Skewering Common Knowledge

mid-afternoon on Wednesday, the 2nd of November 2005 by Chad

"It ain't so much what people don't know that hurts as what they know that ain't so."

Most people who try to think that they are pretty smart and well informed are generally products of false common knowledge.

Lets try a few on for size.

“The Bible was translated so many times, each person doing the translation put their own spin on things, and it is no longer accurate.”

This is also known as the introduction of generational copy errors, or running through babelfish several times. Each time someone translates a passage, they either make a mistake, or put in their own particular change to make some point, typically to oppress women or something like that.
Of course this happens only because it would never occur to the people doing the translations to go back to the earliest source documents available. They would just retranslate the version written a few years earlier. “Yeah, we have two thousand year old copies written in the original greek we could use, but I’ll just copy Brother Bubba’s version from down the hall. Because that makes a lot of sense!”
In other words, “bzzzt… wrong answer, spin it again, Vanna!”
Each time the Bible was translated, the people doing the work would go back to the earliest editions they could and make the translation from there.

“These are people who love fetuses but hate babies and children,” she said, arguing that antiabortion demonstrators “do nothing” to aid adoption, foster care or other programs designed to help women cope with unwanted pregnancies.

Ahh, the argument used by pro-choice against the anti-abortion protesters outside their doors. Sorry, I have news for you. There are millions of people who are willing to adopt. A quarter million people contact state welfare offices every single year looking to adopt. But this is only for older or special needs children, and the number does not include people seeking private infant adoptions, which is much higher. My wife works for an eye doctor here in Colorado Springs. Almost all of her patients are parishoners of the evangelical churches in the area, if not outright employees of places like Focus on the Family. And she has never met so many people in her life who have adopted children than in the 6 months she has been there. It seems that on a regular basis a child on medicaid (or medicare, i forget which is which) comes in, which is a 99% chance they are adopted.
Once again, people using this argument need to go out and buy another one…

I’ll have a few more examples as time goes on… such as everyone thought the Earth was flat until Columbus came along. I’ve already talked about how everyone is completely wrong about the Inquisition.