Talk:Role of the printing press in the Reformation

NPOV dispute - Role of the printing press in the Reformation

Although I doubt anyone would dispute the fact that the democratization of ideas after the spread of the printing press was one of the key things that led to the Reformation, this article is consistently anti-Catholic in tone and and assumes the Lutheran arguments against Catholic ideas of religous authority are accepted by the reader uncritically. There are too many examples in this article to enumerate, so I will just take one from the first paragraph -

" Cost effective pamphlets that could be easily passed from person to person and region to region would lay the ground work for the questioning of Catholic ideologies and ensure that the personal choice of religious beliefs would now be left up to the people to decide. "

The phrase "and ensure that the personal choice of religious beliefs would now be left up to the people to decide." basically assumes that you agree with the Lutheran viewpoint in all of this. A more nuetral phrasing might be

" Cost effective pamphlets and printings of primary Christian texts that could be easily passed from person to person and region to region spread the ideas of the reformation rapidly in a way that was not possible when the Catholic Church possessed a monopoly on such information flow. "
 * I agree - it is highly POV. The article was spun off from Luther's biography, & a better title would be Use of the printing press by Martin Luther or something - though his Bible is hardly mentioned. Johnbod (talk) 00:41, 10 October 2009 (UTC)


 * If someone could come up with the arguments to AfD this, then I will vote for its deletion. The article was created because someone dumped this huge amount of text in one big edit in the Luther article. I took it out because it was clearly inappropriate and placed it here. I don't know if anyone is interested in fixing it to get rid of the POV; if no one wants to do the job then it would be better if it is gone. --RelHistBuff (talk) 09:20, 10 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I have boldly made this into a redirect to a more appropriate article. The original article was a dump of text (from who knows who) and is being maintained by no one (and no one can fix it either). --RelHistBuff (talk) 10:32, 7 November 2009 (UTC)