PLAGIARISM - does God care?

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Loraine Boettner, in (many) of his books, explicitly gives permission to quote from and use his texts as much as you want, since, as he says, all of his ideas come from Scripture anyway.

However, it would still be honest, when quoting Boettner's exact words, to give the attribution, of course.
 
I would like to add that self-plagiarism is a sin also. An example of self-plagiarism would be to write a paper for one class and then turn in that same paper for another class.

I disagree in one sense. As long as the professors know than it would not be, this has been done a lot. Where the two subjects converge and both professors know.

Even without them knowing I would still hesitate to consider it self-plagiarism since I would be the one who wrote it. All mho.
 
I have heard it said that the most plagiarised genre of all time is cookbooks! :lol: Perhaps sermons are close second?
;)

An old saying from our history prof was "History repeats its self, and historians repeat each other---But if I catch you, you will fail my class!"
 
You can only plagiarize yourself if you were told not to do so. If a professor told me not to use any art project from a previous class for their class, nor any reworked version of any previous art project, then I would have to begin work from scratch for their class. Same goes for writing, speeches, and whatever else we create.

I think the least people should do is throw quotation marks around something if they know they did not come up with the words on their own. This is so that the reader isn't confused into thinking, "wow, they came up with that!"

Yes, it is more severe to plagiarize certain things over others. If someone picked their favorite line in a song and used it as their signature and didn't give credit to the songwriter, it's not really much of an issue. But if someone wrote a paper, a poem, or an entire song on their own, and slyly took others' words in order to improve their paper, poem, or song, and did so in a way that it appeared rather seamless, that is theft.

As for this board, when we're talking about scripture it is only right to quote a verse or contextual section, instead of loosely rephrasing it. In rephrasing it we will damage the original wording, changing the meaning slightly, and we would also be dishonoring the Author by adding to or taking away the words. Everyone here pretty much throws quotes around the scripture they refer to, and many go to the trouble of listing the source (ex.: Ephesians 4:20-24).

I know preachers and pastors have used others' ideas and words in their sermons without giving credit to the names of who they got those ideas and words from, and this is wrong. A speech or sermon should hold the same gravity of rules as a term paper for college or grad school.

Thanks for reading. I was really glad to hear everyone's diverse input on this matter : ) God bless everyone!
 
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