Alcoholics Anonymous and Atheism

God, Prejudice, Reason, and Alcoholics Anonymous

I Am A Successful Atheist in the AA "God Program"

Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

Bill Wilson is responsible for writing the book "Alcoholics Anonymous," referred to as the Big Book. AA is a spiritual program, and a "God program," meaning it depends upon what AA terms a "higher power" to relieve the alcoholic of his/her need to get drunk.

In many places in the Big Book we read specifically that other things than God can be considered a higher power. The use of the AA group itself with people you come to rely on, friends, and other people with whom you can discuss your problems, are often suggested as a higher power. A man can think of his wife and children, and use them as his "higher power" because of the very real possibility that if he goes on another binge, or gets arrested one more time while drunk, he could lose them.

Anytime one of us who is alcoholic goes to a meeting and says anything like, "When I fought with my son over something stupid, I knew I had to get to a meeting"; or "I realized I was letting myself become hungry, angry, lonely, tired--I knew I had to get to a meeting," we are then using the group and our time there, away from the "outside world", as our higher power, to recoup a bit of our spirituality.

But in the end, AA members are expected, not by any membership requirement, but through the incessant urging of Wilson to "accept" that the higher power he expects us to discover is God. (Accepting God is not a requirement because there is only one membership requirement: the desire to stop drinking. But the constant urging to accept God has made many people see AA as a multi-denominational religious cult.)

"We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God." [emphasis added] The Big Book

page 46

Naturalism, to Wilson, was unnatural. Naturalism was prejudicial. "To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face." For Wilson, his own prejudice made him believe that "to continue as he is [as an atheist or agnostic] means disaster, especially if he an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. page 44

An alcoholic of the hopeless variety can only be hopeless because he does not accept God; to accept God means he isn't hopeless. "There Is A Solution" touts the previous chapter's title, and that way is through God. "This is the great news this book carries to those who suffer." p 17

The expectancy is that eventually all AA members will have "made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the power of God as we understood him"; and it expected to come sooner than later; turning over one's will is the third of twelve "steps". AA dogma, gathered up from the first few years of attempting to find the steps and the means to make them work, was that you could not get to Step Four without "doing" steps one, two and three first. (Step Two is admitting that only "a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity"; Step One is "admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.")

But Bill Wilson was an extremely prejudicial and biased man. Do you notice in that quote from page 46 how he deftly turned "a power greater than ourselves" into God Himself, without even the pretext of qualifying "God" with "as we understood him"?

The phrase "as we understood (or understand) him" is always italicized in the Steps, in an effort to be inclusive of all religions. But Wilson had to be talked into accepting that phrase, and then only grudgingly. Yet whenever he wrote of his own experience and how it ought to be used by others, God stood alone and every member was expected by Wilson to "graduate" from using the group or other people or a hope as his/her higher power, to using God Himself--who in Wilson's mind stood alone without need of "understanding." After all, he wrote, "it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God." How could He be a God of anyone's understanding when Wilson admits that it was impossible for "any of us" (the original members) to understand Him?

Naturalism, which is necessarily an atheistic doctrine, and agnosticism, were, to Wilson, biases which the new members had to let go of.

"We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results..." [emphasis added] page 46

Page 46 is in the chapter of the Big Book entitled "We Agnostics." Wilson was never an agnostic, and he wrote no chapter for atheists, though he mentions them there. He speaks to the agnostics as though he had once been there himself, putting his brotherly arm around them in words, comforting them in the knowledge that things will be alright if they just let go and let God.

He writes in the first paragraph that "you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience can conquer." Many naturalists and others don't believe in the "spirit" because they have always been told it is linked to God, and God is what they are trying to discard by using an epistemology that admits of nothing supernatural. But this is not a problem for all naturalists.

The Deists were theistic naturalists. Thomas Jefferson wrote,
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

In Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) the spirit, the soul, is a naturally occurring non-supernatural physiological phenomenon of the fact of being human. When someone says he could not do something or was compelled to do something because his "conscience was being affected," it is the naturally occurring physiologically emotive phenomenon we perceive as our soul, that he is referring to.

MN understands existence to be natural and only natural, with nothing supernatural existing within existence. And of course, there is no existence outside of existence. Not even a God can be outside existence, though many believe a God could.

God could not--not without causing an irreparable contradiction within human language. If you believe in God and believe, as did America's Deist Founders, that it was God who gave us Reason in order to be able to solve our own problems without His intereference or help, then such a God would not also have allowed us to conceive acceptable contradictions; they break all the rules of the logic of linquistics. Allow one, you must allow them all. Then "nothing" will be "something," "yes" will be "no", and Reason will be worthless. We will return to the growling animalistic expressions of Man before he gained language, because without Reason language has no expression.

Boethius told us to join faith to reason, "insofar as is possible." Thomas Aquinas and others did that, and the juxtaposition led us to the scientific and then to the industrial revolutions. But at the same time, it did not banish faith by elevating Reason, and the Founders were forced to conceive a nation with a Constitution which assumed the separation of church and state. The assumption was common, was therefore not included in the Constitution in those words, and that common assumption allowed the Supreme Court to declare it a de facto part of the Constitution. The Deists would say it was Reason that dictated the Constitution.

Yet, Wilson tells us we must abandon Reason, for the blindness that comes with "accepting a power greater than ourselves" in the realm of the spirit while upholding Reason in the realm of all other things.

"Instead of regarding ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God's ever advancing Creation, we agnostics and atheists [There he goes again!] chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word... Rather vain of us, wasn't it?" page 49

But Thomas Paine, in "The Age of Reason", wrote: "The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. [ ] I know, by positive conclusion resulting from [my] search, that there is a power superior to all [ ] things, and that power is God."

Paine was one of the most outspoken Deists, even fleeing to France for his life because his devotion to God would not allow him to have faith in anything but a Reasonable God, and no organized religion is Reasonable to a Deist.

"The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient
Mythologists," wrote Paine, "accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud."

"If a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have recovered long ago," Wilson wrote. [p. 44/45] Yet, isn't that what blind acceptance of a higher power is--a supposed better "code of morals" or "a better philosophy of life"?

Actually, Wilson must have realized they were not the same, or he would have said so. Instead he said, "We could wish to be moral, we could wish to be philosophically comforted, but the needed power wasn't there.

"Lack of power, that was our dilemma," he wrote, instead.

Their lack of power was from the desire to turn a wish into reality, without the "mere code of morals" or the "better philosophy." Philosophy is nothing without epistemology. Faith in God is the epistemology of disavowing Reason; faith is the only thing that Wilson serves up.

"Besides a seeming inablility to accept much on faith," Wilson wrote, about the problem of human intelligence as the last word, "we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinancy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. [ ] This sort of thinking had to be abandoned. [ ! ]

"Some of us had already walked far over the Bridge of Reason toward the desired shore of faith. [ ] We were grateful that Reason had brought us so far. But somehow we couldn't step ashore. Perhaps we had been leaning on Reason that last mile and we did not like to lose our support.[ ]

"Did we not have confidence in our ability to think? What was that but a sort of faith? Yes, we had been faithful, abjectly faithful to the God of Reason. So, in one way or another, we discovered that faith had been involved all the time! [ ! ]

"[A religious doubter] recounts that he fell out of bed to his knees. In a few seconds he was overwhelmed by the conviction of the Presence of God. He had stepped from bridge to shore. [ ]

"His alcoholic problem was taken away."

I sit here and copy and paste and write these things, in order to tell the reader that I had my own spiritual experience, and my "alcoholic problem was taken away."
But my spiritual experience was not what faith would have me believe it to be; it is what Reason tells me it was. Spiritualism is not supernatural. Spiritualism is completely natural, and is psychological, combining the mind with emotions.

The mind is the most powerful force in human life. My experience was one of a comgination of mind and that natural phenomenon, the human soul, because they are irrevocably connected even in death; the soul follows the mind and the body into the grave. If I could bottle my experience and release it in a room with someone who was looking for God, he would claim his experience that came from my bottle was God, and then try to convince me of it.

Humility seems to be the greatest virtue in AA. It is mentioned specifically on nine pages of the Big Book and those mentions carry various descriptions of how it works and why it works and why we need it. There are many more references to humility in the other AA "approved literature," such as the "Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions". Honesty is mentioned on twelve pages, but we all know a man cannot be humble if he is not first honest.

Men whose humility does not extend to allowing the possibility that an atheist such as myself can have a spiritual experience and become sober by it, despite "the choicest gift of God to man, the GIFT OF REASON;" wrote Paine, "and having endeavored to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason, as if man could give reason to himself."

Bill Wilson believed in the elevation of faith over Reason. Rather vain of him, wasn't it, to despise the "choisest gift of God to man," Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions;" wrote Paine, "he prays dictatorially; [ ] he follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I."

Wilson's prayers were like that: "Relieve me of the bondage of self," goes his Third Step Prayer, "that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power..."

The strictest adherence to Reason is the act of binding one's self to one's self; altruism was conceived as the act of giving one's self completely over to God, without asking for such things as the removal of one's difficulties: one took what God met out. And what kind of humility is it to ask God to remove one's difficulties, then turn and call that "victory over them"?

"It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything; and, in this case, it would be just as consistent to read even the book called the Bible to a horse as to a man. How, then, is it that those people pretend to reject reason?" Paine

The rejection of Reason was not all Wilson's. It was, and is, endemic of the kind of organization that AA is. The co-founder of AA, "Dr. Bob," wrote in his own chapter of the Big Book, that atheists, agnostics, and skeptics have a form of "intellectual pride which keeps [them] from accepting what is in this book, [and] I feel sorry for you." [emphasis added]

He also ended his chapter saying, "Your Heavenly Father will never let you down!"
Rather prejudiced of him, wouldn't you say?

Note: I got my 3 year token in January, 2009. That spiritual experience that I had in my soul didn't put the fear of God in me; it put in me the fear of being drunk--and of dying that way or of killing someone else. That is a stronger deterrent, apparently, than God who I do not accept as existing.

But I am grateful to have found an AA community in which my outspoken atheism is not rejected. I am fully accepted by my home group and other groups, but spiritualism is something we must never loose sight of. It is a gift of reason. Without reason it is blind, groping for any supernatural explanation it can grasp.

AA works if you find the higher power of your understanding. Mine,"the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind," is Reason. I trust I will never use any other weapon, a weapon which leads me to the positive conclusion that it is a power superior to all things available to man including the irrational prejudice of belief in God.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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Alcoholics Anonymous and Atheism

How Does An Atheist Navigate Alcoholics Anonymous?

Part I

You Vs. Theists

I have decided to publish online the efforts I have gone to, and the thoughts I have to deal with as an atheist in the A.A. program, because it is most definitely a "god" and "spirituality" based program.

It's rather easy to be an atheist in A.A., actually, without compromising your principles. The most difficult part would be to find yourself in a group that does not accept your atheism and one way or another tries to convert you. The A.A. so-called Big Book, which is actually called "Alcoholics Anonymous," does at at times seem to make that attempt at winning us over.

But in the end, it does have enough leeway in the way it operates, so that even a die-hard, no-nonsense, there-is-nothing-supernatural-in-the-universe kind of guy like me can come to enjoy the sobriety and the peace of mind and the serenity, not to mention what the Big Book describes as "a new freedom and a new happiness."

Theists don't frighten me. Why should they? They have their beliefs, and I have mine, or none at all, which ever way you wish to see it. Some atheists say they "believe no god exists"; some atheists say they "don't believe a god exists"; some of us say other things. But it all comes down to the idea that the other members of A.A. are going to talk about the "God of their understanding." Even for some theists, the "power greater than themselves," in which they must find the strength to stay sober, starts out as nothing more than a belief in the power of the group itself to help to them.

That is what the A.A. program offers--the place to find the power to stay sober--and so there are Catholics sitting next to Mormons sitting next to Southern Babtists sitting next to New-Agers, Buddhists, Unitarians, and me. As of yet I have found no resistance to my atheism, and my "home group" is more than happy to listen when it is my turn to speak. If you find yourself in an intolerant group, find another group. If there is no other group in your area, there are A.A. chat rooms online. An intolerant group is not the group that A.A.'s founders would have approved of.

You see, when it comes to speaking and listening to other members in an A.A. group, the unwritten rule is, "Take what you need and leave the rest." We say it all the time. In practice this means that you listen to people speak, and you pick up on what they say that comes close to your own experience. From this "taking" you are able to think about your own situation and whether you would handle it like that person said he/she did. Other speaker's stories may be so unlike your own and unlike the drunken life that you lived, that you have no choice but to "leave" what they say at that table; what that speaker offered had nothing to offer you.

Listening for similarities is what the listening is for, not for finding differences. No one in A.A. ought to criticize another member for anything he/she did or said. It isn't your business. Your business is none of their business--except to listen and learn. If your business is anybody's business, it is the business of your sponsor, and you should find a sponsor right away, even if you "fire" him/her after one meeting. I learn so much from theists that I'm grateful they are at the tables; I just don't "take" their god perspective; I leave it at the tables.

If, as an atheist who is telling his/her story at the A.A. meetings you find resistance, ask yourself if perhaps it is because you didn't have the sense not to criticize the "god" part of their program. You don't want them to criticize your atheism; don't denounce their theism and your resistance to it. I actually think many of the people I attend meetings with learn from the things I have to say. I know they thank me for speaking, and many are my friends.

My own sponsor is not an atheist. He doesn't have to be. He is a "free thinker" who accepts that whatever a person chooses for himself is best for that person. But on the book bag he has, which is filled with his A.A. approved literature, he has a sign that says, "In case of emergency, please contact God." But one of my previous sponsers was very religious; yet he accepted my atheism and worked with me anyway.

The only way you might not make it in A.A. as an atheist is if you are "reductive." Reductivism is a way of thinking that is accepted by many naturalists, most of whom are atheists. Reductivism says that we have no soul or spirit as something that can speak to us, that we can use as a sounding board within our consciousness, and that "seems" to have a life of its own.

Well, actually the reductivist admits that that is exactly the problem: the soul "seems" to exist, we can feel it and experience it, but it isn't real, they say. It's just a "twitch" in our emotional center that is caused by chemicals and electricity in the brain, and in the body. It "seems" to have a life of its own, but reductivists won't admit it is anything more than a "twitch," because to admit that it is more than a twitch is, in their estimation, the same as admitting that it is transcendental, in other words, that it supernaturally manifests itself.

There are all sorts of naturalists. I'm a metaphysical naturalist, which means I don't believe anything is supernatural. That is what makes me an atheist. But some naturalists believe in some supernatural things. Some even believe gods exists; they just don't believe in the gods. And some naturalists believe in god. It's confusing even for we who call ourselves naturalists. The bottom line is, you can be an atheist and still believe the soul is a wonderful expression of your consciousness, and that it is something you can use in that "spiritual" quest that all A.A.er must seek, myself included. I love the spiritual quest, but when I die, my spirit dies with me.

Admitting the soul exists as a thing that tells us about ourselves, that tells us when we hurt or when we are ecstatically happy, is not the same as admitting it is transcendental, eternal, everlasting. It doesn't mean that at all.

I believe there is a power greater than myself, because obviously it made me and I did not make it. Thomas Jefferson, who believed in God, still believed that what held the universe together and made it work was not the direct hand of God, but "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Those Renaissance men used to capitalize all the words that had importance in a sentence, and so Jefferson capitalized Nature to make it equal with God.

Jefferson didn't know what God was anymore than anyone else does, although he and his Deist friends who founded America thought God was supernatural. Still, not knowing exactly what God was but believing He existed, they were naturalists--because they believed that God, whatever He was, created Nature and then let Nature take over. God sits back and watches, and keeps his hands off, never interfering in the affairs of Man, because He gave man Reason for the very purpose of controlling his own affairs.

So for an atheist "god" can be those laws of nature which are obviously there, like gravity. Isn't gravity a power greater than you are? If you want to escape gravity, you have to learn how. You can't just jump in the air and go floating into space.

An atheist author wrote that it is impossible to hear a man's voice over the distance of 240,000 miles; and yet, she wrote, we heard the astronauts speaking to us from the moon. We learned to command nature, but we cannot change nature; we created radio waves and receivers, but it's still just as impossible to hear a man's voice over 240,000 miles. That is a power greater than any man can overcome.

And so it our Reason we must use to navigate the tricky twists and curves of being atheist in a god-based group. But there are very good reasons for navigating those waters.

1) You receive the "Promises," which are officially described, in part, as:

"a new freedom and a new happiness;" a loss of regret over things we may have done or said in the past; that "we will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace"; that "that feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear"; that "our whole attitude and outlook on life will change" for the better; and "we will intuitively know how to handle things which used to baffle us. [These promises] are being fulfilled among us--sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them."

I added the emphasis at the end of that because it must be understood that these things don't come just by showing up at A.A. meetings and listening and talking. You have to work for them, you have to go "into action," which is name of a chapter in the Book. That is why it is important to find someone you can work with on a one-to-one basis. That person is who you can call your sponsor, even if you find another sponsor next week.

Don't let the "god" part of A.A. deter you from using the program selfishly. "The principles we have set down are guides to progress." [italics added]

"We are not saints. Do not be discouraged.
Half measures availed us nothing. Without help it is too much for us.

"But there exists among us a a fellowship, a friendliness, and an understanding which is indescribably wonderful. We are people who would not normally mix. We are average Americans.

"The tremendous fact for every one of us [in A.A.] is that we have discovered a common solution. We have a way out on which we can absolutely agree, and upon which we can join in brotherly and harmonious action. This is the great news this book carries to those who suffer from alcoholism."

Those paragraphs were mixed and matched from different pages and chapters of the Big Book. But that is how each of us must learn to do it. People at meetings who quote the books flip back and forth between pages and books all the time, taking what they need and leaving the rest.

"If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps"; and one of these steps is putting up with a program based on god while you look for your answers that are devoid of god.

In the meantime you will have that fellowship, and those promises will come true if you work for them.

And oh yes, about 1) listed above. Where are the rest of the reasons for navigating the god-waters of A.A.? Well first, ask if all those reasons listed under 1) are not a good start. But then ask yourself if you "want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it." Any length, that is, that does not deny your own beliefs. No person who believes the "Rapture" is coming next year will try to convert a Unitarian; and no Babtist will try to convert a Coptic. No one of any religious faith asks another person of another faith to deny his or her own religious beliefs.

If you are willing, that is the best reason for navigating the waters. Don't be afraid of the theists and their talk of god, because when you open your mouth and speak of how you are finding this-way and that-way of attaining those "principles" which are really only "guides," and you show that you are finding them through something someone said and through something, anything, that you found in the books, then you, and they, will know that the program they put so much faith into even works for we atheists.

For Part II Click Here more

For some outside perspectives, read the Comments on the link below.

http://atheism.about.com/b/2006/04/10/discussion-atheists-in-alcoholics-anonymous.htm

Note: I will be the featured speaker at the Center For Inquiry (CFI) meeting, October 16, 2008, in Portage, Michigan. The topic is "Atheism as a 'Religion' Protected by Courts According to the Establishment Clause" CEC

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

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The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of the
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM, The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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How Does An Atheist Navigate Alcoholics Anonymous?

Part II Working Within the A.A. Idea
Continued From Atheist Survival and Recovery in God-driven Alcoholics Anonymous

(All phrases you will read that are between " " are phrases written in approved A.A. literature. Any phrase you see in italics are phrases used in A.A. but are not necessarily part of any A.A. approved literature--like One Day At A Time, Easy Does It, or Keep Coming Back 'Till You Want to Come Back. I will supplement the official phrases with references, or with live web links from the Big Book, so you will be able to read it for yourself. The Big Book is online free, by the way, and you can--and should--look at it, either online or in a book. http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/
However, as authors will do, some of what you see in italics are my own writing of things I wish to set apart from the rest of the text.)

In AA we have "12 Traditions" as well as "12 Steps". Tradition One is "Our Common Welfare should come first; personal recovery depends on AA unity."

http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/en_appendicei.cfm

Entering an AA group, knowing people in that group are going to talk about God, higher powers, and spirituality, is for most atheists an unsettling experience. It was not unsettling for me--not in the beginning. I was familiar with A.A. through AlAnon, which is for people who have friends or family who are alcoholics.

Just being with that group helped keep me sober day by day, so that I did not drink in front of the person I was trying to understand and to help.

How do you become a member of a group? Tradition Three states: "The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking." That is important to remember for the atheist. It says nothing about membership requiring a "belief in God." It does not say membership requires a belief in a "higher power." But as I explain later, a "higher power" does not have to be supernatural, and having one actually does assist in staying sober.

http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/en_appendicei.cfm

I have heard many people say they came to their first A.A. meetings with a closed coffee mug full of booze; or that they went to a meeting every day without fail, then left the meeting to go get drunk with their friends.

But they had a desire to stop drinking. They simply didn't know the way, which is to listen, to learn, and to act on what you learn. If you get sober at an in-house clinic somewhere, they will probably use parts of the A.A. program, initiate you in it, and then on your way out the door tell you that the only way to remain sober is to keep going to A.A. meetings!

I was not unsettled by the religious people, at the first A.A. meeting that I went to for my own alcoholism, because I have no problem with religious people who don't try to preach. A.A., when done right, does not preach, but the moral messages it tries to inculcate can have many different personal applications.

At A.A., we take those parts of the messages we hear, the parts we need, and we leave the rest without concerning ourselves with it. That is why the "common welfare" of the group is so democratic that no one person can dominate it, no one person's idea(s) can dominate it, and all members' ideas must be tolerated, even ours, the atheists.

But I realized that I had to work the "12 Steps," and that they were steeped in "god." I had to work them or I would be in danger of slipping back into my old ways, feeling the old fears, the old dependencies for alcohol or drugs, whenever I might find myself in a familiar old situation that triggered the desire.

I knew I had to do the Steps because for five years I was in AlAnon. I saw my friend and many other people I met there become sober, civil, productive people again. I had no trouble accepting that A.A. does work.

How does it happen that we atheists can get away from this danger of feeling overwhelmed by god-driven fanatics who we think want us to believe in a higher power? We do it the same way everyone does--by listening to all the things said by other members, and then from those things we hear, by taking what we need and leaving the rest.

The AA Bible is called the "Big Book." That is not its name. Its name is "Alcoholics Anonymous." It has this to say about the change that we can effect in ourselves to prevent slipping back into the old needs, desires, habits and "character defects":

"The terms 'spiritual experience' and 'spiritual awakening' are used many times in this book which, upon careful reading, shows the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms."
[italics added] Appendix II, Spiritual Experience

http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/en_appendiceii.cfm

So how do we atheists get past god and the spiritual stuff? Well, that's the heart of the matter. It has many answers, because we are individuals, and for each of us there is a different set of criteria preventing us from a belief in god. A.A. knows that each of its religious believers is an individual, different in his or her beliefs, and no denomination is favored over another. Yes, there are Jewish A.A. groups, Islamic groups, Buddhist groups, and organized agnostic and atheist groups (very few and far between.)

But the majority of the groups are Christian-based. Yet, the Babtists don't force themselves on the Methodists who don't force themselves on anyone because no denomination in a general group can take precedence over another. A Catholic may speak from his or her experience as a Catholic and even state he/she is Catholic. This is good. It gives you something to reference within that speaker's words.

I have seen people in my home group accept what I have to say about some things, because I can see their eyes light up, or a smile come across their face, or I see them nodding in affirmation and sometimes I even hear someone say "Amen!" to my comments! If that is not acceptance, if that is not acceptance for the "common welfare" to let me speak in a god-based meeting, and if that is not acceptance I see and hear and feel from my fellow members, then I don't know what is.

Without describing each of the categories, there are "weak" atheists and "strong" atheists--so say many atheists. I don't say that. To me an atheist is an atheist, someone who thinks, believes, or knows there is no god.

But the differences exist between us apparently because some atheists can actually believe god exists, but have no belief in it/him. These kinds of atheists can actually have beliefs in other supernatural things like ghosts, card and tea-leaf readings, and astrology.

Then there are those atheists who believe god does not exist, but don't know and don't care. Do you see the quicksand we could get into trying to figure it all out? It isn't important in this context. If you want to know more there are books, and websites devoted to the subject. But the cause of the quicksand is the cause of the problem of how each individual atheist gets over the "god thing," he/she finds in A.A. I'll tell you what I've discovered: A.A. says it only has to be a "god of your understanding." [Steps 3 and 11]
http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/en_bigbook_chapt5.pdf

Notwithstanding the use of the word god, you and any other atheist who wants to get sober can find something that is a "power greater than himself." [Step 2]

So it turns out it is really up to you to figure that out for yourself. I've been a die-hard "there is no god" atheist all my life, yet I can now easily talk about my realtionship to a higher power when I am in the group, and I can even reference the god that everyone else believes in. I know that because of my willingness to sit in a meeting and discuss how I stay sober using A.A. while at the same time remaining atheist, at least one other atheist, possible more, have joined my group.

This is because my group is comfortable with me, and I am comfortable with them. One of the other atheists said her former home group made her feel uncomfortable. When ever any group makes you feel uncomfortable for any reason, not just religious reasons, it is probably better to find yourself another regular group, which is what a home group is. Your home group is the one you attend most often, but not necessarily all the time. You attend it because it feels like home, in a way.

Unless you believe the soul absolutely does not exist, [see Part I for a more complete description of this phenomenon] not even as something that dies with you, then you will come to discover the reason that group feels like home is a spiritual reason.

By using the group, not god, as your "higher power," you will begin to make "conscious contact" with "God as you understand him." My own such understanding is simply that within my understanding, god is just the power we call the laws of nature. But one of my sponsors told me that if I can have a spiritual experience while contemplating nature, such as during the stereotype of laying on the ground staring into space, then I have conscious contact with the "god of my understanding." Since he is a very religious man, I accepted his advice to use that as my understanding.That might have been the best advise I ever got from a sponsor.

But it's a good thing while trying to understand A.A. to ask a lot of questions from someone you trust who is already in A.A., rather than trying to figure out by yourself what the statements in the books mean. This is because taken at face value they often mean something other than when another chapter, paragraph, sentence, phrase, or Step is taken into consideration. Everything in life has "contextual meaning," and the words of the Big Book are no exception. It took a religious man to tell me that as an atheist I already had my own "conscious contact with the god of my understanding."

Whether you like the idea of being in a "god" group or not doesn't matter. One of the truths of being in a group is stated in an informal A.A. slogan. It says, I get drunk; We stay sober. In other words, there is power in belonging to a group.

When we don't have a reason not to not get drunk, we won't. You may think you can't help it, that you try to drink just one beer, wine, or mixed drink, but then you find yourself unable to stop.

You're right. You can't help it--alone. The second part of that phrase, We stay sober, means that when you have a support group made of people who are just like you because they can't stop getting drunk when they only want one drink, then as part of a group, "we" stay sober.
There is another informal saying in A.A. that is very appropriate for the atheist. It begins in the form of a question that millions of people have actually asked when they start going to meetings. The informal saying is the answer.

Q: How long do I have to keep going (coming) to A.A.?
A: Until you have the desire to want to come to A.A.

I am not the first atheist who accepts that A.A. can work for him/her. I am not the first atheist who had to negotiate the tricky propostions of the god problem. I will not be the last, and I hope you will not let the god problem stop you from seeking help.

Your life may depend on it; you may have been sentenced by a court to attend; your family may have begged you to go; you may be losing your home, your job, everything that is valuable to you. Don't let a little thing like an idea you don't like stop you from selfishly using an A.A. group to lean on. They won't mind it if you don't bash their god-ideas. And if they bash your no-god ideas, find another group, or talk to someone in that group you trust.

Look for Part III late next week.

For some outside perspectives, read the Comments on the link below.
http://atheism.about.com/b/2006/04/10/discussion-atheists-in-alcoholics-anonymous.htm