Talk:Christian eschatology

Enormous POV SDA screed

This is the material I removed from the article. Virtually none of it is encyclopedic, all of it is SDA POV, and no WP:RS are cited. Discuss. I would love to see almost all of this chucked out. I have plenty of academic works which could be cited for the relevant points instead.--Taiwan boi (talk) 14:16, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry to disagree but, at Wikipedia, secondary sources trump primary sources. This seeming contradiction to your experience with academic papers actually makes perfect sense when you understand the rationale. When you write an academic paper using primary sources, you are performing "original research" based on your understanding of the sources. Whether your work is respectable and legitimate enough to be considered by the academic community is based on some sort of peer review (usually a peer-reviewed journal or an editor at a respectable publishing company). Wikipedia has no such mechanism for vetting submissions and so it relies on the concept of a verifiable reliable source which, in plain English, means "a published source which has been through some kind of peer-review process". If a Wikipedia editor writes text that is based primarily on primary sources, he is vulnerable to the charge of performing "original research". All we can say is "Unknown Wikipedian X believes A, B and C based on his own interpretation of the primary sources." If we cite a secondary source, at least we can say "Published author Y asserts A, B and C based on his peer-reviewed interpretation of the primary sources." There is still room to debate how reliable "published author Y" is (he could represent a fringe POV, for instance). However, in such a debate, Wikipedians bring more information from other secondary sources to either assert or refute the reliability of "Published author Y". The basic principle here is "not published => not reliable". And self-published doesn't count. --Richard S (talk) 18:09, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I can't supplement it all with secondary sources because so much of it is clearly SDA POV which is not actually supported by WP:RS secondary sources. I have no personal opinion on the content whatsoever, I'm only interested in if it conforms to Wiki policy. The vast majority of it did not. It gave a sectarian interpretation (SDA POV), it spoke as if every statement was fact (instead of identifying it as one theological POV interpretation), and it was completely unreferenced by even a single WP:RS. It could be condensed into about three paragraphs and included under the heading "SDA eschatology", but that's about as much as can be said for it. The entire page to which I moved it has now been deleted by an over-zealous editor who decided to axe first and ask questions later, but I had saved the entire text anyway. Here it is again.--Taiwan boi (talk) 16:38, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

@Taiwan boi - Based on discussions on your Talk Page and that of the other editor, it seems that the problem is that you moved the deleted text to a page in article mainspace. I'm sorry but I have to agree with User:PMDrive1061. I agree that the text below should not have been allowed to stay in the article in its current form. However, even though the name of the article where you parked the text was unlikely to be stumbled upon by anybody, it was still in article mainspace where it did not belong. The WikiPolice are everywhere. A better solution would have been to userfy it by putting it into a page in your own userspace (e.g. User:Taiwan boi/Christian eschatology POV screed) or into a subpage of this one (e.g. Talk:Christian eschatology/POV screed).

If possible, the best thing would be to determine if the POV screed can be classified as some particular POV of Christian eschatology and then converted into an article on that POV. For example, the assertion "Many Christians believe there will be a great deception before the coming of Christ." is not necessarily POV. The question is whether we can find a secondary source that makes this assertion. Surely, there are academic studies of Christian eschatology that provide a typology of Christian beliefs about the end days. Alternatively, it would be sufficient to cite a notable Christian preacher (e.g. Pat Robertson or Oral Roberts) who makes this assertion. (Scanning the text quickly, there are two citations to Ellen White so I suspect that the POV represented by the text may be hers. I don't know enough to know whether all of the text can be attributed to her or not.

The thing that is most wrong about the text below is that it quickly transitions from a perfectly defensible assertion "Many Christians believe there will be a great deception before the coming of Christ." to a series of assertions about the end days which are cited to Scriptural references (i.e. a primary source).

@Kicheko - this is a perfect example of why secondary sources must trump primary sources. If we allowed the text below to stand, we would be asserting its truth based on the scriptural references. Wikipedia must adopt a WP:NPOV stance. We don't say whether the assertions below are true or not. What we say is "Reliable source X asserts that A, B, and C" are true. For this purpose, Ellen White is a reliable source. We know who she is and she has been published. The fact that most Christians don't subscribe to her teachings is irrelevant here. If we identify who the reliable source is, that is enough. However, we must make sure not to give undue weight to White's teachings. We must not imply that most Christians subscribe to her teachings. In fact, we would need to make some effort to establish her position as a minority (perhaps even fringe) POV. --Richard S (talk) 18:28, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Richard. I have already identified the text below as the POV of the Seventh Day Adventists (SDA POV, see above), and have suggested that it be moved to an article on SDA eschatology; see my comment above, " It could be condensed into about three paragraphs and included under the heading "SDA eschatology"".--Taiwan boi (talk) 02:38, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

As it turns out, there is already a quite good article at Seventh-day Adventist eschatology. My recommendation is that we attempt to provide a summary of that article here. --Richard S (talk) 06:04, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Great find, thanks.--Taiwan boi (talk) 06:19, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

You're welcome. BTW, sorry for the earlier confusion. I was in a hurry yesterday morning and I thought SDA was a typo for SPA (single-purpose account) so I missed what you were really trying to say. Once you spelled out Seventh Day Adventist, things became much clearer. The references to Ellen White should have been a big clue but, as I say, I was in a hurry and not all my cerebral pistons were firing. --Richard S (talk) 16:15, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I agree that there is a very clear, and yes "enormous" SDA / Ellen G White POV in this article, at least in the sections The end of the world and the final judgement and A new heaven and earth, but without any citations (searches however reveal a lot of it to be from Ellen G. White's book: The Great Controversy), I strongly agree with what has been proposed here that it should be condensed into a few paragraphs and subsumed under a specific section on SDA eschatology.DMSBel (talk) 19:16, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

However, the policy WP:PRIMARY does exist and should be followed. Nasnema  Chat  19:17, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Eschatology-oriented edits

A lot of the content of all these eschatology pages was getting duplicated, because each of the views had to be heard on each of the pages. I've moved much of the interpretations to their respective view pages (for example, taken the Futurist view of the Book of Revelation and put it on the Futurism (Christianity) page), in the hopes of minimizing duplication, keeping source pages unimpeded by eschatological disputes, and making it more clear what comprises each of the eschatologies. I've moved some of the comparisons among these views to the Christian eschatology page, so that the core differences can be contrasted in one place. With regard to this page, there wasn't much content left after that, so I redirected Christian eschatological views here and moved the content of that page over (there really wasn't much need for two separate pages). Skinrider (talk) 14:29, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Where's the summary?

Why on Earth Summary_of_Christian_eschatological_differences redirects here? Where's the damned summary and why the reader is forced to read all this nonsensical crap?