The seduction of positive thinking

Barbara Ehrenreich explains that positive thinking is often a bad (and dangerous) approach to facing adversity. She argues that: 1. Delusion is always a mistake; and 2. It is cruel to tell people struggling with adversity that it is all in their head (beware the central message of The Secret) Ehrenreich is not advocating doom or depression either. We tend to slip into this because we are hard-wired to be vigilant. These can also be delusional. Instead of positive thinking or depression, Ehrenreich is advocating realism. She is advocating that we take the view that we can address many of our problems with hard work.

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The process of losing one’s faith

Faith is not like a switch that gets flipped on or off. Former Pentecostal Minister Jerry DeWitt explains:

I dearly wish that there was one day or even better, one particular moment when I stopped believing (lost my faith). It would make my story much easier to tell. But instead, like so many others in the growing Secular movement, there was no one particular event, no one particular day when faith suddenly disappeared. Instead, it was like my faith in the supernatural and all things related to it were a pot filled with water on the stove. For the first several years of my spiritual journey the burner dial was set to high-heat and the water of my faith was continuously boiling over. Unbeknownst to me, as I entertained thoughts, concepts and belief systems outside of the Pentecostal doctrine that I had inherited, my belief dial was being turned down and the water temperature was decreasing. Along with doctrines, there were also new life experiences that generated thoughts that couldn't be easily ignored and over time they changed me. In other words, when a challenging thought came my way, I faced it and adjusted according. It took years for all of those small adjustments to add up to atheism. Eventually I simply recognized that I no longer believed.

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Teenaged owls

Sleep scientists urge tolerance with teenagers sleeping in.

"Making teens start school in the morning is ‘cruel,’ brain doctor claims." So declared a British newspaper headline in 2007 after a talk I gave at an academic conference. One disbelieving reader responded: "This man sounds brain-dead." That was a typical reaction to work I was reporting at the time on teenage sleep patterns and their effect on performance at school. Six years on, there is growing acceptance that the structure of the academic day needs to take account of adolescent sleep patterns. The latest school to adopt a later start time is the UCL Academy in London; others are considering following suit.

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Liberals versus conservatives – conflicting mating choices

According to Douglas Kenrick at Psychology Today, liberals and conservatives adopt their morals regarding sexuality in order to serve their preferred lifestyles. Kenrick breaks it down like this--first of all, for skeptic liberals:

1. Smart people are more likely to go to college.

2. If you are going to get a college degree, it helps to delay starting a family.

3. Smart people still have sexual drives.

4. If you don’t want to wait till you are in your mid- to late- 20s to start having sex, but aren’t ready to settle down, you have liberal attitudes about sexual behavior, birth control, and abortion.

On the other side of the coin, if you are not going to go to college, and you want to have a family early, you don’t want a lot of promiscuous people running around – available unattached sexually experimenting people disrupt monogamous families. Early reproducing women don’t want those “loose women” hanging around tempting their husbands, because that means less resources for their children, and a possible divorce. Early reproducing men don’t want promiscuous men lurking around, because they want to be sure that those children they’re supporting are their own.

People don't come prewired with beliefs. Rather they choose their morality based on their perceived needs:

liberal nonbelievers adopt a certain set of attitudes not because they are more logically compelling, but because they serve a particular lifestyle and mating strategy. Because liberals are more educated, they are better at expressing their ideas in compelling logical ways. But although the beliefs on "our" side may seem more logical and enlightened, Weeden has abundant data to show that political and religious attitudes are less about logic than about serving one's own reproductive goals.

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