[WikiEN-l] Using religious encyclopedias.

Wed Jan 28 21:25:33 UTC 2004

Sascha brought up the fact that we can't always rely on the
Catholic Encyclopedia as an unbiased, or even semi-biased
source. It has an uncritical view of supernatural beliefs.
Good point. The same, of course, would be true of
information from any religious encyclopedia, whether
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or whatnot.

Yet Ed Poor cautions us that "Both Catholics and
Unificationists believe in the devil and other evil
spirits as Real Beings...Of course, this is in the context
of a whole bunch of other non-atheistic beliefs; it's not
as nutty as it sounds." This too is a good point.

I think we can use such encyclopedias; they contain large
amounts of objective historical statements. They also
contain religious claims which represent a point of view;
we just need to make sure that we distinguish between
objective and verifiable facts ("Saint Robert was a German
man canonized by the Austrian Church in 2003, under Pope
John Paul Ringo George") and religious claims, which by
their nature are unverifiable ("Saint Robert was known to
have healed several blind men through divine miracles; by
praying to Cthulhu their sight was miraculously restored.
Praise Shub-Niggurath and her thousand dark young.")

We can use both kinds of facts. The first we can simply
state as factual; but the second we have to carefully
preface as a belief. (e.g. "According to Cthuhulian
Catholics, Saint Robert is believed to have healed several
blind men...").  Also, it usually is a good idea to leave
out all honorific phrases (e.g. Praise be unto Muhammed;
Baruch Hashem (Praise God); Praise Shub-Niggurath and her
thousand dark young, etc.) 

Some religious encyclopedias are more skeptical and NPOV
than others; the "Jewish Encyclopedia" (1906, public
domain) has some traditionally religious points of view,
yet has some other articles that are skeptical and written
in a style that today weight call NPOV (those articles, of
course, are out of date in regards to modern scholarship.)
The same is true of its successor, the 1970 (and more
recent updates) "Encycloepdia Judaica", which is written by
a number of authors, many of whom do not uncritically
present all traditional beliefs as historical facts. I
imagine that their are similar semi-critical/NPOV or
totally critical NPOV Christian and Muslim religious
encyclopedias out there as well.

(I use the word "critical" in the technical sense; as a
form of analysis, not as a synonym for disagreement.)

Robert (RK)

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