Ray Comfort Stole Someone Else’s Text for his Origin Intro!!!

Posted by Greg Laden on December 13, 2009
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This is the problem with Christians. They think they have a special pass to do whatever they want as long as it done in the name of their god. Now don’t get me wrong here. The average Christian does not think he or she is above the law on a day to day basis. But it is part of Christian religion and culture, and I’m telling you this from personal experience, to ignore the law when one feels that their god or their religion demands it. So, when Ray Comfort produced his bogused-up version of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the idea of doing it LEGALLY did not seem too important, apparently.

So he STOLE three pages of text written by someone else. Bald faced thievery. What an asshole.

Stan Guffey had been waiting months for Nov. 18 to arrive. On that day, Christian groups handed out free copies of a 150th-anniversary edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species on college campuses across the country. Guffey is a biology lecturer at the University of Tennessee who earned his doctorate studying genetic differences between northern and southern populations of brook trout. When he heard talk outside his office about people handing out books on the UT plaza, Guffey says, “I hot-footed it over to get myself a copy.”

“Would you like me to autograph this?” Guffey asked the distributors, telling them he is one of the authors, albeit unacknowledged.

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Today’s quiz: How can you tell a Christian is lying?

Answer.

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Comments

  1. #1 Mike Haubrich, FCD
    December 14, 2009

    To be fair, they don’t say they are perfect. They admit that they are just as fallible as the rest of us sinners, except that they have been
    “perfected.” I heard it straight from Ann Coulter.

  2. #2 Tomato Addict
    December 14, 2009

    I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, to learn that Ray Comfort is a plagiarist!

    Well, maybe not too shocked. But that RC cannot be bothered to write three lousy pages for himself, or even credit his source, is that laziness, or just plain stupidity?

    Don’t answer that last question, I think I know the answer already.

  3. #3 Mxh
    December 14, 2009

    I’d be upset if my work is something that a creationist likes enough to plagiarize.

  4. #4 MadScientist
    December 14, 2009

    What’s so surprising? These people claim lying for jesus and murdering for jesus are just fine, so why not stealing for jesus as well?

  5. #5 Jay
    December 14, 2009

    I wrote up a short review of Ray’s Evolution: A Fairy Tale For Grownups a while back. I found a couple of places where he had cribbed word for word from other creationist authors. He did refer to the source, but he embedded the material in his own writing (or ghost-writing…) in such a way that most readers would assume it was his paraphrasing of the original.

    There’s an easy way to pick out material Ray probably didn’t write: it looks coherent.

  6. #6 Sam C
    December 14, 2009

    What’s the probability that Ray Banana wrote something that sounded intelligent and that it wasn’t plagiarized? Some pigs just can’t fly.

  7. #7 Thomas
    December 14, 2009

    Sometimes the Christians may be right in putting their own moral over the law:
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/13/santa-yarls-wood-father-christmas

  8. #8 Joshua Zelinsky
    December 14, 2009

    This isn’t Ray’s fault. Ray needed a section which contained information. And ID theory tells us that requires an intelligent entity. Ray is definitely not such an entity so he needed to use someone other individual’s writing.

  9. #9 José
    December 14, 2009

    That was MY banana!

  10. #10 omphaloskepsis
    December 16, 2009

    Since they’re all just parroting the same bullcrap, it almost isn’t plagarism.

  11. #11 Stephanie Z
    December 16, 2009

    And we get the second person who didn’t click on “Details” to find out that what was plagiarized was a short, respectable and respectful biography of Darwin, presumably added here to try to keep Comfort from looking completely biased.