By now the Conservapedia project is relatively old news on the internet. Someone decided that Wikipedia was too ‘liberal’ (whatever that means) and decided an open encyclopedia based on conservative values should be created.  More recently the projects creators have set their eyes on a much older and more venerated source of knowledge: The Bible.  Apparently that is also too liberal (or at least English translations going back to King James are).  They aim to create a translation of the Bible that conforms to explicitly conservative values.  The aims of the project are listed on their webpage.

I will not even bother to waste my time rebutting such a project other than to point out the somewhat hilarious irony of a religious movement with a worldview supposedly based upon literal adherence to the Bible, re-interpreting the Bible to fit with said worldview. The rotations per minute of such circular reasoning are off the charts.

What is more interesting to me is the way that such fringe groups color the perspective of more mainstream groups.  One sees this in liberal as well as conservative groups that such fringe groups (Greenpeace, PETA, Conservapedia, Timothy McVeigh) are used by people to establish their ‘moderate’ credentials.  On the reverse side, members of the opposite group point to such extremes as indicative of the character of the group as a whole.  So while one side looks at such fringe groups as indicative of the validity of their non-extremist beliefs, the other looks on those same groups as representative.

Frankly, we should be less concerned with the ‘extremism’ of the beliefs (which is really just a measure of their deviation form the norm) and more on whether they make sense, stand up to logical scrutiny and real world experience.