Talk:Thomasine Church

History of the "Thomasine Church" page

This page has a complicated history:

1. The first article entitled "Thomasine Church" was created 6 March 2005. It described a modern American religious group, which apparently is extremely tiny and quite new: [1].
2. The article was nominated for deletion, and deletion won the vote 22 Oct 2005. See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Thomasine_Church
3. A backup copy of the original page was hosted in user space. It can be found at User:Snowspinner/Thomasine Church. A copy of the old Talk page is at User talk:Snowspinner/Thomasine Church.
4. The page "Thomasine Church" was then made into a redirect, redirecting to Saint Thomas Christians.
5. Nonetheless, after this time, many links to this page persisted -- none of which actually were relevant to the Saint Thomas Christians page.
6. On 26 Feb 2006, this page was changed to a disambiguation page, as described below.

The current version of this page

The current disambiguation page refers to three uses of "Thomasine" in a religious setting:

• As a synonym for Saint Thomas Christians
• As a general term for the School of Saint Thomas
• To refer to the modern Thomasine Church (the subject of the original page)

Since all of these are referred to as "Thomasine" in Wikipedia (including Talk pages) this disambiguation seemed necessary.

Note, however, that the third bullet is not an internal link, because the vote to delete the page for the modern Thomasine church stands as Wiki-policy. Lawrence King 02:42, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

On 4 March, User:Cryptic removed the third bullet, since we don't disambiguate terms that don't have Wikipedia articles. Hopefully this won't lead to confusion, since the term "Thomasine Church" appears 25 times in Wikipedia articles, almost always in reference to the now-deleted bullet. Lawrence King 01:42, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup of references to this page

I cleaned up all the references to "Thomasine Church" that I could find in Wikipedia. When appropriate, I redirected them to the proper place, or replaced them with external links. When they appeared to be advertisements for the modern Thomasine Church in inappropriate places, I removed them. This seems to follow the spirit of the deletion ruling. Lawrence King 02:42, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

The existence of this page

Is a riddle to me... The concept refers to two things, one well defined still existant group of Indian Syrian Orthodox Christians, the other a hypothesized group with no sources, no links, no whatever, but instead a bunch of links to either books that allegedly are used by said unproven uncited hypothesized group linked up by a red link! Is someone kidding me? This page, if it treated two existing topics, should be Thomasine Church (disambiguation), now it treats one real existent topic and one imaginary nonexistent one, so the only content the article should contain is #REDIRECT Syrian Malabar Nasrani and nothing else. ... said: Rursus (^mbork³) 18:19, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Making some googling, there actually is a 21th C Thomasine Church. The article doesn't mention this. The article content should still be moved to Thomasine Church (disambiguation), there should possibly be an article Thomasine Church (gnostic) sooner or later, and the article named "Thomasine Church" should either contain a redirect to Syrian Malabar Nasrani, or later, if that gnostic church gets some important adherency, a redirect to Thomasine Church (disambiguation). ... said: Rursus (^mbork³) 07:56, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

A little note: the 21th C Thomasine Church is not gnostic but ortodox-styled mystic (yet heterodox, I presume) according to the Gnosis Institute. Since they're regarding Voegelins deviant definition of Gnosticism as deviant and inappropriate, I believe them. ... said: Rursus (^mbork³) 08:21, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

I got it wrong! Instead, by [2]:

The method employed by the Thomasine Church, a process of exteriorization of emotions and the process of detachment from all that one experiences internally, is very reminiscent of the method employed in the Church of Scientology and related organizations...

!!! ... said: Rursus (^mbork³) 08:27, 29 September 2009 (UTC)