Talk:Proper Lady

First, many catholic saints are proved to exist. You may not believe in miracles or any other religious elements, but they are certainly not fictional.

Second, though Mary Mother of Jesus has no historical registers but there are several reasonable causes for that: she was a woman on a highly patriarchal society and romans barely bothered to register the history of people who they conquered. We barely know about her for the same reason we barely know about many women of the same age. What we have in the Bible and in catholic oral tradition is, from a materialistic point of view, an exaggeration of people's deeds.

Now in the case of people like Joan D'Arc, we have legitimate historical register. Her behaviour was heavily documented and monitored because of the role she exercised, well more than many political figures.

So, I think catholic saints should be put in the "real life" section because the fact is that those people existed. You may say people exaggerated their personalities, but this may be the case of many historical figures. At least for saints we have more than just the Bible.

We routinely put Christian material in the "Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends" section because not every wiki user is Christian, and those quite reasonably regard Christian (or more properly, Abrahamic) beliefs to be as much mythology as Christians believe theirs is. (Not to mention agnostics and atheists regarding all religions as equally mythological.) It does not matter that various Catholic saints are historical personages -- the Buddha is a historical personage, Gilgamesh is believed to have been a historical king of the Sumerian city-state Uruk, and Celtic myth's The Book of Invasions is at least partially historical, just to name a few. Should we move their accounts into Real Life just because they have a historical element? Christianity does not get a special pass or unique recognition just because it's the majority religion in the West.

-- Looney Toons, admin

@Labster @Looney Toons @GethN7 @Robkelk @QuestionableSanity @Derivative @SelfCloak

I will make my point clearer: this trope has nothing to do with miracles but with a person's character. People in real life sometimes get declared saints years, decades, sometimes centuries after their deaths. In the centuries to come, if this wiki is still here, we will have to remove them from "real life" because a church authority determined they did something supernatural, despite the trope have nothing to do with the supernatural?

...I don't think any mention was made of miracles, and in no way is this denying that some of the saints may be based on real people - it's moreso emphasizing that the trope applies to the person as conceived through the lens of that religion which granted them sainthood, rather than being necessarily true of the real person that said saint was based on.

I'm Christian, and I support Looney Toons stance on this.

I'm the one who made that move in the first place. While the Romans might not have kept records of females who lived within their borders, they certainly kept records of their regional administrators - and the records they kept of Herod show that it's impossible for him to have done what the Bible accuses him of doing, on account of him being dead at the time. Thus, I for one do not treat the Bible as a reliable source.

Individual Catholic saints with documented existence can be listed under Real Life, certainly. Statements about saints as a whole are, in my opinion, statements about mythic and legendary figures and thus belong under Myths and Legends.

Stated better than I could re: the latter paragraph.