A New Place for Solid Fact?
March 14th, 2007 at 1:52 pm by Zacque
Tags: conservapedia, conservative, internet, liberal, neal-boortz, npr, politics, religion, research, wikipedia
Today, on my way back to my office I happened to catch National Public Radio’s Evening Edition. The story was about a new web reference source in response to Wikipedia. Evidently there are a group of individuals who believe Wikipedia to be too liberal. I am not saying that this group of individuals is wrong, but they came to this conclusion based on the statistics of a poll by Wikipedia editors.
There are several bits of flawed logic with this idea. The assumption that the editors of Wikipedia aren’t human because as a straight set of data this poll would leave no room for human error or a lack of honesty. These facts are statistics. Statistics by nature can be used to sway one way or another. If not lawyers wouldn’t be so profitable. However, the major problem with consevapedia.com, is the misuse of the word conservative.
The main example can be shown by comparing the definitions of the word kangaroo on both sites: Wikipedia and Conservapedia. Okay, I am fine with either of them until I get to the Origins section of the Conservapedia definition. The first thing listed is a creationist theory explanation. That in itself was fishy enough for me to check the dictionary for the definition.
The Oxford dictionary (I would have used Merriam-Webster, but the link wouldn’t pull up) states that a conservative is “(in a political context) favoring free enterprise, private ownership, and socially conservative ideas.” If this is the case then where does interjecting religious beliefs into the origin of a species come into play? A true conservative world should not include religion. Religion is much more defined either one way or another.
Conservapedia.com even goes on to say “A conservative is one who adheres to principles of limited government, personal responsibility and moral virtue.” Where does this give them the right to inteject a secular religious viewpoint, much less stake a claim of moral virtue? If they are truly conservative should they not list the scientific information first?
With that in mind I would like to propose a new web address for this website: severelyscrewypedia.com
March 14th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
I suppose you can count me in that number – conservatively speaking.
March 15th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Hmmm. Scientifically speaking, WTF?
Prove Noah’s ark. I mean, lets count every animal on the earth and multiply by 2 and then figure out the dimensions of the ark as it was: 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high (Creation Tips site).
Now, that means, if we have just the mammal, which there are 4,629 species (Source) we have a whopping 164 square feet per mammal. That’s room for the animal and its food and water, etc. for 40 days.
Let’s not get into the whole how do we hurd all these critters and make sure we have one male and female and then figure out how we keep them from all dying off once they incestuously mate with their children, no, let’s just think about this big boat and holding all these animals for 40 days… Scientifically…
What about the insects? Many of them don’t live 40 days… It gets pretty tricky.
I am afraid I just can’t buy into this science, even giving crazy assumptions like all the animals showing up and marching two by two, male and female into the boat…
March 15th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Freaking bizarre. I saw words on that site I’ve never seen before … all of them ending in “-ologist.”
It’s kinda funny … you can read through Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” pause every once in a while and think, “And God saw that it was good,” and it’ll still make sense.
Applying Science to Religion doesn’t have to be night and day — there’s a long explanation to a simple statement, and where it doesn’t work, there’s room for interpretation.
Applying Religion to Science, however, just doesn’t work — science is always wrong. Remember that it took Christianity a couple of hundred years to digress that the Earth might actually be round…
And where Politics are concerned … What’s worse: the scientist who theorizes, or the zealot who dictates? Which one do you think “is one who adheres to principles of limited government, personal responsibility and moral virtue?”
March 19th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Excellent post. It’s funny but then it’s also scary. Should be fundamentalistapedia…