Conservapedia

The Carpetbagger bagged a good one with this post:

At first, I thought the “Conservapedia” was some kind of joke. Billed as a conservative rival to Wikipedia, Conservapedia would be an ideologically pure, right-wing online collaborative encyclopedia. Except the site was so laughably right-wing, and so intentionally devoid of diversity of thought, it seemed obvious that this was some Onion-like parody.

No such luck. Conservapedia is a project of Andy Schlafly, Phyllis’ son, which is serious about its goals.

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian “C.E.” instead of “A.D.”, which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance. […]

Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America. Conservapedia has easy-to-use indexes to facilitate review of topics. You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise answers free of “political correctness”.

Again, this isn’t a joke. A Bush White House aide famously said a few years ago, “We create our own reality.” I suppose it stands to reason, then, that Bush’s supporters would want to do the same thing.

And Conservapedia seems to fit the bill nicely. Far-right visitors to the site won’t be confronted with anything that might bother them, ever. Pages are scrubbed of inconvenient truths, and replaced with right-wing talking points. In some instances, whole subjects (such as biological evolution) are denied pages, lest anyone get confused.

Sometimes I think they're living in some sort of parallel universe, but upside down universe.

Once again, I'll pick a quote or two from the on-line book The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer that I recommended the other day. Here, he's talking about Christian fundamentalists (who happen unsurprisingly to rate high on the authoritarian follower scale):

If you ask fundamentalists about evolution, it becomes clear that they seldom understand what they are opposing. Instead they seem to be repeating things they have heard from the leaders of their in-groups, such as "Darwin's theory of evolution says that humans descended from monkeys," and "These is a crucial 'missing link' in the fossil evidence that shows humans could not have descended from the apes," and "It's just a theory." They will sometimes tell you evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics, but when you ask them what those laws are, the conditions under which the featured Second Law applies, and what it has to do with evolution, they stumble all over themselves.

He even found that despite the fact that they believe the Bible to be the revealed word of God that is word for word true, nineteen percent of fundamentalist Christians had never read any book of the Bible from beginning to end and only twenty percent had read them all.