I was browsing Amazon.com for books on improving relationships. It turns out, there are a LOT of books on “saving your marriage and prevent a divorce” written by Christian authors.
Amazons section of other self-help and psychology books has much less Christian influence. I guess books on addiction are another area where books become explicity Christian.
I wished Amazon would have a feature where such books wouldn’t turn up in my search results. For me, a psychologist and (non-militant) non-believer, reading even the content page of such a book gives me a strong feeling of dissappointment and bewilderment. It is like a rational person I was having a rational conversation with, suddenly starts talking in ancient Greek about overcoming depression by letting Zeus in my heart.
Weird. I have no trouble with viewpoints opposing my own; I welcome the fresh outlook they give me. But when I read a Christian outlook on something like counseling, a topich I’m not a complete amateur in (I’m a psychologist with a degree and everything) it’s like I have to read a badly and convoluted translation of what turns out, after translation, to be either trite or flat out wrong advice.
I suspect that’s because Christianity puts such a premium on preserving a marriage. The other two major monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, are much more open to the notion of ending a marriage and there’s no threat of damnation attached to the notion.
One of the better Christian-based advice books I’ve read was Intended for Pleasure by Ed Wheat, which is essentially a Christian sex manual (it’s thicker than you think). Lots of good advice in there, but the religious angle occasionally made me go
I agree, though, it’s disconcerting to open an “advice” book and see “pray to Jesus” as an answer to a real-world problem.
I’m currently reading Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, and after being very pleased with how closely his advice tracks with a modern scientific approach to anxiety through cognitive behavioral therapy, I was surprised to find him including recommendations for prayer and turning your life over to God. What I did like was that he includes the religious solutions as options only, and specifically offers alternative techniques for people who are not religious. I think the problem with Christian self-help books is that they tend to imply that religion is the only solution, although frankly, most self-help books tend to present themselves as the one true path.
Exactly. I don’t know if such book are helpful to Christians. I hope so. But they would have to be so, so much different then me for the advice to work. I don’t know if they can be that different. How should I translate “Pray and trust in Jesus” ? Something like: “Beat yourself up mentally, and wait it out?” Or: “Shift your focus away from yourself, and trust it will be okay”? Or… what?
Occasionally, in TV shows I see a witty wise priest or pastor giving some spot on advice to someone in trouble who never believed in the first place, or lost faith. But I mostly suspect the dialog writer who wrote the line isn’t Christian.
I do know the annoyance of looking for books on evolution and finding in the results books about “Intelligent Design”. But is is weird, in a more subtle way, to see the same thing in psychology.
Perhaps everything in such category has a religious flavor. Even science is religious to some people who accept it without question. As such why does christianity alone have such a turn off that the help it can really offer people is so objected solely on the basis that it is from christianity?
I don’t know about that - in real life I’ve met a few priests and pastors who were able to give sound advice to those outside their faith community as well as those within. Not all Christians have blinders on, just a few really annoying ones.
Why is Jung held in such high regard by psychologists. He believed in many things that were 100% scientifically inaccurate. Seances. That trees had spirits. Stuff like that. Lots and lots of examples. I understand he was all into introspection and contemplation and was raised as a loner, so, he accepted his own conclusions above that of others. That explains Jung’s thought process. It doesn’t explain why other psychologists by into his theories.
(I presume his theories on personality are largely correct, but, are they?.. nobody seems to doubt his findings though, given his background should not his theories get more scrutiny?)
I recently saw something on Facebook from my pastor’s wife that had me going :eek: (because it was on Facebook) and I could only imagine how their teenage children would have reacted to it if they saw it, and her parents too. Some ultra-fundamentalist man had written about how female orgasm wasn’t in God’s plan, and she replied along the lines of, “Yes, it is! What’s the point of having sex if you aren’t having it with that in mind? Plus, it’s beneficial to conception if that’s what you want.”
(cuing “When Harry Met Sally”) I’ll have what she’s having!
Fundamentalist Christians actually have the highest divorce rate of any religious demographic.
Not off topic at all. Interesting. You’re right, Jungs writings were introspective and literary. Much like the Bible books, only two thousand years younger. Nothing scientific about them. Jung is generally seen, by lay people, as the more friendly, more positive, more granola-woo-emotional-holistic-feminine-positive pendant to intellectual-agressive-masculine-pessimistic-individualistic-judgemental Freud.
For people interested in evidence based, modern psychology, Jung is only historically relevant.
Dale Carnegie was a part of the link between an explicitly religous Methodist tradition and a secular self-help tradition.
When I re-read his books after reading some of the earlier material, it looked like the whole text was religous, not just the references to God.
But I think it’s fair to say that when the Methodist church was central to a community, there was a lot we would consider secular in the religion, as well as a lot of religion in the secular.
Rather than censoring undesirable religion from self-help books — since the pro-religious ( or pro-communist or pro-anything ) authors have the precise right to write whatever they choose to make a buck, there is an opportunity here for pro-atheist authors to seize back the night and provide anti- or non- religious alternatives for a no doubt huge rationalist market.
Such as:
‘When You’re Nothing, All Your Troubles Are Yesterday’,
‘No-One Really Cares’, and
‘Suicide Is Meaningless, But You’re Gonna Get There Anyway, So Why Not ?’
Truly compassionate people are often motivated by religious and/or spiritual ideals and it reflects in their writings. Often they have achieved something through prayer and spiritual discipline and they want to share it with their readers.
I am non-Christian and have read and profited from Dale Carniege’s book in my teens. I have also read other, overtly Christian, self-help books and I never had a problem when these books say “open your heart to Jesus” as long as it also doesn’t say “and no one else”. They may be sermonizing you but you are free to take what you want and throw the rest away.
How interesting. Do they just get married so they aren’t sinning when they’re doing it? I can see getting married just to have sex leading to a high divorce rate.
At any rate, a reasonable theory is that it’s connected to early marriage and early childbearing. (Here’s one cite.)
It’s certainly ironic if “family values” which place a high value on being married and having children lead people to marry and have kids earlier in life, which in turn leads to higher divorce rates.
After all these years on the SDMB, I finally get to ask… Cite?
I haven’t seen any evidence of that you’re saying. There have been studies that show, in BROAD terms, there are higher general rates of divorce in STATES perceived to be dominated byChristian fundamentalists (and not surprisingly, liberal blue staters were eager to make hay of that), but I haven’t seen any studies showing higher divorce rates among regular churchgoers.
Indeed, Charles Murray’s studies have shown that divorce is highest among what we might call the Southern white underclass. “Aha,” you say, “THOSE are the fundamentalist Christians!” Lots of people make that assumption. And they’re WRONG.
What Murray found is that the white underclass in the South is NOT religious! The white underclass is largely disconnected from ALL of the institutions that we’ve historically expected to help civilize people- that includes church, school, marriage, employment, fraternal organizations, etc.
Visit a Southern Baptist megachurch, and you’ll find that the members are usually richer, more stable and BETTER educated than their neighbors. That’s one reason they cling to their churches- because they’ve seen how badly things have gone for their brethren who’ve abandoned church.
You may want to believe the typical Southern Republican is a toothless, Bible-spouting, oft-divorced meth-head living in a trailer park. But while those types DO exist, they typically don’t vote at all, nor do they go to any kind of church.
While people can be as enthusiastic about science as they can be about religion, science is, at its best, evidence based, while religion is idea-based. Evidence based knowledge evolves; idea based knowledge just revolves or stays unchanged.
Scientific knowledge about human behavior and happiness is evolving. It slowly evolved untill the 1990’s, as the field was still burdened by philosphical and political dogmas. But ever since the 1990’s the tools of the trade have evolved and keep evolving. Tools like better access to research studies in the fields of biology and medicine via the Internet. Cheaper MRI scans, cheaper DNA-tests, more and better drugs and understanding of how they work.
A lot of the "conventional wisdom"in psychology has been found to be simply incorrect. For instance, most of our decisions and preferences are taken subconsciously and instinctively. The rational thinking part of our brain mostly just rationalizes those decisions afterwards. Another more trivial example: bottling up - moderate- anger reduces it more then “blowing off steam”. Here are some more you can read for yourself on Cracked.
The problem with idea-based self help books, whatever their idea-color, is that they offer an idea-colored view of the world and its problems, rather then sharing factual information. And that works, untill it doesn’t work anymore. And most people pick up a book at the point where it doesn’t work anymore.
