Earlier this month, France’s top rabbi Gilles Bernheim resigned, brought down by a plagiarism scandal of his own making (see here and here and here). Geoffrey Alderman, in the Jewish Chronicle online, makes a very good point when, after roundly condemning Bernheim for his thievery, he asks

why one serial plagiarist has been exposed and disgraced, while another has been canonized.

Alderman says he knows a famous theologian who never repented and got away with repeated acts of plagiarism — and so do you.

That theologian is Martin Luther King Jr, the celebrated civil rights activist who was infamously assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, 45 years ago this month.

King … was not just a plagiarist. He was an habitual plagiarist. His Boston University PhD, awarded in 1955, contained numerous plagiarized passages — a conclusion endorsed by a board of inquiry established by that university some years later. To those of you interested in learning more about this, I recommend Plagiarism & The Culture War, a meticulous exposé of King by Theodore Pappas from 1994. Pappas reproduces, side-by-side, passages from King’s PhD and from the work of a fellow Boston University student, whose doctoral dissertation had been approved in 1952.

King went on to publish articles and books that incorporated — without attribution — passages lifted from the works of others.

I knew of King’s well-deserved reputation as a serial adulterer, but the plagiarism allegations were new to me. They shouldn’t have been, I suppose, because as it turns out, King’s thievery is a well-established fact. Wikipedia delicately refers to “authorship issues” surrounding the civil-rights hero — but stripped of euphemisms, King’s behavior was clearly pretty disgusting:

During the late 1980s, as [King’s personal] papers were being organized and catalogued, the staff of the project discovered that King’s doctoral dissertation at Boston University, titled A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, included large sections from a dissertation written by another student (Jack Boozer) three years earlier at Boston University.

As Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, has written, “instances of textual appropriation can be seen in his earliest extant writings as well as his dissertation. The pattern is also noticeable in his speeches and sermons throughout his career.”

Boston University, where King received his Ph.D. in systematic theology, conducted an investigation that found he plagiarized major portions of his doctoral thesis from various other authors who wrote about the topic.

According to civil rights historian Ralph E. Luker, who worked on the King Papers Project directing the research on King’s early life, King’s paper The Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism was taken almost entirely from secondary sources. [Luker] writes: “Moreover, the farther King went in his academic career, the more deeply ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation seemed to be, by then, the product of his long-established practice.”

Even after the extent of King’s academic fraud came to light, Boston University never revoked his doctorate. All the school did was append a letter to his dissertation in the university library, noting the plagiarism.

This old Stranglers song sums it up for me.

[photo of Martin Luther King via Charisma News]

Quite the statement by an op-ed contributor to the New York Times:

One of the most striking scientific discoveries about religion in recent years is that going to church weekly is good for you.

That’s a line from a short essay the Times published yesterday, called “The Benefits of Church.”

The term “scientific discovery” conjures up hard science — the ones and zeros of digital data, rock-solid math, the incontrovertible observations of physics — and that’s not at all what we’re looking at here. What author T.M. Luhrmann (photo) claims as the scientific truth is in fact a squishy, shapeshifting approximation of it, that can change completely depending on whom you ask, what religion they adhere to, what type of god they believe in, and even where they live. More on that in a minute.

Religious attendance — at least, religiosity — boosts the immune system and decreases blood pressure. It may add as much as two to three years to your life. The reason for this is not entirely clear.

But Luhrmann gamely gives it a go:

Regular church attendees drink less, smoke less, use fewer recreational drugs and are less sexually promiscuous than others.

Exactly. And those behaviors have nothing to do with church (or religion) per se. Refraining from promiscuity, booze, and drugs bestows likely health benefits that are also enjoyed by people who choose these things without ever setting foot inside a church.

Luhrmann also believes in the life-lengthening religious power of what she calls “absorption,” which she describes as

the capacity to be caught up in your imagination, in a way you enjoy. What I saw in church as an anthropological observer was that people were encouraged to listen to God in their minds, but only to pay attention to mental experiences that were in accord with what they took to be God’s character, which they took to be good. I saw that people were able to learn to experience God in this way, and that those who were able to experience a loving God vividly were healthier — at least, as judged by a standardized psychiatric scale.

Fine, but I’d wager that non-believers who meditate, or who frequently immerse themselves in the comfort of a quiet forest spot or a beautiful night sky, will experience the same effect. Absorption can even come from losing yourself in poetry, art, or music.

As for that psychiatric scale to which Luhrmann refers, maybe we can spare a thought for the fact that a belief in the classical, wrathful Christian god is substantially correlated with different types of mental illness, as a team of psychologists at Marymount Manhattan College found recently. I wrote about it here. Are those believers healthier, and will they live longer? I doubt it.

Further putting the kibosh on Luhrmann’s theory is that church, and religious faith in general, is often highly stressful for believers. For instance, the less flexible of religious faiths (such as Wahhabi Islam, hard-line Christian evangelism, and conservative Catholicism) tend to do a number on young people, gay or straight, who are intelligent and courageous enough to ask question. Those with probing attitudes are typically frowned upon by their elders and by many of their less-critical peers, which often leaves them socially unmoored and ‘lost’ for a number of years, while they work through religious issues. Surely such a state of mind is not a contributor to great health.

Neither, by the way, is living in any society, from the West Bank to Myanmar to Northern Ireland, where there is a lot of religious hatred, and where people must frequently fear for their safety. (In that same vein: If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably sense, as do I, that the rapists, thieves, and murderers who populate it neither spread nor enjoy inner peace and calm.)

Even in the relatively strife-free parts of the West, it’s clear that outsized guilt over sexual and other matters is part and parcel of much of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Guilt cannot be conducive to overall health, I should think.

Finally, there’s the quality-of-life issue. I’d rather enjoy myself thoroughly, and live two or three or even ten years shorter, than spend my life on my knees praying to a figment of the collective imagination, and carefully hewing to the fingerwagging tenets of a buzzkill faith.

A thieving pastor’s pure intentions became clear after he was caught with a congregant’s missing panties and bra: He explained that he needed them to pray for her.

The police in Lagos [Nigeria] on Monday arraigned a 25-year-old pastor, Tommy Issachar, over an alleged stealing of a female church  member’s underwear and N10,000 ($63) cash.

[The prosecutor] said that the accused stole two pants, one bra and a cash sum of N10,000 belonging to Mrs Gift Bassey.

“The accused, a pastor of All Nations Evangelical Church, Oshodi, was invited to a programme at the headquarters of the church which was the complainant’s church. The complainant and her husband accommodated him (pastor) in their house for three nights to conduct a special prayer session related to her husband’s business,” he said. …

“At first, the accused denied taking those underwears but later confessed that he actually took them. He said that he wanted to use them to pray for her, but denied taking the money,” the prosecutor said.

After the victim notified the police, the pastor allegedly sent her a series of text messages threatening to “eliminate” her.

[image via Sharenator]

A church just down the road from where I live frequently tries its hand at patriotism and clever aphorisms — and comes up short on both accounts.

Apparently god doesn’t believe in spelling either.