How water saved my life

and why you should expect Rod Dreher's forthcoming Dante book to have exactly the same placebo effect if you buy it. Or just catch any 3 AM infomercial for any given whiz-bang nostrum if you need moving pictures to understand this classic hustle.

You see, not many people know this, but a little while back I was as much as 20 pounds overweight.

Then water saved my life!

Yes, in addition to strictly reducing my carbohydrate intake and taking up a strenuous daily exercise regimen, I also began drinking water. Plain water!

And so water saved my life! And it can save yours, too!

So when Rod claims that if you buy his forthcoming product you can learn how "Dante saved my life, and can save yours too", you should think of it as the water in the equation above, an age-old medicine show example of correlation suggestively implying causation.

Now, once you have parted with your money and already bought the forthcoming book, Rod will almost certainly tell you there what he's already blogged about here and here, that the actual drivers of his "salvation" have been intense, clinical, still ongoing psychological therapy and an intense Russian Orthodox prayer regimen - salvation, though, that has thankfully finally left him free of a lifelong compulsive need to try to control anything and everything anyone but himself says about him.

What about you, though? Will drinking water alone or buying a book about Rod telling you how Dante saved his life actually save yours?

Unfortunately, unless you also do exactly the same other, probably far more important things in exactly the same conjunction - nope, whole-body baptism or earnest confession can't be substituted for the genuine ROCOR article, not to mention the regular therapy sessions you probably can't afford anyway (watching Dr. Oz just won't cut it) - the odds of success for you leap off a cliff and into the abyss like an alpha lemming leading the charge.

But you already knew that, didn't you, chump. That copper bracelet in the back of your dresser drawer reminds you of it, embarrassingly, every time you dig for that last pair of clean socks.

But you'll buy the book anyway, hoping your life is somehow miraculously saved by an invocation of the decidedly erudite Medieval Italian poet Dante.

Because that's just how you roll.