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Conservapedia: The theory of relativity is a liberal plot - Except when it is being used to defend the 6000-year age of the Earth or attack Copernicus.

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First published on ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which was recently named one of Time magazine’s Top 25 blogs of 2010.

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.[1] Here is a list of 24 counterexamples: any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect.

I would have filed this under Signs of the Apocalypse, but we are way past that.  This is more like, Signs that the Apocalypse happened a long time ago but we were all too busy watching American Idol to notice.

Yes, there is a Conservapedia and its main benefit to society is that it  apparently occupies the  time of the great many conservatives who  post  meticulously-footnoted articles like the one above, titled, “Counterexamples to Relativity.”

It is hard to know what is the most  mind-boggling thing  about this particular article.  Footnote 1 reads:

See, e.g., historian Paul Johnson’s book about the 20th century, and the article written by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe as allegedly assisted by Barack Obama. Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold.

Really?  The Bible outsells The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by a hundred-fold?   Well then it must be literally true word-for-word.   That’s how we know, for instance, that the Sun moves around the Earth*.  But still,  I am puzzled how this is a counter example:

The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54.

You can click on the second link to read the story in the conservative translation of the Bible –  didn’t know there was a conservative translation, did you, ye of little  ideological faith?

But I don’t see how that story of Jesus healing somebody proves action at a distance instantaneously.  Indeed,  in the conservative translation of the relevant verse

So he asked them the exact hour when he began to feel better, and they told him, “His fever broke yesterday, at about one pm.”

Then the father realized that this was the exact hour when Jesus said to him, “your son lives,” so both he and his entire house believed.

Silly conservatives.   You would need to demonstrate that  the healing took place exactly when Jesus spoke to disapprove the special theory of relativity –   rather than say a fraction of a second later.  But in your retranslation, the testimony is only “about one pm” –  rather than the King James version:

And they said unto him, Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.

And  for the record,  I was taught and believed relativity and I continue to read the  King James Bible.  It contains much one can learn from and is one of the two definitive  rhetoric texts in English along with the complete works of Shakespeare.  But I digress.

You may be wondering how Barack Obama ” allegedly” used  the theory of relativity  to mislead people.   For that you have to go to the Conservapedia entry on the “Theory of relativity“:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of “curvature of space” to promote a broad legal right to abortion.[45] As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments.

Before clicking on the link to the footnote, PLEASE PUT YOUR HEAD IN A SECOND VISE!

I know that you are thinking now that this is some  sort of massive spoof by The Onion. But DailyKos actually recalled that the Onion had mocked the anti-science  ideologues of the right years ago:

The second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental scientific principle stating that entropy increases over time as organized forms decay into greater states of randomness, has come under fire from conservative Christian groups, who are demanding that the law be repealed.

The truly sad thing about the Conservapedia entry is that it treats the theory of relativity like global warming or evolution — as some  insidious liberal plot that needs to be debunked using pseudoscience.

And so we learn that one of the counter examples to relativity is:

The universe shortly after its creation, when quantum effects dominated and contradicted Relativity.

But where in the Bible does it say that the universe, shortly after its creation, was dominated by quantum effects to the exclusion of relativity?  Geez.  I  have no freaking idea where these guys get their information!

Seriously, or rather, semi-seriously,  how can you possibly quote astrophysics to refute relativity?  Why even bother?

Weirdly,  the entry on the theory of relativity includes this:

Creation scientists such as physicists Dr. Russell Humphreys and Dr. John Hartnett have used relativistic time dilation to explain how the earth can be only 6,000 years old even though cosmological data (background radiation, supernovae, etc.) set a much older age for the universe.

Conservatives need to get their story straight on Einstein!  Is he liberal — conservative?

*If you go to the Conservapedia entry on  Copernicus to find out what conservatives believe about whether the Earth goes around the Sun and that part of Joshua that suggests the Sun does move around the Earth, you learn this:

The reception to his work was initially positive within the Catholic Church. Years later, the Church reconsidered in connection with claims by Galileo that the Copernican model had been proven correct. Copernicus’ book was suspended until corrected by the Index of the Catholic Church in 1616, because the Pythagorean doctrine of the motion of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun “is false and altogether opposed to the Holy Scripture”. [1][2] These corrections were indicated in 1620, and nine sentences had to be either omitted or changed.[3] The book stayed on the Index until 1758. In the 20th century, scientists adopted a view closer to the Church scientists. The consensus is now that motion is relative, that Earth-centered and Sun-centered coordinate systems are equally valid for astronomical calculations, that Galileo’s main argument for the Copernican system was fallacious,[4] and that the doctrine of the immobility of the Sun is false.[5]

Yes, the earth-centered system is equally valid to the  sun-centered … because of  Einstein’s theory of relativity.  Darn it,  I forgot to put my second vise on!

And how do we know that the doctrine of the immobility of the sun is false?  The footnote says:

“The Sun orbits around a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.”

But were does the idea of black holes come from?  Here’s  the Conservapedia entry on black holes:

Black holes are theoretical entities which cannot be directly observed and may not exist. Suggested by the theory of relativity (see Counterexamples to Relativity), black holes are postulated to be collapsed objects, usually stars, which have so much mass that within a certain radius the effect if it’s [sic] mass results in an event horizon, past which both light and matter inevitably move towards the center over time….

Black holes have generated much interest among liberal publications, such as the science page of the New York Times and glossy magazines, as well as science fiction writers.

Damn you, glossy magazine!

So black holes are another relativistic liberal plot.  But if so, that how can they be cited as evidence that the doctrine of the  immobility of the sun is false?  So  that means the doctrine of the immobility of the sun must be true — and the  literal translation of the Bible is false.  And that means all of Conservapedia must be bunk….

Ironically, few things have done  more to undermine religion than  this bizarre notion that every single word of the Bible is literally true — or, to  be more accurate, that every single word of whatever particular translation somebody likes, and whatever particular books one accepts as part of the Bible, are literally true.

But still,  this all begs the question,  who actually wastes their time coming up with all of this Conservapedia nonsense?

Read the original story at Climate Progress


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