[WikiEN-l] A course in walled gardens?

Fri Jun 30 13:29:27 UTC 2006

I've been looking round the articles relating to [[A Course In
Miracles]] (ACIM).  One article details a court case pertaining to
authorship, under the rather bizarre premise that since authorship was
claimed to be Jesus, "channeled" through Helen Schucman, copyright did
not apply. I've asked for some citations from sources outside the ACIM
movement for this and other articles in this collection, and received
this reply:

  "But it is quite a challenge to find comments from people outside of
the ACIM "world" when most outside of that insular world have never
   even heard of ACIM. Most non-ACIM students couldn't be concerned
   with whether Jesus is the literal or symbolic source, because most
   non-ACIM students think the whole thing looks insane, cultish,
   weird, etc."

Now to my mind if there are no sources outside the movement we ought
to be very wary about covering the subject at all.  This same editor
added a section to [[forgiveness]] detailing ACIM's view of the
concept which was larger than the section devoted to Bhuddism and
about the same size as the one for Islam.  My view is that unless we
have some reputable secondary sources external to the movement to draw
on, we should not include it there at all (else we'll have to have a
paragraph for Methylated Wesletarians and Jagism).

Back to the article on the court case: I'd say it's a footnote to the
book unless it's been covered extensively in the mainstream media,
discussed in the Harvard Law Review as a ground-breaking case, cited
as precedent in other cases or whatever.  The only cited source we
have in that section is from the Foundation for A Course In Miracles,
which was one of the parties to the dispute.  I am minded to merge.

I don't want to let my natural scepticism run away with me here, how
do others view this kind of apparent walled garden?

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG