That NOT so INERRANT Word of God

Coincidentally, the word of the day over at dictionary.com is mundify.
No, it has nothing to do with the particular difficulties of Mondays, the first work day of the week.
Mundify, pronounced \MUHN-duh-fahy\ , verb;

1.To purge or purify.

Origin: Mundify is built from two Latin roots, mundi-, "to clean," and ficare, "to do."

In that context, I offer a news article which seemed to dovetail very well with the word of the day.  Both word and article seemed significant in view of the Republican candidate wannabe debates, and consideration of the role of the religious right in attempting to make the Bible the foundation for our civil law in the United States, and their efforts to rewrite our history to make it Christian rather than secular.  Regular Penigma readers will be well aware of my particular aversion to the inaccuracies of revisionist history.  I delight in the opposite, the correction of inaccurate knowledge of history through improved technology and primary resources. 
 
I applaud a good, accuate, factual 'mundifying'.
 
Do not  misunderstand me.  I commend anyone who follows their faith, in order to pursue their own spirituality, a connection with God, and being a better human being, a better member of society.  But I condemn those who would exalt their own religious belief, over others, inhibiting those other people to believe or not believe according to their own conscience, or those who seek to interject their beliefs into the lives of others or who seek to impose them on others.  I would include political agendas that prohibit public health decisions such as access to reproductive health measures, including both contraception and abortion, or those who inflict ignorance instead of education in the form of abstinence only sex ed programs on the tax dollar.  We are imperfect, any knowledge we believe to be about God is imperfect, and our attempts to impose those beliefs on others are flawed multiplied.  Those who attempt to do so often use and abuse the word Freedom over and over again, while attempting to make us far less free.
 
I find this article a humbling reminder of our fallibility, of our humanity, and a lovely example of what a better focus on religion can accomplish, in view of the benefit this research brings not only to a better understanding of Judaism, but also the other Abrahamic religions, and by extension, to the world wide understanding of ourselves and each other. The global significance of this research should make us all more tolerant of each other and of our differences - and how and why we differ.
 
From the AP, author Matti Friedman, by way of  MSNBC.com: 

Dr. Michael Segal, editor for the Hebrew University Bible Project, center, Dr. Rafael Zer, editorial coordinator, left, and Efrat Leibowitz, graduate research assistant, confer in their office at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on Wednesday. The ongoing work of these academic detectives shows that this foundation text of Western civilization has always been more fluid than many people's strongly held beliefs would suggest.

 Scholars seek to correct 'mistakes' in Bible

Experts say they're looking to publish the authoritative edition of the Old Testament

JERUSALEM — A dull-looking chart projected on the wall of a university office in Jerusalem displayed a revelation that would startle many readers of the Old Testament: The sacred text that people revered in the past was not the same one we study today.

An ancient version of one book has an extra phrase. Another appears to have been revised to retroactively insert a prophecy after the events happened.

Scholars in this out-of-the-way corner of the Hebrew University campus have been quietly at work for 53 years on one of the most ambitious projects attempted in biblical studies — publishing the authoritative edition of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, and tracking every single evolution of the text over centuries and millennia.

And it has evolved, despite deeply held beliefs to the contrary.

For many Jews and Christians, religion dictates that the words of the Bible in the original Hebrew are divine, unaltered and unalterable.

For Orthodox Jews, the accuracy is considered so inviolable that if a synagogue's Torah scroll is found to have a minute error in a single letter, the entire scroll is unusable.

But the ongoing work of the academic detectives of the Bible Project, as their undertaking is known, shows that this text at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was somewhat fluid for long periods of its history, and that its transmission through the ages was messier and more human than most of us imagine.

'Must be of interest'

The project's scholars have been at work on their critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, a version intended mainly for the use of other scholars, since 1958.

"What we're doing here must be of interest for anyone interested in the Bible," said Michael Segal, the scholar who heads the project.

The sheer volume of information makes the Bible Project's version "the most comprehensive critical edition of the Hebrew Bible in existence at the present time," said David Marcus, a Bible scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, who is not involved with the project.

But Segal and his colleagues toil in relative anonymity. Their undertaking is nearly unknown outside a circle of Bible experts numbering several hundred people at most, and a visitor asking directions to the Bible Project's office on the university campus will find that many members of the university's own staff have never heard of it.

Rumsfeld & the Right Are Wrong: Factcheck.org Fact Checks Revisionist History by Former Sec.Defense Rumsfeld,

Rummy continues his efforts to diminish the effectiveness and improvements of the Obama administration, while apparently trying to re-write the history of the Bush administration to improve a deplorable presidential legacy, of which he was a part.  Seems kind of self-serving to me, and typical of the Right's refusal to give Obama credit in world affairs where credit is due.  This provides an interesting context to evaluating Obama's handling of the upheavals in the middle east, and conservatives efforts to try to sabotage a second Obmama term.

Rumsfeld on the World’s View of America

February 21, 2011
Donald Rumsfeld wrongly denied that the U.S. is viewed more favorably under President Barack Obama than it was under President George W. Bush. In fact, residents of several nations including Britain, Germany, France and China view the U.S. more favorably, according to a survey released last year by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project.

Rumsfeld, who served as Defense Secretary under Bush, told CNN’s Candy Crowley that he didn’t think there was any evidence to support claims that residents of other nations have a more favorable opinion of America than they used to:

Crowley, Feb. 20: The president’s supporters say that in two years he has been able to return this country to a status of being liked across the world in a way that America was not liked during the Bush administration, that he has once again made America a beacon. Do you agree with that? Do you think that the U.S. is now looked at much differently than it was, and much more positively than it was during your tenure?

Rumsfeld: No, and I don’t think there’s data that supports that. I think he has made a practice of trying to apologize for America. I personally am proud of America.

Crowley: Well, he seems to be quite popular overseas in a way that President Bush was not. The streets aren’t full of people burning him in effigy. There does seem to be a new — a chance to look at America in a different way than it did during the Bush administration. You don’t think that’s true.

Rumsfeld: I don’t think that’s true, and I don’t think that there’s data that would support that.

But there is support for such claims. Pew reported in June 2010 that President Obama was pretty popular around the world. "In turn, opinions of the U.S., which improved markedly in 2009 in response to Obama’s new presidency, also have remained far more positive than they were for much of George W. Bush’s tenure," the report said.

In fact, in 16 out of 19 nations (not including the United States), those surveyed had a more favorable view of America in 2010 than they did in the last year of Bush’s presidency. Here is the Pew Research Center’s chart:

Raggin' on Reagan - the Reality of His Legacy versus the Revisionist History

Reagan Worshippers,
image by Mike Licht,
Notions Capital
http://notionscapital.
wordpress.com/2011/02/05/
reagan-worshippers-to-
celebrate-centennial/
Well done Mr. Licht, you've
captured it perfectly - and a thanks
to Mike B for helping me find this.

On his 100th birthday, could Ronald Reagan, the secular, political patron saint of the right gotten elected in the era of the tea party and right wing culture warriors?

Let's take a look: Ronald Reagan raised taxes.  Not just once either, but 11 times. While some might protest that NPR is a lefty source for an opinion, you won't find any criticism, much less factual reporting on the Reagan era on the right at all.  Per an  NPR news interview:

Former Senator ALAN SIMPSON (Republican, Wyoming): Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration. I was here. I was here. I knew him. Better than anybody in this room. He was a dear friend and a total realist as to politics.

HORSLEY: Simpson's recollection is spot on, says historian Douglas Brinkley, the editor of Reagan's diaries.

Professor DOUGLAS BRINKLEY (Rice University): Ronald Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes. He knew that it was necessary at times. And so there's a false mythology out there about Reagan as this conservative president who came in and just cut taxes and trimmed federal spending in a dramatic way. It didn't happen that way. It's false.