJV and the CBP:
KJV: And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
CBP: Then the LORD God formed a human being out of the dry powdered soil on the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And so man became a living person.
Emasculation!
They’re taking quite a while with their ‘translation’; I wonder how their pace stacks up against the LOLcat Bible.
There was an article in the Herald about typos on Google Maps, one of which rendered Oatley Park’s Jewfish Bay as “Few Fish Bay”. I imagine it was just misreading on the part of the data enterer, but it reminded me of a friend’s complaint that she was unable to search for “Jew” on Google, [...]
Okay, so I’m mixing my Indians (Malaysian/Sri Lankan Tamils, actually) with that title, but you get the point. The Wampanoag tribe of Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts have applied for their land’s status as a Traditional Cultural Property on the National Register of Historic Places in a last ditch bid to stop a wind farm being [...]
A piece on msnbc.com about online commuting to church. Apparently they even perform baptisms over webcams. I love this quote from Kurt Ervin, who runs the website for Central Christian Church We live in a day and age and a culture where people go to school online, bank online, date online and do other things [...]
And, yea, I shall delve into the archives for something to write about, for you may know me as a fisher of compliments, but I say unto you, I have become as a fisher of posts. On the 19th of October the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites suffered a Distributed [...]
Apologies to Msrs Diamond, Yauch and Horovitz. David P often links on Facebook to places he’s discovered on Atlas Obscura, a site dedicated to weird and wonderful travel destinations around the world. One of these was the Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory, in Rome, which displays a number of bibles, prayerbooks and other [...]
That’s right. The WORST kind. David P posted this a few weeks ago on Facebook, and I’m only just now getting around to posting it. Retrosexual David Malki has composed a list of fictional collective nouns for supernatural entities, and some of them are religious. I’ll let you work out which ones. I think you’ll [...]
The Institute of Jainology has launched their Jainpedia project: an online depository of digitised Jain texts from collections around the world. Helmed mainly by British Jains, the project aims to incorporate the numerous manuscripts held in British institutions, as well as those remaining in India. Primarily targeted at academics, Jainpedia also hopes to make itself [...]
