Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Purgatory, Roman Catholic teaching

I would like to put forward the following points, inspired by the discussion of the article "purgatory":

1. information about the  theme ought to  assume  Roman Catholic teaching as the MAIN reference due to this church's historic significance;

2. other churches/denominations did not create any  significant body of reference in terms of culture, arts, ideas etc comparable to the Roman Catholic   church, so  their possible innovations on the subject could only come in as  interesting contrasting views, as, indeed, often was their chmpions' intention;

3. the ideal of impartiality is never easy to attain, it might suffice to explain in the subtitle   why the Roman Catholic church's view, and, indeed, doctrine, remains the basic reference in such subjects.

4. I am not sure how  it is possible to present  any doctrine without teaching it: any good  and useful presentation ought to refrain from  tongue-in-the-cheek, let alone explicit questioning of the doctrine presented. It sounds elementary to include doubts, counter- arguments and  points of debate in a separate section, is it not. unsigned edit by 


 * Most of what you have from other Christian denominations is against the idea of purgatory and that needs to go in as criticism for NPOV, else the article is just a promo piece for the RCC. That's why you can't just split it off as a "pristine" article only mentioning the Church view and nothing else.


 * And then other denoms/religions agreeable to it like Mormonism, Judaism, etc. just need a blurb linking to their own articles explaining their own purgatories in detail, as I said on the vote page. -Bikinibomb (talk) 22:43, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I really can't see why a detailed description of a religious concept - or any other - implies "teaching it". Tongue-in-cheek questioning would be a breach of neutrality anyway. All that's necessary is framing throughout that makes it clear that this is the belief of a particular denomination.
 * If anyone else has access, the Encyclopedia Britannica's article makes a good model for organising the material...
 * 1. Introduction
 * 2. Purgatory in world religions
 * 3. Christian traditions
 * a. Origins of the doctrine
 * b. Development of the tradition
 * c. Non-Catholic and modern attitudes
 * ... which places the whole idea in context alongside other religions and Christian beliefs that pre-date the formal doctrines. Gordonofcartoon (talk) 23:47, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, this isn't wikibooks, it's not supposed to be teaching it but laying it out. And then if criticism exists it needs to be in the main article for NPOV, not forked out into another article. I'm assuming that's the whole reasoning for wanting to split them up in the first place, that some want to "teach" their own "official" versions of the RCC position with no criticism and it's all become just a really lame disruption of article development. I'm just going ahead to develop the Purgatory article and disregard this nonsense.

That EB layout seems ok, an intro on general purgatory concepts and as they exist in other religions, then RCC, then some criticisms at the end. -Bikinibomb (talk) 00:32, 20 December 2007 (UTC)