S H A M b l o g

"AND SO IT WAS written, as the ancients foretold, that the evolution of religion and self-help towards some common ground would continue, rendering unto God that which had previously been found only in the annals of viral marketing, and rendering unto you a new Rolex..." The conceptual similarities between self-help and today's more "secularized religions" were always striking. We've been tracking the phenomenon for a while on SHAM blog . But even your host didn't realize the degree to which today's religion is being explicitly repackaged in self-help terms. Such at least is the message of this cover story by Scott Bass, which I found in a Virginia alternative weekly. * The "relevancy movement" in American churchdom is nothing new, and has been most immediately noticeable in the music. Anyone who's listened to gospel music of late (or almost any music emanating from the so-called megachurches ) will have a hard time distinguishing...

I've been waiting for other men/women of the cloth to weigh in on the likes of Joel Osteen (whose cloth is custom-made only ), and it's been a long, frustrating and frankly shocking wait. (I guess those evangelical types tend to have each other's designer-clad backs.) Finally, though, my Jobs-like patience has been rewarded via this piece by Pastor Rick Henderson. For reasons of time and deadlines, I haven't looked into Henderson's background, so I'm going to assume this isn't just a case of some Osteen competitor/wannabe calling the kettle black, so to speak. Anyway, I especially like the graph that goes: There is nothing wrong with being wealthy. I love it when Christians are rich. That should mean more money to fund the mission. But there is a line to how much money we as leaders should spend on ourselves. I don't know where the line is, but it is somewhere before the ministry purchasing million dollar homes for us and our kids. That ...

UPDATE, Saturday, December 12 . I invite all those who peevishly blame the president for what's been happening (or not happening) in Washington to take a look at this poll , just out on PollingReport.com. You will recall that Obama, throughout his campaign, advocated a so-called "public option" as part of healthcare reform, and he has continued to fight for it during the tumult of the past several months. The poll linked above shows that just under 60 percent of Americans, overall, favor a public option. Among Democrats — whose elected officials theoretically control the White House as well as both houses of Congress — the figure is 80 percent. Even a full one-third of Republicans favor the plan. And yet we can't seem to get it done in the obstructivist, gamesmanship-dominated, lobbyist-inflected climate within today's Beltway. ================================= While we're on the subject of politics, major governmental initiatives, political biases and all t...

OK, so my guy won and I'm thrilled. Let there be no mistake. The observations contained herein have nothing to do with the "buyer's remorse" that several of the pundits on Brit Hume's FOX show kept wishing on entrenched Obama supporters in the final days, when a McCain defeat began to look inevitable. But now that the election is a done deal, I want to say a few things about what we seek in a candidate and leader. I'm mindful of this primarily because of all the chatter about Sarah Palin's natural ascension to the leadership of the GOP for 2012 (and I can't even believe people are already talking about that at a time when that silly jingle from McCain's TV ads still rings in our ea rs). Thing is, I have to say it applies, at least somewhat, to Barack, too. We've talked around the edges of this before. I think we need to address it head-on. What makes someone a good candidate? That he or she "connects with voters"? Has "charisma...

I like Obama's new deficit-reduction plan, as well as his in-your-face way of debuting it. Good for him. The way he was going for a while there, he had everybody mad at him, including his base. If his presidency is destined to go down in flames, he might as well do it being the guy whom some of us elected.... ************************ Had a brief but interesting Twitter-spar with Deepak Chopra over the weekend. Was a little bit surprised that he would "engage," given his sometimes-imperial demeanor and his very vocal unhappiness with me over this piece for The Wall Street Journal ; y ou can read his response here . However, I think I might have caught him with his logic down. Here are the tweets in chronological order: DEEPAK : "Only life creates life." ME : "But if only life creates life, then I'm assuming you dispute the validity of evolution/Big Bang etc." DEEPAK : "I do not dispute big bang , evolution, cosmogenesis — they are all express...

Rhonda Byrne may have been a tad late getting to her own party, but the positive-review-athon for The Pow-errrrr appears finally to have kicked in with a vengeance (no doubt with Amazon looking studiously the other way, if not actively participating in the conspiracy). All three of what we used to call "spotli ght reviews" for the book are now glowing 5-stars, as are all 10 of the most recent reviews featured in the sidebar. My negative review has been kicked down the stairs to the cellar...along with a thoughtful and quite-literary take from Kathryn Price that once held sway among the spotlights with a helpful rating of over 70 pe rcent but can no longer compete with the recent slew of 100-percent-helpful 5-stars. ================================= Speaking of unwarranted hype, last week I finally saw Michael Moore's highly engrossing logical quagmire, Bowling for Columbine . As far as I can tell, here is Moore's thesis: The words racism and violence have almos...

Let's start, boys and girls, with a disclaimer/confession: I have not read Rhonda Byrne 's new book, The Pow-errrrr . (And can't you imagine the phrase being uttered just that way, in breathy tones that drip with a practiced air of mysterioso? The Pow-errrrr ... One almost hears distant nighttime thunder and gusty winds rustling through trees in the background. Whooooossshhhhh ....) That said, I ask you to read her publisher's own product description, as appearing on Amazon, and experience for yourself the utter contempt for the collective intelligence of her target market: The Secret revealed the law of attraction. Now Rhonda Byrne reveals the greatest power in the universe— The Power to have anything you want. In this book you will come to understand that all it takes is just one thing to change your relationships, money, health, happiness, career, and your entire life. Every discovery, invention, and human creation comes from The Power . Perfect health, incredible ...

What a lot of people miss about the New Age is that in philosophy and tone, it is very much aligned with latter-day conservatism and the sorts of things we saw happening, say, at AIG and Goldman-Sachs before the f all. The Secret , after all, is nothing if not wildly, irredeemably, unapologetically aspirational. Along with its philosophical sibling movements in the megachurches — such as that run by our friend Joel ("the gospel according to Vera Wang") Osteen — The Secret legitimizes the idea of endless upward mobility and a reality in which wealth is not zero-sum, but in fac t can be attained by everyone everywhere at the same time if "you just want it enough." Secret alum Lisa Nichols says it flat-out in the very title of her CD: " You Deserve It !" In the world according to Rhonda Byrne and her (pseudo-)philosophical protégés, every man (and woman) is an island, and all of those islands are the Caymans . Both The Secret and cons ervatism encourage a...

In our last episode , we met Byron Katie and were introduced to her Four Questions, which supposedly will take you to a new level of peace, happiness and fulfillment. And, in fairness, you'll have no trouble finding legions of online fans. But...you'll also find legions of people who swear by oxycontin , at least in terms of the narcotic's propensity for making life seem rosier and less anxious (till you run out of the drug). Which raises, in my mind, a Fifth Question: Is what Katie espouses really a valid metaphysical system? Or is it just the New Agey equivalent of oxy...a convenient, seductive-sounding way of rationalizing all the bad stuff (and generating enormous revenues for Katie, or so we're led to believe)? Once again, we'll let Katie set the tone in her own words. This is from her site: "The Work of Byron Katie is a way of identifying and questioning the thoughts that cause all the anger, fear, depression, addiction, and violence in the wor...

UPDATE, Tuesday, Aug. 24. Now that my take (scroll down) on Rhonda Byrne's The Pow-errrrr has indeed made it to "spotlight" status, there is apparently a massive counterattack underway from the other side. In just the past few hours, my review has accumulated at least 10 "not helpful" votes. Wonder how long I'll be able to "hang".... And let me add that this isn't some sly effort on my part to "sell a few more copies of SHAM ," as some have alleged. My being dour about The Pow-errrrr , as it were, is not going to sell many (if any) copies of my book...as evidenced by the fact that at this writing, SHAM lolls at No. 529,411, down markedly in the past few days despite my sudden visibility on Rhonda's high-traffic page. I feel safe in proposing that there's virtually zero overlap between her target market and my own. =========================== UPDATE, Monda y, Aug. 23. I've never done this, folks, and I really don't b...

This morning I was emptying the dishwasher, and I started, as I always do, with the dinner plates. That is my ritual: dinner plates, smaller plates, cereal bowls, silverware (I hate that facet of the job for some reason; I'd love to subcontract out the silverware component, certainly the part where you're putting all the like items in their respective places in that damn plastic tray), miscellaneous geega ws (strainers, salad mixers and such), and then I finish up with glasses. When I reached the glasses today I realized I'd missed a dinner plate. It was standing right there in the front of the bin and I hadn't noticed it. If you'd asked me up to that moment whether there could be a dinner plate left in that dishwasher, I would've sworn that there wasn't; couldn't be. Yet there it was, in all its dinner-platey glory.  This is a surprisingly common foible in the close personal relationship between me and my dishwasher: I'll think I've put away one...

A regular reader, Case, gently chastises me as follows: "Since The Secret crowd was on Oprah last week, I've been waiting for a SHAM post on the topic." He also observes, "Isn't The Secret the anti-determinism?", and, helpfully, "FYI, the movie is now free on the web at [ this site ] that aggregates YouTube videos." Case...you got me dead to rights. The last few weeks have been crazed, so rather than watch Oprah's Secret -fest live (which I'm not sure I could've stomached anyway; I'd need several stiff drinks, and I can't start that early in the day), I TiVo'd it for later replay. Alas, the gods of technology decided to have a little fun with me: It didn't "take," for whatever reason. Maybe the Secretmeisters, in their state of profound cosmic contempt for me and my ilk, managed to dispatch some sort of curse into the ethers, and it later came to rest in my video equipment. Or maybe it's a "law of ...

Read Part 8 . In 1921, amid the early tumult of prohibition, a remarkable study took shape in Palo Alto, California. Stanford psychologist Lewis Madison Terman—as serious-looking a man as one is apt to find, with hi s specs, upright bearing and unsmiling mien—would one day be remembered most ly for designing and publishing the final accepted version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. In '21, however, Terman began work on another project that may have more lasting import for humankind, despite being known today to just a small circle of “longevity wonks.” Terman proposed to track th e lives of 1528 American children from that point on. His subjects, encountered in the course of his study of intelligence, were all 10 years old. Terman himself was 44; he would follow them and their families for the rest of his life, and he obtained from his younger associates a pledge to do the same after he was gone. The goal was to note what kind of longevity the 10-year-olds achieved, and try to deduc...

Not far from where I write this is a very nice park, a true urban oasis: one of those elongated greenbelts that, together with the sweeping peripheral roads on either side, particularly lends itself to the description "parkway." For the past quarter-century, the park has been inhabited by a gentleman named Earl. It follows th at this gentleman, now nearing 70, bears the whimsical/romantic labe l "Ea r l of the P a rkway." Earl's exploits have been much-chronicled , such that he is today something of a f olk hero, albeit a melancholic one, among those who live in areas adjacent to the park. Strictly speaking, Earl doesn't have to live in the park. He has options. Many would thus say he chooses to live there. (Or, if we prefer not to use terminology that evokes issues of free will vs. determinism, we could posit simply and neutrally that Earl continues to live there, regardl ess of whether alternatives objectively exist.) You might say that based on that de...