Talk:Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union

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For the May 2005 deletion debate on this page, see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Ciccu.

The CICCU's website can be found at http://www.ciccu.org.uk . The following is taken from the website (with permission)

Text removed in line with talk page guidelines: no relevance to the development of the article (It's been here two years - I assume nobody was planning to put it in the article. Feel free to revert if I'm wrong) Nanopede 05:09, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Allegations of homophobia - section deleted

I have deleted the edit by an unregistered user for the following reason:

1. It gave undue prominence to a possibly biased news report for which an entry in an encyclopedia is not the most appropriate forum.

2. The original paragraph was not written in a neutral voice. I tried to ameliorate the tone to make it more neutral, but I was still unsatisfied with the imbalanced impression it gave of the CICCU as an organisation.

3. Most evangelical organisations encounter controversy at some stage in their experience and history. It is not suprising that an evangelical student organisation such as the CICCU should find itself in similar battles faced by the wider church in today's society.

4. Ever since they were founded, the CICCU and the UCCF have taught the existence of hell and the doctrine of God's wrath against sin. They are after all taught in the Bible, which the CICCU avows to adhere to.

5. An encyclopedia is not a court-room. Not the place to make allegations.


I've restored the section. CICCU's evangelical attitude towards homosexuality is widely known and the events described were very widely reported amongst the student press in Cambridge (I'd give other links, but TCS don't have their full archive online and I don't think many college-based publications do either. Anyway, Varsity is meant to be the more conservative of the Cambridge newspapers!) Moreover, I think that the inclusion of this section is important in understanding the social views of the organisation, and leaving it out would mean excluding the CICCU attitudes and actions that are most known to the student body at large - it would be somewhat akin to writing an article about the Pope that doesn't mention that he's a Catholic. Modernway


For the sake of the reader, I'll make it clear from the start that I am a member of this organisation, but the following is by no means endorsed by CICCU.

The 'Controversy' section should be deleted because it gives a very narrow and biased view of the organisation. I fully recognise that CICCU is critised by some in Cambridge, but to focus in on the particular of homosexuality/bestiality is to miss the main critisism. The main critisism that I have come across is simply that of preaching the Christian message - be that through the form of talks, conversations or through distributions of sections of the New Testament. The controversy section should be replaced to give a more wholistic picture of the opposition to the society. If such an allegation is made, surely one should link to the original quote in context. The audio file can be found on the CICCU website under the media pages. The speaker in question was Philip Jensen at the Promise 2004 mission. His talk was entitled, "The Promise of... Sex". Unsigned

You're right that any controversy regarding CICCU's doctrines on homosexuality are really controversies about evangelical Christianity. This is not the page to document those controversies, unless some notable conflict of interest has occurred involving CICCU. However, if we accept that this is not the page for a general description of evangelical Christianity (including controversies), why does half of the article comprise an 11-point evangelistic description of Christian doctrine? If you're going to include a statement that CICCU believes in "The divine inspiration and infallibility of Holy Scripture as originally given, and its supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct", it's only fair to allow a discussion of the controversies arising from such belief - e.g. the consequences of Romans 1 for homosexuals, the prohibition of sexual activity outside of marriage for heterosexuals, and more importantly the alarming statistic that 100,000 unsuspecting people are thrown permanently into eternal torture every day for their mistaken unbelief. You can't have it both ways. Either leave the whole concept of evangelicalism to an external page, or be prepared for editors to document it from all angles. Nanopede 05:26, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Does it make any sense to do this, tho? If your view is that Wikipedia must not contain any mention of evangelicalism other than (presumably) attacks upon it, well, this is not what Wikipedia is about. If an organisation exists for set purposes, don't we want to see those listed? -- those are key facts about them, surely. Whether you or I agree is pure POV. It is only relevant to include attacks upon these statements in the article if the purposes stated are unique to this group. Otherwise what we will find is that every listing for any Christian group, church, abbey, or bicycle shed will contain pages and pages of identical atheist invective, copied in chunks. That won't work. After all, they will be equally relevant to all of them, won't they? The place for the latter is atheism articles. Surely? With references, of course. Roger Pearse 07:36, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
No, I don't want to censor all "mentions of evangelicalism" out of Wikipedia. Evangelicalism is a notable and influential part of society, and it deserves space in any encyclopedia. The beliefs and goals of CICCU do need to be documented. But they are already documented in a far more encyclopedic fashion in other articles such as "evangelicalism", "evangelism", "proselytism" and "missionary". You say that you don't want "every listing for a Christian group" to be flooded with identical atheist rants, and you are quite right (unless the rants are notably unique to the activities of an individual group). However, you see no problem with the doctrines of evangelical Christianity being listed verbatim in every Christian-related article. The article itself admits that CICCU's doctrinal basis is "what evangelicals perceive as being the fundamental doctrines of biblical Christianity" - so logically the same doctrinal basis could appear on millions of articles. By analogy, if I look up the article on "Nissan Motor Manufacturing (UK) Ltd", I don't expect to find a detailed discussion of how a car works, nor why cars are good or bad for the world, except insofar as the Nissan cars manufactured in the UK are different from other cars. That's what links are for. Even if there are some CICCU-specific beliefs that deserve space in the article (which I'm sure CICCU would deny), a full quotation of the doctrinal basis does not seem appropriate; a quotation of this length seems to violate Wikipedia's primary source policy. Besides, I don't think it reflects well on CICCU. Either CICCU is too self-absorbed in the formalities of its constitution to communicate its beliefs with the outside world, or else the DB is some sort of "religious text" that people are afraid to paraphrase. Neither of these are conclusions that CICCU would want me to draw. I would prefer to see more information about CICCU's history and activities (written for a general readership), and less about the wording of its membership declarations and belief statements, which are not very interesting to anyone outside CICCU.
NB - I reworded "...perceive as the fundamental doctrines of biblical Christianity" to "perceive as the biblical foundations of Christianity". The old wording implicitly suggests the existence of "non-biblical" Christianity, which is a disputed concept. Nanopede 05:01, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

I have edited the controversy section in the hopes that it now sounds neutral. However it lacks sources - the original Varsity article link seems to have died. 131.111.8.104 (talk) 19:50, 27 April 2008 (UTC)