Hogan

I my case, I believe that is really what it is.

I had two points I wanted to make in regards to many of greylines comments

1. some people need to believe in something else because they have lost all hope in themselves.

2. Other people, who question the god concept of the program can find things that will work. What they find may be different for each person. For me, I call it "higher conscience"... which in simplistic terms can be boiled down to will power.

Fully realizing I am the one in control of how I act, and if I drink or not, it may seem silly that I subject myself to the meetings and the hard core god fearing folks. There is something to be said for the group as a whole. I stay there to make friends that have chosen not to drink or use drugs, and to remind myself about places I don't want to go back to.

To answer your question, most hard core followers of 12 step programs would say yes, that is contradictory... "our will has gotten us to this point, it must be someone elses will (god) to give us the strength to recover".

Hogan

I have no doubt you are correct. There are plenty of people in the program that are fully convinced that God is running their life... I keep my mouth shut when they start that babble around me becuase I have to accept the fact that this is needed for some people

I would be interested if you could point me in the direction of some of these studies. The %'s AA makes claims to is obviously a lot higher, I would expect the numbers to be lower than their claims. Going back to my original comments, I think all studies will be skewed a bit because they are going to include court ordered attendees. I am sure the stats for court orders is pretty bad.

I don't know about the rest of the U.S., but I know meetings in the Pacific Northwest are non smoking meetings.

I have only learned about them recently, but know nothing.

Milky

I think most posters in this thread are hung up on the steps and ideas of AA but not AA in its actual process.

For me AA was effective not because of steps or the book but because of AA peer pressure. Peer pressure is one the most powerful incentives for using drugs and alcohol and its a powerful way to quit drugs and alcohol as well.
Whether there are or not athiest recovery groups like AA around is moot for me, because AA already has a decent infrastructure and has meetings all over the place, every city in the country has them and practically any time of day and they are FREE. Location of meetings, time of meetings, amount of meetings is more important than whatever dogma is being spewed, for me it was the peer pressure of meeting other recovering addicts that helped me to recover not the actual 'message'. I took the steps, book etc with a grain of salt, which was my best effort. I took what I needed to remain clean and left the rest.
For this I am grateful, for the program (of going to meetings). Being involved with other addict's recovery helped me considerably, I know for a fact I would have isolated myself otherwise. I would be dead without this help. In the time spent trying to find an athiest group or one with a better ruleset, well I would have given up and started using again. This may not seem sensical, but addiction isn't sensical either. I never wanted to really call it a disease, but if calling it that makes it easier to stop using then who cares?
Handing over yourself to a group of people isn't such a bad thing, if its a decent group of people. They are certainly better people to hand your trust to then active users or even some non-users. The people Ive met in AA were decent enough, with a few exceptions. I was preached to about a specific religion or a specific way to worship a higher power less at AA then by people I've met at work or in daily life.
That being said I recomend it to anyone, for the people you will meet, the lessons learned from people, fellow addicts. What other place are you going to find other people telling the harrows of their personal experiences with addiction in a fairly neutral setting without judgement 24/7 and practically every where in the country.
'The Medium is the message' not the 'message is the message' The very experience of being around other recovering addicts helps in ways words are difficult to describe. Sift through the garbage of what other people are saying at these meetings and you retain what you need, there are plenty of gems of truth to be found.

Sometimes bad writers inspire me to write a novel more then good writers do. If they did it, then so can I. Its not what was written or how it was written, but the fact that it was published.

epepke

Well, it's not simply that it's religious, but that it can directly be traced to a particular old-style fundamentalist group.

The classic is

"A Controlled Experiment on the Use of Court Probation for Drunk Arrests" �* �* Keith S. Ditman, M.D., George G. Crawford, LL.B., Edward W. Forgy, Ph.D., Herbert Moskowitz, Ph.D., and Craig MacAndrew, Ph.D., [i]American Journal of Psychiatry,[i] 124:2, August 1967, pp. 160-163.

There have been a few since then, especially the San Diego study, but that's a good place to start.

Betcha there's a big pot o' coffee on the burner. But seriously, in most of the AA meetings in the US, people smoke like chimneys.

It's really too bad, because they used to be good and were poised to become a major competitor. Then they got into this woo-woo stuff.

DaninGraniteCity

Did anyone watch Penn and Teller's program about AA? What do you all think about it?

epepke

Talk about speaking volumes.

If something doesn't work for a quarter of a century, then it's time to try something else. Something different. Clue brick time.

I remember 25 years ago, not exactly fondly, but with some elements of fondness. I've gotten better at doing things in the intervening years.

WilliamB

I currently have mixed feelings about AA. My closest friend and I gave up drinking at around the same time, eight years ago. He is a member of AA, and I am not, nor have I ever been. The conversations we had about alcoholism and God were essentially what made me the atheist I am today. Prior to our friendship I would vacillate between disbelief and a desire to believe. Oddly enough, the times in my life when I felt the most "spiritual" were the times when I was drunk, or drinking more heavily than usual. It was precisely the opposite with my friend, who claims that when he was drinking he was an atheist.

I drank regularly and steadily for seventeen years. My friend and I had pretty much the same history as far as alcohol was concerned, though he had dabbled in other drugs a fair bit more than I did; but any drug use besides the consumption of alcohol was quite far behind both of us when we met. Neither of us were daily drinkers, though we drank most days; neither of us ever did that hair-of-the-dog thing; neither of us went to work drunk, and neither of us had missed work or lost jobs because of alcohol. My friend and I got drunk only a few times together before we both quit, and I didn't notice anything particularly different in the way he acted while intoxicated than the way I acted, nor did he drink a great deal more in quantity than I did. Nonetheless my friend believed himself to be an alcoholic, while I never made that acknowledgement for myself. To this day I can't honestly say I know one way or the other. I may well be an alcoholic, or I may not. I simply don't know.

Since we both gave up drinking at the same time, obviously the subject of AA came up a lot. My friend believed that he couldn't just quit on his own, and firmly believed in this higher power of his, which he called God. I told him that I was pretty much an atheist and that AA wouldn't help me. I believed that whether I drank or not was completely my choice. I was planning on getting married and becoming a father, and was also on the verge of an important promotion to a management position. With these three major, life-changing events in the offing, there was simply no room for getting drunk. It was a rational choice: continue to get drunk regularly and upset my wife, look like a fool in front of my child, jeopardize my job, or give it up. I gave it up. It really wasn't that hard. My friend insisted on telling me that alcoholics can't simply make that rational choice. It just wasn't that easy, and I was fooling myself. Somewhere along the way we were having a rather heated discussion and I said something arrogant and my friend told me that I was "angering God." There was a certain kind of smugness in the way he said it, a matter-of-factness which I took offense to, and I bluntly told him not to visit his god on me. It was this exchange that stopped me from vacillating and made me take a broad leap towards non-belief.

Many conversations occured over the coming year or so, and our vastly different philosophical views about life in general came to the surface, and eventually drove a wedge between us which cooled our friendship somewhat, to the point where now, eight years later, we hardly ever see eachother. We had great times together, but underneath we were uncomfortable around one another, and eventually the topic of AA, God, etcetera, just never came up.

Bottom line is, if AA has helped my friend to remain sober, then I'd be a fool to disparage the organization. I also have another friend who nearly died due to excessive abuse of alcohol, and she recently turned her life around, with the help of AA, and is now doing well. She swears that AA saved her life, and strongly believes in God, though like my other friend she is not a Christian or a member of any particular religion. Again, if AA has helped her to stay alive and be well, I'd be a fool to try and condemn it. It obviously works for a great many people. The only criticism I could offer is simply that, from what I have observed, people in AA tend to pooh-pooh any suggestion that alcoholism can be successfully managed without some sort of rigid program. They intimate that perhaps if someone just quits cold turkey, without any program, then they either: 1) are probably not really alcoholics, or, 2) will most likely not stay sober very long.

I'm glad AA exists and that it works for some people, but I would respectfully suggest that they should accept the fact that plenty of heavy drinkers, and even some genuine alcoholics, can and have quit drinking without that program, or any particular program.

Sgent29

My understanding of AA having attended more than a few meetings it that they generally don't try to push themselves on people, although this could certainly differ from meeting to meeting (and obviously with a personal relationship).

The AA Big Book specificially mentions that many people are able to find other ways to stop drinking, which is fine, but the progrom is there for those who can't, or haven't been able to stop in other ways.

In AA lingo at least, you wouldn't have been an alcoholic, as your drinking hadn't become unmanageable. Just because your friend was drinking the same amount as you means that she wanted too, or was able to control her desire to do so.

christ-on-a-stick

Like... how could Judeo-Christian religions draw in so many human beings when they are obviously so absurd and unbelievable? :Cheeky:

THE BIGGER THE LIE, THE MORE PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE IT.

Er, hello?! :banghead:

christ-on-a-stick

BTW I hope that my previous post didn't seem overtly insensitive to those who have either been harmed by alcoholism in the family, or those who have/still struggle with it themselves. My own bio-family has been deeply impacted by substance abuse issues and as such I do not take it lightly or dismiss others' experiences out of hand.