Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spirituality/Archive 4

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Timothy Wyllie

This is an article started recently, but the original editor has now left, and needs a lot of work. From what I gather he has published information on "non-human intelligences" such as angels. Would this fall under the remit here? Paulbrock (talk) 18:13, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme

As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.

• The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
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Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot (Disable) 20:52, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Articles flagged for cleanup

Currently, 270 articles are assigned to this project, of which 122, or 45.2%, are flagged for cleanup of some sort. (Data as of 14 July 2008.) Are you interested in finding out more? I am offering to generate cleanup to-do lists on a project or work group level. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for details. More than 150 projects and work groups have already subscribed, and adding a subscription for yours is easy - just place the following template on your project page:

{{User:WolterBot/Cleanup listing subscription|banner=Spirituality project}}

If you want to respond to this canned message, please do so at my user talk page; I'm not watching this page. --B. Wolterding (talk) 17:55, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Spirituality

Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 22:58, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Spirituality, Spiritualism, Spiritism

I think we should first define what spirituality is and what it is not, and mark the borders and differences. For me spiritism is in the antipodes of spirituality, as Yogananda and other respected saints and wisemen said. I also think yoga should be included in the list of subjects related to spirituality.

It is important to clarify the difference between spirituality and spiritism under whatever name, because contact with the dead is contact with the dead, whether you call it spiritism, voodoo, channeling, or whatever. The ritual or decoration does not change the essence.

Otherwise it may happen like the joke of a man who enroled for a "spiritual holiday", when he got there he saw everybody drunk, and when he asked where was the spirituality they said "What do you think we are drinking? Spirits!"--Pedrero (talk) 00:47, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

this is always going to be a problem, because 'spiritual' is a catch-all phrase used by people who want to avoid being associated with particular dogmas. I think the breakdown you're looking for, though, is something like this:

• 'magical' beliefs - appeals to spirits, ghosts, angels, entities, faeries, or other animate beings that are supernatural but not divinities. sometimes these are offshoots of organized religions (e.g. angel worship or spiritism); sometimes they are outgrowths of older pantheistic beliefs (e.g. wicca or vodun); often they are fetishistic (in the old 'idol-worshipping' sense of the word, though we can't use that term because of modern sexual connotations)
  • 'occult' beliefs - appeals to powers that are not necessarily animate. this differs from the above because it's less about appealing to greater powers for intercession, and more about claiming dominion over supernatural-type forces. Crowley's Magik is an example. not sure how much difference there is here from the above, except in mindset and intent - occult practitioners tend towards narcissism...
• 'mysticisms' - beliefs that in one way or another suggest direct experience of the divine. mostly these groups are marked by an emphasis on meditation, prayer, or other practices aimed at creating a trans-personal or absorbed mindstate
• 'spirituality' proper - generally a loose adherence to a version of some mainstream faith or faiths stripped of ritual, dogma, politics, and other unsavory elements.

however, note that these can overlap. New Age thought makes a virtue (or vice) out of blending disparate elements of these into not-very-cohesive wholes; Mystics are sometimes deeply entrenched in established faiths (the way sufism is in islam, and gnosticism is in christianity); magical thinking appears everywhere (christians wear crosses, catholics keep icons of saints, jews will not speak the name of God, some buddhists seek salvation from cestial buddhas or dead/living saints). it's hard to keep these things clear, and easy to insult people if you muddy them up. --Ludwigs2 22:17, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

*Spirituality is a complex human emotionJlrobertson (talk) 19:59, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Energy (esotericism)

I don't know if this is the right place to put this kind of thing. My apologies if not. Is anyone interested in the page Energy (esotericism)? In my opinion, it's always been a battleground page with the skeptical mob. Someone just added a bunch of outrageous skepto-speak to it. I fiddled with it, and it got reverted. I'm not experienced enough with wiki to know the best way to proceed without starting a time-wasting revert war. Does anyone have some advice or suggestions? Thanks. --Mbilitatu (talk) 06:03, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I do. Take it up at WP:FTN. ScienceApologist (talk) 13:09, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I already did.--Mbilitatu (talk) 15:30, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh. No I didn't. I thought you meant add it to your talk page. Your suggestion was to add it to the fringe board, whose purpose is to "This noticeboard aims to serve as a place to report instances where undue weight is being given to fringe theories". But the problem is the reverse. I have a better idea. I'm going to start SAN, the Skeptical Abuse Noticeboard. Let's see how I can do that ... --Mbilitatu (talk) 19:51, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Proposal to redirect Seth Material

There is a proposal to redirect Seth Material (an article within this Wikiproject's scope) to Jane Roberts. Please comment at Talk:Seth Material#Redirect to Jane Roberts. Gandalf61 (talk) 12:21, 27 November 2008 (UTC)