On Plagiarism in Sermons

Plagiarism is such a difficult subject to navigate. Like both Keats and I can have similar themes about the Fall, but we didn't plagiarize each other. It's just the way Fall is, only a few things can be said about it. Which gets into Biblical Exegesis, there shouldn't be too many variations on the subject, because the Bible has one meaning. So, Matthew Henry, Jay Vernon McGee and myself will have a very similar thought process about what the Bible means, because that's just how meaning is.

Not saying these people [who read verbatim premade sermons] aren't plagiarists, but you have to be careful with defining it, because you can essentially outlaw all speech. Like the book Atticus copyrighted some pretty simple platitudes that happen a lot in text conversations, and surely nobody's plagiarizing Atticus when they find those phrases.

It's not all cut in dry. Simply, human thought is limited, so people will eventually come to similar ideas, even removed from each other by millennia or leagues.

And then you add to that, we comprise billions of bits of information we've found all our lives, to make us find what and how we came to all those ideas, you'd essentially outlaw free speech by proxy of making it all subject to someone's copyright. 

What gets copyrighted are specific word patterns and ideas unique to you. Which the point of copyright and trademark is to help people make a living off their own inventions, not to essentially steal it from everyone else. As, the internal combustion engine had hundreds of variations, and what was copyrighted was each unique variation, not the process of internal combustion, which cannot be copyrighted.