The proverbial wisdom of Dilbert

"Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue." -- Proverbs 17:28 (NIV)

Praying for Obama Bible verses

“Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” --Psalm 109:8

That's the Bible verse being used on bumper stickers and T-shirts as a jab at President Barack Obama. It's meant to be funny, but not everyone is laughing, partly because the next verse reads, “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

People sporting it on cars, torsos and in e-mails say either they were unaware of the next verse or that they purposely didn't say 109:8-9 because they didn't mean for Obama to die, just leave office.

Still, it's not very Christian. Even if you disagree with everything Obama stands for, using Bible verses to either make fun of spew hatred toward him is, well, unbiblical.

Feel free to criticise his policies. If you believe they are extremely harmful, say so. If you want to be clever equate him with Stalin, Mao or even Hitler. If you think he's the Antichrist, you can say that, too. But to use a verse that was used in the New Testament to refer to Judas, who killed himself, is deplorable.

"Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God," the Apostle Paul notes in Romans 13:1. That doesn't mean we aren't to criticise our leaders when they are wrong -- especially since God has placed us in a free society in which we are given the right -- and duty -- to vote.

"In 1 Tim 2:1-2, it says to pray for those in authority. Paul the apostle was not talking about a believer in authority," a person purporting to be John Piper notes in the comments section of The Christian Science Monitor story.

The comments section also naturally draws people critical of Christians "exposing themselves for what they really are: mean-spirited, self-righteous hypocrites."

That's true of some. The non-mean-spirited Christians aren't jumping on the Psalm 109 bandwagon.

And, as Jesus noted, not everyone who says to him "Lord, Lord" will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Some of them are, as Kierkegaard noted, merely a "Christian of a sort."

So the thing to do, if you believe Obama is evil, is to pray for his salvation.

Conservative Bible might be a liberal translation

Lots of conservative Christians have gotten upset in recent years over attempts to "liberal up" the Bible. Now they've got something else they should be upset about: a Conservative Bible.

The New International Version, which has usurped the King James Version in popularity for at least the past two decades, attempted to put more gender-inclusive language in the text a few years ago. It didn't go over well.

Already words such as "brothers" had been translated "brothers and sisters" and "men" were called "people" when it was clear that both sexes were being represented.

But now the group that brought you Conservapedia as an antidote to Wikipedia is undertaking to translate the Bible with all the liberalism taken out. (They're doing this on the Conservapedia site at http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project.)

Much like with Wikipedia, men, women, boys and girls can log in, and, if they feel confident in their ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Koine Greek, can offer conservative translations of the text.

While I'm biblically conservative myself, I was skeptical of a project to purposefully translate the Bible in a conservative context. I've read several opinion pieces lambasting the idea, usually from people more liberal than myself. Leonard Pitts throws in the ad hominem that Conservapedia intends to "remake Jesus of Nazareth in the image of Dick Cheney." That's unnecessary. There's enough to attack this effort on, even from a conservative point of view, without resorting to cheap shots.

First, why set out to translate the Bible from a conservative point of view? Theological conservatives are typically biblical literalists, so if you truly believe modern translations have been corrupted from a liberal mindset, then you should correct it from the viewpoint of accuracy, not conservatism. (Of course, whether you be conservative, liberal or whatever, you consider your own viewpoint to be The Truth. Problem is, if you are biblically conservative, you also believe yourself to be "sinful," a Greek archery term for "missing the mark." So you're probably wrong about something, hence your need to pray regularly and seek God's guidance.)

But no, the Conservative Bible Project intends to reduce "liberal wordiness" and nine other such principals, a good many of them anti-liberal/pro-conservative rather than anti-error/pro-truth.

They've caught flak from liberals for wanting to get rid of the passage from John about the woman caught in adultery. They have good arguments for deleting it: It isn't in the oldest available manuscripts, and liberals themselves agree on this point. But the conservative Bible project wants it for that reason and because "liberals commonly put their own spin on" it.

Dudes, liberals can put their own spin on anything. And so can conservatives--which is exactly what you are trying to do with this project. The best translators try to overcome bias by using teams that include various points of view, thus reducing the chance of getting a conservative or liberal Bible, but one that is as close to the original texts as possible. The Conservative Bible Project is using only conservatives for it's project, and in fact, is trying to speed the process by having a single person translate each section -- not a team.

I hate to break it to Andrew Schlafly and the rest of the crew at the Conservative Bible Project, but "conservative" means not changing, while "liberal" means advocating some type of change. So, essentially, their Conservative Bible is theological liberalism.

Photo courtesy:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/notjake13/ / CC BY 2.0