Addendum to the ‘Yay! Questions!’ post


You remember a couple of weeks back I wrote a post answering that TodayChristian ’10 Questions For Every Atheist’ meme that had been going round?

Well… I didn’t recognise the question list out of context, but turns out that (with the exception of the ‘And there is a HELL!’ line at the end of question 3) it didn’t originate with the TodayChristian page. It actually originated with this post, by a blogger called Robert Neilsen, who writes a blog called Whistling in the Wind. You may notice a few things here:

  • Neilsen is, in fact, an atheist.
  • He wrote this list as a collection of some of the main questions-for-atheists going around the Internet, so that he could provide answers.
  • The TodayChristian page does not credit or attribute him.

So, this means that

a) The TodayChristian authors are happy with using plagiarised work. Kind of adds a poignant note to the questions on morality in the list, doesn’t it?

b) Someone has actually looked at a post in which all these questions were answered by an atheist, and quoted them without the answers in order to claim that these are questions atheists cannot answer. Which… does have to net them some points for sheer chutzpah, but that unfortunately has to be set against the large number of points deducted in the ‘basic honesty’ section.

Anyway, I have updated the post to make sure the meme is now correctly attributed, but I thought it was worth writing this post as well. The TodayChristian page want to try taking work that isn’t theirs; let’s shout it out so that people see what they’re up to.

Comments

  1. anat says

    Perhaps the TodayChristian authors couldn’t understand the original answers and decided answers they don’t understand don’t count? Or perhaps they found said answers so unbelievable they wanted to know other atheists actually think along those lines before being able to accept that fact?

  2. Dr Sarah says

    @anat: Or perhaps they just decided that they could take what they want as long as it was all in the cause of converting more people to Jesus? Take your pick.

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