Plagiarism and the Church Shrinkers

I deal with plagiarism among college students. The Internet has made it easier to steal someone else's words, but also easier to find the original source. Years of writing and editing have given me a built-in alarm that goes off. One student suddenly began writing just like someone with a master's in music theory. That paragraph was stolen from an Internet journal.

The current rule used in the classroom is: "Five words in a row from another author, put it in quotation marks and cite it."

Online universities invest in servers and software that compare all the words in an essay to Internet sources and the school's database of papers already submitted.

I find plagiarism the old-fashioned way. I put some of the words in Google and look for matches in bold in the search results. Student responses are interesting:

1. I put the citation in. My answer: "If you stole my car, does it not count if you left a note behind saying you took it?"
2. I changed some of the words. My answer, "That means you knew it was wrong. That only drew attention to the dishonesty."
3. No one has ever said this to me before. You are the worst teacher I have ever had. Ichabodians, I have had students file a report against me for discussing their plagiarism with them. Needless to say, drawing attention to cheating is not wise at any school. Still, that is a common response. Plagiarists are lazy and stupid.

The question for today concerns the reason for the WELS Church Shrinkers copying the words of others and claiming them as their own. (Ideas must be cited too, even if the exact words do not correspond. If I claim China discovered America, an idea I got from someone's scholarship in a published book, I have to note where I learned about this.) The Church Shrinkers have been deceiving people by not telling them where they got their words (verbatim) and their ideas.

Plagiarism is against the law. Plagiarism is commonly called cheating. There are many ways to cheat: stealing words, stealing ideas, stealing another person's affection, lying about the previous things listed, etc. No one admires a cheat. Somehow one form of cheating leads to another. Most people loathe cheats, but cheats love one another. They help each other cheat and lie.

When I learn that someone has brazenly lied about a simple fact (such as going to Fuller Seminary), I wonder, "How many other deceptions are there?"

I imagine the Church Shrinkers have lost their faith or they are in the process of becoming atheists. They certainly are not Lutherans, not even mild Lutherans, to use an old phrase. Anyone can be an atheist and lead churches. One famous Gospel singing group confessed that they did not believe anything they were singing.