If you never heard of Wes Huff, relax — he just flamed out and crashed. Huff was a rising star in Christian apologetics, mainly thanks to his appearance on the Joe Rogan show (you could have stopped there, being Rogan famous is synonymous with being brain dead), and I was seeing him pop up everywhere, because as a good atheist I do try to track the latest excuses from theists. I was never impressed with Huff, because he’s just another Bible thumper who pretends the Bible is evidence for the Bible.
But man, he was just brutally exposed as a shameless plagiarist by Dan McClellan. Here’s his thorough exposé, included for completeness, but you don’t actually need to watch the whole thing — it’s seriously thorough overkill.
Since that came out, Huff has admitted his failure.
Let me be totally upfront in this scenario. If you want to cancel Wes Huff from 2016 or maybe even 2017 and 2018, I do too. I was not a good writer. I was not a good academic. I was just trying to find my legs as to where I fit in in the whole world of scholarship.
Let me be totally upfront and take responsibility for that, for what I think is bad. This paper, in fact, all of the papers I put on Academia.edu almost a decade ago are bad. Their use of citation and attribution is problematic. They’re not well written. They’re all pretty bad.
More accusations followed. He has now deleted his entire website. It’s the most dramatic destruction of a person’s reputation I think I’ve ever seen.
He should have been ashamed at the very beginning of his career as an apologist, because all apologetics is bad academic writing and is not honest scholarship. It’s just now caught up with him. May all apologists suffer his fate.
Nearly all Christian apologia is plagiarism. New ideas are few and far between. And most of the new ones take a special kind of stupidity and reality denial.
I predict: He will rise again in three days, and let us know that Jesus has forgiven him.
In his defence, cheating for Jesus is the core of the Christian right. They just don’t say it aloud.
As they successfully spread the myth of post-birth abortions it should be trivial for them to cover up plagiarism.
“As they successfully spread the myth of post-birth abortions it should be trivial for them to cover up plagiarism.”
Post-birth abortions isn’t a myth!
And every RWNJ christianists should have one given to them.
They’re acephalic, so justifiable.
He thought he fitted in to the “world of scholarship”?
i believe the new socially acceptable term for “post-birth” abortion is now “retroactive abortion.”
I like Dan’s stuff, but I sometimes wish Prof Dave did apologists as well.
There must be some relevant joke in South Park but I have not kept up with it. I have to scroll through Youtube.