Archbishops and Plagiarism

[muriel_volestrangler]

Ironically, one of the pieces is about ethics :rofl:

I can't take any credit for uncovering this story. It is all in issue 1176 of Private Eye, but as that esteemed rag is occasionally less than accurate I decided to do a little googling and fact checking for myself.

On 30th December Sentamu wrote (or at least put his name to) some tedious column for the Guardian about ethics or somesuch. If you read it here you will notice the clarification:

The article by the Archbishop of York in the Face to Faith column drew extensively on an article posted on the website of the Markkula Centre for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, Calilfornia. This should have been acknowledged.


You can read that article here.

It does not "draw extensively", huge chunks of the two articles are identical. It was copied.

And then:

The Archbishop whose words came from same hymnsheet as a Marxist

Plagiarism may not be the most holy of pastimes, but an Australian archbishop has been accused of passing off the arguments of Terry Eagleton as his own in a desperate attempt to fend off nonbelievers.

Seeking to refute Richard Dawkins’s polemic against all religion, set out in The God Delusion, Mark Coleridge, the Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn, turned to the most unlikely of sources.

He allegedly copied, or closely paraphrased, six passages written by the British intellectual Terry Eagleton, the literary critic and an unrepentent Marxist revolutionary, in a review of Dawkins’s bestseller.
...
The Australian has apologised for printing a review with “some similar content” to Professor Eagleton’s work.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article1494951.ece

Good to know they are setting such an excellent example of personal morality.

[Deep13]

1. Plagerism is stealing someone else's original written work. ...

I guess I had no idea that there was anything original in that field to steal.:shrug:

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. The Archbishop of York copied entire paragraphs

In fact, about three quarters of his 'article' was copied word for word from the earlier piece. The Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn used several of the same points in a criticism of a piece, often using almost identical wording. Yes, both are plagiarism - both were stealing someone else's original written work.

[xchrom]

2. how stupid of him to do that.

if you aren't prepared for a critique -- why bother?

there's just no reason -- he's not even in school facing deadline for fuck's sake.

[trotsky]

3. It's ok to be unethical, I guess...

if the purpose is to demonstrate how atheists lack ethics?

[rexcat]

5. You forgot the basic premise of christianity...

which is forgiveness. All one has to do is ask god for forgiveness and poof, it's done, end of problem.

:crazy:

[moggie]

6. How do you know those weren't the words of Gawd?

It's not plagiarism if you're divinely inspired!

I wonder whether the archbishies were paid for their columns?

Why can't the Times spell "unrepentant"? Let's not get into whether a Marxist needs to repent, anyway...

On edit: one of the comments on the Times article makes a good point:

It would be interesting to know whether the Archbishop had even read the book he was meant to be reviewing ... although Coleridge inserts his own interpretations, he only refers to parts of the book that Eagleton has written about.

[struggle4progress]

7. The Eagleton piece is interesting

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
Terry Eagleton
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins · Bantam, 406 pp, £20.00

... Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal ...

Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus ...

Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the Scriptures’ (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class ...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html