And has there been a retraction, yet?

In your case, you simply passed on a bogus quote and as Ed Brayton noted, we've all done this at some point in our lives. The situation with Armstrong would only be analogous if the David's Tent web page had put those sentences in quotation marks and attributed them to Paul Nelson. Just as your mistake was to trust the pastor, Armstrong's mistake would have been in trusting the authors of that web page. But that is not what happened.

Mike wrote:

Also, I was wondering if there is anyone reading this blog who has ever made the mistake of taking embarrassing words off one obscure web page and putting them into the mouth of another person. Anyone?

I did 4 years ago, and that was when I was still a newbie on the ID/creation/evolution scene. It was during a talk I gave at GMU, September 2002. I used this creationist mis-quote that can be found in the talk-origins quote mine project The Quote Mine Project :

"There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility. Spontaneous generation, that life arose from non-living matter was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others. That leaves us with the only possible conclusion that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God. I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to evolution." (Wald, George, "Innovation and Biology," Scientific American, Vol. 199, Sept. 1958, p. 100)

At the time I naively trusted that a pastor (David Moore) would work to accurately quote someone. He after all was a pastor!!! Nope, he apparently copied it from someone else whom he trusted!!! And I copied what he said from an audio tape of a talk he was giving. Because I was hasty in preparing my materials, I took a shortcut of a second-hand quote, fully trusting the process which got it too me. Some time later, while reading Talk Origins, I discovered my error and that of many others. Since then I grew to have an intense distrust of YEC literature with the notable exception of people like Walter Brown, Barry Setterfield,A.E. Wilder-Smith, and Paul Nelson.

What is distressing about Armstrong is she should know better. It took me less than a year to learn what not to do. If she is quoting a secondary source which she can not verify, she should simply say, "……according to unconfirmed sources." And thus cover herself. But such statements are for breaking news, not for well-thought out, pre-meditated opinions!

Salvador
PS
That misquote on my part was a year before I joined ISCID and ARN and had the experience of debating the other side. One quickly learns in the process of debating critics versus preaching to the choir one will be forced to much higher standard of reporting and scholarship.

Thus, I'll often dump unrefined ideas on the net to get editorial feedback form critics. Bill Dembski does this all the time as well.

Since those days in 2002, and having learned the art of cross checking with the critics. I'd like to think I've ironed out the problems of such mis-quotations.

For the record, a large body YEC materials are horrible!!! Gasp.
ID literature in contrast is much more accurate.

In the past, one merely needed to cite real errors of fact in YEC literature to discredit it.

In contrast, when critics descend on ID literature, I see them having to put words in the mouth of the author to build a case.

I'm sorry, but I simply cannot get my mind around the mistake-hypothesis that you are suggesting. How about providing a somewhat detailed hypothetical scenario that better explains what you are trying to say.

Also, I was wondering if there is anyone reading this blog who has ever made the mistake of taking embarrassing words off one obscure web page and putting them into the mouth of another person. Anyone?

He's only mentioned later in the article, and then only as encouraging people to "intercede for Israel, but also to reach out to Jewish people with the message of Yeshua." Why on earth would Armstrong write down the quote on a notecard, attributing it to "Paul", as opposed to "Ezekiel" or "Isiah"

That wasn't exactly what I meant to say. All you need is some association of "Paul" and the quote, on some secondary display like a notecard or webpage search, to help along the fallible human mind to produce a boneheaded, sloppy mistake like this. If she wrote "Paul N." for some reason — abbreviating "Paul note" perhaps — we get even closer. It's not going to make a lot of logical sense, but errors don't have to. Someone would not logically write "cdesign proponentsists", after all.

I may be keyed up on this topic having payed a lot of attention to how creationist misquotes or false quotes come about. The chain of mistakes, assumptions, and copying from secondary sources that eventuates in a given convenient "proof quote" can be quite amazing sometimes. E.g. the spontaneous generation of this fake Clarence Darrow quote:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faq...

Armstrong says she gets death threats and hate mail and such, so I can certainly understand why she would want to keep her contact info under wraps. She is a public speaker, however, represented by The Lavin Agency. As with book authors who you can contact via their publisher, a message to Armstrong can be sent through the agency. Their email is: info@thelavinagency.com and Here is their Karen Armstrong page.

I should think the agency would be concerned about something as serious as this because it can impact their client's credibility, even if the bogus citation isn't a big deal (or even noticed) in Britain.