Are We Thinking Straight

This book highlights the strategic deployment of a straight identity by an LGBT organization. Cortese explores the ways in which activists strategically use a "straight" identity as a social movement tool in order to successfully achieve the movement objectives.

I know God doesn't make mistakes, and if I'm gay it's because that's what he wanted. What you wanted. And I think the challenge is to get everyone else to see that. This is their test, not mine. If only Taylor Adams had kept on lying to his parents, none of this would have happened. He wouldn't have been shipped off to Straight to God, an institution devoted to "deprogramming" troubled teenagers and ridding them of their vices--whether it's drugs, violence, or in Taylor's case, other boys. Not that Taylor has a problem with being gay, or with reconciling his love for God with his love for his boyfriend Will. . . At Straight to God, such thoughts--along with all other reminders of Taylor's former "sinful" life--are forbidden. Every movement is monitored, privacy is impossible, and no one--from staff to residents--is quite who they first appear to be. There's Charles, Taylor's clean-cut roommate, desperate to leave his past behind. . .Nate Devlin, a handsome, inscrutable older boy who's alternately arrogant and kind. . . gorgeous, secretive Sean, who returns to Straight to God each year to avoid doing prison time for drugs. Here, where piety can be a mask for cruelty and the greatest crimes go unpunished, Taylor will learn more than he ever dreamed about love, courage, rebellion, and betrayal--but the most surprising lessons will be the truths he uncovers about himself. In this smart, insightful new novel, Robin Reardon presents a compelling exploration of the journey from boy to man, and a testament to the strength that comes with accepting both who we are, and who we love. . .

I know something about you without knowing you. I bet you spend A LOT of time in your head. You know, thinking, worrying, stressing, freaking out -- call it whatever you want. I call it a preoccupied mind. And with what? 99% of your thoughts are useless. William James, once the leading psychologist in America, and one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism, put it best: "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." Pragmatism believes that the mind is a tool. Your mind should work for you, not against you. People who don't master their mind, don't believe it's possible. They say: "I can't help but thinking these things." Well, you can TAKE CONTROL of your mind with enough practice. I've done it. And in THINK STRAIGHT, I share exactly how. It's a quick read and you can use it to immediately to improve your thinking. You have the ability to decide what you think. Or, you can choose NOT to think. And that is one of the most important and most practical things you can learn in life. Before I learned that skill, I would spend hours and hours inside my head. Just think about how much you think. - "I wonder what my boss thinks?" - "What happens if I screw up and lose my job?" -"What if my business never takes off?" - "Does she love me?" - "Why does my life suck?" - "What if I get cancer?" - "I can't finish anything. What's wrong with me? And the list goes on. THINK STRAIGHT reveals the recipe for taking control of your mind so you can improve your life, career, relationships, business. I wrote this little book in a way that you can read it more than once. And I hope that this book serves as an anchor to you--especially during trying times. The mind is the most powerful tool on earth. Change the way you think. And you'll change your life.

This book highlights the strategic deployment of a straight identity by an LGBT organization. Cortese explores the ways in which activists strategically use a "straight" identity as a social movement tool in order to successfully achieve the movement objectives.

Practical reasoning and clear thinking are essential for everyone if we are to make sense of the information we receive each day. Being able to quickly know the difference between valid and invalid arguments, the contradictory versus the contrary, vagueness and ambiguity, contradiction and self-contradiction, the truthful and the fallacious, separates clear thinkers from the crowd. How to Think Straight lays the foundation for critical reasoning by showing many ways in which our thinking goes awry. Celebrated philosopher Antony Flew entertainingly instructs on the many and varied faults that occur in argument, the power of reason, how to challenge assertions and find evidence, and how not to be persuaded by half-truths. Flew also examines poor reasoning, and why we should be concerned with finding the truth. Lucid, terse, and sensible, with study questions and exercises to help along the way, this enlightening second edition will help you develop the skills necessary to argue and reason effectively by following a few simple, easy-to-remember directions.

Imagine a future scenario in which prospective parents will have the option to decide the sexual orientation of their offspring in the privacy of a doctors consultation room.In the past, liberals dreaded the intrusion of a paternalistic state apparatus into the minutiae of peoples private lives.In the future they may have to fear the reverse: that private reproductive decisions will impact the very demographic composition of future generations that make up the public. Nowhere does this book claim that the ability to isolate a gay gene or similar genetic marker for homosexuality currently exists. Rather, it demonstrates how Christian bioethicists and liberal eugenicists have so far anticipated and addressed the seemingly implausible scenario just described and provides a liberal critique of the their arguments, should pre-natal selection for sexual orientation ever become a genuine possibility. Murray provides an unprecedented survey of Christian bioethicists responses to the gay science of the 1990s, and shows where they fit in a long religious tradition of stigmatizing and pathologizing homosexual people that stretches back to first century Christian communities. This book contains no assertion that all people who identify as homosexual, gay, lesbian, bi, or transgender are born that way. Nor does it suggest that being born that way is a necessary condition for granting full legal acceptance of homosexual behavior. Rather, it reveals how religious teachings about human sexuality have both misrepresented the facts of human nature and misjudged their ethical significance. Murrays analysis provides an opportunity for the universal and global church and those who object to homosexuality as less than innate to reconsider and learn new perspectives. Reverend Rowland Jide Macaulay, Founder & CEO, House Of Rainbow Fellowship, Lagos, Nigeria and London, United Kingdom A fresh, informative and challenging contribution to the scientific and ethical issues concerning homosexuality, which debunks traditional Christian objections and tackles the emerging debate around the potential of genome editing to eliminate same-sex behaviour. Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner

This collection of original essays will unravel the current heterosexual scene in two parts: one on rights and privileges, the other on popular culture. Topics covered include weddings, proms, citizenship, marriage penalties, cartoons, mermaids and myth.

A world-class thinker counts the 100 ways in which humans behave irrationally, showing us what we can do to recognize and minimize these “thinking errors” to make better decisions and have a better life Despite the best of intentions, humans are notoriously bad—that is, irrational—when it comes to making decisions and assessing risks and tradeoffs. Psychologists and neuroscientists refer to these distinctly human foibles, biases, and thinking traps as “cognitive errors.” Cognitive errors are systematic deviances from rationality, from optimized, logical, rational thinking and behavior. We make these errors all the time, in all sorts of situations, for problems big and small: whether to choose the apple or the cupcake; whether to keep retirement funds in the stock market when the Dow tanks, or whether to take the advice of a friend over a stranger. The “behavioral turn” in neuroscience and economics in the past twenty years has increased our understanding of how we think and how we make decisions. It shows how systematic errors mar our thinking and under which conditions our thought processes work best and worst. Evolutionary psychology delivers convincing theories about why our thinking is, in fact, marred. The neurosciences can pinpoint with increasing precision what exactly happens when we think clearly and when we don’t. Drawing on this wide body of research, The Art of Thinking Clearly is an entertaining presentation of these known systematic thinking errors--offering guidance and insight into everything why you shouldn’t accept a free drink to why you SHOULD walk out of a movie you don’t like it to why it’s so hard to predict the future to why shouldn’t watch the news. The book is organized into 100 short chapters, each covering a single cognitive error, bias, or heuristic. Examples of these concepts include: Reciprocity, Confirmation Bias, The It-Gets-Better-Before-It-Gets-Worse Trap, and the Man-With-A-Hammer Tendency. In engaging prose and with real-world examples and anecdotes, The Art of Thinking Clearly helps solve the puzzle of human reasoning.

Author and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin tackles the problems of twenty-first century information overload in his New York Times bestselling book The Organized Mind. 'The Organized Mind is smart, important, and as always, exquisitely written' - Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University, author of Stumbling on Happiness Overwhelmed by demands on your time? Baffled by the sheer volume of data? You're not alone: modern society is in a state of information overload. The Organized Mind investigates this phenomenon and the effect it has on us, analysing how and why our brains are struggling to keep up with the demands of the digital age. The twenty-first century sees us drowning under emails, forever juggling six tasks at once and trying to make complex decisions ever more quickly. Using a combination of academic research and examples from daily life, neuroscientist and bestselling author Daniel Levitin explains how to take back control of your life. This book will take you through every aspect of modern life, from healthcare to online dating to raising kids, showing that the secret to success is always organization. Levitin's research is surprising, powerful and will change the way you see the world. It's time to learn why there's no such thing as multitasking, why email is so addictive and why all successful people need a junk drawer. In a world where information is power, The Organized Mind holds the key to harnessing that information and making it work for you. Dr. Daniel J. Levitin has a PhD in Psychology, training at Stanford University Medical School and UC Berkeley. He is the author of the No. 1 bestseller This Is Your Brain On Music (Dutton, 2006), published in nineteen languages, and The World in Six Songs (Dutton, 2008) which hit the bestseller lists in its first week of release. Currently he is a James McGill Professor of Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience and Music at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

The nursery rhyme "There was a Crooked Man" is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point -- the Bible -- so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it. Gary DeMar shows the power of biblical thinking and the desperate need of it in the church. He defines what a biblical worldview is and demonstrates how to acquire and practice it. - Publisher.