Julie wrote: Care to back this up with facts? Or should I counter this claim by pointing out that you have written a significant number of articles that are not NPOV, but written from a relativist (some would say apologist) perspective? That you wanted to delete facts from the Galileo article because you didn't like the source, as you regarded it as biased, without being able to prove it wrong? You and Michael Tinkler have done a lot of work on Wikipedia, and I respect that, but both of you have written articles on subjects of Christian history which I consider far from NPOV, often entirely ignoring church-critical positions (likely because you are not even aware of them, although Tinkler tends towards sincere apologism, he's a devout Catholic after all). Julie responds -- Erik, this is one of the things I had in mind. The subject in which you demonstrably have little expertise is historical method and in thinking like an historian. The source you wanted to have a major part in the article was one generally regarded by historians as having been untrustworthy, particularly because of his biases. It was not difficult to demonstrate then that the author is beloved mostly by anti-Christians, nor that specialists in the period disregard him. What you didn't like was that Michael Tinkler and I were able to e-mail scholars and recall our own grad school experiences and felt confident in relying on them. As for ignoring church-critical positions, that's nonsense -- primarily because for the most part those positions did not occur for the time periods in question. As Jeff Russell put it so nicely, the history of the Western Church is one of Prophecy and Order -- or of actual spiritual belief tied in with the fallacies of human administration, administration constantly subject to both corruption and reform. That reform was within a very narrow context, however. Except for a fairly small Jewish population, Europe as Roman Christian. While people may have wished to reform the habits of the clergy, no one ever thought of himself as anything other than a Christian. Even groups like the Albigensians thought of themselves as good Christians -- there were, in effect, no church-critical positions in the sense of there being an option to Roman Christianity. To say so is disingenuous, and to think so plainly idiotic. Moreover, historians generally try to avoid judging, because what we want to do is explain how people thought and felt at the time. What you seem to want is articles that condemn certain practices of the Church, and you argue that to not condemn them is to be relativistic. You can condemn them all you want, but doing so in a 'pedia article is POV, and implying that such criticism existed at the time is anachronistic and inaccurate. Erik said: I still find your following statements from the Inquisition talk page quite remarkable: "What happened to NPOV? Yes, the Inquistions[sic] to us are pretty scary, but could we please try to remember that, to the vast majority of people living at the time of the first two Inquisitions discussed in this article, heresy was a BAD thing. Heresy existed, and not because of some conspiracy by Authority[sic]. Heretics not only went to hell, but their very presence in society put others at risk. At least, that's how your average medieval Christian would see it. CONTEXT IS IMPORTANT." That's cultural relativism at its best -- let's turn cause and effect around until they no longer are recognizable. I can live with this view being *represented*, but I can not accept it being *presented* as if it was NPOV. If this is still your understanding of NPOV, it is deeply flawed. Julie responds: What I said above. And please just stop. It's silly. We are not, for example, talking about people in the modern world who participated in genocide and trying to say, "well, in those times, everybody felt that way" -- because that's patently untrue because the modern world is one where people are generally able to try on different world views and defend them. The medieval world view was pretty narrow and relatively uniform. Next, you'll say that we should write articles that imply that Ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hebrews, etc., were morally flawed because they took other people's lands and held slaves. The idea that these things were wrong would not have occurred to people in these societies -- they were integral parts of them (some more than others). Right and wrong don't really come into it for historians -- instead, we look at the part slavery played in those societies and the nature of slavery in those societies -- and we do it neutrally, objectively, because that's our job. Erik says: Because of this relativism from interested parties, it will be a lot of work to add, for example, accurate information about the books of the Bible and their individual history, the historical person of Jesus, persecution of pagans and destruction of temples and libraries, Christian book burnings and censorship, medieval fakery, Christian anti-Semitism, Christian anti-scientism, church attempts to destroy knowledge about contraception, modern church support for dictatorships and mass murder etc. etc. The long historical tradition that correctly views the Dark Ages as dark is not accurately represented on Wikipedia. Your alleged expertise is not an argument. It may be an argument in Larry's world, but it is not here. Modern medievalism in particular is often an attempt to "invent the Middle Ages", as Norman Cantor, a medievalist himself, called it. I am happy that the NPOV policy will make this impossible in the long term. Julie replies: Horseshit. The fact is, Erik, that you have a vested interest in presenting things in what you call a church-critical perspective. But there is a difference between thinking critically and judging critically and presenting information critically, and what you want, which is to present articles that make the Christian church out to be the unilateral bad guy. FYI, when I teach the history of the Church, which I often do, I start with Jesus as a Jew, discuss (using documents from the time) the changes of treatment of Jews and Christians by the Romans, and discuss the fact that Christianity was only one of many minor mystery cults for quite a long time. The students are ready for this anyway, because they've read other resurrection myths -- they also learn that the Gospels were not written by people who knew Jesus, and that there were Gospels that were thrown out -- and that early Christians fought very hard to define doctrine. When we talk about the Middle ages, we talk about the Crusades in all their less pleasant aspects, and in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, we talk about the nature of the papacy and the idea of papal monarchy. Articles on similar subjects should mention the downside -- but in a way that leaves people thinking -- e.g., "the crusades were done in the name of God, yet thousands of people, including Christians, are killed by the crusaders -- wow! How could they reconcile those things?" Historians give the information to answer those questions, but we don't say whether we think the answers were good or bad. Another, shorter example: My class reads a lot of primary source documents having to do with women in society -- One of the things that I try to teach is that "women were treated unfairly" is not an objective statement, and not neutral BUT "the evidence indicates that Athenian women were considered less important and had fewer legal rights than men" IS valid. Oh -- and my expertise in being a professional historian isn't alleged. And the dig at Larry was not very nice. Finally, I have no interest in taking anything off-line. You have just managed to remind me of why I stopped contributing. For that, I thank you. Jules