Conservative Bible project

This amazing cultural artifact has been bouncing around the blogosphere the past few days.

There are many interesting things to think about here:

1. Are liberals (of either sort) really wordier than conservatives?

2. Is this the best example you have ever heard of where relying on the distributed knowledge of the internet masses is likely to produce a great big mess rather than a thing of beauty or truth? I think it may be such for me.

3. Is there perhaps a contradiction between not "dumbing down" the prose (and why pick on the NIV here and not the "Good News" bible or other similar populist abominations) and relying on internet amateurs to do a translation, rather than actual scholars?

4. Could this be a troll? That is, could this be lefties trying to make the righties look bad, rather than a sincere proposal? I assign some small probability to this state of the world.

We live in a varied and wonderful world, indeed.