“Watching people who get their first smartphone, there’s a very quick progression from having a basic phone you don’t talk about to people who love their iPhone, name their phone and buy their phones outfits,” said Lisa Merlo, director of psychotherapy training at the University of Florida.

Anyone going from a RAZR to an iPhone is going to be enamored by it. They’re moving from a phone where the most they could do beyond calls was text using numbers, to a phone that can now play games and videos, provide a full keyboard for texting and emailing, and can be used as a GPS device in your car. Of course they’re going to love the phone! As for naming their phone, nobody does that. And if they do, who cares?!

…psychologists say the love of them is becoming more like an addiction, creating consequences that range from teenagers who communicate in three-letter acronyms like LOL and BRB to car accidents caused by people who text while driving.

Using shortened text and acronyms is not an addiction. As for car accidents caused by people who are texting, that has nothing to do with smartphones, and has everything to do with stupidity.

Merlo, a clinical psychologist, said she’s observed a number of behaviors among smartphone users that she labels “problematic.” Merlo says some patients pretend to talk on the phone or fiddle with apps to avoid eye contact or other interactions at a bar or a party. Others are so engrossed that they ignore people completely.

They are using their smartphone, because the information and interactions on the smartphone are far more interesting than the people in the room. Before the smartphone, a person would stare at the TV screen at the bar, needlessly check the time on their watch, stare at their drink, leave, or grin and bear with people who annoy the living shit out of them. When you look at it like that, the smartphone is the greatest device ever made!

“The more bells and whistles the phone has,” she says, “the more likely they are to get too attached.”

This is where the psychologist, Merlo, really gets it wrong. What is a smartphone really? A smartphone is a replacement for separate, antiquated and immobile devices. It consolidates all of those devices into one tiny, portable device. Some of the things it replaces are:

• Landline phone
• Desktop computer (for email, web browsing and e-commerce)
• Calendar
• Address Book
• Stereo coupled with CDs/Cassettes/Records
• Video game system
• Wallet
• Newspaper and Magazines
• Notepad
• Camera
• GPS devices
• Alarm Clock

Of course they’re going to become attached to it, but that’s because it just replaced 10+ things in their life.

It’s too bad that the psychologists interviewed in this article are so clueless. The entire piece reeks of self-motivated job security – creating and perpetuating problems that don’t actually exist for self gain. If you focus on any human behavior without considering the full context and history of its actions, it will almost always be troubling. However, it’s the job of a counseling psychologist to cut through the bullshit, not create it.

The word “addiction” was needlessly and unprofessionally misused in this article. The reality is that everyone has an addiction to something. It may be a concentrated addiction to one thing, or an addiction to many things (which subsequently helps mask it from a clinical perspective). Addiction in itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s only bad when it interferes with your ability to relate well to others, harms other people or yourself, causes you to lose your job or not pay your bills, etc… The person who chooses to pull out their smartphone at a party they don’t want to be at is not ruining their life with their so called addiction to smartphones. What they’re doing is making the best out of crappy situation that’s full of douchebags and blowhards.

“What’s the difference between Jesus and an imaginary friend?”

The question at first seemed absurd, but I knew it had to be answered. When I initially researched it, I found out that the official psychological term for it was “imaginary companion.” I thought companion was a fitting word for how I and most Christians view their relationship with Jesus.

The more I pondered my own belief in Jesus, and what it meant to have an imaginary companion, the more it looked exactly the same. I would constantly ask myself how this could be. How could so many people have the same imaginary friend? Not only that, how could rational adults believe in an imaginary friend, let alone, the same one?

Imaginary friends, which are usually experienced by children to combat loneliness or an emotional deficit in their lives, have names, unique characteristics, and most of all, provide companionship. Even though imaginary friends can’t be seen by the person who is imagining them (except in some rare hallucinatory cases), the person fully believes in their existence. They talk to them, depend on them, and often love them. The alternative to life without them is loneliness, and in some cases, despair.

In Christianity, if you bring together groupthink, a tendency to be superstitious (which includes every human being), religious doctrine, and the desperate need for hope and meaning in your life, then congratulations, you’ll be getting a new imaginary friend named Jesus.

The idea that everyone perceives Jesus in the same way is a fallacy. Jesus is experienced differently by everyone, even for those who are indoctrinated in the most homogeneous of religious sects. While the experience of Jesus may appear identical, that illusion comes from a religious group’s structured archetype of Jesus. The who and what of Jesus is a well defined social construct. The rest is completely up to your mind’s imagination. That’s why Jesus talks to people in different ways, and why they ultimately experience their relationship with him in very unique ways.

During my journey into becoming a rational, logical freethinker, I had the opportunity to meet with a very popular Christian author. This person is very intelligent, has a background in psychology, and is someone who I continue to have great respect for. We met privately, and I presented him with my list of questions. As with most of the questions I presented to him, he didn’t have a reasonable answer for it. When I asked him what the difference was between an imaginary friend and the belief in a relationship with Jesus, he quickly conceded that there wasn’t any difference.