User talk:Charles Ulysses Farley

I'm happy to reconsider my edits in the light of your opinion. What looks like mainstream in one part of the world is very much not mainstream in others. People in my country who believe in a thousand year reign of Christ on earth are regarded as fairly wacky by many of their fellow Christians, never mind non-Christians. Myopic Bookworm 14:11, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

That is one reason why these things are supposed to be referenced. One major problem is that often there are signficant differences of opinion between clergy and theologians on the one hand and "the people in the pews" on the other hand. However, "the people in the pews" do not represent the official teachings of the religion. For instance, many Roman Catholics "in the pews" hold views directly contrary to Roman Catholic teachings and not supported by the Bible. A related problem is that often there are several major views, sometimes including officially-recognized differences. A major example is the "filioque", Latin for "and son". The Nicene Creed used by Roman Catholics and Protestants says that the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the Son". The version used by Eastern Orthodox leaves out "and the Son" because (1) There is no scriptural evidence that HS sometimes proceeds from the Son without the Father's involvement and (2) There is no scriptural evidence that the Son must be involved in order for HS to proceed. On WP, although it is commonly done, especially in these "overview" type articles the lack of documentation is a particular problem.

The real problem with certain of these articles that discuss the beliefs of multiple religions on a biblical subject is that a small group from a particular religion have no qualms about going into articles or sections about Christian beliefs or views and adding in those articles or sections material about the views of the interlopers' religion and they claim they are doing it to maintain NPOV. It is an on-going problem. As a result, a number of these multi-religion articles have almost no input from either Christians or Moslems because C & M contributors get tired of having their religions' views edited and distorted by people who have little or no background in their beliefs, and who are relying on distorted biased materials from radicals in their own religion rather than recognized scholars. What little information there is about C or M views is usually so distorted it is worthless.

As I mentioned in the talk, a real overview is simple but I don't want to put it because I have been involved (under other names) in similar battles before and the battles are not worth the effort. A simple description would be:

In the New Testament Jesus and his disciples repeatedly refer to him as the "Christ", which is the Greek word for Messiah, for example, Matthew 2:3, Mark 3:4, Luke 5:6 and John 7:8; 9:10, 11:12-13. (sample citations) Christianity teaches that humans have become estranged from God because they chose not to follow his ways. This refusal to follow is called "sin". Christianity teaches that a sacrifice was needed to atone (pay) for humans' sins. Christianity teaches that an atonement was necessary to satisfy God's sense of justice and to make it clear that sin does not go unpunished, even if someone other than the sinner takes the punishment. Christianity teaches that Jesus exists eternally and came to Earth as a human, the Messiah, took upon himself the sins of the world, and took the punishment for those sins (Isaiah 52:13-53:12), punishment to physical death. Christianity teaches that Jesus came back to physical life after three days and returned to heaven about forty days later and that he will return at the Second Coming and will rule the Earth from Jerusalem. It claims that many of these events were foretold in Bible prophecy about the Messiah and that both his suffering and eventual victory and rule were foretold. "

For the "Messiah" article I would not bother going into the details of how long he will rule, returning the kingdom to the Father, etc. They really are off topic. As for defenses, (a) pre-Christian and modern Jewish interpretations are not relevant to "Christian view" and are off topic. (b) Orthodox and Conservative Judaism definitely disagree with Reform Judaism on whether there will be a physical messiah. When stating the Reform view, if it is not necessary or appropriate to say, "However, Orthodox and Conservatives respond . . ." to maintain NPOV, why is it necessary to add such a statement in the "Christian view" section? Charles Ulysses Farley 23:01, 19 March 2006 (UTC)