Several "Books critical of ..." categories were recently removed from this article. The edit summary referred to "categories removed which are not the main notability of the book, per WP policies on categories, as article says the main point of the book is to show the superiority of fundamental Christian beliefs, not criticize others".
I'm not at all convinced by this reasoning. Quite the contrary, it seems to me that criticism of the categorized groups (Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism, Scientology, and the Unification Church) is central to the purpose of the Another Gospel book. The book contains individual chapters on these groups (32, 44, 20, and 22 pages, respectively), as well as several others. And I don't really see much backing in the current text of the article to support the claim that the "article says the main point of the book is to show the superiority of fundamental Christian beliefs, not criticize others" — the book is clearly polemical in nature, a point which I think the article makes clear.
I've brought up the question of whether these categories belong at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Religion#Removal of polemical categories from two book articles, and I hope we can get some discussion and reach some sort of consensus on the issue. — Richwales 01:37, 27 June 2012 (UTC)Reply
- This quote from the book, featured in the current article: "every individual concerned about maintaining traditional Christian values should be apprehensive about the potential negative effect the New Age may have on the coming generations." Says that New Age systems are a new religion and that they are a threat to Christian values. That sounds like strong criticism to me. I think the categories that were removed should be re-added. -- — Keithbob • Talk • 19:57, 21 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
- A discussion of this issue took place back in June, at the talk page of the Religion project. That discussion has been archived, but it can be found here, and I'd recommend people go back and read it. Aside from the question of possible overcategorization, a second question was raised — namely, whether the relevance of numerous polemical categories can be justified based on the actual contents of the book, or whether any categorization must be based solely on the basis of the text of the article (which, in turn, is limited by the paucity of secondary sources on this book). — Richwales 21:19, 21 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
