[WikiEN-l] Internal criticism of a religious movement: What should our policy be?

[Robert]

On the Unitarian-Universalist article, a subject came up
that would be of interest (I believe) to anyone working on
any religion articles. I recently added an internal
criticism of a religious movement"


  Rev. Earl K. Holt III, minister of King's Chapel in
  Boston, the nation's first Unitarian church has recently
  been at the lead of offering internal criticism of the
  direction of the UU Church. In a recent interview with
  the Boston Globe he stated "I'm ready to defend now the
  hypothesis that Unitarian Universalism as it presently
  exists is not in any meaningful way...a continuity of
  either of the traditions" [Christian and monotheistic 
  from which it originated from]. He notes that the 
  UU Church now officially has no theological beliefs that
  adherents must have, and it is tolerant of nearly any
  belief system. He concludes that "at some point,
  pandering would not become too strong a word" his
  church has lost unity.
  Source: ''Revisiting Unitarian Universalism''
  Rich Barlow, The Boston Globe, July 17, 2004


In response, UtherSRg removed this addition of mine, and he
noted:

"While I agree that Rev Holt's criticism has merit, I
wonder why this was placed in the article as a direct
quote. I don't believe other religions have such direct
criticisms on their articles. I could understand a brief
summary of various criticisms."
[[User:UtherSRG|UtherSRG]] 06:27, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)


I gave the following response, and would like the viewpoint
of others here. This may be about a general policy question
that warrents Wiki-En, or even the main Wiki list,
attention.

My reply:

Your comment and question is fair enough!  It turns out
that other Wikipedia articles ''do'' have substantial
sections on internal criticisms. Within the [[Judaism]] and
related articles, there is plenty of dicusion of internal
criticism; the same is true for many of our articles on
Islam (see especially the sections on Shiite versus Sunni
forms of Islam.) I think that all of our religions and
social movement articles should include sections on
internal criticism, especially when such internal criticism
is openly discussed among many adherents of that movement.
Some examples that I think should be discussed include:

:Why some members of the UU movement have criticised it, as
it has broadened to the point where it includes nearly any
faith, or none at all.

:Why many members of Conservative Judaism have criticised
their own movement for not cultivating an observant layity.

:Why many members of Reform Judaism have criticised their
own movement for creating a new definition of who is a Jew,
thus creating a schism that may create two separate Jewish
peoples.

:Why many members of Orthodox Judaism have criticised their
own movement for not taking seriously the role of women as
equals, the way that Orthodoxy understands homosexuality,
or the increasing uses of churmras (legal stringincies).

:Why many members of Catholic Christianity have criticised
their own movement for not allowing priests to marry, and
for not policing their own priesthood enough vis-a-vis the
child abuse scandal.

Including external criticisms are another issue entirely,
and I think we should avoid this whenever feasible. I am
sure that one could write a long section full of polemics
on why Christians think that Jews and Muslims are wrong,
and why pagans are worse than wrong; similar, one could
write a long section full of polemics on why Muslims think
that Christians and Muslims are wrong, and why pagans are
worse than wrong! Generally, any well-known religion has
been the subject of a vast critical and polemical attack
from many people outside that religion. We need to
extremely careful about this. But the subject of internal
constructive criticism is a different issue altogether.


As long as we make sure that all info is written in an NPOV
fashion, what do you think?


Robert (RK)



		
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