…by our plagiarism and very public bitch fights.
Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations With God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com about his son’s kindergarten winter pageant.
During a dress rehearsal, he wrote, a group of children spelled out the title of a song, “Christmas Love,” with each child holding up a letter. One girl held the “m” upside down, so that it appeared as a “w,” and it looked as if the group was spelling “Christ Was Love.” It was a heartwarming Christmas story from a writer known for his spiritual teachings.
Except it never happened—to him.
Mr. Walsch’s story was nearly identical to an essay by a writer named Candy Chand, which was originally published 10 years ago in Clarity, a spiritual magazine, and has been circulating on the Web ever since. Mr. Walsch now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually come from his personal experience….
Except for a different first paragraph in which Mr. Walsch wrote that he could “vividly remember” the incident, his Dec. 28 Beliefnet post followed, virtually verbatim, Ms. Chand’s previously published writing, even down to prosaic details like “The morning of the dress rehearsal, I filed in ten minutes early, found a spot on the cafeteria floor and sat down.”
Walsch claims it was all a big misunderstanding—he copied, he pasted, he assimilated—but the story’s original author isn’t buying it. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys one Christian author accusing another Christian author of all sorts of commandment-breaking activities (and you are, you are), you’ll wanna go read the whole story.
ZOMG there is a Christian who lied! This just proves how Christianity is a fiction that is destroying the world!
Should gay-bashing evangelicals enjoy one gay author accusing a member of the gay community of authoring a local ricin scare?
Please, please, please, stick with the sex-advice columns.
I’m not.
Let me see, if I Lie Cheat Steal and Torture than I can be a Christian President, right?
David Cross first drew my attention to sermon anecdotes that are obvious lies. Should be a literary category of its own. I heard one at Christmas this year, boilerplate from a missionary at a large Nicaraguan garbage dump. Describing his first impression of the horrific scene, he said he first saw small animals, then larger animals, then people (!) in the garbage; then he told us that 1.2 million people work and live there. Sounds like the kind of lie a loyal follower would say was justified to separate old ladies from their cash for a good cause.
I’m a fan Dan, but I gotta point out that Neale Donald Walsch is a new age guru and not a Christian author in any sense of the term that you mean.
If you’ve ever read all 3 of the CWG series you’ll realize that this incident may not be all that surprising considering that he, like most new age baby-boomer writers, essentially rely on synthesis of plagiarizing bits of Eastern philosophy combined with their own personal ‘woo-woo’ touches.
I can’t speak to Nicaragua, but many, many people in Mexico do in fact live and work in garbage dumps. There’s no organized recycling there, but literally every imaginable scrap of something of value is collected and reused or sold. The dumps swarm with people collecting stuff.
Dear The Stranger, I am the author of several published books. The story about the Christmas story you posted about on Jan 7, 2009 (which comes across on this site to have been written by you) was actually written by me.
Although the story about the story has circled the interent for years, (often as author unknown–which may be how you found it) it’s actually a true story about a copyrighted story, titled Christmas Love.
Please make sure the correct author byline is added immediately. Thank you.
Candy Chand
@6: Right. If it’s swarming with people, which it is, you’d probably notice the people before animals that are smaller than people. Preacher’s progression was too perfect.
Candy Chand, are you for real? If so, how did anyone as stupid as you get books published?
@7: Either Dan changed his post, or you are insane.
Actually, considering it’s a rather lame story in the first place (upside M looks like a W! Changes the meaning to be… absolutely nothing!), I guess that doesn’t surprise me.
On Snopes the category is called “glurge.” Edward Gibbon called it “pious fraud” but I like glurge better.
Also, shouldn’t it be “Christ IS love”? I’m pretty sure “Christ was love” is heresy.
@11: Thanks, elenchos!
Candy! Darling! Loved your video, what was it – christmASS BLASTERS XIII?
unless @7 was a sockpuppet… in which case, well played madam/sir.
It reminds me of ‘Hey Nostradamus’ by Douglas Coupland, where the girl wrote ‘god is nowhere/god is now here’ over and over in a notebook, and when she died, the last thing written was ‘now here.’ She chuckles (after dying) at how people take that to have some deep meaning.
Christians have bad taste. I can’t judge them based off of one man’s plagiarism, but the fact that trash like this gets lapped up as ‘meaningful’ doesn’t bode well for the religion. They’d rather read mushy ‘chicken soup for the soul’-type crap than the bible itself. It seems like it’s written for 9 year olds.
Except that he doesn’t identify himself as a Christian:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neale_Donal…
@6 and @8 – The population of Nicaragua is only 5.6 million. A fifth of the nation’s population does not live in one garbage dump or all of the garbage dumps combined.
That’s so cute! It reminds me of a kindergarten winter play I went to where the kids were going to hold up signs spelling “Christmas Love” but all the letters got screwed up and it ended up spelling “Shit Lovers Cam.”
Christ was love, indeed.
Nobody should be trying to take credit for this story.
What is next?
Plagiarising gay poets in terrorist threat letters??
It’s the end of the world as we know it…..
@17: I know! I asked the Christian parrotteer how many people lived in Managua, if 1.2 million lived in Managua’s dump, but he didn’t know.
Here’s the text from the card announcing their donation to this cause. (I actually googled this.)
In the late 1990’s, in Nicaragua, missionary Father Marco Dessy passed by the Chinandega city dump. Through the swarms of flies he could see the rotting food, discarded cardboard, crushed plastic containers, and broken bottles. He then noticed that roaming among the piles of steaming garbage were starving dogs, horse, oxen.
Then, to his complete and utter horror, he saw dozens upon dozens of young children, pregnant mothers, and entire families, sifting through the heaps of refuge, desperately looking for something to eat and something to salvage. These were the “Children of the Dump.”
Oh, phooey, what’s breaking a commandment? Gays are marrying!
*swoon*
Aw man, don’t call him a Christian.
Please don’t.
The guy fucked up by claiming personal experience of a story that was too well-known, but don’t use the blanket term of ‘Christian’ to describe him.
I thought plagarism and bitch fights were the identifying characteristics of feminists?
Oh wait, those are the creative misapplication statistics and bitch fights. My bad.
Sorry, but I don’t think the bible has any rules against plagiarism per se. Stuff about bearing false witness and wocka wocka wocka, but I think the concept of plagiarism postdates the bible by about 1500 years or so.