Talk:New religious movement

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Pictures

The article really could use some more pictures. I will add some that show major groups mentioned in a, hopefully, interesting way. Borock (talk) 13:55, 18 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Unsupported broad definition...continued

I asked a question, and no one responded. Then my question was archived. Is this normal practice? If so, I think it is a bad idea! This page can hardly be called cluttered; I'm rather new to editing Wikipedia, but what justification can there be for archiving questions that have not been addressed at all?

I wrote:

"The third sentence ("Scholars studying the sociology of religion have almost unanimously adopted this term as a neutral alternative to the word cult, which is often considered derogatory.[1][2]") has citations supporting the latter claim (that "cult" is derogatory) but not the former (that scholars "have almost unanimously adopted" the terminology NRM rather than "cult"). Does this claim need a citation?"

DrSocPsych (talk) 19:33, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Most talk pages are set up to be automatically archived after some time, generally after a given number of days after the last comment in a given thread. For several of the really contentious articles, where the talk page can have 30 or more threads started in a month, it saves a lot of manual labor in doing the archiving. Regarding your question, that is a good one, which I have some difficulty answering directly. Having looked over a lot of the recent reference literature, it definitely seems to me that the word "cult" has been pretty uniformly dropped from academic literature, and some of the following content in the article seems to indicate that the term NRM has been widely used as a substitute, but I have to agree I don't see anything that clearly supports the statement that the term has been "almost unanimously adopted." Generally, for lede sections, if something is referenced later in the appropriate section of an article, that citation is considered enough, but none of the later sources I see clearly support the claim, so some citation would be indicated. If you have such a citation, please feel free to produce it. Alternately, if you would wish to change the existing phrasing to something else, and have some degree of sourcing to support any particular contentions which might be made, please do so. John Carter (talk) 19:45, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

[I got an error message that said "Edit conflict"] Okay, I see that the sentence was changed and a citation added without any comment in response to my question. DrSocPsych (talk) 19:52, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I just made a very slight change to the wording to match what it said in the new reference. Maybe a different reference would allow a stronger statement? DrSocPsych (talk) 19:55, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) Edit conflict happens when you submit a change at the same time someone else is submitting a change. It happens kind of frequently on some articles. It would have been nice if whoever did the change chose to answer the comment on the talk page, but I know from personal experience sometimes that you can have two many screens open, feel the need to respond to something happening elsewhere first, and eventually forget or lose track of the response you were intending to make. If you had a source which would provide support for a stronger statement, and could produce a reference for it, that would definitely be welcome. John Carter (talk) 19:57, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The original source for the unanimously adopted-claim (under dispute) is most probably the CESNUR-website (CESNUR): "Scholars did welcome these terms, and almost unanimously adopted them in order to avoid the derogatory words "cults" and "sects": but there was never a real agreement on definitions and boundaries." In this quotation the words 'these terms' (plural) refer to 'new religions' and 'new religious movements'. 81.206.112.118 (talk) 09:22, 23 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Image in "Joining" section

A recent series of edits have been trying to change image in the "Joining" section, of File:Casaemcasa.jpg, to instead be File:MISSIONNAIRES MORMONS.JPG. This is not helpful: the existing stable article version image is of Jehovah's Witnesses in the act of evangelising door-to-door, which clearly demonstrates some of the the actions being discussed in that section; the new image is of two men mugging for the camera, while wearing suits with the name badge used by Mormon missionaries, which only tangentially demonstrates what is being described in the article. One reason given in an edit summary for wanting the Mormon image is "The LDS missionary picture links to the LDS missionary article, which is better, because the JW have no special missionary article" — the descriptive text of an image used the article is not the key point, the image is, and the Mormon missionary image itself is of less utility than the Jehovah's Witnesses. Additionally there is a wikipedia article that include information about this specific activity (Jehovah's Witnesses practices#Evangelism) and the image description in my latest edit to the article reflects that. ^—^Asterisk*^Splat^→ 21:52, 3 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed merge with Opposition to new religious movements

The new article Opposition to new religious movements only lists a few facts. They're well-sourced, but I see no reason why a separate article is needed at this point. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 12:28, 6 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I created the article, actually using material from this one, since there has been a template "Opposition to new religious movements" for quite a while but no article until now. I don't know if you want to merge the templates too. I would not object. Skylark777 (talk) 15:33, 6 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I will go ahead and merge the articles. I have no idea how to merge templates so I will not work on that now. If someone disagrees my merge can be undone, of course. Skylark777 (talk) 15:44, 6 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think the templates need merging. But I don't see why every template should have a main page either. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 20:02, 6 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Their titles are linked to a page. I think everything is fine now since that template (which is mainly about the anti-cult movement) now links to the section here. Skylark777 (talk) 22:15, 6 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]