A work mate recently left and as part of taking over some of their role I am being forwarded their emails. Aside from work related information I am receiving a weekly fix of Neale Donald Walsch the author of
The Complete Conversations with God and the same Neal Donald Walsch that was apparently caught out plagiarizing another person’s story and retelling it as his own.
From Wikipedia:
Walsch was accused of plagiarism in his 2008 Christmas article, “Upside down, or right side up?” which was published in Beliefnet.com.[1][2] Walsch’s story purports to tell the tale of a miraculous appearance of the words “Christ Was Love” during the rehearsal of his son’s school Christmas pageant; but his article is almost identical to the same article published 10 years previously by Candy Chand in spiritual magazine Clarity and spread over the internet in places like the Hearthwarmers website, down to the name of the son mentioned in both articles, Nicholas – as both authors have a son named Nicholas.[1][3] Walsch subsequently apologized, saying that he must have erroneously internalized the story as his own over the years, a claim the original author Chand doesn’t believe.[1] The article was subsequently pulled from Beliefnet.com, and Walsch withdrawned from the raster of authors.[1] Walsch has explained that he was fully convinced that the history had really happened to him and that he had been repeating it as his own in many speeches over the last years, he says that “I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me”[1]
So whether you buy his excuse or not I want to draw your attention to the type of material he posts out to people that sign up to his service.
Now as I understand it the man does believe he is inspired by god, that he converses with God, so perhaps any good idea he can grab onto is something god wants us to know.
I want to ask you the question – is what he is doing a form of plagerism( not in the strict sense of taking anothers and passing it off as one’s own). Perhaps he is appropiating, taking from the worlds traditions, their aphorisms/wisdoms and claiming them as god’s or that god wants us to know them?
Here is one example below:
Now he’s a Deist so I guess that he sees all the world’s wisdoms as prt og his own tradition. But to make the claim that:
God wants you to know:
…that time stays long enough for those who use it.
Leondardo Da Vinci said that, and he was right.
There are those who say that “time flies,” but they are
those who do not use every minute of it. Time is actually
your greatest gift. It is better than money. Invest it, therefore, wisely.
What will you invest your time in today?
What will be your return? What did you invest your time in
yesterday? What was your return? Is it “time” to use you
time more wisely? Just wondering…
Why the pretense? Wh not just look at this from a humn perspective, celebrate the good things people have said or though, why add god? Does it give the idea any more power?
After plagerising or appropriating for for god is it that much of a stretch for him to plagerise for his own ends? Are the two any different in his mind?
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I definitely accept the fact of false memory syndrome. I am, however, greatly suspicious that he is self-aware enough to have discovered it in himself, rather than just using it as an excuse for wrong-doing.
Yes I think. He's asking a bit too much for us to swallow the story. Still I doubt it will make much of difference to those that follow him.
Yes I think. He's asking a bit too much for us to swallow the story. Still I doubt it will make much of difference to those that follow him.
I've heard evangelical preachers tell canned stories in the first person on multiple occasions. Whenever I heard such an account, I would go home, or to the library at the Christian college where I taught, and find the "first-person, it happened to me" stories in at least one book or journal (yes, I amuse myself in weird ways sometimes). My respect for the people who employed the tactic diminished considerably.
As for Walsch, over time, he may have come to believe that the story was his. At the beginning, though, there probably was an occasion on which he decided to recast it as his rather than someone else's. At that point, unless it was just a story hanging around at the back of his mind for quite awhile, he chose to be dishonest.
I wonder if there is a text book that evangelicals quote these stories from? I have just finished visiting a secondhand book store that had several shelves devoted to Christian ministry. Ranging from liberal catholic liturgical books to stuff on the emergent church. I expect there is a market for ready made moralistic stories ready to copy and paste into your sermon.
[...] Neale Donald Walsch – God’s plagerist? | Sean the Blogonaut [...]
Come on, we have all said stories that our not our own but made out that they are.