Ugh. The secret for teens.

Rhonda Byrne is releasing a new book aimed at teens. As reported at the Huffington Post:

Rhonda Byrne’s self-help multimedia phenomenon, which has sold millions of copies, will come out this fall in an edition for young people. “The Secret to Teen Power” will be written by Paul Harrington, who produced the DVD version of the original “Secret.”

So we have new nonsense aimed at teens.

RDF TV: Shermer’s Balooney Detection Kit

Link Dumping: Nontheist Pastors, the “why” of conspiracy theories, etc

So I have lot’s of interesting things to share this Thursday evening. The first is Stephen Gibson’s discussion on why he became a nontheist reverent.
I am profoundly mixed on these sorts of ideas. I don’t know that I want anything humanistic and skeptical mimicking the function and style of religious faiths. Yet I do think there are cultural reasons to have nonsectarian chaplains, and I do think it meets a need for families that we often do not meet in the skeptical movement (although the European humanist movement seems have done a better job here). Still I don’t understand cultural Christians as much as I understand cultural Buddhists and Jews. Partly because I am not culturally Christian and partly because Christianity is a religion based on Orthodoxy not Orthopraxy, so the cultural elements are more variable anyway.
I have no conclusions here, but I do find the whole debate interesting. I don’t think Gibson says anything explicitly Christian in his piece, but I am also reading on Michael Dowd who does use explicitly Christian language to make an explicitly nontheistic evolutionary message.

Little Atoms recently did an interview with Kathryn S. Olmsted on her book, Real Enemies. I have not read the book, but Olmsted does make a convincing case that the open information about real botched conspiracies that the US government has engaged in is part of why the “paranoid style” is so prominent. Although Olmsted would seem to agree with Sir Karl Popper about the narrative of conspiracy having the same comfort as theistic belief, it seems that Olmsted does think that governmental culture is a large contributor to the problem.

So Specter of Reason has a bit on the formal logic of “induction” in science and argues that simple induction does not a huge place in science. It’s an interesting article that goes to the foundations of logic through Hume and Popper. So read it.