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 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...

Today, boys and girls, we have one of my occasional guest columns, this time by a regular who pops in now and then under the name "Frances." A few prerequisites. First — as is always the case when I present these columns — they are not to be interpreted as anything beyond "one person's opinion." * I am showcasing the following thoughts not under the guise of presenting universal truth (though I do think they cut pretty close to the heart of the mat ter , or perhaps in this case the breast of it); I'm showcasing them because I find them interesting and on-message. Second, by the ir nature, all posts of this type deal in anecdotal evidence. Frances is comparing the plight of one high-profile cancer victim who turned to conventional medicine to the plight of another high-profile cancer victim who turned to The Secret . Bear in mind, however, that in the latter instance, anecdotal evidence of failure carries more weight than in the former instance, because devo...

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 ...