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other articles that are skeptical and written in a style that today weight call NPOV (those articles, of course, are out of date in regards to modern scholarship.)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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