It's the uselessness and total ineffectiveness of the discipline that makes me angry. I see and know people every single day who regularly go see a psychologist/psychiatrist combo, obtains a diagnosis so that they can get government money, and then spends the money to fund their drug and alcohol abuse. They always finally come to the church when they have had enough of being told that they can never be well and drug-free, and finally they realize that their sole existence has been to justify the psychologists' salary.

The fact is that every few years the government studies the results of clinical psychology programs on addicts, and the cure rates are often between 1%-15%, while Christian-based programs like teen challenge are boasting cure rates of over 60%.

That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

What more can I say?

You are working off the wrong template, the wrong psychological assessment of man, and thus, you are wasting government money and everybody's time, as well as destroying lives.

it might if you had a citation so we know you aren't making this up as per usual.

Yeah, but aren't there some forms of psychology that are considered 'pseudoscience'? [I'm not trying to defend either side, I'm merely asking an honest question.]

I have never made up statistics. If you try impugn my character one more time, I will put you on ignore, troll.

http://www.acadc.org/page/page/2495014.htm

http://www.mntc.org/sites/www.mntc.o...ary%202010.pdf
http://www.spring.org.uk/2005/07/psy...alcoholism.php

You do whatever you like, bud. Not only do you fabricate things, we now know that you lie when being confronted about fabricating things. Keep spreading that Christian message though, broski, you are a real credit to the faith

There is a difference between fabricating (which implies creation with intent), and making an error.

I have also lied about nothing.

Welcome to my ignore list.

The sooner you are banned, the better.

In fact, let's do some psychology 101 right now: why do you always make most of your posts about another's character, instead of responding to content?

Answer: Because you are a troll, who quite honestly, should be banned.

Yes, and we can let the viewers of this thread decide which you did. Incidently posts like this after the fact, in which you try to defend your post:
Do not help your case. You can decide to block me instead of actually dealing with these issues, it's your choice. Unfortunately for you, however, they don't block people for stating facts.

Bummer

Because you frequently have no "content" to be responded to. You make blind assertions like the ones in that thread and this one all the time, and when your hand is forced you provide loltastic sources like the ones above.

I'm looking, and I still can't find that you have presented evidence of fabrication or lying.

Something tells me that there is indeed a liar active in this thread... and it's not me.

More, eh? Okay, how's this?

LOL, so you knew it all along, and then after you get called out on it you "misspoke"

Why not correct yourself immediately If you "knew it all along"?


uh huh. Onward Christian Solider. Keep digging that hole.

Yes. It's very simple, actually. I begin to write post.

I fact-check post because I am unsure of a claim I made. I forget to change "most" to "more" and hit post, and I do not recognize the error.

Trolls jump all over it, even though it is almost inconsequential to the point of the post.

Next?

The irony of all of these ad-hoc explanations is they make you look worse than you would if you just admitted you made it up in the first place.

Also, it seems to me the reason you haven't kept me on ignore like you said you would is because you know you have something to answer for. How's THAT for psychology?

I'm still waiting for evidence that I fabricated. I'm still waiting for evidence that I lied.

You've done a troll's job well, though, by destroying this thread, and causing chaos where there was order.

If you want to believe that I fabricated it, by all means, go ahead. I know the truth, and God knows the truth.

I don't even know why I am sinking down to your level. I am not morally superior to anybody. I do lie. I sin every day.

Believe what you want, and in fact, go ahead and impugn my character all that you want. It's your life, dude. I'll just say... doesn't sound like much fun to me.

I'm very confused now. You specified "social psychologists around these parts", what does this have to do with social psychology? You are obviously describing clinical fields.

Did you really throw out criticism at a field you don't know what is? With all due respect, this does colour your arguments in a less than flattering way.

So you admitting you knew your post was incorrect and failing to correct it until others pointed it out int you lying? LOL


Also, to your bolded... how can you even say that with a straight face? Do we really need to rehash all the things youve said about atheists over the years? Are you chucking right now?

I won't deny the enjoyment of catching someone like you in the act.... its fun to watch you squirm.

All branches of psychology are bunk (with possibly the exception of evolutionary psych).

Quite honestly, I have no desire to debate you here. I told you twice now that I came in for a broadside attack, and I'm not interested in clarifying further. If I get laid off next month I'll have the time to do the topic justice perhaps, and make an in-depth "psychology is pseudoscience" post/thread in smp, where it belongs.

In fact, I'll commit to do one out of fairness.

Lay off the sauce, dude.

Obviously, I knew the correct ordering, because I had just looked it up mid-post, but never realized that I did not revise my post until it was pointed out to me.

Why is this difficult to understand?

Edit: To further complicate matters, I believe that I was looking at the previous year's results instead of the current. Not my best moment, but I was rushing it.

I humbly accept your concession

also LOL "I just wanted to attack your chosen life's work without any justification whatsoever!"

Can't imagine why anyone would ever have a problem with you here. It's almost impossible for you not to understand how offensive you are.

I'm not asking you for a debate, I'm (fairly politely) asking you to clarify your argument.

Critizing social psychology for psychiatric practice is very weird. Why would you specify "social psychologist" as targets for your criticism, but offer musings on clinical practioners when asked about "scientific viewpoint"?

You have used very strong words like "pseudoscience", "quackery" and "useless". It is not unreasonable to expect anyone so bombastic and negative about a field to know what it entails.

So again; Why did you use clinical practice to explain criticism against social psychology?

I never criticized social psychology for psychiatric practice. Indeed, that would be weird. I was critiquing clinical practice because they- imo- are the worst among the branches. I was picking the low-hanging fruit, rather than getting involved in a debate with a specialist about the merits of his own discipline-- which I know would just be endless, time-consuming and unfruitful.

This still does not really string together very well. Earlier in the thread you were very specific...

... and as one can note, even in three separate posts, none of which were lacking in very strong characterization and bombasticism.

Certainly then, you can understand why it raises some questions, when your professed rationale for this criticism raises issues from a different field? Maybe I am biased on this, as you are specifically targeting my field - but I can't shake the feeling that you are trying to dust a "swing and a miss" under the carpet.

It's perfectly understandable, it's just not believable.

The bolded is almost certainly wrong. At the very least, you'd need to show much more to suggest that link.

For more than 2 millenia, this debate was more or less entirely inner-theological, starting from discussions within the OT. So, just positing a just-world-hypothesis apparently didn't make the problem of an apparently injust world go away, not even within religions. If one were so inclined, one could probably make a polemical case for theists being among those less susceptible to the j-w-hypothesis, as they, throughout history, continued to grapple with the question of theodicy, even though they could just have maintained the justness of god and invoked a version of the j-w-hypthesis.

Furthermore, I'd suggest that "religious belief that bad things happen to people because they have somehow brought it upon themselves, which is why their god allowed it to happen to them, or actually did it to them" is not as prevalent in religion as you may think. Religions often posit causal relations of the sort "You've transgressed, thus you will suffer" - this is not the j-w-hypothesis but simply asserting a link between action and (possibly post-mortem) consequences.

A "true" j-w-hypothesis would not even be your initial example of "We find out someone we know died at age 43, did they smoke? Were they overweight or living an unhealthy lifestyle?" It's unusual for someone to die at 43, thus it's perfectly reasonable to ask for the causes - and, given our society, accidents/illness is the most common cause of early death.

Rather, a good example would be: Joe died at 43. Jim mutters under his breath: "I told him that cheating would have consequences." This, however, is an argumentative figure you'll find not many (sane) religous people to hold - certainly you won't find it in official theology as it's blatantly patronizing and easily debunked by dying newborns etc. In fact, Ijob, for example, is a discussion on this kind of explanation and maintains that they do not work. Ijob, so to speak, at roughly 400 bce maintains that the just-world-hypothesis in is pure form is indeed a fallacy.

On top of that, I'm somewhat sceptical of this particular bias in general and I found the wiki-page relatively unconvincing. Certainly, in personal life, my experience has been that if I act kindly towards others, on average, I get acted on kindly as well. So, in the social sphere, I would need a bit more than just the wiki page to be convinced that my experience in this regard is not well founded. Certainly the original experiment referenced in the wiki-article has obvious design-flaws as rationalizations under intense emotional pressure are prone to many different mis-interpretations that aren't necessarily indiciative of a j-w-hypothesis.

It's certainly very generalised suggestion. In the OP I used the word 'part' ("what part people may think") because I don't imagine that it entirely explains anything, simply that it might play a role in the phenomena.

Also, just because explaining (or suggesting) a belief could be formed, doesn't necessarily explain how it is formed, also doesn't mean that it doesn't in fact explain how it IS formed. It might.

Do you not think that the idea has any merit?