Conservapedia ... Believe It Or Not!
An online encyclopedia with the blatantly partisan name "Conservapedia" has appeared on the internet in an effort to restore encyclopedic balance. The founder is a guy named Andy Schlafly. He's out to rectify what he describes as Wikipedia's "liberal bias".
Wikipedia manages to provide good to excellent in-depth information, and in most instances includes pro and con views on contentious subjects. By contrast Conservapedia comes off as not merely wildly biased and even downright wrong, but at times laughably so. In fact over the past few weeks it has been the hoot of the internet.
Mr Schlafly regards the Wikipedia crew as a cabal of the godless. He sees a conspiracy at work in Wikipedia's preference for tagging dates with BCE instead of BC, and CE instead of AD. He calls this "anti-Christian". He also berates Wikipedia for using British spellings at times rather than American. The fact that the Brit version of the language known as "English" traveled much like the pilgrims, doesn't give it a leg up in Schlafly's hierarchy of usage, where the American idiom apparently occupies the gold medal position.
Schlafly, who started his pedia version with the help of a group of home schooled teens in Jersey, uses the term "commandments" to describe the stated policies of Conservapedia. He appears to be blithely unruffled by the hoots of derision that have greeted his Wiki parody and claims he wants to do for knowledge what Fox News has apparently done for news. This already suggests bias and spin of turbo charged proportions.
Even conservatives are balking at Schlafly's claims to represent anything close to objective truth. Threads on Digg include comments by conservatives who refuse to endorse Conservapedia. Conservative pundits such as Andrew Sullivan and Jon Swift have openly mocked the inaccuracies that show up in Schlafly's Wiki rip-off.
Tom Flanagan, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, is a solid fiscal and social conservative. He won't touch Conservapedia with a barge pole. He describes it as "quixotic and narrow".
A number of people who have reviewed its slim selection of slim entries, suggest it should be called Religipedia, because a good deal of its biases are derived from unproven bible-based assumptions.
According to Conservapedia - "kangaroos originated in the Middle East ... and were taken aboard Noah's ark prior to the great flood".
It also offers a bizarre twist on cacti - "... early Catholic missionaries in the west thought the plants to be the work of Satan, and this is perhaps a preferable view to that of materialistic evolution since it is difficult to imagine how something like mescaline could have evolved by natural selection. Besides that, the psychoactive content of many cacti have inspired the writings of such ungodly men as Aldous Huxley and Albert Hoffman".
Type in sex, and you get ... "1. The process by which offspring are conceived - 2. Another term for gender". Sex and fun don't correlate in the minds of these sober custodians of one-sided truth. Sex is viewed as procreative labor, no doubt in the missionary position.
The entry on Atheism is unintentionally hilarious. Assumptions are made about Atheism as though it's some sort of homogeneous movement of the like minded - sort of like Atheist Degenerates R' Us.
The following commentary detailing the rise of immoral Atheist counter culture is based on little more than pure prejudice ...
"Since atheists have no God, as a philosophical framework atheism simply provides no logical basis for any moral standard. They live their lives according to the rule that "anything goes". In recent years, this has led to a large rise in crime[1], drug use, pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy,[2] pedophilia[3] and bestiality".
The inference that belief in God is "logical" is not terribly well supported by the dubious content served up in Conservapedia.
Aidan Maconachy is a freelance writer and artist based in Ontario. You can visit his blog at aidanmaconachyblog.blogspot.com/.
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