“Conversations with God” author charged with plagiarism
By Marjorie Kehe | 01.07.09
Neale Donald Walsch, author of the “Conversations with God” series, admitted yesterday in his blog on the Beliefnet website that a Christmas essay he had passed off as his own was actually written by someone else.
Walsch had written a story about what he said was a Christmas concert at his son’s school 20 years ago. In the story, the children held up letters that were meant to spell out the words, “Christmas Love.” But one child held the letter “m” upside down, so the message read “Christ was Love” instead.
It turns out the story was originally written – in nearly identical form – by a writer named Candy Chand, who published it 10 years ago in Clarity, a spiritual magazine. It has been circulating on the internet ever since.
Walsch’s blog has been taken off the Beliefnet site. But yesterday he wrote an apology to readers and said he must have unknowingly internalized the story.
“All I can say now — because I am truly mystified and taken aback by this — is that someone must have sent it to me over the Internet ten years or so ago,” he wrote. “Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of ‘stories to tell that have a message I want to share.’ I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized … and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”
Chand, however, is not convinced. “Quite frankly, I’m not buying it,” she told the New York Times.
Comments
2. T. Scott | 01.07.09
Mr. Walsch makes money based on the words that he writes as his own. He has clearly plagiarized this passage and then attempted to “massage” the truth as to exonerate himself. This is the typical wormy behavior combined with a lack of personal responsibility. If Mr. Walsch was an upstanding man to begin with, he would have never even considered passing off someone else’s work as his own. My question is, how many other passages has he plagiarized that haven’t been caught? It is critical for the people of the US and other countries to stop excusing and tolerating reprehensible behavior.
3. justcallmelater | 01.07.09
I think the original author should have taken it as a compliment and Waschl should be more careful next time not to use a commonly used story from the Internet to claim as his own.
4. Peter | 01.07.09
Alan Dershowitz, at Harvard law school plagiarized an entire book, was exposed but is still teaching at Harvard law school.
5. Barbara | 01.08.09
These misdemeanors need to be exposed. Mr. Waschl would certainly be aware of what he had done and all this drivel about “internalizing” doesn’t get him off the hook. I’m glad he was found out.
6. Ronny, Norway | 01.08.09
Actually, the act of internalizing stories as memmories is well known and happens all the time with most ppl, and since authors are people too, odds are from time to time it’ll be part of what they write. He might be lying, but I have no trouble believing it could have happened as he describes it. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-16345935_ITM is one article exploring this (though this is in reference to advertising)
7. Jason | 01.08.09
Walsch’s deep spiritual insight should have told him some one wrote this article already. Oh wait…..he’s a fraud. After all, he claims to have had conversations with God……….or at least a voice he calls God, but really it is a manifestation of New Age mumbo jumbo repackaed. Oprah, Tolle,JZ Knight, and the others must be very disappointed with him.
Walsh’s plagurized story about “Christ was Love” is ironic since Walsch’s visions distort and twist the very fundamentals of Biblical teaching. True Christ IS love, but the character of Walsch’s God is not the character of God in the Bible, but a Politically Correct god of Walsch’s own imagination.
This blatant plagurization is just another confirmation that the man is decieved at best, but more likley just dishonest. Stick to the original book of truth for your insight, not dime novel authors out to make a buck!
Baruch Haba B’shem Adonai
8. Beth | 01.08.09
This is another example of why we should not pass around stories on the internet. Most of those stories have an author who owns the copyright. When stories are shared and published without permission, it prevents the author from earning income from the story because editors want fresh pieces, not ones that have been shopped all over cyberspace.
9. Leif | 01.08.09
If one is only interested in what was a story of god published and distorted by scribes for centuries then the word of the bible is what you should follow, Jason. If one can open ones heart to see love in all the faces and acts of good in the world then we need not be concerned that this act of “internalizing” happened.
10. Lester Smith | 01.08.09
This is certainly an odd one. The original tale itself has the earmarks of a fable. (Who would really plan to end a holiday play with the message “Christmas Love”?) That fable then travels the Internet for 10 years, gaining a mythic significance. Is it possible to plagiarize a myth?
I think the point should be that if we have love in us, we don’t need to be reading either Walsh or Chand, or anybody else who makes a buck off religion.
11. Lynne | 01.08.09
Isn’t it more important in these times to find a way to come to peace? I’m 57 and can’t remember half the things that I’ve done and half the things I’ve witnessed. Things get mixed up with other events and I’m always surprised when another witness gives me their version of the events. THe truth is usually somewhere in the middle. If we want to talk plagarism, then we should look at the Bible and remember that some stories are told again and again in the Gospels and recounted events were not necessarily witnessed by the actual writers. So who is correct? Are we supposed to split hairs on everything to maintain OUR supremacy as a commentator or is it really all about the point of the story. I must go with Chapter Two of the Bhagavad Gita to offer some thoughts. It tells us that the greatest flaw of mankind is our desire to “Lord it over the Material World” (ie material nature and our fellow beings)in order to compete with God rather than give Him credit or any of our fellows. If someone steals my story and it’s ten years old and was written only on the internet rather than in a published book out in the material world, and they apologized to me and gave me the credit, I’d take their apology and simply ask that further publications were made accurate. This isn’t a sex scandal people. This is a beautiful story written apparently to make a spiritual connection. When are we going to just be at peace. The peace of God is about forgiveness and love and just letting it be. I’m tired of fighting unimportant battles and listening to them be fought. Life is not a soap opera. There are other things out there that should be done and they involve positive actions rather than negative. You are what you eat, all you non-vegetarians and you are what you think, all you argumentative individuals. Think about it. In the meantime let God deal with it.
12. Courtenay Rule | 01.09.09
“Internalising” a previously read or heard story is a known phenomenon - there’s a famous example of Helen Keller doing so as a child. But it’s rather a stretch to believe that Walsch could have “remembered” this incident as having happened at his OWN son’s Christmas concert, which he presumably would have attended himself. Much though memories blur and merge over time, there’s quite a difference between recalling something you read somewhere and remembering something you lived through as your own experience. You can have an anecdotal story floating around in your thought and forget that you didn’t invent it yourself, but it would surely be rather more difficult to forget that an actual experience didn’t actually happen to YOU… (Unless one happens to have an exceptionally unreliable and invention-prone memory… which would possibly also cast doubt on the accuracy and factuality of one’s reported “conversations” with God.)
13. Steve Real | 01.09.09
I wonder if Neale Donald Walsch stole any other stories besides this one…
Oops! What I meant to say was: I wonder if Neale Donald Walsch “internalized” any other stories as his own?
14. Simon Martin | 01.11.09
Well I feel like just prattling a few thoughts, in order to express my mode of reality and path that I am taking as a part of the All Mighty One.
Yes it may have been wrong for time to ‘internalise’ an experience, but the scope of what he is writing about - I think just take the first book. It is truly amazing. It is a manifestation of the deepest love. I don’t see it as a mumbo jumbo of new age stuff. It is a return to truth. The Christ conciousness. We are all one, the many different folds of flock. I think it would be wise for us to stop concerning our selfs with Ego ownership, and start asking the big questions. And if one is led to a book containing such truths, no matter where it came from, even if it was partially plagiarised, it still is like a loving gift to the soul who seeks it. Are we not seeking to evolve? Are we not seeking to understand our human nature? Or are we concerned the we may offend our for fathers, that we may offend our god, or not get a royalty check? The universe provides! What we ask for we get, and now we are on the brink of an awakening of very simple truths, that will help us restore love into the hearts of the children of god.
If you believe that this book is fraudulent, and not a work of the highest manifestation of love, than I have a challenge. See now, I have started to see that we are magnets to our thoughts. This book as many others, and people as teachers have come into my life the moment I have knocked at the veil.
So a simple task is to ask a true question with in yourself, with the purest of intentions, and the beilf that god is working in wonderful ways through all moments in your life. Now holding this true question in your mind (with grace and honesty), open up Conversations with God to what ever page you are guided to, and the words your eyes first fall on, will be for you.
You can do this with most things in life, and can tune into your truest intentions, though I see the spiritual integrity of this book is well beyond the scope of and calibre of most current human modes of reality. Usually there is a lot of inference, and reading between the lines, but I think it is hardest for us to accept simple truths. For from them arises the very questions and the very reason for which we have collectively chosen experience.
For example a exert I got from some of fords stuff years ago (even though I don’t agree with a some of his stuff):
I die that Chist may live. I die daily to become apart of the Universal Mind and heart and to express it. It is necessary to restore to mankind an understanding of his full nature and his relationship to God.
and
Restoration not of anything of the past simply because it belongs to the past,
But restoration of the basic truths out of which all civilisations and all religions have grown.
Well I believe it will be necessary when we are ready to seek that path with the truest of heart. And listen to the words of wisdom that resound when we here them. If this line of thinking if not for you then keep to your ways and rejoice that god is with you and god is in you, and pray that you are blessed all the days of your life.
And this is out of interest, just because it fell into my conciousness the other day (I looked it up 
“Gentlemen, I am your grateful and devoted servant, but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you; and as long as I draw breath and have my faculties I shall never stop practising philosophy”
“Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?”
“and all day long I will never cease to settle here, there and everywhere, rousing, persuading and reproving every one of you.”
thankyou Socrates for your truth (though I dont agree there is a need to be ashamed, its just most of us can comprehend the simple truth of such a man) I hope that one day I to will be in the house of god, the grandest version and the highest vision of myself.
And from cwg (before randomly opening it, my question was the expression of this rant, for I was being to question if I should even post it)
“Passion is the fire that drives us to express who we really are. Never deny passion, for that is to deny Who You Are and Who You Truly Want to Be.
The renunciate never denies passion – the renunciate simply denies attachment to results. Passion is a love of doing. Doing is being, experienced. Yet what is often created as part of doing? Expectation. To live your life without expectation – without the need for specific results – that is freedom. That is Godliness. That is how I live.”
So I will post this in my new found god space. And I hope that Neale Donald Walsch continues with such passion, for as long as he does, what ever he writes will have some great food for thought and spirit.
15. Mark Levinson | 01.11.09
Well, then Ulrich Tolle will be going to the slammer; he doesn’t have a single original sentence in any of his books.
16. Jen | 01.14.09
It seems that if Walsch had written a best selling novel about something less controversial, there would not be such uproar about this incident. I find it easy to see how a writer especially, can jumble memories, dreams, stories and life experiences. I could swear some dreams I had years ago actually happened, and my family will swear otherwise. We create stories in our head every day about reality, and obviously about this incident. Our opinions are made up stories based on our belief systems and are different for everyone. In my story, Walsch probably does not think and feel in terms of separateness and ownership. In fact, this incident proves that humankind has a long way to go to reach the kind of love offered by Christ. It is interesting that the story in question had a message of love and that now it has become a message of property and ownership. It happened for a reason though, and I do not believe this will affect the enormous impact that Walsch’s books have had and will continue to have on our world. It actually shines more light on it, and I think the majority of folks will not condemn the man. It does not change the contribution he had made to the growing awareness in our world.
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1. Thomas Beck | 01.07.09
Chand says she’s not buying it? I find it dispicable that she wouldn’t “buy” Walsh’s explanation. The message is one of love not material possession. things of that nature should be given away for free, in my humble opinion.