AW! Epistles
From Paul
Abstract
Thursday, 30 December 2004
Mike, I have the following comments on: AskWhy! on Christmas—Christianity Revealed. A fable in letter form: From The Mystic Monks of McCabe, brother Paul founder. As put down by his scribe, Bullshat. To The honorable Doctor Magee of the Island of England, the hallowed place of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons Hail to you from California, oh brother of the common tongue, We write to say we have finally discovered who the true Messiah is. He is the former monk turned writer and lecturer named Joseph McCabe. He had almost everybody fooled into thinking he had become an atheist. It is so unbelievable it must be true. Although dying in 1955, his first miracle was to come back to life in order to correct some of your writing on Mithra and the origins of Christmas. Apparently you almost had it right, but it needed some minor revisions. The Savior McCabe’s (May Mithra’s Bull bless his Holy Name) second miracle has been to get it published on the net as though it were work done during his first lifetime, but I know better, for the proof is obvious. The proof he has not only plagiarized, or as we should say reaffirmed, your scholarship, but has also edited to change its meaning slightly in order to bend, or rather to rectify, your text’s meaning can be seen clearly by simply comparing a sample of the two texts: Dr McGee under the heading “Mithras” on the above referenced web page:
“F Cumont, the great authority on Mithras, who it is now fashionable to disparage, laboriously collected for us these details about the Persian religion, and more than one of the Christian Fathers refers nervously to the close parallel of the two religions. Mithras had possessed 25 December as his birthday for ages. He was eternal—the unconquered and unconquerable sun—the sun god as a spiritual god, with light as his emblem and honesty his supreme command. What could the Christians do? Nothing, until Constantine. Then they took 25 December, and Mithraic garb, customs and ritual, and so zealously desolved the Mithraic religion into Christianity that only scholars know anything about it.”
Joseph McCabe in The Story of religious Controversy, Ch 14 on internet infidels page:
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/joseph_mccabe/religious_controver sy/chapter_14.html#4
“F. Cumont, the great authority on Mithra, has laboriously collected for us all these details about the Persian religion, and more than one of the Christian Fathers refers nervously to the close parallel of the two religions. The Savior Mithra was in possession, had been in possession for ages, of December 25th as his birthday. He was the real ‘unconquered sun’: a sun-god transformed into a spiritual god, with light as his emblem and purity his supreme command. What could the Christians do? Nothing, until they had the ear of the emperors. Then they appropriated December 25th, and even bits of the Mithraic ritual; and they so zealously destroyed the traces of the Mithraic religion that one has to be a scholar to know anything about it.”
We here at the monkery, freshly dedicated to the Resurrected Messiah, find it quite telling that His Holiness McCabe has rectified your phrase “…emblem and honesty his supreme command” to “…emblem and purity his supreme command”. Perhaps McCabe in his second lifetime put more of an emphasis on purity than honesty. We don’t know because the Great McCabe has since returned to the heavens—his work completed… honest. However, we the Mystic Monks of McCabe, feel that His rectification of your inspired text is on a par with the rectification, editing and redaction of other holy scripture and can therefore be safely said to be absolutely correct, whereas yours is only a slightly misguided prototype. We hope you agree and don’t change a thing because it’s our main proof in the McCabian Resurrection. We’ve taken counsel and decided not to believe in your eternal damnation if you do change any of the the McCabian text, but for the love of The Word (that is, the printed Word), and to bring the Earthly criticism of our fledgling community by those dastardly Christ People to a head, we implore you as the Foreshadower, in the mold of John the Baptist, to relent to the truth of our Savior’s Words while keeping yours honest but not pure. You see the logic in that, don’t you? Besides for new converts that may like honesty over purity or visa versa we can switch to the appropriate text and make many more shekels from their donations. We will sacrifice three bullocks complete with barbeque sauce in your name to the Holy One, that he may inspire you to recognize his supremacy while keeping your work unchanged. (Last week we seethed a goat in its own mother’s milk just to see what would happen; it was fun! Try it!).
Moral: It looks bad to take another man’s work without giving credit, change it somewhat to fit your ideas a little better and then publish it under your name with a copyright symbol decorating it. Especially when you’re criticizing bishops and monks for doing more or less the same thing, albeit with religious text. It sets you up for criticism. It’s like being an atheist (or Adelphiasophist) in a foxhole, standing up to present yourself as a nice fat target and being shot down by any pious Christian with a search engine.(Hey, no analogy is perfect) You quote Massey, Smith and the New York Sun on the same page, so this looks as though it is not intended to be a quote or a paraphrase since no credit is given, but is a mutilation of the original author’s work while being presented as your own.
An amusing piece, wonderfully schoolboyish. It is nice to know that even Christians can be fans of a sort of Joseph McCabe. He did, after all, know a huge amount more than today’s ignorant fundis who spread supposed Christian truth about in their utter ignorance. McCabe was a man who found honesty—discovering the truth about his own original odious beliefs, and admitted it—so perhaps was a Mithraist himself before he died.
As to plagiarism, McCabe is cited fifteen times in my pages on Christianity according to a quick count you inspired me to do. Some pages began small and grew large enough to be divided, an example being the pages on the dying and rising gods of which Mithras originally was a part, in these pages. McCabe is cited in other pages on the Mystery Religions, all originally one. Acknowledgements on the original page might have become separated from the citation. Only pedants and those using pedantry for even more dishonest ends are bothered. It does not worry me as the whole website is meant to be a unity, so you cannot have read very far in your search for plagiarised texts to have missed the debts where they are acknowledged. Furthermore—shock and horror—some individual sections have been cut out and pasted into other pages where I judged them to be better placed.
In any case, you note, and kindly illustrate, that the passages were not plagiarised but were corrected. If McCabe and Cumont had a good reason for saying ‘pure’ rather than ‘honest’, then I do not know quite what it was. Mithras, to the Romans, anyway, was noted for his honesty, not his purity. That is why the change was made. Mithras was the God of Covenants, to use the appropriate biblical word. We would say contracts. And his overseeing and guarding of these contracts was why Mithras was so respected among Roman merchants. Of course, Christians do not normally care about such details, preferring to be thought policemen to guard their untenable beliefs rather than their supposedly almighty God, who is one imagines quite capable of looking after himself, but prefers to have the protection of a graveyard of brainless zombies waiting for their reward as the undead.
I have not tried to avoid my debt to McCabe, as I have already pointed out, but he must be flattered that you are seeming so diligently to guard his reputation. As I have said on the pages, more than once, I consider myself a reporter. I am not a scholar in the sense of using special skills like knowledge of ancient tongues to research original texts. Like any reporter, I am presenting research to the public, research that they would find time-consuming to compile themselves, if they felt able to do it at all. Scholars and pseudo-scholars, like most so-called biblical scholars, like to make endless citations—which merely deter many readers—to boost their own pseudo-scholarship. I have no need, and no wish to do that, dear friend, and nor do most reporters.
Moreover, McCabe wrote mostly before the second world war, and in a style that was too self conscious for today’s taste, or mine at any rate. So I have used him as a source and I have altered him when I thought he was wrong or writing tediously or too self-consciously. Sorry about that, since you plainly do not like texts to be changed, being a believer in the divinity of the Holy Word, but there you are!
Using other people’s findings is the sort of thing that general writers do. It is the reason why researchers find things out and publish them, and the reason why reporters, like me, find it useful to present them again is that the general reader does not read scholarly journals or even heavy tomes. McCabe depended on the scholarship of Cumont, and I depended on the honesty of McCabe, among others. I cannot see how any general book or textbook can be written without using sources. I admit—oh the shame!—that I use them. I also list the main general texts in the bibliography, mention specific texts and authors in line, and have at least three references to the Internet Infidels in the pages.
Finally, I have again said on the pages more than once that the copyright notice is to deter opportunists, mainly Christians I would wager, from copying what they have not prepared themselves, to make a profit—to stop those who would reap where they have not sown, dear Theophilus. Since I am doing what the internet is meant for, in my view, exchanging information, I offer my own efforts free, gratis and for nothing. I therefore think it would be impertinent, greedy and dishonest for someone else to publish the same work for profit. I am not seeking gain or glory in this, though words of appreciation are encouraging. I expect to get none from Christians because they do not like what I am saying, cannot adequately counter it by reason, and have little conception of what doing anything for neither gain nor glory means, being themselves too often crooks and glory seekers hiding behind a mask of kindness, and an odour of sanctity.
So, while the object of your irony is misguided and ignorant, I thank you for your subtle humour. I do hope your talent is not going to waste. You should write for Rumsfeld or Bush. Curious that my sevice provider classed your letter as SPAM.
I obviously was a little blundering in my last email to you. I’m not hostile towards your work. I can understand breaking pages up could easily make a citation or acknowledgement go bye bye, and you do give McCabe credit on other pages. I still feel in this case it is presented as though the Mithra paragraph was your writing and your phrasing alone. I’ll give in on the copyright symbol point assuming your books don’t contain this, but had you quoted the man and added your comment as to what’s wrong with his quote as you have done elsewhere, you could’ve cut, pasted or expanded as needed without any problem.
I’m not paid for this. You are making me an academic again. My practice on these pages is to use quotations for emphasis. Plagiarism is always called the highest form of flattery, and it is, in more senses than one. In cases like this, I wanted to express what McCabe had expressed, and obviously could see no point in altering all his words for the sake of it. Yet, it was not a centrally important point that I wanted to emphasise. Why not work out what percentage of the several millions of bytes there are here that are mine and what percentage are other people’s. Then tell me what percentage of copied words constitute plagiarism. There are pages online that are simply quotations put in an order to make a statement. Some of them are interesting and useful pages, but here I am writing my own statements, not using others to do it for me, though based on what experience and scholarship has discovered, but when some sentences from a source get into the text unaltered, I am evidently guilty of a major crime.
I thought it was entirely your writing until I did a search for “F Cumont” (since I’d never heard of him, or McCabe) and came up with the Infidels’ page of the original McCabe piece, which is why it startled me because I’d just finished reading your page.
Interesting that. I have been accused of plagiarizing pages online that have been plagiarized from me. Thought policemen are like Christians—always right.
There was no nice way to say to you that I felt this looked like you borrowed another man’s phrases, spun it however slightly, and gave any would be detractor of yours ammunition for criticism. Honesty is not purity, Constantine is not “…the emperors”. and, “Mithraic garb, customs and ritual” isn’t just “…ritual”. You’ve changed the guy’s meaning but taken his sentences. That’s not a quote and it’s not paraphrasing. So citing or acknowledgement wouldn’t actually cure the problem, because you’d be misquoting or misleading the reader still.
You are baffling me here. If only some of the words are McCabe’s then how can I say it is a citation? If I had done, some other thought policeman would have accused me of false citation. Copyright law protects your words, but not little clips of this and that idea expressed as well as it could be. How far do you have to take this sort of investigation. If I use the words ‘salt of the earth’ without attributing them to Tyndale, or even to Matthew, am I guilty of this shocking crime? Was Matthew himself guilty for not citing Mark as the author of many of his words? Modern copyright protects us from wholesale robbery of works that might affect the author’s income and reputation. What I have written does not affect McCabe in either of these ways, and my guess is that he would have been glad a few people like me are continuing skeptical tradition in a world full of gullible cannon fodder for Christian leaders. If McCabe were alive rather than a man dead for half a century, your criticism might hold more water.
It makes me wonder when you say on your page re Christianity and Fascism, “Joseph McCabe points out that the Annual Register impartially notes that the Bavarian Catholics, under orders from their bishops, supported Hitler”, if perhaps you’ve added the phrase, “under orders from their bishops” because you believe it to be true where McCabe never committed himself. I’m not saying you have, but if I were really interested I’d have to try and check it out because I can’t be confident you’re imparting what the guy actually said. If I have to check out every blurb from someone you use on top of what appears to be your writing, the value of your work becomes tainted.
That is true of everything you read, and I recommend that you check as much as you can, or remain skeptical of most things. Initially, I suggest you stick to satisfying yourself that an argument is self-consistent. If it is not, then the sources are irrelevant. If it is, then the sources are only a dressing. When someone uses indirect speech, what follows does not have to be the words of the person cited. They might be, or they might be a paraphrase. We are back to what you were recommending above—putting citations that are not precise into quotation marks. That would be wrong. When these marks are used to denote the words are verbatim then any that are omitted are marked by an ellipsis, and any added are normally put into square brackets. Frankly, when the words are immaterial to the meaning I sometimes leave them out without cluttering the text with dots and brackets, but few people, except you, worry about it. As I said, the argument should be more than simply offering some authority, even McCabe. Citation of authority should simply add substance to an argument by showing that others with some intellectual substance themselves have argued similarly.
So I tried humor. I didn’t expect you to change anything. I am not a joke writer, as I probably don’t need to tell you, and I’m also not a Christian or a anything-else-religious which I should have made clear originally. I rarely email anybody about anything. What I am is a 50 year old guy from Long Beach looking around for information as defense against the seemingly never ending supply of born again Christians here who have come on quite strong since America elected and re-elected Mr Bush, started the Iraq war and so forth. That information you have given me and I appreciate it. I have used your information to raise a few people’s suspicions regarding their beliefs, but would think twice about using this little Mithra bit or anything else similarly edited because it might serve to just raise people’s suspicions about my integrity.
I do not blame you for being cautious, but this seems more than that to me. It is neurotic, if you say you are not a Christian. I have said repeatedly on my pages that Christians are unrepentent liars. To be able to say it, my own honesty should be above suspicion. I believe it is in large measure. Any apparent lies you or anyone finds in my writing are most likely not lies but errors, and when pointed out, I have corrected them more than once, and in more significant cases given my teacher an attribution for it. Since I put my arguments into the open for anyone like you to take an axe to, I try to be correct and accurate when it is possible to be so. Not everything is certainly known, especially when Christians have had 2000 years to destroy whatever they did not care to preserve. In these pages, I have a visibly presented reputation to keep up. So, I have more reason than you have to be concerned about my personal integrity.
If that’s pedantry, so be it.
Your explanation of your attack on me does not stop it from being pedantic.
I am actually surprised that most people would think that I’m just being picky, though. Have you really asked somebody whose judgment you can trust about this? You’ve been in the academic community, would the concept be wholeheartedly accepted there for reportage? I showed your main page, one of your pages where you reference McCabe, the Infidels’ McCabe page and our last emails to my buddy. His exact quote was, “God, you know how to waste time Paul, but that (AskWhy!) website shows plagiarism”. Or did he say, God and time are plaguing your waist Paul, but that AskWhy! website shows know-how?
I have to take it your pal knows what he is talking about. Perhaps you could look up a few definitions of plagiarism to persuade me, and argue the case more formally. What, for example, is my motive for wanting to plagiarize a man who is largely forgotten—his name is mainly kept alive by people like me—when Christians, particularly Catholics, would sooner it was forgotten? Curiously enough, this evening, as I was having supper with the guests who are here for Christmas, an item came on TV about the Ukrainian elections. One of the younger guests happened to mention that a friend of his had been an observer in the disputed election of a few weeks ago. A TV reporter had asked him his views about the fairness of the election and he had given him a succinct reply. He stood around and minutes later the reporter stood before the cameras and used the reply he had given almost verbatim. The young man was not bothered. He phoned home and asked his mother to video record the news for several days hoping to see the report and to be able to say to his mother, “I told him that!”
Reporters are usually meticulous about reporting their sources precisely, though they often do not give attribution—they cannot without giving away their source which might be unoffical, or without cluttering up a limited amount of news space with attributions most readers could not care less about. We saw last summer what happened to Andrew Gilligan of the BBC and his two most senior bosses when he used the merest infelicity in a report that was otherwise correct. It was too near the knuckle for the great Christian leader of the British. I try to be precise in what I say, but I have no bosses to tell me I am wrong, and might make blunders. People like you can correct me, but so far, like the Gilligan case, mostly it has been quibbling. I have made no huge blunder so far, but doubtless I shall. Using my own knowledge to correct a couple of sentences of J McCabe in one important respect while leaving out some words that were not crucial to the point is not plagiarism and is not an error, because I did not attribute the changed words to McCabe. To have done so would have been wrong.
Anyway, thanks for responding, I understand your position and will respect it and I’ll stop flogging a dead horse of a subject.
I am pleased to hear it. This horse is not yet dead, and I am sorry I mistook your attack to be from a Christian. The only motive I could see was that a Christian wanted to use his tarnishing brush as usual. I am sure you can be constructive. If so, I should be glad to hear from you again.
