[[Roman Catholic Church]] vs [[Islam]], The sins of the fathers repeated Options

[Peter Damian]

Interesting how the great world conflicts tend to repeat themselves on Wikipedia. Xanthar is complaining here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Xandar

about the Catholic church article has been refused FA, despite the Islam article getting it. His complaint is that whereas there is an element of criticism in the Catholic article, there is almost none in the Islam article. Yet FA status does not reflect this.

I haven't looked in detail, but there seems some truth in what he says. It also reflects my own experience in medieval history articles, where there are a number of editors prepared to make the most absurd claims about medieval Islam (unreferenced and in some cases entirely false). My view is that there is some anti-Christian, pro-Islam bias in Wikipedia, but this is difficult ground isn't it.

Here is Xandar's splendid rant on the talk page:

I think it's quite clear that after this fifth round of the farce that is FAC, that the FAC system is broken, and that no Catholic article that isn't a "blistering expose of Catholic evil" is going to make it past the clique of POV-pushers at FAC. The FAC process and personnel need an urgent and thoroughgoing review so that a few biased opposers are no longer allowed to continually stymie an article with vague and unspecified allegations of POV until it fits in with their viewpoint. The running of the RCC FAC by Sandy has been chronic. She has done nothing to rigorously test opposes and see that they were precise and fitted the criteria, and has consistently made laughably biased interventions on behalf of the the same clique of "reviewers". I notice the same Marskell who came late to the FAC with POV opposes, is actually admin co-ordinator on Featured Article Review - the same FAR that voted the extremely unbalanced Islam article (see beneath) a free ride back to FA status! Unbelievable! The bronze star means very little in real terms now by the standard of much of the junk that gets passed on the nod, while articles of effort and substance on major topics are treated in this manner. (Many of the articles passed are about obscure highways, Video Games or buildings like today's Featured Article Priestfield Stadium!)

Feature Article co-ordinator, SandyGeorgia, attempted to imply that the process worked by arguing here that the Islam article passed the system. Actually all that shows is the double-standard of the system being run at FAC. Just look at the Islam article - particularly the History section. Is there ANY mention of the massacres of Mohammed perpetrated on Jews and fellow Arabs? Any MENTION of the destruction of neighbouring civilisations, piracy slavery? NOT A WORD! Oppression of women? Not mentioned. Mention of massacres in Spain, Byzantium, Armenia, Greece? No sign. The Crusades were "launched" by Christians. No mention of the Muslim attacks on Byzantium, Georgia and Armenia that provoked the response. One section is even titled with the amazingly POV heading "Golden Age"! Imagine if we had put that title up on a section of the Catholicism article... 1000-1500 Golden Age of Catholicism! How the same people who supported Islam would have had an attack of apoplexy - and been supported by the same SandyGeorgia who now tells us how wonderful and NPOV Islam is! Yet "Islam" flies through, and Sandy and her followers at FAC strain at gnats over the Catholicism article, wanting us to list every negative action ever commited by a Catholic and cut out anything that might hint Catholics ever did anything good. That single comparison shows the hypocrisy of the present process and why major changes need making to ensure the process is truly unbaiased and not he preserve of a certain clique. Xandar 09:32, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=250806766 (permalink)

This post has been edited by Peter Damian: Mon 10th November 2008, 9:18am

[Kato]

Here is Xandar's splendid rant on the talk page:

I think it's quite clear that after this fifth round of the farce that is FAC, that the FAC system is broken, and that no Catholic article that isn't a "blistering expose of Catholic evil" is going to make it past the clique of POV-pushers at FAC. The FAC process and personnel need an urgent and thoroughgoing review so that a few biased opposers are no longer allowed to continually stymie an article with vague and unspecified allegations of POV until it fits in with their viewpoint. The running of the RCC FAC by Sandy has been chronic. She has done nothing to rigorously test opposes and see that they were precise and fitted the criteria, and has consistently made laughably biased interventions on behalf of the the same clique of "reviewers". I notice the same Marskell who came late to the FAC with POV opposes, is actually admin co-ordinator on Featured Article Review - the same FAR that voted the extremely unbalanced Islam article (see beneath) a free ride back to FA status! Unbelievable! The bronze star means very little in real terms now by the standard of much of the junk that gets passed on the nod, while articles of effort and substance on major topics are treated in this manner. (Many of the articles passed are about obscure highways, Video Games or buildings like today's Featured Article Priestfield Stadium!)

Feature Article co-ordinator, SandyGeorgia, attempted to imply that the process worked by arguing here that the Islam article passed the system. Actually all that shows is the double-standard of the system being run at FAC. Just look at the Islam article - particularly the History section. Is there ANY mention of the massacres of Mohammed perpetrated on Jews and fellow Arabs? Any MENTION of the destruction of neighbouring civilisations, piracy slavery? NOT A WORD! Oppression of women? Not mentioned. Mention of massacres in Spain, Byzantium, Armenia, Greece? No sign. The Crusades were "launched" by Christians. No mention of the Muslim attacks on Byzantium, Georgia and Armenia that provoked the response. One section is even titled with the amazingly POV heading "Golden Age"! Imagine if we had put that title up on a section of the Catholicism article... 1000-1500 Golden Age of Catholicism! How the same people who supported Islam would have had an attack of apoplexy - and been supported by the same SandyGeorgia who now tells us how wonderful and NPOV Islam is! Yet "Islam" flies through, and Sandy and her followers at FAC strain at gnats over the Catholicism article, wanting us to list every negative action ever commited by a Catholic and cut out anything that might hint Catholics ever did anything good. That single comparison shows the hypocrisy of the present process and why major changes need making to ensure the process is truly unbaiased and not he preserve of a certain clique. Xandar 09:32, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=250806766 (permalink)

Does the above quoted passage sound like a scholarly examination of an article on a complex subject? Or does it sound more like some cretinous online blowhard who shouldn't be let anywhere near a real encyclopedia?

[Peter Damian]

The question is whether there is any substance to his view. It seems to me that the Catholic article does have a number of sections dealing with criticism (such as the child abuse issue, and the old Galileo question and all that), whereas The Islam article seems to have less.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam

And how about this:

The spread of the Islamic dominion induced hostility among medieval ecclesiastical Christian authors who saw Islam as an adversary in the light of the large numbers of new Muslim converts. This opposition resulted in polemical treatises which depicted Islam as the religion of the antichrist and of Muslims as libidinous and subhuman.[81] In the medieval period, a few Arab philosophers like the poet Al-Ma'arri adopted a critical approach to Islam, and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides contrasted Islamic views of morality to Jewish views that he himself elaborated.[82]

Try substituting 'Christian' for 'Islamic', and 'the logician William of Ockham' for 'the poet Al-Ma'arri' and note the startling effect.

Mention of 'Women and Islam' is very much watered down. The article refers to this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_Islam

in which, however, there is no real mention in the introduction of the central question that the article is attempting to address, namely the question of whether Islam is more nor less patriarchal than other world religions, and it is only by careful reading of the whole article that you realise that this is the real question it is trying to approach in a circuitous and paraphrastic way. Did a man or a woman write this? In the main article, the whole section on women is this:

Many have asserted that "women are not treated as equal members" of Muslim societies [10] and have criticized Islam for condoning this treatment.[11] The term "Muslim apartheid" has been used to highlight religious isolation in France as well as gender segregation practices.[143][144]

The Catholic Church has warned christian women about marrying Muslim men because of the "inferior" status of women in Muslim countries and the nonexistence of maternal rights to children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Islam#Women

Note the scare quotes around 'inferior', and the implicit criticism of the Catholic church for its warnings to 'Christian women'.

Finally, the main article refers to this one on the Islamic Golden age, which is a travesty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age

[edit] As a balance, this article about the church's role in civilisation is a travesty of the same sort:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_the_R...in_civilization

This post has been edited by Peter Damian: Mon 10th November 2008, 11:57am

[Gold heart]

Interesting how the great world conflicts tend to repeat themselves on Wikipedia. Xanthar is complaining here

This stuff is all over Wikipedia. Don't upset the Moslims. Don't upset the Jews. Don't upset the Brits. Don't upset the Unionists. What we're ending up with is a POV-ravaged encyclopaedia, that is getting even more pov-ridden by the day, and as it gets more popular. Thus Wikipedia is now becoming the "laughing stock" of the academic world. By the time the project is "finished" it will be hardly be worth the effort throwing in the trash can. I say "tell it as it was", because anything else is just 'cloud cuckoo', and won't endure very long before the next 'pov-bash' begins.

[wikiwhistle]

A lot of liberals feel they have to gush or can't criticise Islam for political correctness reasons or because they might be accused of racism, whereas the Catholic church is fair game to them.

[Cla68]

If your article doesn't pass FAC, complaining that it has something to do with discrimination probably won't help much in getting the article ready for the next submission. As I state in my advice to writing FA-articles on my talk page:

Don't fight with the FA reviewers. After you nominate your article as an FA candidate, assume that the comments or criticism that comes from the FA candidate reviewers are being made in good faith. Respond constructively and try to correct whatever they point-out, even if you don't agree with it. If they ask or object to something that you feel isn't reasonable, still try to work with them to resolve their concern in a constructive and calm manner.

SandyGeorgia provided the nominators of that article some extensive feedback on how to fix it. Complaining about how unfair the system is probably won't help the nominators too much. I've seen articles related to a great variety of religions, including Christianity, pass FAC, so I'm not sure if I agree that there is some kind of institutionalized bias against Christian-related topics in Wikipedia.

[GlassBeadGame]

A lot of liberals feel they have to gush or can't criticise Islam for political correctness reasons or because they might be accused of racism, whereas the Catholic church is fair game to them.

...or maybe they just never met a person who was molested as a child by an Islamic cleric.

[Jacina]

no, because they're legally married, which means they aren't being molested

[KStreetSlave]

A lot of liberals feel they have to gush or can't criticise Islam for political correctness reasons or because they might be accused of racism, whereas the Catholic church is fair game to them.

...or maybe they just never met a person who was molested as a child by an Islamic cleric.

Perhaps the child was shortly thereafter accused of blasphemy and impurity, and then executed by stoning.

[Kato]

A lot of liberals feel they have to gush or can't criticise Islam for political correctness reasons or because they might be accused of racism, whereas the Catholic church is fair game to them.

...or maybe they just never met a person who was molested as a child by an Islamic cleric.

Perhaps the child was shortly thereafter accused of blasphemy and impurity, and then executed by stoning.

I've rarely met a European Catholic or a Western European Muslim that has openly supported execution in any form. But I've met plenty of people from the United States of all religious stripes that support execution. What does that tell you about the the relationship between religion, national character, and the law?

That guy on this site that was shooting his mouth off recently, and purporting to represent the Voice of Catholics, was in reality representing the extremities of a national character that bore little relation to the voices of Catholics in different cultural regions. Likewise, Muslims in Marseilles are as closely related to some crazy "Stone him" Mullah in Afghanistan as The Archbishop of Canterbury is to the lunatics who murder Abortion Doctors in Louisiana.

These standards come from the cultural mores of the environment people find themselves in. The billion or so Catholics or Muslims in the world straddle all societies and cultural mores - and thus reflect those local values far more than they reflect some singular all encompassing "faith".

Anyway, why gripe about this trivia when there's a so much Mormon propaganda clogging up WP?