The Confessing Seventh-day Adventist

The premise of the papists in the Seventh-day Adventist Church on the question of Ellen G. White's alleged plagiarism is that we are to accept the opinions of the Church's paid experts. And my premise is that the good Lord has given the remnant enough common sense to recognize plagiarism when they see it.

I remember reading that the Seventh-day Adventist Corporation paid over $1,000,000 to the law firm of Diller, Ramik & Wight, Ltd., for a specialist in patent, trademark, and copyright cases, Attorney Vincent L. Ramik, to research about 1,000 copyright cases in American legal history and the accusations of Ellen G. White's alleged plagiarism. For all that money, Ramik issued a 27-page legal opinion in which he concluded "Ellen White was not a plagiarist, and her works did not constitute copyright infringement/piracy."

It is also alleged that the Seventh-day Adventist Corporation paid $500,000 for a thorough analysis of Ellen White's use of literary sources in 15 chapters of her book The Desire of Ages. Dr. Fred Veltman, at that time the chairman of the Religion Department of Pacific Union College, undertook the investigation and took eight years to complete the study, finishing it up in 1988.

The result of this $500,000 "Life of Christ Research Project" is a technical 2,561-page report, including a 100-page summary, that no one wants to read. Again, the point of the report isn't that Adventists, skeptics or anyone else, would be edified or even persuaded by reading it. Rather, it is for the Church to say authoritatively that a scholar conducted the appropriate scholarly research and that Veltman's 8-year study answers Ellen White's critics.

Did Ludwig van Beethoven shamelessly plagiarize the music of a Wood-Wren? We could trust a paid shill from the General Conference to decide for us or we could think for ourselves. Let’s compare one Wood-Wren's musical composition to Beethoven's 5th Symphony.



Taken from Great Facts on Plagiarism