On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 08:03:34PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
I don't see a problem with that article. What else is there to say about it? The Book of Mormon claims something about a person named "Nephi", and we report "the Book of Mormon claims the following about Nephi". Do we need to explicitly say "however, people who think the Book of Mormon is mostly hogwash think this claim is also hogwash"? Should we add to the [[Nirvana]] and [[Shiva]] articles that a lot of people think that Nirvana is nonsense and Shiva might not actually exist?
We do reasonably well with fictional characters. We mention the context in which they appear, and then go on to discuss their character and life as presented in the story. We don't keep saying "By the way, Luke Skywalker doesn't exist" or "Nobody sane believes Harry Potter -really- lives in England; after all, there's no village of Little Whinging".
The same approach should work for religious and mythological figures -- start by mentioning the context in which they appear (e.g. the Book of Mormon) and then go on to describe them within that context. This should work just as well for Nephi as for Noah or Maui or Krishna or Apollo.
Consider the following passage from [[Apollo]]:
Apollo had an affair with a mortal princess named Leucothea, daughter of Orchamus and sister of Clytia. Leucothea loved Apollo who disguised himself as Leucothea's mother to gain entrance to her chambers. Clytia, jealous of her sister because she wanted Apollo for herself, told Orchamus the truth, betraying her sister's trust and confidence in her. Enraged, Orchamus ordered Leucothea to be buried alive. Apollo refused to forgive Clytia for betraying his beloved, and a grieving Clytia wilted and slowly died. Apollo changed her into an incense plant, either heliotrope or sunflower, which follows the sun every day.
Would this passage be improved greatly by stating that modern science holds that the heliotrope or sunflower evolved rather than being created by Apollo from the corpse of a princess?