Except for how it's not France, it's some Orson Scott Card novel that is apparently - get this - a retelling of the Book of Mormon set in space.

Oh, that's so awesome.

Hey, I saw some Mormon missionaries in my neighborhood the other day for the first time, and there were THREE of them. I thought they always travelled in pairs?? The Elders who come to your door tend to be hotter than average, because they tend to be corn-fed 20 year olds. As far as I can tell.

I can't deal with The Secret. Although I'm with Beej in wishing just once I could be the one to slap a great marketing campaign on an obvious and/or stupid concept, and make shitloads of money off it.

I just went to slate.com, and the lead story was about The Secret: [link]

Oh, that's where I first heard about it. I read half of that article and got too annoyed/depressed to finish it.

eta:

There's no secret to The Secret. The book and movie simply state that your thoughts control the universe. Through this "law of attraction" you "manifest" your desires. "It is exactly like placing an order from a catalogue. … You must know that what you want is yours the moment you ask." "See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it. It works every time, with every person." The appeal is obvious. Forget education, effort, performance. Everything you want—money, power, comfortable shoes—is yours simply by wanting it enough.

If nothing else, the claim, "It works every time, with every person" should arouse suspicion....

My Mormon didn't come to my door--he came to my seat. When the hot guy you noticed outside the gate comes to the empty seat beside you on the plane because your behaviour intrigued him, he gets to talk a fair bit. He was very soft-sell on the religion, perhaps because I hauled out what I knew about it from OSC and that BYU alum that had just joined the NBA. Still, I left him with my address and an inscribed copy of the Book showed up a few weeks later.

He was really hot. I mean, my first reaction to him revealing he was Mormon was "Oh good! Then the chick with you won't be an obstacle." Which is perhaps impolite and beside the point.

Okay, back to database reconciliation for me.

What bothered me most in the argument with my neighbor was that she was trying to hammer successes in MY life into that concept.

Which was crazy making.

What bothers me most is thinking about the email I just got from a relative with cancer who's all upbeat about the fact that he might be able to eat real food again soon, and the fact that The Secret people would say he drew the cancer to him with negative thinking. Argh.

In Atlanta I saw a couple of police officers of Segways and I was wondering if Mormons could Segway instead of walk.

Also during the F2F at some point Wham!'s Careless Whisper came on and I revealed that was the first song I ever danced to with a boy and it was at a Mormon dance. My best friend during middle school was Mormon so I went to events at her church. They'd show movies and once it was Dreamscape --which so wasn't what they thought it was and there was a debate about letting us finish watch it and they finally did.

The thing about Mormons (and I lived with one) that drives me craxy is the white dress shirts! Shortsleeved white dress shirts, especially. Why must they be white!

Also, the spellcheck wanted to replace Mormons with morons.

What bothered me most in the argument with my neighbor was that she was trying to hammer successes in MY life into that concept.

HA! I can see it now, "No, I didn't just want a book deal badly enough. I stayed up late, stressed, wrote and edited my ass off, along with a bunch of other stuff that wasn't easy, and lo, book being published! Sigh You're right, it wasn't all the hard work. It was my positivivity that allowed me to actualize my words on a page."

What bothers me most is thinking about the email I just got from a relative with cancer who's all upbeat about the fact that he might be able to eat real food again soon, and the fact that The Secret people would say he drew the cancer to him with negative thinking. Argh.

I'm struggling to understand how someone could believe that.

There was this annoying pseudo-hippy I knew who believed stuff like that. I'd come up with all sorts of extreme examples, like, "What about a two-year-old who has terminal cancer?" and he'd say, "On some level, that kid wanted to get cancer."

I guess I'll just chalk it up to "Many people are stupid."

The Secret wouldn't bother me for the first principle-- even though it's effectiveness is probably marginal, there's no harm in thinking positively-- it's the corollary that's at best eyebrow-raising and at worst evil. The Secret does promote the idea that people deserve the things that happen to them, that people "thought" their way into bad things happening (like genocide, say), and you should avoid such people-- I'm not sure why, I guess their bad thoughts will rub off on you? It shows a shocking lack of perspective and morally suspect level of empathy to publish that and promote it like Oprah does.