PopeInTheWoods

Not that I'm a huge fan of AA, but even atheist moi must agree that it's probably better for someone to be addicted to AA than to alcohol, if only for selfish reasons (i.e. he won't be driving drunk, or racking up huge Medicaid bills because of his failing liver). True there's no real recovery or cure in this case, but the life-threatening symptoms are under control (sort of like AIDS treatment).

Andy

lunachick

AA quite possibly is a cult, given the 12 step programme, but it at least helps people to overcome serious alcohol addiction. I guess it understands that, for some at least, one faith/addiction (the bottle) needs to be replaced with another (God), so it makes that trade-off.

As for alcoholism itself, about a week or so ago I watched a doco relating to the genetics of alcoholism. Apparently there are two types of drunk - those with a genetic propensity for it (there is a common factor in this groups DNA that is not found in non-alcoholics), and those who are environmental alcoholics. AA can only help those who are from the latter group. The former group require medication to be successful. IIRC, the University of Melbourne, Australia, is the leader in this specific genetic research.

Either way, if AA can help some people rebuild their lives, then that has to be a good thing, IMHO. It just has to realise that not all people can be 'cured' through its methods.

Hayden

This is still bloody dangerous, IMO, as it treats only the symptom and not the disease (figuratively, anyway). What happens when the replacement addiction fails? I reckon they'd be better off dealing with the addictive personality, rather then letting them lurch from one crutch to the next. (Sounds harsh, I know!)

HR

PS I just had a (sort of) Father Ted moment, thinking about that last bit: "Drink! God! Drink! God! Feck!"

irishajo

Don't forget all the spinoffs of AA. I did some research on Overeaters Anonymous years ago, and got turned off before I ever darkened the door of a meeting. Just another version of the 'God is perfect, you are a worthless sinner' crap.

joedad

Actually they're based on <a href="http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Babylonian_mathematics.html" target="_blank">The Babylonian Numbering System</a>

joe

irishajo

<a href="http://www.aadeprogramming.com/reclaim/courts.html" target="_blank">Some links to court cases about the 'religiosity' of AA</a>

joedad

We need a new word here, Neolithicism.

And that would include all the antihumanist religious bullsh*t you point out. But that would be an insult imo to much of the resourcefulness and adaptability that also obviously marked those ancestral times.

Maybe we should call it religio-neolithicism, that being how evolutionary psychologists might describe the evolved, genetically programmed brain networks that arose in competition with other such neural circuits in resposne to quite natural pressures and challenges relating to survival. See
<a href="http://www.sciencenews.org/20020921/bob9ref.asp" target="_blank">Evolutionary Upstarts</a>

joe

Amos

Good move because AA is equal to hell on earth as it forces our "inner man" to be exposed and cling to the "saved sinner" complex for the rest of our days.

Ab_Normal

The main problem I've seen with my brother and sister-in-law, who are in AA/NA, is that the organization ends up being their only social contact, so of course they end up dating folks from the organization, and so far it's always ended badly.

Tharmas

I’m sorry for the length of this, but once I got started I couldn’t stop. These are my thoughts on AA. I have a certain amount of experience with AA, alcoholism, and addiction. I want to state right here that I do not in any way speak for or on behalf of Alcoholics Anonymous. These are purely my own experiences and opinions.

Of the two co-founders, Dr. Bob was certainly a Christian who, I am told, would freely invoke the name of Jesus when talking with other alcoholics. On the other hand, Bill W. seems to have fit more the model of the seeker of some kind of vague “spirituality” rather than practicing any particular religion.

The attraction of AA for me and for very many of my fellow alcoholics is its looseness as an organization. It has almost no formal structure. Indeed one of AA’s “twelve traditions” is “AA as such ought never be organized.” Within certain limitations (and they are really very few) any group of alcoholics who chooses to get together and call themselves an AA meeting can do so.

There is nothing you “have to” believe to be a member of AA. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a meeting where I haven’t heard read in the introduction the phrase “The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.”

Part of what this means in terms of describing AA is that it’s like the blind men describing the elephant. Everybody’s right, and everybody’s wrong. If you go to a meeting and hear a lot of “Jesus,” go to a different meeting and you won’t hear the word “God” mentioned. Or you’ll hear someone introduce himself as “a recovering alcoholic and a recovering Catholic.”

If you go to a meeting and they’re all burning candles (I know of one such weekly meeting, in the literally thousands that take place in the metropolitan area where I live), you’ve gone to a very atypical meeting.

In general, when you hear that “AA says this...” or “AA believes that...” In my experience you should generally translate that as “an individual member of AA said that...” For example, to my knowledge, AA does not claim that alcoholism is a “disease.” On the other hand, I know that the American Psychiatric Association does. Of course, one frequently hears people say in meetings how grateful they were when they came to AA and found out they had a disease and weren’t just weak-willed. On the other hand, I’ve been to meetings where I’ve heard people say just the opposite.

The original AAs who wrote the “Big Book” (Bill W and a few friends) stated that alcoholism was comprised of a metal obsession and a physical compulsion. That has been my experience.

As I understand it the “physical compulsion” part is related to what today we might call the genetic component. I understand that to mean that the way I metabolize alcohol and the way it hits my brain is dabnormal; after I have a drink or two something happens and I have no more control over how much I am drinking. That is what the famous AA “powerlessness” means to me. I don’t find that powerlessness demeaning. I believe it is a statement of fact, like any other positive or negative component of my genetic makeup.

The “mental obsession” is my character defect. It’s what kept me liking to live in a dream delirium to the expense of everything else. It’s why over and over again I kept choosing to drink when ordinary experience would have shown anybody with any sense at all that the only possible outcome would be disaster. So why did I quit? Was it that time I was busted by a full SWAT team in front of my wife and five-year-old son? Was it losing my wife and kids? The car wreck? The DWI? The time I was evicted and thrown out on the streets with only the clothes on my back? Living on the streets? Those times waking up in jail? How about that time I came out of a blackout in a park wearing only my underwear, covered in my own vomit, yelling up through the darkness and the sleet at some god I didn’t believe in to strike me dead? Hell no. After each of those occurrences my first though was that I really needed a drink.

After I showed up (for the last time) in AA I heard the phrase “I’d just had enough to drink.” That makes sense to me. I was thirty-six when I’d had enough to drink and staggered into an AA meeting. Although I’d been to quite a few meetings over the previous few years when I saw a few guys getting papers signed at the end of the meeting (probationers) I thought you maybe had to “sign up.” When I asked the chairman he looked me over and laughed. “Don’t worry,” he told me, “you’re right where you need to be. You remind me of myself when I first came in. You’re shaking like a dog shitting peach pits.”

Freethinkers and atheists have always been part of AA. That’s why it says “as we understood him,” after the word “God” in the steps. That addition was insisted upon by some of the first atheist AAs to get sober when they were putting together the so-called "Big Book" in New York in the late thirties.

I have occasionally been bothered by born again folk talking about Jesus in meetings, and the fact is that every meeting I’ve ever attended has closed with a prayer. On the whole however I have found that AA is true to its vision of not endorsing any actual religion and keeping to just suggesting that members find some sort of spiritual center to their lives. Incidentally I discovered that when I finally settled on deciding that I could pin the word “God” on some kind of undefined karmic harmony and let it go at that, nobody, and I mean not even my sponsor, ever asked me to define my concept to them. Every one I knew in AA stayed true to the philosophy that I should find my own definition of G-O-D and that was that.

By the way the book *Getting Better* by Nan Robertson is as I recall a fairly good account of an atheist sobering up in AA.

I have known people who after all simply couldn’t take the God stuff and after a year or two of staying sober on the “fellowship” dropped out and stayed sober on their own. I know other alcoholics who have simply quit on their own.

These observations lead me to believe that there are as many different “types” of alcoholism as there are metabolic pathways or, indeed, alcoholics. It is a complex interplay between genetics and psychology. The only really foolish conclusion would be to assert absolutes like “Joe sobered up without help, so all alcoholics can,” or “Only AA helped Jane, so only AA can help alcoholics.”

So in my opinion, is AA a cult? Sure, in the sense that it is definitely a group that offers group support. As a member of AA you certainly feel a certain “us” and “them.” Considering that the “them” is the group of active alcoholics and drunk drivers out there that “we” used to be part of, it’s not too bad a split.

I used this group identification as a powerful tool to help provide me with an alternative to the obsessive world of alcoholism. As far as cults go, however, there are a couple of things I’ll say that AA does right. There is NO compulsion on membership or attendance and no focus on personality or personality cult. Also there is no charge. Although the hat is always passed at every meeting I have never ever felt coerced to put anything in nor have I ever seen any coercion. Moreover there are actually strict and rather modest limits on how much any individual is allowed to donate to AA even if they want to give more.

The fact that various courts sentence individuals to attend AA meetings bothers many members of AA. A lot of those people don’t really belong in meetings and it seems to be missing the point of AA in a big way to make it compulsory. I’m aware of some of the court challenges based on AA’s being a religion. I don’t know how the rulings have gone but I’m not personally unsympathetic. It’s hard enough for motivated people to deal with the God stuff.

As for the statistics that are cited, all that I seen referenced on these various links and mentioned in the threads are, in my opinion, completely worthless. For one thing, AA keeps no membership rolls. Any body who says they are a member of AA is a member of AA. Any body who says they don’t drink is taken at face value. Did any of those tests administer UAs? Otherwise you may be just testing honesty.

But a more fundamental flaw is that most alcoholics that I personally know in AA, including myself, went to many meetings and tried a number of times before finally getting any long-term sobriety. So merely taking a head count of people going in and out the doors means little. For example I was one of those “failures” six times before I got any real sobriety. Now that I have seventeen years sobriety it turns out that, gee, I failed six times and succeeded once, so I should count myself a 14% success?

Other problems? Do some people live only for AA? Some people do, it’s true. There’s even an AA pamphlet on the subject. As for me, I stay active in AA. I work in the community in some of our jails. I still go to a few meetings, but not as many as I’d like. I like to remind myself of where I came from. I like to stay grateful for what I’ve got. Just a general undirected feeling of gratitude, thank you. But then, I’m not one of those people who bristle when they hear the word “God.” I’m perfectly happy to refer people to Rational Recovery or wherever they need to go. A lot of what AA offers is just a pot of coffee and some people to talk to while your head clears. Believe me, in my case my head had to do a lot of clearing before I was ready or able to really help myself in other ways.

Just my 2 cents. Thanks for listening...