OT, the WaPoo is looking for a new columnist . CH ( and others ),why not give it a shot? If Fred’s off his meds that day, you might have shot.:) It’d be a vast improvement . Talk about a shit sandwich. ( You being the good filling, of course

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/pundit-contest/index.html

Tangentially – to play devil’s wee advocate for a minute on the Conservapedia idiocy, many religions had public health components manifested by dietary “laws” and rituals. The anti- shellfish & pork (cloven hooved animals) components of Jewish dietary law I would imagine protected against red tide toxicity and parasitic pork, among other stomach beasties. I can’t get quite as exercised about Biblical food traditions when seen through the lens of “best practices at the time” which may have been directly related to and protective of arable lands, lands suitable for grazing, food safety and public health.

However, I doubt that the “skollars” at Conservapedia will have actually looked at such inconvenient things as facts, historical data and translation accuracy as ondelette and others have pointed out.

I remember about thirty years ago, an overzealous — again, my opinion — food safety office in Los Angeles tried to ban Peking duck from Chinatown. The complaint was that the cooking process took too long, and took place at too low a temperature, to prevent bacteria growth in the duck. The local merchants stopped hanging the ducks outside their shops on strings, but they didn’t stop making Peking duck. After an enormous uproar — we’ve been cooking and eating Peking duck for five thousand years, and the fact that there are ten times as more of us than there are of you should tell you something — etc., etc. The city gave up. Along with thousands of my Han brethren, I cheered.

Americans won’t eat cheese because it has mold on it, or fish because it smells, or green things unless they’re cooked in bacon grease. Traditionally, the Inuit ate mostly fat — there was hardly anything else to eat in the winter, and they needed the calories. Most Hindus eat no meat at all.

Incidences of chronic diet-related and genetic diseases vary amongst these different populations, true, but I’ve yet to see any correlation that’s specific enough to ban this or that food in a population which has traditionally eaten it. Perhaps we’ll find out eventually that there are such correlations, such as arteriosclerosis in beef and ice-cream eaters, or colon cancer among those who eat large amounts of fermented soy, but I’d say that so far, the jury is still out.

Oh, and the virtues of peanut butter…? One word: aflatoxin. Look it up. Bleach on your cutting board and countertops? Maybe, but maybe it will simply kill of the bacteria that you can live with, leaving more room for those to grow which you can’t live with. Look at hospitals. It’s now pretty clear that they’re the principal breeding ground for the most dangerous bacteria we know, and it isn’t because they’re dirty. On the contrary, it appears to be because sterilization techniques and antibiotics have goosed bacterial evolution ahead of our own, and destroyed any hope of reasonable symbiosis between us — at least within the confines of the places where we’re supposed to go when we need healing.

I’m not arguing that industrial food production doesn’t bring new dangers, or that the Bush administration’s version of laissez faire in food inspection and regulation isn’t deplorable — and dangerous — but I am saying that being too squeamish about what we eat will leave a lot of us ignorant of the splendors of one of our most ancient and satisfying art forms.

Ages ago, when I was in seventh grade Greek class, the teacher showed translation errors where the King James Version and the Vulgate (Latin Bible) both failed to translate some verses correctly, from the Bible’s original Greek.

And the Greek can be faulty, too, and contain mistranslations from Hebrew.

The “voice crying in the wilderness” wasn’t actually in the wilderness, for instance.

Is it any wonder that there are stories about Christians becoming atheists after learning Greek and Hebrew and then seeing the translation errors and then wondering how all those errors could be divinely inspired?

But the project notes indicate that the Conservapedia translation teams won’t be risking atheism by wasting time learning that pesky Greek alphabet and those pesky Greek noun declensions and those super pesky verb forms.

Second Aorist Participles? Who Needs ‘Em?

They found a shortcut – - they’re going to “translate” from the KJV into God’s English.

Why bother with the Greek language?

It’s an inferior and “inadequate” language,

http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project

“Christianity introduced powerful new concepts that even the Greek and Hebrew were inadequate to express, but modern conservative language can express well.”
– - conservapedia