From: "James D. Forrester" james@jdforrester.org
The identity of 'the God', 'a god', or 'the gods' is one that a great number of people have differing views upon. A sub-example of this is the concept of the rôle of 'the God' - a large number of people consider the Palestinian Jew "Jesus" to have been this figure. Other religions and traditions have different views - "Rastafarians believe that Haile Selassie is both God the Father and God the Son", to quote our article [[God]]. Yet further ones insist that he is yet to come forth, but will do at some point - Jews, for instance (IIRC).
This is getting a bit off topic, but Jews are not waiting for God to come forth, since they already believe they have received a great deal of revelation from him. Rather, they are waiting for the Messiah. Your confusion probably arises from the fact that Christianity equates the two.
All of these are opinions held by (at least) millions of people, and we would (and do) given them time in an article on the subject (we would probably go through them in rough descending order of believers, by past memory - this gives more prominence to widely-held opinions without prejudicing the readers' opinions of or promoting some judgement on them). OTOH, [[Sollog]] believes himself to be the son of God (AIUI, or God himself, or something), and there are very few, perhaps no, people who hold this opinions of him; thus, we would not mention his claim in the article, as it is inappropriately giving time and hence credence to a cause that does not warrant it. This, indeed, is exactly what we do do. Common sense seems to have triumphed. :-)
Exactly; those who claim that every single thing that everyone has said on a subject must be included in an article on that subject, so long as the statement can be cited, are trying to build some soft of general knowledge/trivia repository, not an encyclopedia.
I've never said that only one POV should be represented, only that extreme minority POVs shouldn't be.
This is still treating truth as a numbers game. Sometimes great scientific discoveries have come from people who stubbornly maintained their opinions on a discovery. Verifiability is a more important criterion than being the position of a small minority. Some people who held the ridiculous minority notion that the earth went around the sun were severely persecuted at one time.
So? It's not our job to trumpet minor views "just in case" they turn out to be correct all along. Yes, we're "treating truth as a numbers game": it's called showing editorial judgement.
Exactly.
Jay.