User talk:Bravehearted

Welcome to Wikipedia![edit]

Dear Bravehearted: Welcome to Wikipedia, a free and open-content encyclopedia. I hope you enjoy contributing. To help get you settled in, I thought you might find the following pages useful:

Don't worry too much about being perfect. Very few of us are! Just in case you are not perfect, click here to see how you can avoid making common mistakes.

If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on your user page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions.

Wikipedians try to follow a strict policy of never biting new users. If you are unsure of how to do something, you are welcome to ask a more experienced user such as an administrator. One last bit of advice: please sign any dicussion comment with four tildes (~~~~). The software will automatically convert this into your signature which can be altered in the "Preferences" tab at the top of the screen. I hope I have not overwhelmed you with information. If you need any help just let me know. Once again welcome to Wikipedia, and don't forget to tell us about yourself and be BOLD! Michael 08:45, 9 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Martin Luther and the Jews[edit]

Thank you for coming in and helping on this article. Maybe you could lend us a hand on Martin Luther as well. The more the merrier.--Drboisclair 14:47, 13 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Aerians[edit]

A tag has been placed on Aerians, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a very short article providing little or no context to the reader. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content.

Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself. If you plan to expand the article, you can request that administrators wait a while for you to add contextual material. To do this, affix the template {{hangon}} to the page and state your intention on the article's talk page. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Od Mishehu 11:38, 26 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Aerians[edit]

Again PLEASE DON'T REMOVE THE TAG YOURSELF.

A tag has been placed on Aerians, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a very short article providing little or no context to the reader. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content.

Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself. If you plan to expand the article, you can request that administrators wait a while for you to add contextual material. To do this, affix the template {{hangon}} to the page and state your intention on the article's talk page. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. SECisek 16:58, 16 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Claudius of Turin and others[edit]

Thanks for posting on my talk page, I have responded there and here as well.

The Claudius article had a bullet-point list of statements. I rewrote the list into prose and cited the facts. I deleted some uncited conjecture. You have now gone back and tacked the list on AFTER the prose stub so all the facts are now in the article twice. If you read my edit, you would see that the facts were still there. Wikipedia articles should not be lists of trivia or isolated statements. The articles need to be readable. As for why Claudius wasn't deposed, I can not speculate and I sure as heck couldn't write about my conjecture in Wikipedia even if I could. Wikipedia should present cited facts and let the reader decide. In a number of articles, there were several times that an editor squared the circle for the reader. I removed those, but I see you restored some. I will remove them again with explanations for each on the corresponding talk pages.

To address some specific points, while it can't be proven that the Waldensians trace their roots to Claudius, it is a proven fact that the Waldensians themselves trace their roots back to Peter Waldo, nearly all scholarship backs this, as well. If it is proven that Waldensians trace their roots to Peter Waldo, it is impossible to prove that Claudius founded the sect, because he didn't - Peter Waldo did. I try to be very respectful of other's work, but editing is the very heart of Wikipedia and if an article is filled with uncited conjecture, vandalism, obvious historical anachronism, or blatant errors, every editor should make it their duty to improve the article to the best of their ability. I did not change a letter in any of the articles with out citing my source and – if it was big – hitting the talk page. My sources on those articles are a number of books from the Oxford Press - highly respected sources. I do not have "great knowledge", but I do have great citations! My edits were not intended to imply that I "consider others like (you) to be stupid kids." - not at all. It is the nature of Wikipedia, at the bottom of this very screen:

"If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed by others, do not submit it."

I am sorry if you have hurt feelings, feel free to edit over my edits, but please cite your sources and explain on the talk page so we can dialog about any controversy.

I am going to nominate Proto-Protestant for deletion as I have failed to find, in print or on the web, enough info to even get a working definition of the term. It is a neologism and doesn't belong in wikipedia. Aside from some of my cited edits, the article is all original research, which isn't allowed at wikipedia anyway. Sorry once again, and I look forward to seeing these articles in question improved. -- SECisek 13:03, 25 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You wrote: The term proto-Protestants has been in use now for quite a long time to describe religious movements sharing the beliefs very similar or even identical (as far as key issues are concerned) to those professed by Protestants of the 16the century.

I was unable to find this definition online can you post a link.

Continued: There clearly is a group of such movements, including the Waldensians, the Lollards, the Hussites, but also in the earlier centuries, the Vigilantians, the Aerians, the Helvidians, the Jovinians, whose views were identical to those of many Protestants.

I don't know that it is all that clear. Identical? Aerians insisted that the observance of Easter was a Jewish superstition and they fasted on Sundays. Not very Protestant. The Vigilantians argued against the veneration of relics, the sending of alms to Jerusalem, the rejection of earthly goods and the attribution of special virtue to the unmarried state, especially in the case of the clergy. No mention of the Bible, no mention of justification, nothing else Protestant. All that is known about Helvidius is that he did not believe in the Virgin Mary. That doesn't exactly make him a Protestant. Identical is laughable - there is no evidence to back up such an assertion. Wikipedia is not about truth, it is for fact that can be cited with recognized secondary sources of evidence.

You went on: This becomes even more obvious when we consider the fact, that the Waldensians, the Lollards and the Hussites joined the Reformation and often mixed with various Protestant groups. The Waldensian Church, still existing in Italy, is considered a Protestant group and not a sect, as User:Secisek tries to imply. This is because all key beliefs the Waldensians have professed since the 12th century are common to most Protestant groups and are different from those professed by sects considered heretical by both the Catholics and the Protestants.

Whoa, I did not imply they were a sect, I wrote that they were. I intended no offense with that word. The Waldensians were a sect, and they revised their doctrine at the Reformation to conform to the new Protestant thinking. This is taken from the Waldensian's article:

"In 1532 they met with German and Swiss Protestants and ultimately adapted their beliefs to those of the Reformed Church. Moreover, the Waldensian absorption into Protestantism led to their transformation from a sect on the edge of Catholicism that shared many Catholic beliefs into a Protestant church adhering to the theology of John Calvin, which differed much from the beliefs of Peter Waldo. From that moment the Church became the Italian branch of Reformed churches."

This contradict your assertion: The Waldensians have never altered their key beliefs, they are considered Protestants and still they had existed for over 3 centuries before the proper Protestants and the Reformation. Many scholars have used the term proto-Protestants in their articles, although there do exist historians who argue that the term should not be in use for various reasons.

The fact is, they have altered their key beliefs - that is what made them Protestant.

The problem is, however, that the Catholic historians often argue against the term to show that Protestants appeared only in the 16th century, while before them, there was just one Church of Christs and many small sects. For this reason even Waldensians, now considered a part of the Protestant Church even by the Church of Rome, are called a sect by Catholic historians. This dychotomy is absurd, as it implies that the Waldensians were at first a sect and then a Protestant group, while they have never changed their beliefs in the course of History. If the Waldensians are Protestants now, and they maintain the same views they professed in the late 12th century it means, that they have always been Protestants, even when the term had not been in use.

They have not maintained the same views, read the Waldensian article. They were still taking Roman Catholic Eucharist until the time of the Reformation, with the belief that the validity of the sacraments depends on the worthiness of the priest performing them. Seven sacrament is not very Protsestant.

I am not a Roman Catholic, nor do I care what Roman Catholic historians argue, although I am sure RC historians would at least acknowledge the existance of the Orthodox and Oriental Churches rather then maintain that there was "just one Church". The facts are quite clear - Protestants appeared in the 16th century for a variety of historical and cultural reasons that existed at that moment in history. They could not have appeared before that moment and it mental gerrymandering or wishful thinking to believe otherwise. I will be happy to discuss this further, but it seem that the article is likely to be deleted. -- SECisek 10:33, 28 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]