The main problem I run into with books like these is that they generalize too much. It could be framed more accurately as “how to make use of the privileges you have” and it would possibly be helpful… for people with those privileges. As it stands I don’t see the difference between this and “The Secret” other than one is overtly Christian and the other has gently removed Christianity but kept the architecture standing.
8 Likes
Well, that and the fact it’s never been successfully demonstrated under controlled, double-blind conditions.
14 Likes
Time for a family meeting!
2 Likes
I wouldn’t say I’m puritanical about reality. I enjoy a bit of Alan Moore or Robert Anton Wilson or Subgenius nonsense when I’m in the mood. But that’s leavened with irony and wit, and overtly pitched at skeptical readers. And even with that sort of thing, there are some people who I’d recommend they leave it alone.
It’s like, I’m not teetotal either, but if there was a bestseller called “why it’s fine to drink as much as you want all the time”, that’d piss me off.
10 Likes
From suit-and-tie-respectable Norman Vincent Peale and prosperity gospel Xtianism to the grinning hawkers of MLM get-rich quick schemes to New-Age-infused magical thinking like “The Secret” and this “Miracle Club”, this victim-blaming (and sometimes self-blaming) just-world-fallacy garbage has always struck me as a particularly American form of self-help woo.
A scholarly examination of the history of the concept and a discussion of its roots in America, similar to “Occult America”, might have been valuable. Perhaps it started that way and got derailed into true belief, perhaps this was where it was headed all along. In either case,
12 Likes
Taken to its logical end point- you’re responsible if you were born to a poor family.
9 Likes
Actually, if you want to explore a solid overview of “demonstrated under controlled, double-blind conditions” stuff, here you go:
8 Likes
Conservatives especially are willing to take it right there with no stops along the way. Ironically, there’s always a whiff of determinism in this nonsense, in the sense that some people, even some families, are simply not equipped to think positively hard enough to escape whatever economic or personal problems they’re mired in.
As with all effective scams, the positive-thinking grift starts with some useful and valid and (to people not operating under crushing duress*) obvious advice, but quickly sidetracks onto a the dead-end spur to one of the revenue-generating Crazyville theme parks that America extrudes on a regular basis.
[* this is why substance-abuse rehab centres have lately become prime recruiting grounds for these predators]
11 Likes
I hear that. I’m even more on the outskirts being that I was raised in a new age religion for a significant portion of my childhood, I know who Manly P. Hall is, and I regularly wade as deeply as I can manage into the nonsensical depths of my own psychology in an endless quest for self-improvement for no reason other than I want to. I really think a lot of things were and are conveyed through “religious” interaction, or that religion was the center of such interaction for so long that we are struggling to pull out the positive and needed components without swallowing a hook. To me, the minute some one says something that amounts to “pray for your rent” then they crossed the line. Same thing for emotional memory in water crystals or any kind of crystal for that matter. People who tell you things that they can’t possibly know are true are people who are lying.
9 Likes
Actually … no. From Teh Wiki:
Radin’s paranormal claims have been roundly rejected by those in the skeptical and mainstream scientific communities, some of whom have suggested that he has embraced pseudoscience and that he misunderstands the nature of science.[11]:158[12][13] The physicist Robert L. Park has written “No proof of psychic phenomena is ever found. In spite of all the tests devised by parapsychologists like Jahn and Radin, and huge amounts of data collected over a period of many years, the results are no more convincing today than when they began their experiments.”[13]
Chris French criticized Radin for his selective historical overview of parapsychology and ignoring evidence of fraud. French recounts that the medium Florence Cook was caught in acts of trickery and two of the Fox sisters confessed to fraud, but that Radin did not mention this fact.[14] Radin has claimed the results from psi research are as consistent by the same standards as any other scientific discipline but Ray Hyman has written many parapsychologists disagree with that opinion and openly admit the evidence for psi is “inconsistent, irreproducible, and fails to meet acceptable scientific standards”.[15]
Radin and his colleagues have suggested that small-scale studies have produced a “genuine psychokinetic effect”[16] but critics have asserted that Radin has not shown evidence that the null hypothesis of no such effect can be confidently rejected.[17][18] Further, psychologists David B. Wilson and William R. Shadish writing in Psychological Bulletin criticized claims made by Radin and his associates that human minds can psychically influence random number generators, saying that parapsychologists “need to go beyond statistics and explain how the mind might influence a computer, then test that prediction”.[18] Radin has appealed to quantum mechanics as a mechanism, claiming that it can explain the non-locality and backward causality associated with psi phenomena, though such ideas are harshly criticized by physicists who study quantum mechanics as being pseudoscientific.[11][a][6][19] Radin has written that not all people experience paranormal phenomena (or see ghosts) because they block such signals due to the process of latent inhibition.[20][21]
9 Likes
If you let yourself be open-minded, and let yourself think that you’ve already bought the book and read it, then it’s as effective as actually buying the book and reading it.
Do it with me now. Think of a nice hot cup of your favourite beverage, sit back, and really think about all that reading. Give it your best effort for best results. You can think of days in mere seconds, if you try.
There! Thanks to your effort, you’ve just saved yourself $13.07 in opportunity cost. If you want, you can now pass on your new riches to those around you, just as I am here thinking of sharing my own profits with you. Check your pocket, friend!
17 Likes
Wow, that worked!
9 Likes
I didn’t realize Hallmark was such a venerable U.S. corporation. The Salem Witch Trials were held in the early 1790s. That would make Hallmark only a couple of years younger than the oldest company still running in the U.S.: King Arthur Flour.
5 Likes
lolwtfbbq
4 Likes
I have a new (ok… it’s not new) idea (well, less idea than simple fact) about how to effect positive change. Forget thinking. Try doing. Actually physically doing positive things and actions will actually effect the world around you. Sometimes that effect is even the one you hope for. It works 100% of the time and has science to back it up. Science has show again and again the power of action to create change. Take advantage of this amazing secret everyone everywhere already knows and perform some action and change reality today!
4 Likes
I think it’s great that people want to think positively and that they will work hard to get something they want or need, but the book title includes the word miracle, which according to Merriam Webster is “an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.” Supernatural in other words.
Is it possible that our brains can do things we may not have realized? Sure. Any four year old who grows to be twenty has experienced it. Learning the practice of meditation also causes measurable physical changes. And certainly if my mind says close the refrigerator door, it happens (though my wife may quibble). Not miracles; just the way the universe works.
The only mind magic going on with Miracles/Secrets/Attraction is that this supernatural puffery, often targeted at vulnerable people, is so lucrative for the Libertarian hucksters who push it. A friend who collects conservative email for sport notes that almost all are really ads for miracle cures, survival food buckets or MLM (they apparently eat their own). Likewise with the “prosperity gospel” (or what Al Franken called “Supply Side Jesus”) “ministers” fool the gullible —or desperate— into thinking that making the preacher rich will make them rich. No one ever checks to see if that turns out better than, say, investing your tithe in an index fund.
Horribly inherent in this weird view is that some people (presumably those with the Secret) are just better than others and that those without the secret (often meaning black or poor or lazy or heathen) have chosen their fate and just need to get out of the way. The Libertarian undertones of this “movement” are as dangerous in one’s personal affairs as they are for our nation which now, unfortunately, is experiencing a tsunami of it from the Republican President and his Republican enablers in Congress.
5 Likes
This is seriously embarrassing. I thought BB was a site that supported scientific method and logic. This is just… stupid and wilfuly unaware of itself.
Adding that to the endless disposable, unnecessary crap that BB peddles through its online shops these days - despite regular posts about plastic waste and climate change - I seriously wonder what happened to BB’s principles.
6 Likes
The main problem I run into with books like these is that they generalize too much.
I 
this sentence.
11 Likes
