The Heresy of the Twelve Steps
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by A. Orange
Possibly the greatest heresy in the A.A. dogma is this bit of idolatry: In the Alcoholics Anonymous program, you can use anything for your "God" or "Higher Power". A.A. has lots of stories of people using a bedpan, a teacup, a doorknob, a stone, a teddy bear, a mountain, a motorcycle, or "Good Orderly Direction" for their "Higher Power". You can pray to any Golden Calf, stone idol, or Higher-Powered item of Household Hardware that you like. You can even use your local A.A. group itself as your 'God' if you wish. One of the more ridiculous word redefinitions that A.A. offers us is, you can make the word "G.O.D." mean "Group Of Drunks".
Another 12-Step organization, Cocaine Anonymous, even twists this into
"G.O.D. = a Group Of Drug
addicts".6
A.A. founder Bill Wilson wrote:
"I must quickly assure you that A.A.'s tread innumerable paths in their quest for faith. ... You can, if you wish, make A.A. itself your 'higher power.' Here's a very large group who have solved their alcohol problem. In this respect they are certainly a power greater than you, who have not even come close to a solution. Surely you can have faith in them. Even this minimum of faith will be enough." Most Christians are more accustomed to the idea of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost. Not very many of them will enjoy praying to a group of drunkards, and Seeking and Doing the Will of Drunkards. And I can't imagine Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, or Native Americans being too happy with such a "Higher Power", either. And "having faith" in a Group Of Drunkards is really stupid. What am I supposed to believe? That they won't relapse and drink some more? That they have a special hotline to God and are really expert on spiritual matters? That I can trust them with my life and my soul? In addition, the Twelve Steps talk about "God as we understood Him". Members are allegedly free to define God however they imagine or understand "Him" to be. Bill Wilson told A.A. recruiters to
Stress the spiritual feature freely. If the man be agnostic or atheist, make it emphatic that he does not have to agree with your conception of God. He can choose any conception he likes, provided it makes sense to him. The main thing is that he be willing to believe in a Power greater than himself and that he live by spiritual principles. What is that deceptive double-talk?
And what about, Such examples are of course absurd, but so is the statement that you can use any kind of a "God" or "Higher Power" you want, and that He will nevertheless perform a miracle for you — save you from death by alcoholism. Bill Wilson emphatically repeated that doctrine in the Big Book:
Despite the living example of my friend [a sober Ebby Thacher] there remained in me the vestiges of my old prejudice. The word God still aroused a certain antipathy. When the thought was expressed that there might be a God personal to me this feeling was intensified. I didn't like the idea. ... That is obviously insane: "It's only necessary that I believe whatever I wish to believe, to get what I want. My new delusion will care about me."
The A.A. auxiliary for the other family members, "Al-Anon", also teaches that we can choose any "God" we want. Al-Anon propaganda even goes so far as to say that we can hire and fire "Gods" as the mood strikes us:
The concept of "God as we understood Him" was hard to grasp. My family believed there is only one way to view God. My parents used religion to keep me in line. ...
Who says that everybody is qualified to "hire" the God of their choice? That is the heresy that the Catholic Church calls "indifferentism" — the declaration that all religions and Gods are just as good, and it doesn't matter which one you choose.7 But who decides which versions of God are acceptable to an A.A. 12-Step program? The sponsors? Where did they get their theological training? What seminary did they attend? Do theology lessons come packaged in bottles labeled "Jim Beam" and "Jack Daniels"? Bill Wilson's goal was ostensibly to be ecumenical, universal and all-embracing, to avoid religious conflict, but his solution to the problem was hardly sound theology. Something that tries to be everything to everybody ends up being nothing to anybody.
And that is the error that the Catholic Church calls "syncretism" — uniting conflicting religious beliefs so as to reduce them to a common denominator that is acceptable to all.8 It's like reducing religion to a bland pablum that is not offensive to anyone, no matter what their morality or lack thereof. In addition, Bill soon contradicted himself. Just any old conception of "God" or "Higher Power" will not do at all. The A.A. God cannot be just any spiritual "Power greater than yourself". The Alcoholics Anonymous "God" must be a meddling, micro-managing, order-dictating, prayer-answering, message-sending, wish-granting, miracle-delivering authoritarian power, or else the Twelve Steps will not work. If your personal version of "God" or "Higher Power" doesn't meddle and deliver miracles on demand, then
The idea that you can surrender to any "Higher Power" and it will be wonderful spirituality is nonsense. What if someone believes that Satan is the Master of This World, and that evil rules this world? How will surrendering to Satan and Evil work out? Or, what if someone believes that Reverend Sun Myung Moon really is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ? Or Bagwan Shree Rajneesh is God. Or Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada? Or Lafayette Ronald Hubbard is the Savior of Mankind? Will the A.A. sponsors instruct such a believer in "the correct beliefs", and "the correct faith", or will they say that the beginner's strange "Higher Power" is really okay, and will produce great results? So, will Satan or Moon or Rajneesh or Prabhupada or Hubbard really get people sober and deliver miracles on demand and correctly guide people in Step Eleven? Remember that A.A. claims that any Higher Power is okay, as long as it makes sense to the newcomer:
Stress the spiritual feature freely. If the man be agnostic or atheist, make it emphatic that he does not have to agree with your conception of God. He can choose any conception he likes, provided it makes sense to him.
But what if the newcomer is insane? Lots of them are, you know. The A.A. Step Two even says:
So what "Higher Power" is restoring that insane person to sanity?
Please let me repeat that, it's so important:
A.A. says that an insane person can wisely chose the correct god to save him. The A.A. story about your relationship with God is also rather curious. The way that Bill Wilson tells the story, you must surrender yourself utterly to your Higher Power (Who is supposed to be God, but Who might be a doorknob or a bedpan, or a Group Of Drunks, or something else), and be His slave, and do His bidding every day forever after. Every day, you must do Step 11, hearing the voice of God to get work orders and the power to carry out those orders. And then you go do what the voices in your head tell you to do. In return, He will do some magic tricks for you and take away your desire to drink alcohol, and also grant a few other wishes, starting with restoring you to "sanity" and taking care of your will and your life for you, and then removing all of your "defects of character" and "moral shortcomings".
We were now at Step Three. Many of us said to our Maker, as we understood Him: "God, I offer myself to Thee — to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, 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, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!" We thought well before taking this step making sure we were ready; that we could at last abandon ourselves utterly to Him. Follow the dictates of a Higher Power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world, no matter what your present circumstances!
"Yes, Satan, I will surrender myself to you utterly. I will worship you and love you and give you my soul, and be your grovelling servant for all of eternity, in trade for you granting me this list of wishes right now — starting with the wish that you make me quit drinking. ...And then you have to take care of my mind, my will, and my life for me, and restore me to sanity, and remove all of my 'defects of character'..." One thing that the preachers told me about that Evil One is that he is very clever and lies a lot. They say that Old Beelzebub, the Lord of the Netherworld, isn't above claiming to be, and appearing to be, God or the Angel of Light or some other Higher Power, while he bargains with you... And a church that starts off by instructing you to lie and deceive — "Fake it 'till you make it" — "Act as if" — "Don't tell the newcomers..." — "...lure the reader in..."10 — "Don't raise such issues, no matter what your own convictions are."11 — "Dole out the Buchmanism 'by teaspoons, not buckets'..."12 — is highly suspect. Did Jesus tell you to lie to the newcomers, and tell them that the program never fails, to get them to join the church? Was it Jesus or Satan who was called "The Great Deceiver"?
"Yes Higher Power, I will lie for you, and practice deceptive recruiting for you, and tell the newcomers that God is 'a Group Of Drunks'... So I can't help but wonder, if you sell your soul to — "turn your will and your life over to" — Bill Wilson's vague Higher Power, or his "God as we understood Him", who can be anything from a doorknob to a bedpan to a "Group Of Drunks" to a "god", well, just who or what are you really dealing with and giving your soul to?
"Come on, hurry up. Sign the contract. Abandon yourself to me utterly. And would you quit looking at my feet?" Just a thought...
Speaking of dealing, some of the early A.A. members seem to have thought that the "spiritual" program was a business deal, too. A.A. number three, Bill Dotson, is quoted in the Big Book chapter A Vision For You as saying this to Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob:
"The way you fellows put this spiritual stuff makes sense. I'm ready to do business. I guess the old folks were right after all." Bill Wilson repeated the "deal" description of the A.A. program again while reminiscing about how he wrote the Big Book and the Twelve Steps:
Well, we finally got to the point where we really had to say what this book was all about and how this deal works. As I told you this had been a six-step program then. "Yeh, don't you just hate it when they manage to wiggle out of the contract after you've made a deal for their souls? I mean, there you are, you've got a signed contract, you bought the guy's soul fair and square, it's a done deal, and then the damned fool manages to wiggle out of the contract at the last minute, just because of some darned nitpicking little legal technicality. It's really enough to frost your ass, even in Hell. Damn that Daniel Webster anyhow... And damn those Yankees, too, especially that floozy Lola..."
This is how Bill Wilson described men joining Alcoholics Anonymous:
Many a man, yet dazed from his hospital experience, has stepped over the threshold of that home into freedom. Many an alcoholic who entered there came away with an answer. He succumbed to that gay crowd inside, who laughed at their own misfortunes and understood his. Impressed by those who visited him at the hospital, he capitulated entirely when, later, in an upper room of this house, he heard the story of some man whose experience closely tallied with his own. Since when do you "succumb" and "capitulate" to a cure for a disease? You don't. What Bill is describing is men surrendering their minds and souls, not men getting cured of a disease.
One of the biggest heresies in the Twelve Steps is the demand for a miracle in Step Seven:
No matter how humbly we ask for it, and no matter whether we do it on our knees, like the original version of Step Seven said, it is still a demand for a miracle, not just a polite request. We have made absolutely no preparations for taking care of ourselves and solving our own problems ourselves should God decide not to grant us that miracle. There is no Alcoholics Anonymous "Plan B." Bill Wilson became even more demanding in his so-called "Seventh Step Prayer" — Bill wanted every defect removed, and he wanted strength too, and Bill didn't even say please or thank you:
When ready, we say something like this, "My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen." We have then completed Step Seven. Well, Bill might have been done with Step 7, but was God done? Is God going to grant Bill's demands and make Bill into a strong, defect-free slave?
(Also notice how Bill Wilson actually tried to con God — Bill argued that God should remove all of Bill's defects so that Bill would be a more useful slave for God.) God has to do it, or He will blow the whole 12-Step program. Step Seven is the heart of the entire A.A. self-improvement routine: You just wait for God to fix you. Literally. The rest of the steps involve making lists of all of your faults, wrongs, sins, defects of character, and moral shortcomings, and making more lists of all of the people you have harmed, and making amends, and wallowing in guilt, confessing your sins, and admitting that you are powerless and insane, but no other step actually deals with fixing yourself.
What if God says,
"No. You made your bed, now you lie in it..."? If God doesn't fix you, then you are screwed. If God won't fulfill Bill Wilson's demands, and work Bill's Steps like Bill Wilson says, then your goose is cooked and you are in trouble. 'But let's not think about that. Let's all just "come to believe" that God will fix us and make us quit drinking just because we humbly "pray" that He do it.' And He will, Bill Wilson says:
We will seldom be interested in liquor. According to Bill Wilson, recovery from alcoholism is effortless. "It just comes." We don't have to do a thing. Our problems are magically solved "without any thought or effort on our part." That is obviously completely delusional nonsense. (No effort? Don't we have to go to a life-long series of A.A. meetings, and "Work The Steps" constantly, and "Seek And Do God's Will" every day? That's a lot of effort.) Remember, That is very much like this temptation of Christ in Matthew 4.5:
Then the Devil took Jesus to Jerusalem, the Holy City, set him on the highest point of the Temple, and said to him, "If you are God's Son, throw yourself down, for the scripture says, You do not throw yourself off of a precipice, demanding that God save you before you hit bottom and go "splat!", and you don't demand that God keep you from drinking, or else you will kill yourself on booze. But the pro-A.A. literature still insists that we should do that. We find something very similar passed off as a wonderful "leap of faith" in the book Power Recovery, The Twelve Steps for a New Generation, by James Wiley:
A Leap of Faith What insidious nonsense. The Bible just specifically told us not to play games like that. Worse yet, according to the standard A.A. dogma, we can have any God or home-made "god" we wish. Our "Higher Power" can be any "Power greater than ourselves", or any "God as we understood Him". Our new god can even be a bedpan or a doorknob or a Golden Calf or a stone idol or our new "G.O.D." that is a "Group Of Drunks". Then, according to Mr. Wiley, we are supposed to faithfully believe that our personal made-up version of God is totally real and correct and all-powerful and able to deliver miracles, and we are supposed to believe it so fervently that we will make a "Leap of Faith" and jump off of a spiritual cliff, betting our lives and our souls that our home-made god will catch us before we hit bottom and die. And then they pass off that suicidally stupid behavior as wonderful "faith". Faith in what? How is any of that compatible with the teachings of Jesus Christ? (Or compatible with the teachings of Mohammed, or Buddha, or Seneca, or Confucius, or Soloman or Moses?)
Just because we make ourselves believe that something is true doesn't make it true.
And should God refuse to do any of those tasks for us, then it ruins the whole Twelve-Step program. If God won't play along, and Work The Steps for us, and do what we wish, then how can the Twelve-Step program possibly work? The simple undeniable answer is, "It can't."The whole Alcoholics Anonymous program depends on God micro-managing both our lives and the world around us, and granting our wishes and making everything turn out okay just the way that Frank Buchman and Bill Wilson said that He would if we followed their instructions. And we are supposed to believe that we are incapable of doing any of that stuff for ourselves, and God must do all of it for us. We are supposed to believe that we are completely powerless, helpless, insane, and unable to manage our own lives, and that only by having God make good little robots or puppets out of us can we live good lives.
The A.A. slogan is:
"I pray to God every day that I never get the idea that I can
run my own life."
And to say that ordinary people can control their drinking, and give it up for Lent, but alcoholics cannot, is baloney, and a cop-out. It is just spiritual laziness, demanding that God fix what the alcoholic could fix by himself.
Then some teachers of the law and some Pharisees spoke up. "Teacher," they said, "we want to see you perform a miracle." And Matthew 16:1 says:
The Pharisees and Sadducees came and, to test him, asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He said to them in reply, "In the evening you say, 'Tomorrow will be fair, for the sky is red'; and, in the morning, 'Today will be stormy, for the sky is red and threatening.' You know how to judge the appearance of the sky, but you cannot judge the signs of the times. An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah." Then he left them and went away. Jesus just didn't like people demanding miracles and signs, did he? Bill Wilson wrote:
"God ought to be able to do anything."
I have to comment: Countless millions of other people on this planet are suffering and dying from all kinds of things, particularly starvation and diseases, and God won't do just any old special favor for them. God lets them die. Sixty thousand people die of starvation every day on this planet, and most of them are children. That's just how it is. Millions of people are dying of AIDS in Africa. It's beyond being an epidemic — entire regions of Africa are being depopulated. Those people are far too poor to be able to afford drugs like AZT; their entire countries are too poor; it's totally out of the question; so they die without medicines. And God just lets them die, in spite of their prayers. But somehow, you 12-Steppers think that you are so special that you rate God's favors when they don't? What makes you think you are so special? And mind you, that is not a criticism of God. It is a criticism of the stupidity of people. In the rather hokey movie Oh God! where George Burns played God, he had at least one great line, in which God said simply, "I don't do cheap magic tricks." That one simple line answers so much. Isn't it enough that the Lord created the entire physical Universe in a blindingly brilliant flash of light? Must the Lord also hang around this backwater planet and do cheap magic tricks to amuse the local yokels? If you can accept the idea that the Lord simply does not do cheap magic tricks, then you can accept the idea that God doesn't play Santa Claus, and God doesn't deliver miracles on demand. You can understand how But if you do come to terms with that idea, the idea that God is not Santa Claus and does not grant wishes like a Genie who just popped out of a bottle, then it really blows a big hole in the theology of Alcoholics Anonymous. All of the people in meetings yammering about how their "Higher Power" is giving them a bunch of wonderful things becomes ludicrous. All of this talk about getting the goodies becomes childish nonsense and wishful thinking: This is also childish nonsense and wishful thinking:
I have no other explanation for the many good things that have happened to me since I have been in A.A. — they came to me from a Greater Power. And so is this: We will seldom be interested in liquor. ... This is more childish nonsense and wishful thinking: Of course, the often disputed question of whether God can — and will, under certain conditions — remove defects of character will be answered with a prompt affirmative by almost any A.A. member. To him, this proposition will be no theory at all; it will be just about the largest fact in his life. He will usually offer his proof in a statement like this:
And lest you have any doubts, Bill Wilson wrote in the Big Book:
Step Eleven suggests prayer and meditation. We shouldn't be shy on this matter of prayer. Better men than we are using it constantly. It works, if we have the proper attitude and work at it. Bill Wilson wrote on page 87, "We are careful never to pray for our own selfish ends", but the giddy believers who are getting the goodies ignore that, and happily brag at meetings about all of the wonderful stuff that God has given them lately, like this...
I have no other explanation for the many good things that have happened to me since I have been in A.A. — they came to me from a Greater Power. (Those good things couldn't have been caused by quitting drinking? They couldn't have been caused by no longer constantly shooting yourself in the foot by always being drunk at the wrong times? They couldn't possibly have been caused by being clear-headed, healthy, and able to work and get stuff done — just for a change?) And then the enthusiastic believers pray for even more goodies, as if God is their Divine Butler, on call day and night, always eager to solve all of their problems for them.
Many times at our own, as well as at AA meetings, I have heard people talk of "gimme prayers" as if they were worthless. Speaking only for myself, I believe they could not be more wrong because I cannot think God considers any prayer worthless.
I find it amusing that the Hazelden Foundation 12-step religious propaganda says that Al-Anon is all wrong and is practicing black magic:
The wrong kinds of prayer can be a form of black magic, for when we seek to use a supernatural force to help us achieve our goals, it ceases to be supernatural and becomes superhuman. To make God into a servant is to place him under our superhuman power. Yet is this not exactly what we have long been taught to do? To get down on our knees and pray for God to go to work for us?
And, as usual, I am left with the question: Many newcomers to A.A. find the oldtimers instructing them to stop taking their doctor-prescribed medications and just trust the 12 Steps to heal them, no matter what their aliment is. That is faith healing, pure and simple, just as insane as those Christian cults that don't believe in going to doctors for medical care when they are sick, even deathly ill. A.A. has caused many deaths by telling sick people not to take their doctor-prescribed medications. A.A. and the other 12-Step organizations, especially Al-Anon, jabber slogans like, A.A. members who insist that the 12 Steps will heal any disease are actually attributing magical powers to the 12 Steps. Those Steps have no such powers. The 12 Steps are Dr. Frank Buchman's cult religion practices for recruiting and converting newcomers. They have no healing powers. Attempting to use the 12 Steps to do magical healings is essentially an attempt at practicing black magic. A.A. also arrogates unto itself healing powers like those of Jesus Christ. But nowhere in the Bible does it say that if you practice the 12 Steps, you will get healing powers. And demanding that God heal people just because they are A.A. members doing the 12 Steps is another example of the A.A. heresy: "Miracles On Demand". Here is a long list of A.A. "No Meds" Horror Stories, where the A.A. "no medications" doctrine produced very bad results.
Many churches will object to the occult practices inherent in Alcoholics Anonymous. Essentially, Step Eleven demands that the A.A. follower "channel" God. (Yes, channelling, just like Shirley MacLaine taught.) The A.A. member is supposed to just sit quietly, and pray and meditate until he hears God talking to him. Then he assumes that his own internal mental noise, the voices in his head, are The Voice of God, talking to him and giving him religious instruction and marching orders:
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. (Note the contradiction here: The standard A.A. dogma says that you can use anything you wish for your Higher Power — a doorknob, a teddy bear, a bedpan, a motorcycle, or your A.A. group {G.O.D. == "a Group Of Drunks"}. But when you practice Step Eleven, and pray to Doorknob Almighty or Baal Bedpan, "God" answers back... Hmmm....) Bill Wilson learned this particular technique from the notorious fascist cult leader Dr. Frank N.D. Buchman, whose Oxford Groups would sit silently during the "Quiet Hour" and listen for God to give them messages. (Apparently, God told Frank that Adolf Hitler and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler were really wonderful fellows.)
Step Eleven suggests prayer and meditation. We shouldn't be shy on this matter of prayer. Better men than we are using it constantly. ...
PASS IT ON says: "One of Bill's persistent fascinations and involvements was with psychic phenomena." It speaks of his "belief in clairvoyance and other extrasensory manifestations" and his belief in his own psychic ability. (Page 275.) "This was not a mere pastime. It was a passion directly related to AA which went on for many years." (Page 280.) Likewise, Susan Cheever reported, 'Like Bill, Bob believed in paranormal possibility [sic.] and the two men spent time "spooking," invoking the spirits of the dead.'5
UPDATE: Feb. 2012: Alas, the latest news is that the managers of Stepping Stones refurbished and refurnished the room, and got rid of all evidence of spooking.
Bill Wilson fancied himself an "adept", "gifted"
in the psychic sense, and he served as a medium for a variety of
discarnate entities who chose
to speak through him in séances and "spook sessions."
One account published in the official A.A. history book,
PASS IT ON,
tells of a pre-breakfast conversation that Bill had with a trio
of ghosts
— whom Bill Wilson claimed were three distinct long-dead Nantucket
citizens — during a trip to Nantucket in 1944.
(Pages 276-278.)
Henrietta Seiberling wrote that Wilson also practiced automatic writing, which is supposed to be a way of receiving the thoughts of a dead person. How it works is, you relax and clear your mind, and then just write down whatever comes into your head. Then you imagine that your writings are messages from departed people or other spirits. Bill imagined that he wrote dictation from a Catholic priest who had lived in the 1600 period in Barcelona, Spain. In the official A.A. history book 'PASS IT ON', Bill Wilson described the "spook sessions" this way:
"The ouija board got moving in earnest. What followed was the fairly usual experience — it was a strange mélange of Aristotle, St. Francis, diverse archangels with odd names, deceased friends — some in purgatory and others doing nicely, thank you! There were malign and mischievous ones of all descriptions, telling of vices quite beyond my ken, even as former alcoholics. Then, the seemingly virtuous entities would elbow them out with messages of comfort, information, advice — and sometimes just sheer nonsense." Notice how Bill Wilson clearly stated that he received messages from evil spirits, something that he also denied or minimized when it suited him to do so.
Bill enthusiastically wrote to his Catholic Priest friend, Father Ed Dowling, telling about the help and guidance he was receiving from spirits of the dead while writing his second book, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (July 17, 1952):
...Bill adds, "But I have good help — of that I am certain. Both over here and over there." The "over there" refers to the spirit world. Bill slipped in this voice from the other side like this was an everyday happening. It was, he said, the voice of Boniface, an apostle from England to Germany, Bavaria, and France, who reformed old church structures, and as bishop with powers from Rome, set up new monasteries and bishoprics. Amazing, that Bill with hangups on the hierarchical church was open to receiving help from a dead bishop.
Father Dowling's response was far less enthusiastic. He felt that Bill was messing with lying evil spirits from the dark side:
"Boniface sounds like the Apostle of Germany. I still feel, like Macbeth, that these folks tell us truth in small matters in order to fool us in larger. I suppose that is my lazy orthodoxy." Bill wrote back that he felt that the attitude of the Catholic Church towards his psychic contacts was narrow-minded and unreasonable:
"It doesn't seem reasonable to think that the Devil's agents have such direct and wide open access to us when other well-disposed discarnates including the Saints themselves cannot get through. That is, in any direct way. Since prudent discrimination and good morality is necessary when we deal with people in the flesh, why shouldn't these be the rule with discarnate, too. So motivated, I don't see why the aperture should be so large in the direction of the Devil and so small in the direction of all the good folks who have gone ahead of us. One can't blame the Church for being cautious but I do sometimes wonder if the view isn't rather narrow and even monopolistic. To assume that all communications, not received under Church auspices, are necessarily malign seems going pretty far. I'm not sure the Church says this but that is what the inference always seems to be. I do say this, though, more in the nature of speculation than argument, for the spook business is no longer any burning issue so far as I am concerned. Without inviting it, I still sometimes get an intrusion such as the one I described in the case of the purported Boniface." The ghosts were talking to Bill Wilson without him even inviting them? Bill really did have mental problems, didn't he? Also notice the mind game that Bill Wilson was playing. Bill first wrote to Father Dowling with a "wowy-zowy look-at-me" attitude, bragging about his psychic contacts, but when Father Dowling expressed disapproval and wouldn't bite on that hook, Bill changed his rap and declared that he had lost interest in "the spook business". But Bill's séances and "spook sessions" still went on for years. Many of the early A.A. members were very disturbed by Bill Wilson's occult activities, and they tried to get him to stop it. One, Sumner Campbell, wrote to a man whom they all respected, C. S. Lewis at Cambridge University in England, describing Bill Wilson's spook sessions and asking his opinion. Lewis wrote back with total disapproval, saying, "This is necromancy. Have nothing to do with it." Bill Wilson ignored the criticism and continued conducting his séances and communicating with the dead people each evening anyway.3 (That is the same C. S. Lewis as the author who is famous for the Tales of Narnia books like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and also The Screwtape Letters.)
But, perhaps, if you practice Step Eleven enough, you too will start hearing voices in your own head... And maybe, if you hold séances and use the Ouija board, automatic writing and spirit rapping, you can contact the spirit of Bill Wilson directly, and ask him about this stuff yourself. See "The Funny Spirituality of Bill Wilson and A.A." for more of Bill's supernatural shenanigans. Also see what Nell Wing, Bill Wilson's secretary for many years, wrote about Bill's spook sessions.
Why should death transform an evil personality like Adolf Hitler into a kindly, loving spirit who will just always tell us the truth and only pass on the best of cosmic wisdom to us? I see little reason to believe that death would just suddenly make an angel out of Adolf. If we are channelling and opening ourselves up to random spirits, why wouldn't a creep like Hitler occasionally show up and lie to us about who he is, and try to fool us into thinking that he was a good ghost, and then try to poison our hearts and minds with his evil and his hatred? After all, that's pretty much what he did while he was alive. And Bill Wilson was assuming a lot when he assumed that he would always be able to tell the difference between the good ghosts and the bad ghosts who came a'visiting. Presumably, the really clever bad ghosts won't tell you that they have evil ulterior motives. They will lie to you. After all, they are evil spirits, aren't they? For that matter, why mess around with the small fry? I mean, Bill Wilson and Frank Buchman insisted that we would talk to nothing less than God Almighty Himself when we sought Guidance during our Quiet Time. So why couldn't — wouldn't — the Big Guy for the Other Side show up? And how could we tell for sure which one was talking to us? After all, Lucifer was said to be very beautiful — he was The Angel of Light before his big fall. — And he is now said to be very clever and very convincing.
So, like we were saying, everybody just assumes that they are not channelling the spirit of Hannibal Lecter or Theodore Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. And, for that matter, nobody ever seems to get Forrest Gump, either. It's always Cleopatra or St. Francis of Assisi or Joan of Arc or some genius like Einstein... Worse yet, everybody just happily assumes that "the spirits" know what they are talking about, and tell the truth, and really do have peoples' best interests at heart. We have, of course, no evidence to support such giddy Pollyanna beliefs.
Much of A Course In Miracles sounds disconcertingly similar to some aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous:
...the course more than intimates that through the proper practice (doing its lessons), anyone can become a channel for the spirit of Christ.
To start at the top, Alcoholics Anonymous is also a channelled
religion. Step Eleven specifically instructs members to practice
channelling every day. This is simply a continuation of Frank Buchman's
doctrine of
The Quiet Time where one makes oneself into a
channel to receive
Guidance
from God:
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. The authors correctly point out that a channelled religion creates a completely self-referential system. One cannot criticize it or find fault with it because any criticism can be deflected by saying, "Well, you just haven't done the practices long enough to know the truth. Try our path for a year, and then you will see." A.A. has just that problem. Anyone who questions A.A. dogma gets condescending put-downs that he is "just a newcomer, a baby, and hasn't been a member long enough to know". He is "still inexperienced and having just made conscious contact with God..." (Big Book, page 87.) It is difficult to counter the claims that if you just practice the Steps long enough, hard enough, "working a strong enough program", that you, too, will eventually receive Divine Guidance and begin to see the truth of the A.A. program and the brilliance of Bill Wilson. Then we have several other points of similarity between Alcoholics Anonymous and A Course in Miracles: Both are authoritarian and renunciate, both demand that your "self, self-centeredness, and ego" be crushed, both demand that you "surrender to God's will" [really, surrender to the cult], and both indulge in grandiose babbling about super-human purity and unconditional love. Look closely at the A.A. statements that newcomers will receive "complete acceptance" and "unconditional love". Such grandiose claims are ridiculous on the face of it — because they are actually accompanied by veiled demands that the newcomer quit drinking, Keep Coming Back, get a sponsor, Work The Steps, and believe in A.A. — but there is much more to it than just that: Kramer and Alstad point out:
Love and self-sacrifice are joined in all renunciate moralities. When unconditional love is made into a prescription of how to be, it is really an authoritarian mechanism of control. If one gives, or loves, or forgives willingly, it isn't a sacrifice. They become sacrifices when done because of an ideal. Here one is not only controlled by the ideal but wants others to be controlled by it, too.
So all of the appeals for, and demands for, complete acceptance
and unconditional love are
really just another mechanism of authoritarian control — especially,
of authoritarian mind control: (Never mind that fact that coerced unconditional love isn't really love at all.) But the grandiose demands for "complete acceptance" and "unconditional love" are basically impossible to fulfill, because they are too lofty, too angelic, and totally unrealistic. As Kramer and Alstad wrote: "Ideals of unconditional forgiveness or unconditional compassion (the Buddhist version) are variations on the same theme that create unlivable standards of emotional purity." Such high ideals are just some more examples of the standard cult characteristic of "An Impossible, Superhuman Model of Perfection". Such standards are things which are great for making people feel inadequate, inferior, and guilty, because people can't live up to them, but those super-human standards are not much good for anything else. No sane person would even want to live by such high-falutin' standards. Imagine that you are in an A.A. meeting, and one of the other members "shares" the confession that he has been kidnapping, raping, and murdering little girls during full moons. Would you really feel obligated to give him "complete acceptance" and "unconditional love"? I sincerely hope that you would feel disgust and anger and call the police on him, fast. (And that example is not too much of an exaggeration: The Paul Cox case featured an A.A. member who confessed in and after an A.A. meeting that he had murdered a doctor and his wife while on a drunken binge. Another A.A. member told the police.)
On a more mundane level, would you wish to give him complete
acceptance if he confesses that he throws temper tantrums and
beats his wife or kids regularly?
Or mugs gays and blacks for the fun of it?
Shouldn't you rightly criticize him and tell him to stop behaving in such a despicable manner? On a more practical level, I find that I simply do not like all of the people I meet at A.A. meetings, and I don't even want to be friends with some of them, never mind pretend that I am giving them complete acceptance and unconditional love. And I certainly don't want to look like I am granting complete acceptance, or even approval, when they tell me about some of their bad habits. And I don't feel guilty about that, either — as a functional adult, I claim the right to decide for myself whom I will accept into my life, and to what I will give my approval and acceptance.
What is not noteworthy about the Course is its worldview, which is not essentially new, but a mixture of Eastern mysticism with Christian love and forgiveness. Of more interest to us is its claim of not being authoritarian. It is overtly stated that it is not necessary to believe any of the Course's assertions to experience the promised transformations:You need not believe the ideas... accept them... [nor] even welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter, or decrease their efficacy.All that is required is conscientious daily practice of the lessons.
The claim that you don't have to believe in the stuff masks the fact
that
you have to believe in the stuff. And, even if you are a bit skeptical to start with, you will gradually get converted into believing all of it: The Course is but another revealed (by an unchallengeable authority) renunciate ideology that separates the spiritual from the mundane, the pure from the impure, the selfless from the self-centered. It says listen to your own voice, but programs what your voice will say by taking away the validity of experience, reason, thoughts, and disapproved of emotions. Like gurus, it then fills the vacuum it creates with its own renunciate worldview offering the same old coin of eternal bliss. Nothing could be more authoritarian, for who could argue against a disembodied spirit with the credentials of a traditional God? If one were to say (as we do) that one's inner voice says something quite different, then what?
Thus the misguided idealist renounces this world that has disappointed him, and he also denies his own thoughts and feelings which are in and about this world — he can "stuff his feelings" and suppress his anger, disappointment, rage, pain, and sorrow, and just pretend to feel only eternal bliss and joy (or "Serenity and Gratitude") because the "true reality" is just fine. He programs himself to only believe in and accept the reality of his perfect dream world. It's the ultimate escape artist's trick.
Obviously, such a Course in Miracles that ostensibly teaches "how to channel" is a ticket to travel right out of this world. The promoters of the course hint that it is a ticket to Heaven. Others would suggest that it's a trip to Hell. And Alcoholics Anonymous has the same problem. Later in their book, Kramer and Alstad specifically talked about Alcoholics Anonymous, and said,
Although overtly leaderless (actually, old-time members assume leadership roles), A.A. shares many features of authoritarian cults: an unchallengeable written authority ("The Word"); commandments or rules to live by; a conversion experience achieved through inducing surrender to a super-human power; and dependency on the group, which often undermines relationships with those who do not accept the sanctity of the 12 Steps. Disagreement with any of the Steps is labeled denial or resistance. Like other authoritarian groups that manipulate fear and desire, fear of leaving is instilled by the often repeated warning, "You can't make it without us." While we are talking about the problems with the Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous practice of dabbling in the occult, there are very serious theological problems with Frank Buchman's whole doctrine of receiving constant "Guidance" from God, and with Bill Wilson's copy of it in Step Eleven, too:
Step 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. Rev. John A. Richardson wrote about such 'Guidance':
It is difficult to conceive anything more degrading. The theory and practice of 'guidance' is not merely foolish and likely to lead in practice to moral pitfalls. It is in itself fundamentally immoral.... Imagine a world in which everyone lived wholly by 'guidance,' making each day simply the execution of commands received in the morning 'Quiet Time' and noted in the guidance book! All planning and thought, everything permanent in human relationships and human purposes, everything which makes life really human and worth living, would be brushed aside as an irrelevant waste of time if this theory were worked out to its logical conclusion and acted upon to the full" ("Morals and the Group Movement," The Nineteenth Century and After, Nov., 1933, p. 602). If we are supposed to just sit quietly every morning and "channel God" and receive our work orders through "spiritual live wires" (as Frank Buchman called them), then we are reduced to being nothing but mindless little robots that are remotely controlled by God, just like the radio-controlled toy cars that you can buy at Radio Shack. We don't need to think or plan or have a brain at all — we are just radio-controlled toys, objects be moved here and there by the whims of God (or worse, by the whims of some "Higher Power" who is not 'God'). That is grossly heretical. Nowhere in the Gospels did Jesus ever say that the Christian life consists of being a mindless robot who just follows orders.
The very idea that you can give up on your life and become a puppet who is remotely controlled by God and taken care of by God is heretical. There is nothing in standard Christianity or in the Bible that says that you can do that. Nor is there any such doctrine in Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or any of the world's other great religions. If the ideal spiritual life consists of being guided and manipulated by a "Higher Power", then Pinnochio the Puppet is a holy man. And the radio-controlled toy cars that you can buy at Radio Shack must be very spiritual too. It is also heretical to declare that the ideal Christian life consists of being a mindless slave who is "Guided" by some "Higher Power" in a Step-Eleven séance. I am reminded of a criticism of Frank Buchman's "Oxford Group" doctrine of "Guidance by God" that Marjorie Harrison wrote. This is where the Alcoholics Anonymous theology came from:
The Bishop of London, speaking on the [Oxford] Group some time ago, said: "God has given us intelligence and reason to be the lamps to guide us."
Bill Wilson loved to brag about humility, but that is a sham.
We are told in Al-Anon that there can be no progress without humility. This idea is confusing to many at first, and it almost always encounters a stubborn resistance in us. "What!" we say, "am I supposed to be a submissive slave to my situation and accept everything that comes, however humiliating?" No. True humility does not mean a meek surrender to an ugly, destructive way of life. It means surrender to God's will, which is quite a different thing. Humility prepares us for the realization of God's will for us; it shows us the benefits we gain from doing away with self-will. We finally understand how this self-will has actually contributed to our distress. (Notice the word redefinition game: "Humility" does not mean "surrender to God's will". Furthermore, the real A.A. surrender is to the cult elders, not to God.)
So it is that we first see humility as a necessity. However, the A.A. Step 11 reveals a complete lack of humility in A.A.:
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. This step is just some dabbling in the occult, an attempt to "channel" God and hear the Voice of God in a séance. This is all of course merely the repetition of the Oxford Group practice of "Guidance", where they believed that anyone could sit quietly for 15 minutes or an hour, and get a message from God. A Catholic theologian criticized that belief with these words:
What the Group has forgotten in all of this is that God ordinarily uses secondary causes (public revelation as proposed by the Church, tradition, our own intellects, etc.) as instruments for the attainment of truth. The Catholic, therefore, realizes that God does not want us to set these lightly aside and seek truth directly and immediately from His infinite knowledge. God wants us to seek Him, His Goodness and Truth, in all that He has made and with all the means He has given us; otherwise, He has made all of these in vain. Indeed. For someone to simply assume that he can talk directly to God at any time that he chooses to have a "quiet time", and get divine answers on demand, is the height of arrogance and egotism, the exact opposite of humility. Ordinary people have to spend years in prayer and meditation and contemplation — some spend lifetimes in monasteries — but Oxford Group members and Alcoholics Anonymous members get direct contact with God in 15 minutes. In truth, the A.A. attitude is, "I am so holy and so special that I have a direct hotline to God, and He gives me His personal attention, and God talks to me every day and gives me instructions and wisdom, and work orders and the power to carry them out, in less than an hour, while God ignores the six billion other less-worthy souls around the planet. Not only that, I am also very, very humble." That is not humility, that is extreme arrogance and delusions of grandeur.
** And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin, ** is pride that apes humility. ** == Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Devil's Thoughts Speaking of the occult, the way Bill Wilson tells the story of his "spiritual experience" while detoxing in Towns Hospital, Bill summoned up God the way that a wizard would summon up a demon by name: This is part of Robert Thomsen's description of Bill Wilson's "spiritual experience"
His fingers relaxed a little on the footboard [of the bed], his arms slowly reached out and up. "I want," he said aloud. "I want..." In the A.A. book Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age (1957) Bill described his experience this way:
All at once I found myself crying out, "If there is a God, let Him show himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!" In the book Bill W.: My First 40 Years, Bill Wilson described his "religious experience" this way:
The terrifying darkness had become complete. In agony of spirit, I again thought of the cancer of alcoholism which had now consumed me in mind and spirit, and soon the body. But what of the Great Physician? For a moment, I suppose, the last trace of my obstinacy was crushed out as the abyss yawned.
Note that Mr. Wilson allegedly had the power to summon up the Spirit of God,
just by demanding that God show himself.
Ordinary sorcerers and wizards have to settle for summoning
up ordinary demons, but not Bill Wilson.
Bill Wilson waved his arms in the air and commanded
God Almighty Himself to appear (and Bill didn't even say "Please"): Also note that Bill was arrogantly demanding that God show him a sign. We touched on that before, when Christ condemned the Pharisees for demanding to see a miracle and seeking signs, in Matthew 12.38 and Matthew 16:1. And although they seem to never come right out and say it directly, the A.A. true believers often imply that somehow God had to answer Bill Wilson's demand for a sign, or that God did give Bill a spiritual experience because Bill demanded one:
As usual, Dr. Silkworth gave Bill belladonna and barbiturates, and as the alcohol wore off, Bill sank into a deep depression. ... Although he didn't believe in God, although he believed only in the power of his own mind, he found himself begging God for help. "If there be a God, let him show himself!" he cried. The response was amazing. "Suddenly my room blazed with an indescribably white light..." So Bill Wilson demanded that God show Himself, and God had to obey Bill Wilson... "The response was amazing." Susan Cheever didn't bother to mention the inconvenient but important fact that belladonna is a very powerful hallucinogenic drug. She just said that the doctor gave Bill belladonna and barbiturates in the hospital, and then, when Bill demanded that God show Himself, the results were "amazing" — Bill started to see things. I would suggest that the "amazing" results were far more due to the hallucinogenic drug cocktail taking effect than due to Bill's ridiculous arrogant demand that God show Himself and give Bill Wilson a sign.
The way that A.A. tells it, "God" is a vicious tyrant who will torture you to death with alcohol unless you grovel before Him every day. If you don't do Step 11 and conduct a séance to hear the Voice of God dictating orders, then you will die from alcoholism, Bill Wilson wrote. Jesus said that God loves you more than a mother loves her baby, but Bill Wilson said that God doesn't love you at all; God is a harsh dictator: We are not cured of alcoholism. What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. Every day is a day when we must carry the vision of God's will into all of our activities.
Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A., and there we discover the fatal nature of our situation. Then, and only then, do we become as open-minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be.
"Then, too we have a dictatorship — and how! God constantly says to us, 'I trust you will find and do my will.' John Barleycorn, always at our elbow, says, 'If you don't conform, I'll kill you or drive you mad.' So we have all the advantages and more, of the modern dictatorship."
Therefore we [AA] have the full benefits of the murderous political dictatorships of today but none of their liabilities.The full benefits of murderous dictatorships? What benefits? Benefits to whom? And what liabilities of dictatorships does A.A. not have?
Follow the dictates of a Higher Power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world, no matter what your present circumstances! In A.A. there is active still another form of association, a form of which the world is today in great doubt. It has its virtues, nevertheless, especially for us of Alcoholics Anonymous: I am speaking of dictatorship. In A.A. we have two dictators, and we profit and grow through both. One is John Barleycorn, who is never very far from the elbow of each of us. The other is the Father of Lights, who presides over all men. God is saying to us, "Learn my will and do it." And John Barleycorn is saying to each of us, "You had better do God's will or I will kill you!" So, according to A.A., the A.A. "Higher Power" tortured me with alcohol abuse and alcohol addiction for 20 years until I lost everything and was homeless, and the A.A. "Higher Power" did it so that I would break down and join the right church — the A.A. religion. Only then will "Higher Power" be nice to me. That is not what Jesus taught. That is not anything like what Jesus taught. In my 69 years of life on this planet, I have met some very cruel and unsavory characters whom I do not wish to ever meet again. But the A.A. "God" is far worse. He isn't a "Loving Being"; he is more like a Demon From Hell. And then there is the question of who is entitled to speak for God. Bill Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous start off saying that you will hear the voice of God when you practice Step Eleven:
Step 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. But then Bill Wilson declared that you weren't qualified to hear God talking to you, and that you had to take your received occult messages to your sponsor or other group elders, and let them interpret the 'words of God' for you, and tell you what God really meant:
If all our lives we had more or less fooled ourselves, how could we now be so sure that we weren't still self-deceived? How could we be certain we had made a true catalog of our defects and had really admitted them, even to ourselves? It is grossly heretical for Bill Wilson to imply that the A.A. sponsors get to speak for God.
How does Alcoholics Anonymous rationalize arrogating the job of priests and ministers? The same problem is present in the A.A. "Tradition Two", where God supposedly speaks through the A.A. members:
For our group purpose, there is but one ultimate authority — a loving God as he may express Himself in our group conscience.
But who decides what God is expressing in the group
conscience? So when did they study theology in a seminary, and learn to speak for God? Another problem with Bill Wilson's understanding of miracles is his declarations that God's miracles wear off after 24 hours, and that alcoholics must beg God for another miracle every day:
We are not cured of alcoholism. What we have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. Every day is a day when we must carry the vision of God's will into all of our daily activities. When Jesus Christ healed people and made the blind see and the cripples walk, Jesus didn't say that the healing would only last for one day and then it would wear off, so all of those people had to "Keep Coming Back!" for another treatment every day... Jesus also never said that the healings would be revoked if people didn't "Seek and Do the Will of God" every day. Jesus also never said that the healings would be revoked if people didn't go to a meeting at the Temple at least once a week. Jesus never told Lazarus that he would go back to being dead if he didn't please God all of the time.
And Jesus never said that you can't quit drinking unless you "carry the vision of
God's will into all of your daily activities."
While we are talking about people praying for miracles, we shouldn't overlook Christ's admonition of those who pray in public (like at A.A. meetings and A.A. conventions):
And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
"Let Go and Let God" is one of the most popular A.A. slogans. That is suggested as the solution to numerous problems. It sounds very religious or spiritual, but it isn't either. It is lazy, superstitious, mindless, and heretical. Someone might as well incant, "Let Go and Let Santa Claus." Jesus Christ never taught people to live passive lives of "Let Go and Let God." Jesus never told people to sit on their duffs and wait for God to do things for them. Jesus always talked about people doing things for themselves, and actively doing good. Christ said that good people should feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, and give money to the poor. "Let Go and Let God" is just another bit of A.A. heresy.
We are God's eyes in this world; it is our duty to see what needs to be done. "Let Go and Let God" will guarantee that God's work doesn't get done in this world. Everybody who follows that slogan will be sitting on his hands and waiting for God or somebody else to do the right thing. Nobody will be doing God's work. When you think about it, "Let Go and Let God" could be one of the core teachings of the Satanic Church. It is one of the most pernicious teachings that A.A. espouses, one that guarantees that God's work will not get done in this world.
 Drunk-junk jewelry
Speaking of "Letting go and letting God", and the Al-Anon idea of "doing nothing about my problems", A.A. also does nothing to help anyone else with their problems. Jesus Christ repeatedly instructed people to feed the hungry, clothe the naked children, and help the poor. Buddha and Mohammed taught similar things. But Bill Wilson taught the exact opposite. Bill said that we must not be of service to other people, not even to alcoholics:
The minute we put our work on a service plane, the alcoholic commences to rely upon our assistance rather than upon God. So Bill Wilson taught that we should not help the poor or the alcoholics, and we should not perform any services for them. Bill said that they must learn to rely on God. And A.A. lives by those instructions today. Alcoholics Anonymous never engages in any kind of charity work or social work to help the poor or the homeless, even though many of those people are poor and homeless because they are alcoholics. The only way that A.A. wants to "help" anyone is to convert them to the 12-Step religion:
Helping others is the foundation stone of your recovery. A kindly act once in a while isn't enough. You have to act the Good Samaritan every day, if need be. ... That isn't quite what Jesus had in mind when He instructed us to help others. Imagine someone going to confession, and saying to the priest, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six months since my last confession. I've done all kinds of things since then, but none of them is my fault. I am powerless over everything, and I have no control over my actions. I turned my will and my life over to the care of God quite some time ago, and now God controls everything, and anything I do wrong is God's fault. If I do something good, it is because God makes me do it, so I can't accept any praise. If I do something bad, it is because God makes me do it, so I can't accept any blame." The priest isn't going to accept that cop-out for a minute. And what if that person continues with his confession, "I have been defeated by sin, and have no power over it. That is why I gave my will and my life to God, so that He can do something about it. God is the only hope I have of not being destroyed by sin. So all I can do is Let Go and Let God." The priest isn't going to accept that one either. The priest will tell that person to get off of his lazy ass, and quit feeling sorry for himself, and get to work at fixing himself and battling sin. And the last thing the priest will say is, "Nobody is powerless. You can resist temptation, so do it." The priest is right, and he clearly sees what could come of this nonsense: Imagine a horny teenager who says, "I am powerless over my sexual urges. I am driven to have sex all of the time. I can't keep my hands off of the girls. So I joined Sexaholics Anonymous, and turned my will and my life over to the care of God, and humbly asked Him to remove my shortcomings. [Long-comings?] Well, He hasn't gotten around to doing it yet, so I just can't help but gleefully jump on all of the pretty girls, day and night, night and day, until God gets around to fixing me. It isn't my fault. It's all God's fault, because He isn't doing His job." Logically, the kid has a point, if we believe in the Twelve-Step bull droppings: Now, your friend is responsible for whether the car crashes or not. Now, God is responsible for whether your life crashes or not. You don't have to do a thing anymore. "Let Go and Let God" is a very popular A.A. slogan. All Christian religions emphasize the idea that you are responsible for your own actions. And so do Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism (more properly called Vedantic religions). And so do Native American religions. I just can't think of another religion, anywhere in this world, besides Alcoholics Anonymous (and its parent, Buchmanism, a.k.a. The Oxford Group Movement, a.k.a. Moral Re-Armament, a.k.a. Initiatives Of Change), that pushes the idea of you not controlling yourself, of you not controlling your drinking, of you not being responsible for your own actions, of you being powerless over any temptation or vice, and of you not ever being able to change that. In truth, even A.A. is confused on this issue:
As an insurance against "big-shot-ism", we can often check ourselves by remembering that we are today sober only by the grace of God and that any success we may be having is far more His success than ours. When someone stays sober for a year or more, all of the members celebrate and thank and praise God for performing that Miracle. But when an A.A. member does something bad, like relapse, the member gets the blame. Suddenly everybody forgets about God, and whether He was running the show. That is not logically consistent, to put it mildly. I can just see Mr. Spock of Startrek saying, "That is not logical. Whatever the causal agent is, it is responsible for both its meritorious actions and its reprehensible actions. And the most likely causal agent is the A.A. member himself." The A.A. theologians try to dodge the inconsistency by declaring that some people have really turned their lives over to God, and some people haven't. Some are holding back a little, and keeping a little of their ego still "inflated". And when those people do their own will, rather than the Will of God, then that is when they get into trouble. That is a rather depressing view of the human race. People's wishes are always bad? Anyone who does what he wishes to do will always do evil? Is it evil to wish that your child gets to eat? Is it evil to willfully insist that your family and friends not suffer harm? (That is what is called a Gnostic heresy — and it is also Manichaean — the doctrine that all goodness is in Heaven, and this material world and all of the people in it are all evil — matter and flesh are in the realm of darkness — this world, the Earth, is the realm of Satan. Buchmanism is loaded with that particular heresy.) Common sense tells us that the vast majority of Americans are not members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Neither have the vast majority of Americans surrendered their wills and their lives to God, in the style of A.A.. Most people still have their own egos, their own wills, and their own desires. Nevertheless, most people do good things every day. Most people do almost nothing but good, every day. Thus, the inherent true nature of people must be mostly good. Certainly not all good, not angelic, but more good than bad. No matter how bad the world looks some days, people are still far more good than bad. Our world would self-destruct if that were not so. Undoubtedly, there have to be some A.A. members who have not turned their wills or their lives over to God; lots of them, actually. They may have thought about it, but not quite gotten around to doing it. Or they may have discovered the truth: that it is extremely difficult to do, almost impossible to really do. That the only people who have really shed their egos and their desires and totally surrendered to God are saints, real genuine saints, and those things are as rare as hen's teeth. So rare, in fact, that we are fortunate if there is just one present on this planet at any given time. What strikes me as one of the most tragic parts of this whole twelve-step routine is the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who are wasting their time pretending that they have turned over their wills and their lives to the care of God, or wasting their time, and going through all kinds of frustration, trying to hand over their wills, and finding out that the darned things won't go away, that they are tied to the owner as if with a rubber band, and just snap back. And that the harder you try to get rid of your will or your desires, the more strongly they just come back to you.
This stuff is really old hat. Us Hippies were talking about
it back in the sixties, and it was
thousands of years old then. One of the popular Zen stories
tells of a student who had been
working for ten years to gradually rid himself of all desires.
He went to his Zen master and asked, And the old Zen master smiled and answered, "Now you really do have a problem, don't you?" Alas, neither Frank Buchman nor Bill Wilson knew much about Buddhism or Hinduism, or ego loss, or human psychology, or Zen, or the whole process of really surrendering to God, or infinity, or eternity, or your Higher Power, or whatever you want to call it. And neither Buchman nor Wilson had a clue about the reality that even if you succeed in that surrendering process, that it is just temporary, and you will return to normal reality again all too soon, like in just a few minutes; that only a few rare souls can stay out there for any length of time at all. (Bill Wilson should have known, because his own drug-induced religious experience only lasted for a few minutes, and then Bill returned to normal insanity.) The rest of us mere mortals are still stuck with our wills, our lives, our egos, and our desires. Now we might have a moment of inspiration, and do something good while divinely inspired, or we might just have a good moment and do something good without God forcing us to do it... Thus it becomes basically impossible to tell whether the good things an A.A. member does are due to his or her own inner goodness, and good wishes, or due to God's goodness. It is just goofy logic then to insist that all of the good actions of A.A. members are done by God, and all of the bad actions are done by the members themselves. But if we dump that brain-damaged logic, then we blow a huge hole in the A.A. theological edifice. The whole game is based on surrendering control of your life to God, and becoming a good little robot, or a good little puppet on a string. And being good, and staying sober, is considered to be evidence that you have surrendered to God, and God is keeping you out of trouble. And the more years of sobriety you have, the closer you are to God. Obviously. But alas, that logic breaks down again when old-timers relapse. I have just recently listened to the stories of a guy who had 9 years of sobriety and then relapsed, and a woman who had 18 years off of drugs and then relapsed. Tragic. Sad. But even more tragic was their inability to even understand what happened in their lives. The guy only said, "I just got stupid for a while." The woman said, "It's so wonderful. Now that I have gone out and used and come back, I know that I don't ever have to relapse again." And everybody cheered and clapped. I couldn't help but wonder, "Did you know that you had to relapse before the last time? Were you saying to yourself, 'Even though I have 18 years of success, I know that I will have to relapse at least once more, just for the Hell of it.' Huh? I don't think so." They just didn't have a clue about what had really happened, or wouldn't admit to having a clue. If that is true, then they are sitting ducks for another relapse, because they won't know how to prevent the next one any more than they did the last one. A.A. and N.A. dogma says that you just cannot stay clean and sober for that long without working the Twelve Steps and getting God's help. (If you could, then who needs the Twelve Steps or N.A. or A.A.?) Anyone with 9 or 18 years of sobriety has obviously long since "worked the Steps", many, many times over, and has turned his or her will and life over to the care of God. Obviously, long ago, according to standard dogma. So where did the will to relapse suddenly come from? How can someone without a will of his own suddenly get the will to relapse? Inquiring minds want to know. Our friend Spock would say, "That is not logical. Something without any will cannot wish to get a will. If we assume that a rock is an inanimate object without a will of its own, then we can see that a rock cannot suddenly wish to learn calculus, or wish to take a drink, or wish to get a free will of its own. On the other hand, when a human suddenly wishes to take a drink, and does so, after 9 years of not drinking, then we must assume that the human has a will of his own, and had one even before the desire to drink came along." Apparently, some of the A.A. faithful are capable of thinking along these same lines, but they seem to burn out a few critical brain cells at just the moment when they almost hit on the truth. This text is from a pro-A.A. web site that wishes to teach us to do the 12 steps:
STEP 3: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. To turn my will and our life over?? This sounded like some kind of brainwashing to me. Was A.A. (Alcoholics Anonymous) some kind of cult? It turned out that A.A. is not a cult. I have the right to take my will back any time I want.
This guy just doesn't seem to be able to understand what
"will" means. You can't willfully
take your will back if you have no will. And you can't
"want" to take your will back if you have
no will. In this context, "want" and "will"
are the same thing. And to say that you have the "right"
to take your will back is some kind of a joke. It is like saying
that you have the "right" to defy
gravity. If you don't have the physical ability to levitate, then
the right to do it is useless. [One can only wonder whether the oldtimers were playing mind games with the newcomer. The new guy worries about whether he has joined a cult, so the oldtimers tell him, "Don't worry. You have the right to take back your will and your mind any time you want."] In truth, your will is a part of your mind, and you cannot just give your will away as if it was a coin or a token. And you really can't be giving it away, and then taking it back, repeatedly, in some kind of a neurotic dance.
Perhaps you saw the beautiful movie Awakenings, starring
Robin Williams. There, Robin Williams played the role of a doctor
who worked in a mental hospital with chronic post-encephalitic patients
who looked and acted like total zombies who had no will of their own.
They were basically catatonic, and sat motionless all day long, unless
the doctor stimulated them and got them to do something.
They would do whatever the doctor made them do, or urged them to do,
but they had little or no will of their own.
That part of their mind was almost a total
blank. I have never seen anyone at an A.A. meeting who looked like that,
and I doubt if anyone else has, either.
The people at A.A. meetings all have a will of their own. There isn't
a mindless zombie in the bunch. Even if you decide that you have no will of your own, even if you decide that you have been defeated, and surrender to someone else, and swear that you have no will of your own left, and have no desire except to do the dictates of your master, then that is still your will. Your will is now to be a sycophant, or a slave, or a passive dependent, and to just get ordered around. But, just for the sake of argument, let's continue with the crazy idea that you can give your will away. Logically, to take it one step further, if the man with 9 years of sobriety had really turned his will over to God, then God must have given it back. And the same is true of the woman with 18 years off of drugs. So you give your will to God, and He turns around and gives it right back to you, and also sticks you with all of your usual problems again? That isn't how the A.A. true believers like to tell the story... Then, to really flog this dead horse one more time, we can ask, "Why did God choose to give that guy his will back, after 9 years of taking care of him? Of course God knew what would happen. As soon as God decided to give that guy his will back, his fate was sealed. His relapse was as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun. So that was a really mean thing to do, giving the guy his will back... Why would God do that? It couldn't be because God was unhappy with something he had done, because he had not done anything. God had his will, and ran his life for him, and made him do whatever he did. Until, suddenly, God didn't feel like controlling him any more. Why not?" Inquiring minds want to know. The really bad thing about those old-timers who relapse is that they threaten to bring the whole logical structure down; they threaten to collapse the whole house of cards. They are living proof that the Twelve Steps don't really work. I mean, if the Twelve Steps won't even save people who have done them for 9 or 18 years, then what hope is there for the rest of us? The Church of Loserism is the church where you proudly brag about what a helpless loser you are. The Church of Loserism teaches that God will love you extra special because you are a worthless sinful weak piece of garbage. God doesn't like competent virtuous people who do things right — God loves the losers, and answers their prayers and grants their wishes. The Beatles' song I'm a Loser is the standard church music. Competence, strength, intelligence, self-reliance, and self-confidence are terrible vices and sins, immoral mistakes to be avoided at all costs, while incompetence, stupidity, ignorance, irrationalty, superstition, blind faith, dependency, weakness, powerlessness, and insanity are virtues to be proudly "admitted" at church get-togethers.
"You are powerless over everything," Obviously, the teachings of the Church of Loserism contradict the teachings of every major religion in the world. All of the mainstream religions teach people to get a grip and live good lives and do things right. In addition, spending years moaning and groaning and confessing what a sinful loser you are is very harmful psychologically. You will turn into what you keep on saying you are. The A.A. Big Book gives us the following religious teaching:
And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation — some fact of my life — unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake. If nothing happens in this world by mistake, if everything is just "exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment", then we have no free will and no individual responsibility for our actions. We are just robots or puppets, being manipulated by God and being made to do His Will. We have to be, because everything that happens, including what we do, is just the Will of God. So we cannot possibly have any choice in the matter, or else something that we do could be a "mistake".
If we do something good, it was just what God wanted to happen. You and I cannot possible do something wrong, because if we did, then that would invalidate the above statement — it would be something that God did not want to happen, and there would be something in this world that was not "exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment."
But the logical conclusion of such a doctrine is absurd: Such a doctrine is obviously grossly heretical. Most all of the major religions of the world teach the concepts of free will and individual responsibility. They tell you to get a grip and manage your own life and do good works. They don't let you just bliss out and mindlessly proclaim that everything that happens is just what God wishes.
So there is no point in us listing all of our "sins" in Step Four, and confessing them to someone in Step Five, because we haven't committed any. It's a contradiction in terms. Likewise, we don't need God to remove our flaws and shortcomings in Steps Six and Seven, because we don't have any. We are exactly what God made us to be, and who are we to choose to change God's Great Plan? The logical conclusion is that we should simply throw away A.A. Steps Four through Seven, and stop wallowing in guilt.
With a God like that, who needs a Devil? (Well fortunately for me, I don't believe that God is like that. It's just some heartless religious nut-cases who are like that.) Another heretical part of the Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve-Step religion is the dogma that says, "Once an addict, always an addict. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Quitting isn't an option for addicts like us." Christian religions believe that people can be saved, that they can be salvaged or redeemed, that they can always be made into something better. And one way or another, the other major religions of the world also say essentially the same thing. They all agree that you can work on yourself, and resist temptation, and make yourself into a better person. Only A.A. says that there is no hope for you, ever, that you are powerless over your sin — alcoholism — and cannot manage your own life, and that you cannot ever recover, and that the only thing you can do is essentially give up on yourself, and hope that God takes over and does something useful with you, and maybe makes you into something good. So, in total despair, you turn over — surrender — control of your will and your life to God in Step 3.
It is a standard Alcoholics Anonymous heresy to teach that no one can resist temptation by himself. A.A. says that you must always continue to attend meetings, and practice the Twelve Steps, for the rest of your life, because you are only "in recovery," and can't ever finish it, and actually get recovered, and learn to stand on your own two feet: "Nobody ever graduates from this program, not ever", the A.A. faithful brag:
In conclusion, I can only say that whatever growth or understanding has come to me, I have no wish to graduate. Very rarely do I miss the meetings of my neighborhood A.A. group, and my average has never been less than two meetings a week. A.A. doesn't seem able to distinguish between an unchangeable condition, like the genes someone inherits, and a changeable condition, like one's behavior. I will agree that, unless genetic engineering makes some fantastic advances real soon, I am pretty much stuck with all of the genes that I inherited. And at least one of them does seem to be a gene for alcoholism. But after that, all bets are off. The gene does not force me to drink. The gene changes how my brain and body react to alcohol, and changes how I feel when I drink it, but the gene doesn't force me to drink. I don't have to do it. I can quit, and I have quit. And I can recover from the effects of having drunk too much, and live a different life. As the Christians would say, "I can do good. I can choose good over evil. I have free will." Those who believe that wallowing in powerlessness forever is a good thing to do might consider this Biblical passage, John 10.33:
They answered, "We do not want to stone you because of any good deeds, but because of your blasphemy! You are only a man, but you are trying to make yourself a God!" Somehow, I get the impression that "knowing your place", and staying in your place, isn't quite what Jesus believed in. How do you read that? Jesus also used the phrase "children of God" more than once, as in, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be known as the children of God." What do children of God grow up to be? I don't think that "Bigger children of God" is the entire answer. Here, we might also consider this statement by St. Paul in his letter to the Romans:
All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery, but you have received the spirit of sonship. Bill Wilson was inconsistent on the issue of "Once an addict, always an addict." The Alcoholics Anonymous theology is very confused and contradictory there, because Bill Wilson and his Big Book also teach us the doctrine of instant perfection, just like Frank Buchman's cult did. So you get both "you never recover" and "you are suddenly transformed" in Bill Wilson's religious teachings:
If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. ... We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. ... Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. ... We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
We pocket our pride and go to it, illuminating every twist of character, every dark cranny of the past. Once we have taken this step, withholding nothing, we are delighted. We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall from us. We begin to feel the nearness of our Creator. We may have had certain spiritual beliefs, but now we begin to have a spiritual experience. The feeling that the drink problem has disappeared will often come strongly. We feel we are on the Broad Highway, walking hand in hand with the Spirit of the Universe.
Assume on the other hand that father has, at the outset, a stirring spiritual experience. Overnight, as it were, he is a different man. He becomes a religious enthusiast. He is unable to focus on anything else. ... There is talk about spiritual matters morning, noon and night.
As soon as we admitted the possible existence of a Creative Intelligence, a Spirit of the Universe underlying the totality of things, we began to be possessed of a new sense of power and direction, provided we took other simple steps.
We have found much of heaven and we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed.
Don't Leave Five Minutes Before The Miracle! The idea of sudden, dramatic attainment of perfection is tempting, but heretical (as well as impossible). Christianity and all of the other major religions of the world teach us that love takes a lifetime — that spiritual attainment is a slow, life-long process of "Progress, not instant perfection" — and you don't just suddenly attain Heaven on Earth, or get instantly rocketed into the fourth dimension. Life just isn't that easy. Like Tom Driberg wrote about Buchmanism (a.k.a. "the Oxford Groups", a.k.a. Moral Re-Armament, MRA), which Bill Wilson adopted as the theology of Alcoholics Anonymous:
For — to sum up the main criticisms — MRA is irrational in its mystique and authoritarian in its methods; it rejects free discussion; it practises with insufficient discrimination the dangerous, and often deadly, doctrine that the end justifies the means; and, by seeming to proclaim the possibility of instant perfection, it raises hopes that cannot be fulfilled. In short, it is essentially non-Christian and anti-democratic. And just to confuse the issue further, "Progress, Not Perfection" is also a common A.A. slogan. But that slogan of course contradicts all of Bill Wilson's writings that were quoted above that talked about instant transformation. Speaking of "the end justifies the means", "Don't Tell The Truth" is another of Bill Wilson's heresies that he felt was justified by the end goal. Bill Wilson taught the A.A. recruiters to hide the true nature of Alcoholics Anonymous — to be deceptive and downright dishonest about the details of the A.A. program when speaking to prospective new members — "It's okay because it will get more recruits into Alcoholics Anonymous."
To some people we need not, and probably should not emphasize the spiritual feature on our first approach. We might prejudice them.
It is seldom wise to approach an individual, who still smarts from our injustice to him, and announce that we have gone religious. In the prize ring, this would be called leading with the chin. Why lay ourselves open to being branded fanatics or religious bores? We may kill a future opportunity to carry a beneficial message.
"A future opportunity to carry a beneficial message" is code language for
"a future opportunity to recruit someone else into the A.A. cult". And Bill instructed the recruiters not to be very explicit about A.A. theology when talking to doubters: When dealing with such a person [an agnostic or atheist], you had better use everyday language to describe spiritual principles. There is no use arousing any prejudice he may have against certain theological terms and conceptions about which he may already be confused. Don't raise such issues, no matter what your own convictions are. (Notice how Bill Wilson declared that anyone who disagreed with his Oxford Group religion was "prejudiced", and "confused about what the words mean". Such arrogance.)
They wanted a psychological book which would lure the reader in; when he finally arrived among us, there would then be enough time to tip him off about the spiritual character of our society." Lure the reader in? A.A. was supposed to be a cure for "the disease of alcoholism". Since when do you "lure the reader in" to good medical treatment? You don't. In fact, that is illegal. "Informed consent" is the law of the land. The doctor must tell you the truth about suggested treatments and medications, and how well they work. In his history of Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, Bill Wilson described how he practiced deceptive recruiting for his cult religion, rationalizing that he had to do it because alcoholics are so bad:
When first contacted, most alcoholics just wanted to find sobriety, nothing else. They clung to their other defects, letting go only little by little. They simply did not want to get "too good too soon." The Oxford Groups' absolute concepts — absolute purity, absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love — were frequently too much for the drunks. These ideas had to be fed with teaspoons rather than by buckets.
Real Christians do not dole out the truth about their churches and their beliefs
by "teaspoons, rather than by buckets".
Fake it 'till you make it.
Yet another heresy in the Alcoholics Anonymous dogma is the concept of inherited sin. That is an old idea, one that the ancient Jews believed in. Jesus Christ was asked whether a man who was born blind was blind due to his own sin, or the sin of his parents. Essentially, Jesus said, "Neither. We aren't playing that game any more. Paradigm shift time. He is blind for the greater glory of God." And then Jesus healed the blind guy. (John 9:1) But A.A. still believes in inherited sin. An alcoholic is born with the gene for alcoholism, so he is born with the spiritual disease (read: "sin") of alcoholism. He is guilty and damned and condemned to Hell the instant the sperm hits the egg. And the only salvation available to him is to accept A.A. and the Twelve-Step program with its Higher Power as his savior. This effectively makes Alcoholics Anonymous one of the strangest deviant sects of Calvinism around: They believe in predestination with a nasty genetic twist. Occasionally, at some meeting, one of the faithful will entertain you with stories of how he was an alcoholic and dysfunctional, even as a child, even before he took his first drink. (I wish I were making this stuff up, but I'm not.) And he wasn't talking about codependency, or being an ACOA — adult child of alcoholics. He wasn't talking about having been made maladjusted or neurotic by an out-of-control alcoholic parent (although he might well have been). He was talking about being a dysfunctional person, an alcoholic, because he was born one. He was talking about having been born with a hereditary "spiritual disease" and having acted wrong since birth. One story in the Big Book begins: My alcoholic problem began long before I drank. My personality, from the time I can remember anything, was the perfect set-up for an alcoholic career. I was always at odds with the entire world, not to say the universe. I was out of step with life, with my family, with people in general. In the Big Book, Doctor Bob, the co-founder of A.A., described his alcoholism this way:
So, he was a born alcoholic, and his alcoholism was caused by in-born selfishness. The idea of that some people are "born the wrong way" is repeated at the start of every Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The A.A. members begin every meeting by reading out loud Bill Wilson's declarations in the Big Book that the people for whom the A.A. program did not work were "constitutionally dishonest with themselves" and "born that way":
RARELY HAVE we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. (Notice the double-talk: It isn't their fault, but it is their fault because they are defective. It sure isn't the fault of Bill's program, Bill says.) Many other people report the same kind of nonsense: Now, a person who has never had a drink, or never drank problematically, would never be called "alcohol dependent" — but you frequently find such people in AA meetings, saying that they "identify as 'alcoholics'", because they "have the character defects of alcoholics" or some such. There have even been reports of people calling their PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN "alcoholics", because they display "self-centeredness"! This rubbish is only possible in a world where "alcoholism" has a mystical, "spiritual" meaning that has nothing to do with alcohol. And it also explains why many people are suggesting that EVERYONE should be in a 12-Step program, whether or not they have any substance abuse problem. And more: Many of the people in the program who were parents would accuse their young children or teenagers of acting "alcoholically" when they were disobedient or acted selfishly. Some of the members' young kids actually believed that they were alkies or addicts even though they had never even nipped off of someone's beer or smoked a joint. It was sad to see children brainwashed by this nonsense. One boy would come up for chips and yearly medallions stating his "clean time" even though he had never used drugs. This mother's middle daughter did the same thing at the AA meeting and this kid never drank. The boy ended up being a problem in his young adult years and the NA/AA father banned the kid from the home. The youngster was once a good boy. Could it be that years of hearing this bull$hit of how he was an "addict" during his formative years led him to believe that he was worthless and would never amount to much unless he continued to go to these meetings with his dad?
One problem that any Christian will have with Alcoholics Anonymous is the organization's abandoning of the Bible. The Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, is their new Bible. Some members claim to still use the Bible; I sometimes hear a bit of lip service to the Bible like, "Keep the Big Book next to the Good Book," but you won't see a Bible at a meeting, and you won't hear it quoted. Everybody is carrying the Big Book, and all readings come from it, or from a similar book of daily meditations, also written by Bill Wilson and other members of A.A.. In fact, reading aloud from the Bible at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is usually forbidden. The Bible is considered "outside literature". Reading aloud at meetings from anything but A.A. "Council Approved" (and A.A.-published) literature is forbidden.
UPDATE: Also see this letter where the correspondent objects to an A.A.
member claiming that his crazy A.A. beliefs are in the Bible when they are not: A.A. has essentially abandoned Jesus Christ. The A.A. faithful believe that Bill Wilson is superior to Jesus Christ when it comes to dealing with alcoholism, and you will hear Bill Wilson quoted a hundred times more often than Jesus Christ. As a matter of fact, I can't really remember the last time I heard Jesus Christ quoted in an A.A. or N.A. meeting... Again, the Christian Bible is not "council-approved literature". The third edition of the A.A. Big Book does not contain the word "Jesus" anywhere, not even once. Bill Wilson raved constantly about "God", but didn't talk about Jesus Christ at all. There is one and only one mention of "Christ" in the entire book, and it is Bill Wilson's statement that before his hallucinatory experience on belladonna, his so-called "spiritual experience," he didn't have much use for Christ:
With ministers, and the world's religions, I parted right there. When they talked of a God personal to me, who was love, superhuman strength and direction, I became irritated and my mind snapped shut against such a theory. To Christ I conceded the certainty of a great man, not too closely followed by those who claimed Him. His moral teaching — most excellent. For myself, I had adopted those parts which seemed convenient and not too difficult; the rest I disregarded. Apparently, Bill continued to disregard a lot of that stuff even after he "saw the light," or saw "the God of the preachers", because Bill never mentioned Jesus or Christ again, not anywhere in the Big Book, not ever. The first edition of the Big Book contained one story, "My Wife and I," that contained a line mentioning Jesus Christ:
Here were these men who visited me and they, like myself, had tried everything else and although it was plain to be seen none of them were perfect, they were living proof that the sincere attempt to follow the cardinal teaching of Jesus Christ was keeping them sober. That story was dropped from the second, third, and fourth editions.
In fact, the most striking evidence of the non-Christian nature of AA is in the testimonials of its members. In Came to Believe, which we are told is a record of "the spiritual adventure of AA as experienced by individual members," not one single testimonial out of the several hundreds could clearly and unquestionably be considered Christian. Not one single reference to the God and Father of Jesus Christ or Jesus Christ, as the one and only Savior, can be found. This is especially interesting when one realizes that every other kind of testimony is recorded. Out of the millions of AA members, surely AA could have included one Christian testimony in a book filled with testimonies! If anything, this book shows an anti-Christian bias. Alcoholics Anonymous is not a Christian religion, no matter what some members like to say. It is a religion all right, in spite of the denials of the members who claim that it is only a "spiritual program." Alcoholics Anonymous is a Buchmanite religion. Alcoholics Anonymous is just Frank Buchman's crazy "Oxford Group / Moral Re-Armament" religion, only slightly edited by William G. Wilson and Dr. Robert H. Smith. Basically, Alcoholics Anonymous believes in and practices the teachings of Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, another man who had little use for Jesus Christ, because he preferred his own beliefs and teachings to those of Jesus. Bill Wilson did not invent the theology of A.A. — he merely copied it from Frank Buchman. In spite of that fact that Bill Wilson tried to hide the strong connections between Frank Buchman and A.A., Buchman's Oxford Group got three mentions in the third edition of the Big Book, while Christ got only one. (The first two mentions of the Oxford Group are in the Foreword to the Second Edition, and the third is on page 218 of the third edition, in the story "He Thought He Could Drink Like A Gentleman".) For that matter, when you consider the fact that Jesus' first miracle was changing water into wine at a wedding party, there might be a real problem with Jesus being a member of Alcoholics Anonymous... (John 2:1 to 2:11.) I am reminded of a contemporary critic of Frank Buchman's Oxford Group, Pastor H. A. Ironside, who criticized Buchmanism by saying that it was not a Christian religion, in spite of Buchman's claims that it was, because everything in Buchmanism would still be possible even if Jesus Christ had never been born. The same thing is true of Alcoholics Anonymous. A.A. would not have to change one word of the official church dogma even if Jesus Christ had never been born. The sacred Twelve Steps of Bill Wilson do not mention Jesus Christ, and do not require Jesus Christ in order to work, and the Twelve Steps don't even require Jesus Christ to have ever existed. Neither are the Twelve Steps based on any of the teachings of Jesus Christ. (They are based on the teachings of Dr. Frank Buchman.) Alcoholics Anonymous simply has no need for, and no use for, Jesus Christ. A.A. worships Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob, not Jesus Christ. An A.A. true believer "shared" this story:
Friday, January 20th 2006 Notice the criticism of faith in Jesus Christ there. This A.A. true believer says that a program based on Jesus won't work, and you will be lucky to survive it. But he will save a seat for you at the A.A. meeting, if you live long enough to make it back to a meeting. So much for the hypocritical A.A. claims that "There is no friction among us over such matters". (The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 2, There Is A Solution, page 28.) Another correspondent who went to A.A. reported:
As soon as I divulged that "The God of my understanding" is God Almighty (God The Father, God The Son, God The Holy Spirit) — I noticed a HUGE change. I experienced being ostrasized, I was keenly made aware that I was the "joke in the room".... people laughed when I "shared" anything. I saw people in the room nodding their head, rolling their eyes at the ceiling, snickering, putting their finger up to their nose and looking in my direction. When I volunteered to "chair a meeting"... I was told I was still a newcomer and I was STRONGLY discouraged from doing that. When I did chair a meeting, an AA member sat across from me and "DICTATED" what I was to do... before I even started, told me what books to read out of, advised me "this is how a meeting goes", and spent the rest of the time glaring at me and sitting with her arms crossed. And, um, since I'm NOT STUPID, I can recognize when someone is belittling me, putting me down, and giving me a "how dare you come in here and chair a meeting and try and tell us what to do. You don't know shit, Lady." attitude. It was LOUD and CLEAR to me exactly how some members of the group felt.
In fact, Christians have often found it necessary to even start their own recovery groups, separate from the A.A. mainstream, just to have an emphasis on Jesus Christ:
Saddleback's 12-Step program began when [John] Baker, a recovering alcoholic and increasingly devoted Christian, grew frustrated with the taboo of mentioning his higher power — Jesus Christ — at traditional Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. In the secular world, the concept of a higher power — the cornerstone of 12-Step programs — can be anything from God to a doorknob, depending on the spiritual comfort level of the person in recovery. And just recently (August 2003), the following exchanges occurred in the Internet newsgroup "alt.recovery.addiction.alcoholism" between some A.A. true believers and me:
Mias:
"I don't know what meetings you have observed, but the meetings we took note of pushed attendeding [sic.] college, taking prescribed medications, and sure as hell never mentioned Jesus." And another A.A. correspondent declared,
"Radically departs from Christianity." I don't think many addicts (or anyone else) really care if this is true or not. Maybe some zealot Christians or dry drunks, etc but that is their problem.
Another feature of the worship of Bill Wilson is something that I would call the worship of false saints and false relics. Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob were not saints, and their former possessions are not holy relics. Way back in 1963, Dr. Arthur H. Cain criticized the growing cultishness of Alcoholics Anonymous, saying:
A.A. as a group must recognize its real function: to serve as a bridge from the hospital or the jail to the church — or to a sustaining personal belief that life is worthwhile. It must not pose as a spiritual movement that provides everything the alcoholic needs to fulfill his destiny. It must not teach its young (as it does in Alateen, its Sunday School for the children of alcoholics) such catechisms as: "We will always be grateful to Alateen for giving us a way of life and a wonderful healthy program to live by and enjoy." It must realize that "the actual coffee pot Anne used to make the first A.A. coffee (shown in "Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age," Harper 1957, a commentary on the A.A. bible, Alcoholics Anonymous, Works Publishing Company, 1946) is not the Holy Grail. The cake and coffee served after meetings are just refreshments, not the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Dr. Arthur Cain might have added: "And the Big Book, 'Alcoholics Anonymous', is not the Word of God, either. Bill Wilson was not "divinely inspired" when he wrote the opening chapters of the Big Book. (He was just repeating the beliefs and practices of the Oxford Group cult religion.) And an old-timer who is selling a copy of the Big Book to a newcomer is not grandly passing on the Holy Wisdom to the younger generation, but you wouldn't know that from the proud look on the old-timer's face." Speaking of abandoning the Bible, some A.A. apologists claim that the Twelve Steps are based on the Bible. Several books and articles have made such a claim — the authors simply browsed the Bible and picked out some quotes that sounded sort of like some of the Twelve Steps, and then claimed that the Steps were based on Biblical teachings. (It's the same process as seeing things in Rorschach ink blots — things that aren't really there.) They simply ignore the obvious fact that Bill Wilson's 12 steps are unquestionably just the occult practices of the fascist cult leader Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, a man who preferred his own teachings to those of Jesus Christ, and who claimed that any contemporary Oxford Group member's Guidance and revelations were just as authoritative as those in the Bible.
The more faithful Christians have found it necessary to "adapt"
Bill Wilson's 12 steps for Christian use.
For example, Step Three: 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.becomes: 3. Made a decision to turn our lives over to God through Jesus Christ. If the Twelve Steps were really based on the Bible, then it should not be necessary to change them and "adapt" them to make them acceptable to a Christian recovery program.2
The irony of a Twelve Step program customized for Christians is that many who use it believe it is not only effective but Biblical. The author of Rapha's program explains that:Rapha's Twelve Step Program for Overcoming Chemical Dependency is designed ... to complement the original Biblically based Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.8If the original Twelve Step program needs to be "adapted" for Christians, it seems odd to say that it is "Biblically based." What kind of double talk is going on here? Unfortunately, this kind of confusion is characteristic of the literature of "Christianized" recovery programs. In the final analysis, any religion that tells you that you can worship a bedpan or a doorknob or a Group Of Drunks as your "god" is more heretical and totemic than Christian. And to insist that you will get a miracle by praying to such a "Higher Power" is more superstitious than spiritual. It is the worst sort of idolatry. Some A.A. members are even more blatant about the huge gulf of incompatibility between Christianity and the 12-Step religion. In a recent radio interview, the country singer and short-lived TV star Steve Earl declared, "I'm not a Christian, and I'm not a Moslem, and not ... a Buddhist." He went on to declare that he practiced "the 12-Step spirituality." (Here and Now, by Robin Young, NPR, 2 Jan 2012, 10:50 AM) Speaking of ignoring Jesus Christ and the New Testament of the Bible, Alcoholics Anonymous actually also ignores the second half of the Old Testament. A.A. is based on rather primitive ideas of God rewarding people for being good and believing in Him. In the earliest books of the Bible, the Israeli sheep herders and goat herders had essentially very childish ideas of religion — "just be good and believe in God and God will take care of you and make you win wars and give you lots of sons and make everything else okay too." But then the Book of Job came along and refuted such simple-minded ideas. In the Book of Job we learned that bad things happen to good people. The Lord our God will not necessarily reward goodness in this lifetime. Job was a good man who suffered immensely, and the Lord did nothing to stop it. Job's friends taunted Job and asked him why he still believed in his God when the Lord had obviously abandoned Job. The Book of Job answered that question with another question: "Who are you to question the motives of God?"
The philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous is still stuck at a pre-Jobian stage of development.
A.A. members act like infantile narcissistic children who expect God to take care of them
and grant all of their wishes if they are good.
It is essentially just Santa Claus Spirituality —
Santa will bring the children a bunch of goodies if the children behave themselves.
The Alcoholics Anonymous Third Step specifically declares
that God will take care of you if you surrender your will and your life to God: Well, there is nothing in the Bible that says that God will take care of your will and your life for you if you surrender like that. The Book of Job says just the opposite — that God won't.
Let us not forget the "It's spiritual, not religious" conceit. A.A. members like to claim that "Religion is for people who are afraid of going to Hell, and spirituality is for people who have been there." Which leaves the A.A. members feeling superior to the people who own the churches in whose basements A.A. meets, because the A.A. members think that they aren't afraid of going to Hell any more, and the other people are. That is really just an ego game of spiritual one-upmanship. Likewise, A.A. members imagine that A.A. is superior to the other religions because Alcoholics Anonymous is supposedly more open-minded and liberal about religious and spiritual matters. (Actually, it isn't. The "great spiritual freedom" is just a bait-and-switch trick to mollify the newcomers. You really have to believe in the A.A. version of God — a tyrannical order-dictating wishing-granting micro-managing patriarch — for the 12 Steps to actually work.) Which in turn is another point of conceit: A.A. members feel that A.A. is superior to a religion, because a religion is just a bunch of people who meet in a church, while "spirituality is everywhere..." (The A.A. members somehow overlook the small detail that they meet in the very same building as the church members.)
And then there is the issue of ordained clergy. Both Alcoholics Anonymous and its theological predecessor, Frank Buchman's "Oxford Groups" (a.k.a. "Moral Re-Armament"), had a bad habit of arrogantly declaring that their own members were better theologians and better counselors than ordained priests and ministers. The Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book printed one story where a newcomer who had read the previous edition of the Big Book enthusiastically declared that he was better at curing alcoholism than anybody else:
Here was a book that said that I could do something that all these doctors and priests and ministers and psychiatrists that I'd been going to for years couldn't do! Likewise, well before that, Oxford Group members were declaring that experienced old sinners and degenerates from the back alleys were better spiritual advisors than ordained ministers and priests. Rev. Geoffrey Allen was a leader and a true believer in the Oxford Group Movement who attempted to explain and rationalize all of the practices of the Oxford Groups, like receiving Guidance from God in séances and "sharing" sins with others who are not ordained priests or ministers. First, Rev. Allen explained how all members had to openly confess their sins in Group meetings, and then he declared that the Oxford Group cult members were better qualified to hear the confessions than ordained clergy:
Sooner or later, when we are ready to receive it, the Spirit will lead us to a deeper sharing of all that has been weighing on us from the past. It is a healthy practice for everyone, when they are led by God to do so, to share to the depths whatever in the past has most burdened their memory with thoughts of guilt. Such deep sharing may often be of things of which it is a shame to speak in public, and it will be right to accept the guidance of the Spirit, and to share with some older individual. Such an individual will then stand to us as ambassador of the forgiveness of Christ. In a Church which was fully Christian the natural person to whom to take such confession would be the priest. Whether in the actual Church the priest is always the right person is questionable. He might be shocked; and that might be good neither for him nor for us. The person who receives such confession must be someone who has learnt from his own experience, both under the Cross and in the Christian fellowship, that the forgiveness of Christ outreaches the furthest sin of man. He will therefore never be shocked; before the utmost evil he will say without blame, as Christ would say: 'Thy sins are forgiven; go and sin no more.'
The A.A. "sharing" of public confessions in A.A. meetings is another heretical practice. Bill Wilson got that idea from Frank Buchman and his Oxford Groups cult. Frank Buchman seized on a fraction of one verse in the Bible, and claimed that it warranted the practice:
"Confess your faults one to another and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effective fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." As you can see, that verse emphasized people sick praying for each other so that they may be healed, not people constantly confessing everything to everyone forever. Also, that line said "confess your faults one to another", not one to a crowd. That line does not justify public confessions. The very early Christian church did practice public confession, but they learned the hard way that the practice of public confessions in church services created all kinds of horrible problems, including corrupting the children, and offending the older people, and people taking pride in their sins, so they banned the practice of public confessions. (And that is still the official policy of the Roman Catholic church today.)
It is a great stretch to go from that one fragment of a line that St. James wrote to making a circus and a public spectacle out of confessions. This is old hat — a 2000-year-old mistake. The Oxford Group cult, from which Bill Wilson derived the practices of Alcoholics Anonymous, had the same problems. Frank Buchman just resurrected a very old mistake, and then Bill Wilson copied it from Frank. Notice that the Catholic Church has people confess to an ordained Priest in private, in sworn confidence, in a confessional, not in public. There are a number of good reasons why the Catholic Church has a ban on public confessions. Over the centuries, they learned the hard way what not to do. Unfortunately, neither the Oxford Group nor Alcoholics Anonymous learned anything from the experiences of the early Christian Church. They arrogantly assumed that the Church had nothing to teach them, and that they knew better than the Church. The Bishop of Durhan noticed that problem with the Oxford Group back in 1933:
The Groupist ignores the history of Christianity, and regards the system of the Church as too apparently ineffective to command acceptance. He moves at a stride from the Age of Apostles to the present time, and assumes that the centuries of Christian experience have nothing to teach him. Surely this is a position which cannot seriously be defended. Also read more about Oxford Group confessions and hilarious confessions and unwholesome confessional practices for more about the problems with the Oxford Group practice of confessions in group meetings. Another item of Bill Wilson's heresy is this: Christianity teaches that you receive grace from God as a gift, and that you are not saved by good works. Bill says just the opposite: that you get in God's good graces by doing all twelve of Bill Wilson's Steps:
We are sober and happy in our A.A. work. Things go well at home and office. We naturally congratulate ourselves on what later proves to be a far too easy and superficial point of view. We temporarily cease to grow because we feel satisfied that there is no need for all of A.A.'s Twelve Steps for us. We are doing fine with just a few of them. Maybe we are doing fine with only two of them, the First Step and that part of the Twelfth where we "carry the message." In A.A. slang, that blissful state is known as "two-stepping." And it can go on for years.
Notice how Bill Wilson equates the following of his dictates with
"spiritual growth": Bill actually has the arrogance to declare that people will not "grow" spiritually unless they do what he says. (And yes, Bill is hiding behind other people again, by saying "A.A.'s Twelve Steps", rather than "my twelve steps, which I wrote and shoved on everybody else".) Bill says that something bad will eventually happen in your life. I agree. It's Murphy's Law. Something bad will always happen, eventually, sooner or later. Somebody will get sick, or somebody will die, or somebody will suffer a major misfortune. Bill says that you won't be able to handle it unless you do the Twelve Steps. I disagree. There is absolutely no evidence that the Twelve Steps make you better able to handle those nasty blows and hard knocks that life can deliver, and Bill offers us no evidence of that, either. Then, in another verbal shell game, more slick double-talk, Bill arbitrarily declares that we surely have a chance if we switch to doing all twelve of Bill's "suggested" steps, and if we also receive the grace of God. Yeh, and I surely have a chance of winning the lottery, too, if I buy a ticket. But how much of a chance? There is not necessarily any connection between doing Bill Wilson's Twelve Steps, and receiving grace from God, but Bill deceptively links them together in one sentence, as if he has a special exclusive wholesale grace distribution arrangement with God, as if God will give you His grace only if you are willing to do all twelve of Bill Wilson's Steps. (That is more evidence of Bill's insane delusions of grandeur.) The Bible specifically teaches us that Grace is a gift from God, and that it cannot be bought with good works, but Bill Wilson says that you must earn Grace from God by working Bill's program and doing all twelve of his Steps. That is heresy. One of the more disgusting aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous is their attitude towards wrong-doing by other A.A. members. If you criticize A.A. for things like allowing the sexual exploitation of young women who come to A.A. seeking help with drug or alcohol problems, the A.A. members whine and rationalize: "We Are Not Saints!" Bill Wilson's line on page 60 of the Big Book is used as an excuse for tolerating all kinds of sins and crimes. And then they recite the slogans, After listing the 12 Steps in the Big Book, and calling them "principles", rather than the cult religion practices that they really are, Bill Wilson declared:
Many of us exclaimed, "What an order! I can't go through with it." Do not be discouraged . No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection. So, because most A.A. members do not perform the 12 Steps correctly, they claim that it is okay to sexually exploit underage girls in Alcoholics Anonymous and shrug it off by declaring that "We are not saints." The same goes for financial dishonesty and any other kind of exploitation of newcomers. And the line, "Progress, Not Perfection" is also used as an excuse for wrong-doing. As if we can't expect Harry K. to behave properly this year; maybe he'll stop the child molesting next year after more he makes some more "spiritual progress". Alcoholics Anonymous uses the "We are not saints" excuse to explain away everything from dealing drugs to other A.A. members, to helping oneself to the collection basket, to sexually exploiting the attractive young women who come to A.A. seeking help with a drug or alcohol problem. One A.A. apologist actually argued that it was wrong to demand moral behavior from rapist A.A. Midtown Group members — to demand that the sexual predators in A.A. stop raping the young female newcomers — because that would be setting expectations too high:
The problem with what you are doing is that A.A. is a place for sick people to get well. For alcoholics to come recover. It is not a place for nice kind folk to become saints. The writer argues that "If you don't change, you won't be around long." That isn't true at all. The thieves and rapists in the Midtown Group have been around for 20 years, and they show no signs of going away. Why would they quit A.A. when they get money, power, and sex from running a cult? This A.A. apologist is actually trying to argue that there are no rules in Alcoholics Anonymous, and that it is against "The Traditions" to demand that people behave in a moral manner. Well, the A.A. "Third Tradition" says,
The "A.A. 12 Traditions" do not say that the only RULE that A.A. members must follow is "a desire to quit drinking". There are still other rules that are expected of all people: don't rape, don't rob, don't murder... A.A. does not get to suspend those rules because "We are not saints". You know, it takes an incredible amount of arrogance and gall for A.A. members to declare that we cannot impose any rules on them — rules like "don't rape" — because they are busy recovering from drinking too much alcohol. Imagine that you visit a new church, and during the service, the speaker stands at the podium, in front of the congregation, and laughs and boasts: "Yes, ha-ha, first, our Founder and Prophet got drunk and stole all of the money, then he screwed all of the women, then he took drugs and made up a new religion and declared himself the New Messiah, here to finish the work that Jesus didn't complete. Ha-ha! Hail the Messiah!" And the whole congregation laughs and cheers, and hails their savior. What church do you imagine you are in? Both the Big Book and members sharing in meetings say things like:
I have no other explanation for the many good things that have happened to me since I have been in A.A. — they came to me from a Greater Power. The A.A. members don't seem to realize it, but every time one of them "shares" the sentiment that they are feeling so grateful because their Higher Power rigged events to make things turn out so good for them, they open up an incredibly nasty can of worms. When I hear one of them yammering mindlessly like that, I always want to ask,
"Since your Higher Power is controlling every little detail of this world, and making things so good for you, I have to ask, why did your Higher Power start the War in Vietnam? Three or four million innocent people were killed over there, besides making all of the guys of my generation very unhappy. And then the war spread to Cambodia, and another two million people got killed there. This is nothing new. Theologians have been debating this question for thousands of years. And Bill Wilson mentioned it himself in the Big Book, in explaining why he didn't like religions:
The wars which had been fought, the burnings and chicanery that religious dispute had facilitated, made me sick. I honestly doubted whether, on balance, the religions of mankind had done any good. Judging from what I had seen in Europe and since, the power of God in human affairs was negligible, the Brotherhood of Man a grim jest. If there was a Devil, he seemed the Boss Universal, and he certainly had me. Unfortunately, Bill never returned to this issue. After he flipped out on Charles Towns' quack "belladonna cure" and saw "The God of the Preachers", Bill just declared that having a special relationship with God was wonderful, and the only way to live, and that everybody ought to do it. Bill just blissed out, and mindlessly ignored this issue forevermore, and never answered his own question. Other theologians have not been so blind, or so giddy. They have debated the question endlessly. And they keep coming up with the same problem: If you believe in a God who can and does control every little detail of this world, then God is responsible for all of the bad stuff that happens, as well as all of the good stuff. Some religions can deal with this. Hinduism has many gods, and some of them are evil or demonic. Kali and Shiva come to mind as two of the Destroyers. Buddhism, on the other hand, has no deities, per sé. Rather, Buddhism recognizes that there is duality in all things, so creation and destruction, or good and evil, or love and hate, or light and dark, or positive and negative, are two sides of the same coin, and you can't have one without the other. Judaism sees God as observing the world from above, usually with some bemusement, and not interfering with human affairs down here much at all. Christianity mostly takes that approach, but many sects are very mixed up on the subject. Some sects see life on Earth as a chess match between God and Satan, with us as the pawns. Others see it as a football game, with God and Satan as opposing coaches, and we are stuck in the middle of the field, as players, and have to win the game for God. (Well, assuming that you decided to play for God's team, that is...) In neither of those cases is God all-powerful. There wouldn't be much point to it if God could always just cheat and fix the game whenever He started to lose... An incomplete religion like Buchmanism, or the A.A. religion, has a problem when the believers want to declare that God has complete control of the world when he is doing favors for A.A. members, but does not have control of the world when bad things are happening to non-members... I call those religions incomplete because they are not thoroughly thought out. They are not philosophically or logically self-consistent. They are little more than collections of unconnected superstitions. It is ridiculously Pollyannaish to say that God is controlling the world and doing favors for me, but God is ignoring the rest of the world, so God isn't responsible for any of the bad stuff that happens elsewhere. The A.A. or Buchmanite believer is likely to answer, "That bad stuff is caused by people who are doing their own will, rather than obeying the Will of God." Nope, that is just dodging the issue. If God has control over this world, then God has to relinquish control to allow some little fool to cause trouble. Imagine this scenario: I see a child carrying a gun into his school, to shoot up the place. Imagine that I can easily take the gun away from the kid, and keep him from hurting anyone. But instead of doing that, I say, "That youngster has free will. I shall let him exercise his free will." If I were to really do that, then I would be criminally responsible for some kids getting shot. It's called "Criminally Negligent Homicide," and it's a real crime. You can be charged with killing people when you never lifted a finger to hurt them, when you just negligently failed to do what would keep them from getting killed. It's also called "Depraved Indifference". That's what the Christian Scientist parents, and now "Follwers of Christ" parents, get charged with after they let their children die by refusing to take them to a doctor and get them some competent medical care. I can't get off of the hook by saying that I simply chose to not control the situation, that I gave the child free will, and that I allowed the kid to do whatever he wished just because he was being rebellious and self-seeking, and did not wish to do my will. No, I wouldn't get off of the hook that easily. And the Higher Power who micro-manages the world doesn't get off of the hook that easily either. He ends up getting the blame for everything. Allowing bad people to do bad things to this world is controlling the world just as much as not allowing them to do it.
The answers that most religions have come up with are:
But A.A. members don't have the benefit of either of those two
religious doctrines. A.A. theology tries to be half and half.
A.A. members claim that God is running their lives, and
is keeping them
from drinking, but God isn't responsible for any of the bad stuff.
So they have opened up that nasty can of worms, and bought into the
whole puzzle. They end up with a religion that is illogical, and
is not self-consistent — a religion that contradicts itself:
And likewise: Some A.A. members claim to have the answer: God gives Free Will to all people, and lets them do whatever they wish. And it's usually evil. God only interferes in this world to help a few people, those who are seeking and doing God's Will. That leaves A.A. members with an even more callous and cruel God than any other religion around here is describing. God is so mean and unloving that He will allow children to be beaten and raped, old ladies to be murdered, and whole populations of Jews, Russians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Tutsis, Tibetans, Native Americans, or Bosnians to be slaughtered in genocidal wars, and God doesn't give a damn about those people because they aren't grovelling before him, confessing all of their sins, and begging for knowledge of God's Will and the power to carry it out? God only loves the Buchmanites and the Twelve-Steppers, and everyone else in the world can just drop dead? A.A. just gets weirder and weirder. Another aspect of the incompleteness of the 12-Step religion is the question of an afterlife. A.A. basically has nothing to say on the subject. All that Bill Wilson offered people was a sober "Heaven on Earth" in the present. Some 12-Step believers will now claim that this shows that A.A. is not really a religion; it is just an add-on to other religions. They wish to leave such theological questions to the other religions. But that doesn't wash when the Hazelden Foundation is telling us to set our religion aside and just practice the A.A. 12-Step program to get A.A.-style "spirituality". A.A. most assuredly is a religion — it's just an incomplete one that fails to address such issues.
Footnotes:1) The Big Book Unplugged; A Young Person's Guide to Alcoholics Anonymous has a credibility problem. Page 44 declares that the DSM-IV describes "the symptoms of alcoholism". It doesn't. The American Psychiatric Association never used the word "alcoholism" in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. They described two related conditions: Alcohol Dependency, and Alcohol Abuse, but they carefully avoided endorsing the idea of any such "spiritual disease" as "alcoholism". Nevertheless, the author deceptively wrote:
To demonstrate that addiction is now officially considered a disease, mention that medical doctors look for specific symptoms in diagnosing alcoholism and chemical dependency. They are outlined in the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), published by the American Psychiatric Association. This is a physician's bible.
As is usual for steppers, this author once again repeats
the mistake of Bill Wilson and Marty Mann
— confusing the symptoms of a disease with the
signs of a disease.
The DSM lists signs of mental disorders, not symptoms.
The symptoms of a disease are what the patient complains about.
The signs of a disease are what the doctor observes and measures.
Also, the DSM-IV is the "bible" of psychiatrists, not "medical doctors"
or "physicians". Likewise, page 51 of BB Unplugged tells us that:
Chapter 8 is written by wives, but you don't need to be a wife to benefit from the authors' advice.
That is totally untrue, and everybody who knows the history of
the Big Book knows it.
Bill Wilson wouldn't let his wife write the To Wives chapter even though
she very much wanted to do it. Bill Wilson didn't trust his wife Lois to "get the
style right", he said, so
he wrote it himself,
while saying that the wives of the alcoholics wrote it.
9) L. P. Jacks, writing in Oxford and the Groups, by Allen, Rev. G. F., Crosman, R. H. S., et al., 1934, pages 129-130.
10)
William G. Wilson, Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age (1957), page 17:
Fitz wanted a powerfully religious document; Henry and Jimmy would have none of it. They wanted a psychological book which would lure the reader in; when he finally arrived among us, there would then be enough time to tip him off about the spiritual character of our society. ... As umpire of these disputes, I was obliged to go pretty much down the middle, writing in spiritual rather than religious or entirely psychological terms.More on that here.
11)
William G. Wilson, The Big Book, 3rd Edition, page 93.
When dealing with such a person [an agnostic or atheist], you had better use everyday language to describe spiritual principles. There is no use arousing any prejudice he may have against certain theological terms and conceptions about which he may already be confused. Don't raise such issues, no matter what your own convictions are.More on that here.
12)
William G. Wilson, Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, pages 74-75.
When first contacted, most alcoholics just wanted to find sobriety, nothing else. They clung to their other defects, letting go only little by little. They simply did not want to get "too good too soon." The Oxford Groups' absolute concepts — absolute purity, absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love — were frequently too much for the drunks. These ideas had to be fed with teaspoons rather than by buckets. More on that here.
Bibliography:
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