Best-selling "God" author faces plagiarism claim

[onager]

His next book will be entitled "Conversations With Lawyers..."

:rofl:

Frankly, I even doubt the ORIGINAL author's story. "Christmas Love" seems like a bizarre sign to hold up at a kid's Xmas pageant. Being a grumpy Fundamentalist Atheist, I think the original author made up the whole yarn. Sounds like she started with her marketing message--"Christ was love" (except for the roasting-in-hell part, I guess). Then back-fitted that message (clumsily) into the rest of the story.

Best-selling "God" author faces plagiarism claim

The Associated Press – Tue Jan 6, 7:42 pm ETNEW YORK – Neale Donald Walsch, best-selling author of "Conversations with God," said Tuesday that he unwittingly passed off another writer's Christmas anecdote as his own in a recent blog post.

As a result, Walsch's blog on the spirituality Web site Beliefnet.com has been shut down. The Web site said in a statement that Walsch had failed to properly credit and attribute material from another author.

Walsch had written about what he described as his son's holiday concert two decades ago in which children were to hold up letters spelling "Christmas Love." One of the children held the "m" upside down, so the audience got the message "Christwas Love," according to the retelling.

Author Candy Chand said in an interview Tuesday that she stumbled onto Walsch's post when she ran "Christmas Love" through an Internet search engine. She immediately recognized her own words, from her story based on her son's kindergarten Christmas pageant. She contacted Walsch and Beliefnet.

The story first appeared in a spiritual magazine in 1999, and was later anthologized. Chand said she copyrighted the story in 2005, in part because it had appeared on the Internet uncredited. The story was published as the illustrated book "Christmas Love" for this past Christmas, she said.

Walsch wrote on his blog Tuesday he was "truly mystified" about what happened and apologized. He said he had been telling the story for years in public talks and "somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience."

"As a published author myself, I would never use another author's words as my own," Walsch wrote. "Yet I have apparently done just that — although with no deliberate intent to do so."

Chand, of Rancho Murieta, Calif., said she did not believe Walsch's account.

"It's pretty difficult for me to believe that someone has a memory lapse that is word for word my story," she said. "He deleted the first paragraph. That's it."

Beliefnet said in a statement Walsch "failed to properly credit and attribute material from another author. As a result, Mr. Walsch has decided to remove himself from Beliefnet's blogging roster, a decision we will support in order to protect the mission and integrity of our site and community. As a faith-based web portal, Beliefnet will continue to hold ourselves and our writers to the highest standards of trust."


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090107/ap_en_ot/author_plagiarism

[BattyDem]

1. Heh ... heh heh ... ha ha ha ...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! :rofl:

[Poll_Blind]

2. I find a number of aspects of this story hilarious but I'm just going to enjoy..

...them silently. That's probably a first.

PB

[lob1]

3. Gee, I thought it was the Grinch who stole Christmas.

[LiberalHeart]

4. I kept telling the story of Christ rising from the dead until I believed I had done so.

That internalizing thing is powerful.

[kevsand]

5. Actually, I'm not sure that Christ ever mentioned hell.

He pretty much was love. But then, there's a lot of shit he didn't say that turns up in churches anyway.

[moggie]

7. He did

This idea that "Christ never mentioned hell" seems to crop up frequently, and mainly demonstrates that Christians aren't familiar with their own holy book. For example, Mark 9:43-48.

[dmallind]

9. So where is the wailing and gnashing of teeth then?

And no he didn't really mean the burning trash pit just outside town. That could have been eliminated by going to look at it and failing to see anyone wailing and gnashing their teeth.

[DeSwiss]

6. Eh....

...what a maroon.

- K&R

[charlie]

8. Battle of the pretentiously pious

Yeah, she was wronged and he's a thief. And she's milking it with high handed twaddle like this:

“I have strong issue with anyone who would appear to plagiarize my work and pretend it is his own,” she said. “That takes away from the truth of the material, it takes away from the miracle that occurred, because people begin to question what they can believe anymore.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/books/07book.html

Now someone might mistake her bit of Reader's Digest treacle as something other than a miracle. They might even suspect her account of giggling kids suddenly dumbstruck by what they were witnessing is, to put it politely, dramatic license.

Oh, dear heavens. Mr Walsch, what have you done?

[trotsky]

10. Yeah, her little story has just about everything, doesn't it?

Evil secularism taking everything out of the holy season? Check.
Public schools tolerating all beliefs part of the problem? Check.
'Mistake' reclassified as a 'miracle'? Check.
Power of Christianity overcoming horrible persecution by liberals? Check.

Ya know, there's also the little detail about this being a "dress rehearsal". Why was she there for that, instead of waiting for the real thing? Why did they bring in the entire rest of the school to watch a dress rehearsal? Why didn't gawd perform the miracle during the REAL show, to enlighten not only the children but all the parents, grandparents, etc. too? Must be pretty sad when you have to create a fake memory to make your beliefs more "real", and then accuse someone else of stealing it. :eyes:

[charlie]

12. Oh no, it's already begun

The First Rule of supernatural inflation is you don't mention supernatural inflation. If nickel and dime turns of fortune aren't miracles, then we can't have any more miracles! Who wants to live in that world?

Yeah, the Jeebus huckster would be wise to just keep her yap shut. There's nothing more vainglorious than a religious showboat though, so this might get even funnier before it's over. I can only hope.

[moggie]

11. It's like watching two bald men fight over a comb

And yes, the hush falling over the audience was the high point of this glurge. Getting a class of six-year-olds to shut up would be a genuine miracle.

[charlie]

13. Mutual Assured Destruction

Someone should learn Ms Hack about the concept pretty quick. After she chided him with God's Commandments in the NY Freakin' Times, Mr Hack probably won't hold still for much more.