Talk:The nature of God/Archive 1: Difference between revisions

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I agree...this is a fine essay but not really appropriate for an encyclopedia.--Devotchka

Is "What is god?" the best name for this article? Encyclopedias should answer questions, not pose them. I suggest "The nature of God," or something similar. -- Cayzle

Not only that, but "What is the Christian God" or "The nature of the Christian God" seems to be more correct, or maybe "The nature of the Christian God, according to Christians". -- arcade

This is an interesting essay, but it doesn't look much like an encyclopedia article. It's just a speculative line of reasoning or two. It reads more like something that would be an interesting external link on wiki articles regarding agnosticism and epistemology, and even from the God and theism articles. But turning the essay into an article in and of itself seems rather gratuitous. It also tends to discourage bold editing, since I would be twisting and rewriting an individual's essay, rather than trying to improve the way facts are presented. --Wesley

Maybe we should create a new entry on "The nature of God." It could discuss the various views (Aristotelian, Platonic, mediveal neo-Aristotelian, Kabbalistic, process theology, etc.) The entry that we already have on God doesn't cover this topic. In fact, an entry on "the nature of God" might well be classified under philosophy. We could then leave much of the old material aside as a personal essay? RK

There's an article on process theology, but most of the other material you list could still stand additional coverage. I'm not sure what the entry should be called; "nature" has a specialized meaning or definition within Christian trinitarian theology, but I suppose it could be used in the article heading in its more common and general sense. My real question, though, is, "what is the role of essays in Wikipedia?" Are we encouraging people to write essays about their favorite topics, pick a title that isn't taken yet and send them in? --Wesley

Just so everyone knows, this pages is a portion of Larrys Text, which is a series of undergraduate introductory philosophy lectures given by Larry Sanger. He put it in Wikipedia during the early days of the project with the intention of turning the text into proper articles. It's been slow going. :) At taht time, essays were fairly common in Wikipedia, so it was decided that they should live at Wikipedia commentary. Recently, those essays have been moved to http://meta.wikipedia.com.

To make a long story short, essays don't belong in the encyclopedia. --STG

Guess it's looking like it's time for me to wikify this one at least, finally... :-) It's not an essay. It's a lecture. Anyway, give me a second. --LMS

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 To make a long story short, essays don't belong in the encyclopedia. --[[STG]]
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+Guess it's looking like it's time for me to wikify this one at least, finally...  :-)  It's not an essay.  It's a lecture.  Anyway, give me a second. --[[LMS]]