User:Ephilei/POV

I thought it would be helpful to other editors and myself to explain my own point of view (POV). Everyone has a point of view, so it seems best to be share it so others understand better.

Keeping Information

In order to best help Wikipedia, I think it healthy to all verifiable information posted on WP, even information seeming trivial. This makes me an inclusionist. If an editor thought it worth their time to write with strong effort about a subject, then surely a dozen others will think it worth their time to read about it. Obviously, this doesn't mean I support content written poorly or that cannot be verified. It means I think Wikipedia is a source of content without boundaries of size that can host (in theory) the entire sum of human knowledge. Therefore, deletion of content that is judged not important by a few is unworthy reason for deletion.

Liberal Biblical Scholarship

I hate the word liberal, but it's all I've got for now. A better description for the biblical scholarship I refer to is anti-Christian, but that's not PC. Unfortunately, many intelligent westerns have a disdain for the meaning of the Bible and wish for others regard it as merely a history book and a bad history book at that. I do not intend to prove the historicity of the Bible because it is not a history book. I do intend to counter the any work, antognistic non-Christian or fundamentalist Christian, that equates the Bible with history. Writings that use the Bible as history in order prove it's false history and thus justify their own disdain for it especially frustrate me.

There is a false understanding that most biblical scholarship antagonizes traditional Christianity. I suspect this is true because the majority of people and institutions in the West are non-Christian, thus want to use information without a Christian bias. Thus scholars with an axe to grind against Christianity are given more publicity than scholars who think it accurate, no matter how good their scholarship. Thus there is injustice built into this system. If a non-Christian becomes convinced that the Bible is accurate after good scholarship, they'll become a Christian and thus mostly ignored by non-Christians. In other words, the conclusions are not allowed to favor the accuracy of the Bible.

However, I love WP because it is a place to challenge these patterns. WP places different ideas side by side, without letting editors make conclusions, only the readers. May quality scholarship be seen!

Myth

Unfortunately, our pro-history, pro-literal culture (referring to just about any culture with Internet access to read this) has forgotten what a myth is, replacing its meaning with "a widely believed falsehood". Rather, a myth is a narrative that communicates universal truth. That was the purpose of Zeus and Isis and is still the purpose of the Bible, the Qur'an, and every scripture written. A myth does not have to be neither literally true nor literally false. That's mixing apples and oranges.

It's a huge undertaking, but on WP, I hope to restore available knowledge about the traditional and academic understanding of myth, as understood by the legendary scholarship of Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien.