Sleeping with extra-terrestrials Book

A Joel Osteen book listed on Goodreads has 616 ratings. This book has 22. Now it has 23.

A trip to the bookstore yesterday showed Osteen's book prominently displayed -- by the door, with the bestsellers, etc. There were rows and rows of self-help books, new age books, prosperity books. Over and over and over again, people find ways to market New Thought, Positive Thinking, the Law of Attraction, the Law of Reciprocity, and the Prosperity Gospel. It strikes me as peculiarly American -- see the book "Madame Blavatsky's Baboon" for a relevant American history lesson.

If you're into mainstream Christianity, there's the Prosperity Gospel -- God wants you to be rich. If you're not rich, attend my church to expand your faith and my pocketbook, and soon the money will come pouring in. If you're into New Age spiritualism, there's the power of the mind to attract what it wants through focused spiritual seeking -- read my book to find out how. If you're a fundamentalist, Pat Robertson will teach you the Law of Reciprocity.

There is a cyclical remarketing of these same ideas to the reading public who seek personal improvement or advancement in some way. The purveyors may or may not believe it -- but why wouldn't they, look how rich they're getting selling you books on the subject! I'm reminded of an observation about highly specialized professors in theoretical areas -- the practical (marketplace) value in learning what they have to teach is almost exclusively in becoming a teacher of the same material. Which is a way of saying the only way to profit from their ideas is to become another purveyor of them -- not by actually "applying them." It's a somewhat poor analogy, since many professors in abstract research areas have contributed over time to engineering breakthroughs and the like. A better analogy is the chiropractor who believes a spinal adjustment can cure every known ailment, from schizophrenia to cancer -- at $50 a pop! They seem to be true believers -- but it's easy to be a true believer when you benefit financially.

Wendy Kaminer's observations in this book helps one to step back and view all of these phenomena together and understand the forces that allow these purveyors of prosperity porn to proliferate. Her subjects range across mainstream religion, the New Age marketplace, the recovery movement, and many more of the intersecting pop religion sects that have integrated with the American gold rush culture to create the omnipresent Oprahfied world of American popular culture today. Read it and join the "reality-based community." (A group famously denounced by a Bush administration insider who claimed that the government's job was not to fret about reality but to visualize whatever it wanted in the world and then go create it. With bombs and deregulation if those are the tools God has placed at our disposal. Look how we've prospered!)

Kaminer's book is probably more grounded in issues of belief and the will to believe in supernatural forces as a psychological phenomenon -- with less focus on pervasive marketplace consequences than my review suggests. There -- I've tried to represent the reality of the book a little more closely, with a little less personal spin on what I want it to be about.