“Jesus loves you so much that he told me to visit this site, and contact you.”

Translation: You felt like ‘saving’ someone and started googling until you settled on my article. Either that or you are a christian who knows me personally, and decided to pull a magic trick by insincerely claiming a higher power sent you here. Either way, it’s dishonest and crappy, especially if you expect me to come back to that way of life. Even though I’ve stated that I honor truth above all else, you would lie to me immediately and have my whole spiritual reaffirmation be based on falsehoods? IMHO: that’s terrible.

As for the rest of your comment, you seem to talk for God, as if you know Him personally. You may even believe you do, but there are a lot of people who claim to know how God works… some condone burning people alive at the stake, some rob their poverty stricken parishioners blind just to fill their own pockets, some strive to enforce laws that take basic human rights away from the people they disagree with, and some do it to fill a dogma-dredged, guilt-laden hole in their own lives. But do any of these people really know God’s agenda? Really? I’ve often heard God described by christians as being “Unknowable”. How then, do you presume to know anything about God? How does anyone?

Since nobody can agree on exactly what God wants, needs, or even how He works (even within the different sects of christianity), it tells me that people are making stuff up, and it doesn’t matter if He exists or not. With that much inconsistent information coming from every corner of the Earth and every walk of life, I can’t say either way, if he exists or not. So for now, there is a big question mark in my life where God used to be. And that question mark get’s smaller every time I learn something new.

“This root problem is your heart.”

As for my heart. It isn’t hardened, it’s cautious. I do have a loved one who has gone out of their way to harm me, time and again, in order to preserve their own way of life and make themselves feel better. Though I do forgive them, I don’t fully trust them. To do so would be foolhardy. After all, love should always be freely given, but trust is something that’s earned. Trust isn’t a right, it’s a response to a social pattern.

I don’t trust in the existence of God and the power of prayer because I have always gotten inconsistent results and mixed messages, making faith a very untrustworthy tool to help you get through life.

“Supposing you developed Alzheimer’s disease. How on earth will you have the intelligence and energy to take actions necessary to solve your problems?”

Your question seems non sequitur. If I developed Alzheimer’s, the only problem I would want to solve at that time would be to NOT have Alzheimer’s. But that diagnosis won’t change, no matter how much praying I do…

Presumably, if I’m a really good guy, I’ll have a strong support system to fall back on, even during the hardest of times. I will have this support system because I’ve dedicated my life to the service of others. I don’t understand how God is needed at all in this circumstance.

If this ever happens to me, this is one of those circumstances that life passes you that you cannot control, and it’s definitely a situation that you cannot handle. Something God promises he would NEVER do, yet how many good christians are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s each day? And does their faith ultimately save them from the indignity and horror this disease certainly provides?

All that aside… This is a very common end to a person’s life. How on Earth would praying save you from that? Nothing saves us from mortality, we are all going down that road. When I’m gone, so are my cares and problems. The only thing having support and help during this kind of death would provide, is extending my life for a few more months, as I waste away slower than if I were on my own. What exactly do I need to pray for then?

You can’t just put up a tree and call it a scientology tree now and assume that you’ve started a whole new tradition. The general population at the time of the writing of the bible was already taking a tree down to decorate it in winter and to exchange gifts as a symbol of oneness and solidarity not just for a display of wealth.

The book starts off by attacking something that is patently unreasonable, and then once it has you nodding your head in agreement, it switches to attacking cognitive psychology. And make no mistake, Ehrenreich isn’t attacking positive psychology — she’s attacking *cognitive* psychology through positive psychology, which is a subset of the field.

Ehrenreich is a classic 1960s liberal. Behaviorism and cultural determinism underpin the entire philosophical framework of the old-school left, and she is a student of that nonsense. You take Ehrenreich at face value, instead of considering her ideological motives. She is a quack. Her book is quackery.

Bright-sided carries two implicit messages:

1. Cognitive psychology is bullshit
and
2. Our mental states and behaviors are better explained by environmental and cultural factors.

That’s what her book is about. That’s the subtext. That’s what you get if you actually bother to follow her arguments to their natural conclusions.

“People have no self-control, their behaviors and mental states are determined by their environment, and if people are unhappy jerks, it’s because they live in unhappy environments. Society made them that way.”

Psychology was held back immensely by behaviorism and cultural determinism. Paul Ekman was afraid of publishing his work on facial expressions because it went against the idea that emotions are cultural, and that there are no human universals. He wasn’t alone in his fears. For decades, researchers and professors were blacklisted if they didn’t toe the party line. Martin Seligman, who Ehrenreich savages in her book, played a huge role in wrestling control of psychology away from the determinists and behaviorists. Ehrenreich knows this. I suspect that’s the real reason she showers him with so much contempt.

Bright-Sided pretends to be a polemic against positive thinking, but it’s really a polemic against the existence of universal principles in psychology. For Ehrenreich, cognitive psychology has no basis.

http://www.relativelyinteresting.com