After the news of the conservative Bible, I wasn't sure if I would ever find a stranger bible translation. Apparently a man by the name of Nick Coles has made the most incomprehensible translation by rewriting sections of the bible in cockney rhyming slang.

Here is the Lords prayer as you have never seen it before:

Hello, Dad, up there in good ol’ Heaven,

Your name is well great and holy, and we respect you, Guv.

We hope we can all ‘ave a butcher’s at Heaven and be there as soon as possible: and we want to make you happy, Guv, and do what you want ‘ere on earth, just like what you do in Heaven.

Guv, please give us some Uncle Fred, and enough grub and stuff to keep us going today, and we hope you’ll forgive us when we cock things up, just like we’re supposed to forgive them who annoy us and do dodgy stuff to us.

There’s a lot of dodgy people around, Guv; please don’t let us get tempted to do bad things.

Help keep us away from all the nasty, evil stuff, and keep that dodgy Satan away from us, ‘cos you’re much stronger than ‘im.

Your the Boss, God, and will be for ever, innit?

Cheers, Amen.

Thanks to Heather for finding this.

After posting about the conservative bible project I feel that some form of response is in order. I don't want to respond myself since that usually ends in incoherent rambling, so here is an article Micheal Moore wrote for the Huffington Post entitled For Those of You on Your Way to Church This Morning...

Friends,

I'd like to have a word with those of you who call yourselves Christians (Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Bill Maherists, etc. can read along, too, as much of what I have to say, I'm sure, can be applied to your own spiritual/ethical values).

In my new film I speak for the first time in one of my movies about my own spiritual beliefs. I have always believed that one's religious leanings are deeply personal and should be kept private. After all, we've heard enough yammerin' in the past three decades about how one should "behave," and I have to say I'm pretty burned out on pieties and platitudes considering we are a violent nation that invades other countries and punishes our own for having the audacity to fall on hard times.

I'm also against any proselytizing; I certainly don't want you to join anything I belong to. Also, as a Catholic, I have much to say about the Church as an institution, but I'll leave that for another day (or movie).

Amidst all the Wall Street bad guys and corrupt members of Congress exposed in Capitalism: A Love Story, I pose a simple question in the movie: "Is capitalism a sin?" I go on to ask, "Would Jesus be a capitalist?" Would he belong to a hedge fund? Would he sell short? Would he approve of a system that has allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the 95 percent under them combined?

I have come to believe that there is no getting around the fact that capitalism is opposite everything that Jesus (and Moses and Mohammed and Buddha) taught. All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what's left for everyone to fight over. Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven. He told us that we had to be our brother's and sister's keepers and that the riches that did exist were to be divided fairly. He said that if you failed to house the homeless and feed the hungry, you'd have a hard time finding the pin code to the pearly gates.

I guess that's bad news for us Americans. Here's how we define "Blessed Are the Poor": We now have the highest unemployment rate since 1983. There's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds. 14,000 people every day lose their health insurance.

At the same time, Wall Street bankers ("Blessed Are the Wealthy"?) are amassing more and more loot -- and they do their best to pay little or no income tax (last year Goldman Sachs' tax rate was a mere 1 percent!). Would Jesus approve of this? If not, why do we let such an evil system continue? It doesn't seem you can call yourself a Capitalist and a Christian -- because you cannot love your money and love your neighbor when you are denying your neighbor the ability to see a doctor just so you can have a better bottom line. That's called "immoral" -- and you are committing a sin when you benefit at the expense of others.

When you are in church this morning, please think about this. I am asking you to allow your "better angels" to come forward. And if you are among the millions of Americans who are struggling to make it from week to week, please know that I promise to do what I can to stop this evil -- and I hope you'll join me in not giving up until everyone has a seat at the table.

Thanks for listening. I'm off to Mass in a few hours. I'll be sure to ask the priest if he thinks J.C. deals in derivatives or credit default swaps. I mean, after all, he must've been good at math. How else did he divide up two loaves of bread and five pieces of fish equally amongst 5,000 people? Either he was the first socialist or his disciples were really bad at packing lunch. Or both.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

Christianity is a rather interesting faith. Like all faiths, there are numerous disagreements in exactly what Christians are, what they believe in, how they should act, and so forth.

Generally when one group of Christians disagree with each other they split and form a new denomination. What happens when a Christian group, no longer content to disagree with other Christians, also disagrees with the bible?

Well, a group of conservative Americans want to rewrite the bible to better coincide with their opinions about faith. The entire page about this project reads like a bad joke, which I certainly hope it is.

I could go on at length about my feelings about this, but here is what they have to say for themselves.

Their rationnel for creating a new translation is as follows:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots"; using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."

Their approach to the task is as follows:

- identify pro-liberal terms used in existing Bible translations, such as "government", and suggest more accurate substitutes
- identify the omission of liberal terms for vices, such as "gambling", and identify where they should be used
- identify conservative terms that are omitted from existing translations, and propose where they could improve the translation
- identify terms that have lost their original meaning, such as "word" in the beginning of the Gospel of John, and suggest replacements, such as "truth"

This is going to be a web 2.0 bible since the translation is occurring on a wiki. Here are the purported benefits to an online translation effort:

- supported by conservative principles, the project can be bolder in uprooting and excluding liberal distortions
- the project can adapt quickly to future threats from liberals to biblical integrity
- the ensuing debate would flesh out -- and stop -- the infiltration of churches by liberals pretending to be Christian, much as a vote by legislators exposes the liberals
- debunk the pervasive and hurtful myth that Jesus would be a political liberal today

Hopefully people will simply ignore this translation since it will be the "bible anyone can edit".