That being said, these smaller towns already pressure people to believe in a higher power in most social settings, so it’s less a case of AA imposing it and more society, which is kind of to be expected in a people driven effort.
My son's in Cub Scouts and we take this approach with the "duty to God" requirements (he doesn't have a duty to God, so duty fulfilled!) but some troops require a bit more than that.
When you contrast it to any other type of 'militant', there is typically violence involved..
However, personally, I think the closest thing I could believe in is a "best self". Not that anyone chooses their beliefs, but the rest would be pretty hard to digest for any good reasons.
Honestly, I just think giving up on the idea that you can do this by yourself (in the long term) is counter-productive. Especially if you have an existential crisis later in life and that 'higher power' was the only thing that kept you moving forward. Learning how to embrace self-respect/love/understanding/esteem would go so much further in the long run and would help in all aspects of your life. With each success, and learning to accept each failure -- you will be strengthening productive habits.
I think of militant as unyielding and confrontational. This isn't some pejorative assigned to others, it is a term forwarded and embraced by proponents of that ideology. For an unironic perspective I suggest this New Yorker article "All Scientists Should be Militant Atheists" by Lawrence Krauss [1].
1. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-shou...
Which clearly indicates that the author doesn’t actually believe that’s an appropriate term, but is rather saying that if what is described by some as militant atheism (an adjective the author doesn’t agree with, hence the quotes) then all scientists should be atheistic enough to be described as militant by those people.
Thankfully that was many, many years ago, but stuff that happened to me:
1. Atheist stealing my bible then proceeding to play "soccer" using it as ball.
2. And Atheist + Vegan being physically threatening because I was eating meat and was christian.
3. I got hit on the back of my head with a chain, in middle of a university class, completely out of the blue, some time after an atheist classmate found out I was christian (he waited until I was busy reading something to attack me).
4. Had a group of atheists constantly bully me (for example stealing stuff, damaging my property, graffiti, etc...)
All of that happened near "highly educated" people, for example inside school, academia, white-collar workplaces...
After I started to interact with "normal" people (the average person of my country, that doesn't have college education, have blue collar work, or work in service industry directly in contact with people, etc...) this all stopped.
In my country the population is mostly followers of african religions, although they don't know that (they all claim to be catholics, but don't go to mass, but often go to african-based holidays, festivals, etc... and often believe in african supersticions), atheists are a tiny minority, but they are important, "elite" places, like Academia, politics, mainstream media and so on, have lots of them, and many are blatantly militant, although I cited some anecdotes, during cold war we had atheist guerrilas and violence that needed to be handled by the army (that in turn commited their own atrocities).
I wish people believed more in certain freedoms, for example atheists I know often interpret separation of church and state to mean "freedom from religion", instead of "freedom of religion", but "freedom of religion" should also mean freedom to not believe in anything at all.
Also I wish people would stop conflating some things, for example many atheists I know are biologists (there is a important state-backed biology course in my metro area, often students are sent to MIT, Harvard, etc... in exchange programs), and many believe that biologists that have a religion are evil people that believe in fantasies... meanwhile had leadership in some churches I visited insist that science is evil because evolution and whatnot is not in the bible.
I believe this is part of why we ended in the situation we are discussing on this thread: many atheists intentionally want to dismantle all forms of belief on higher powers, no matter what kind of powers they are, because they conflate being religious with evil.
Not that you're saying its not, but I'd grasp onto this to add a point that its valid and useful to debate whether that surrendering is the best path.
In my mind, what you're being asked to do is abstract and make a virtual externalization of your ego. The benefit is you can get some of the benefits of ego-depletion or ego-loss, but the side effect is that it risks further use of that mechanism to explain or stop caring about things that are more easily under one's control. This can lead to a cycle of ignorance - if every event that happens is "God's Plan", then why not give into nihilism? Its ends up being the answer to every question - if you don't understand something, then its not due to lack of effort, it must be ungodly.
Note that plenty of religious people don't fall into this trap. They don't have a problem expanding their knowledge, and they leave the dieties in the periphery of understanding. Growing up amongst some extreme fundamentalist people though and seeing the downsides of dealing with all problems through faith alone, I am really lax to recommend the surrendering that AA espouses as a universal/sole truth.
That's quite cheeky.
Telling people to believe in a "higher power" simply translates into the gods in the mainstream religion in the society they live in.
Sure, you can surrender to the top name of whatever religion dominates your surroundings. Or you can surrender to the top name of the one your parents raised you in counter to the surroundings, or the top name of the one you found yourself drawn to as you grown up.
Or you could surrender to the Invisible Pink Unicorn, blessed be Her invisible mane. Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or anything else made up to mock the idea of religion. I wouldn’t recommend surrendering to Cthulhu for healing via the AA but if you think that sounds like a good idea then go for it.
Whichever deity works. If all you know is the default for your culture and you’re not down with that one, then it’s time to do some research.
There are people that can just say "from tomorrow I will believe in God/afterlife/spirits etc. It would be so easy to live knowing that your loved ones are not gone or that if you are good enough your problems will be solved soon but for some people(like me) it is like trying to convince me that 2+2=5 and giving cancer to children has a higher purpose that we are to stupid to understand but we still should worship that "bigger" thing.
People come to AA when their lives have completely fallen to shit. They need something, even if it's something that they have to completely make up for themselves out of whole cloth. They'll believe it because they need to believe it.
People who can quit cold turkey, or manage their alcohol consumption, should do so. AA is a last resort, when you're so desperate that even an atheist is willing to give up something of themselves in order to stop drinking. For atheists there are ways to make that "higher power" palatable, but it's still going to be horrible.
Most people will never have to do that, and they should happily pass that by. Just be aware that there are people whose lives are that bad that they'll try to force themselves to believe. Even so, many will fail. Addiction is a terrible, awful thing.
(In my experience).
For me, to consider the very fact of existence rather than non-existence, the beauty and order of it, the people around me who have somehow manifested as conscious beings from chaos... (and on and on)...
none of those things require a supreme being or intelligent creator, but the sense of awe after giving sufficient consideration is difficult to differentiate from feeling god.
Do you think that, in a universe with a proven-real, interventionist diety—picture, say, the Architect in the Matrix—that "feeling god" would really be a feeling of awe?
I'd personally expect it to be mostly a feeling of fear, at how insignificant and easy-to-accidentally-kill you are.
Imagine the feeling of being made aware of an entire galaxy, one containing quadrillions of lifeforms, getting sucked into a black hole.
Imagine the feeling of knowing that if you ask a question, a million consciousnesses might be created and then destroyed in order to answer it.
In short, imagine the feeling of someone else having an omnipotent magical genie.
Feeling at one with the flow of the universe is, to me, the exact opposite of "feeling god." It's feeling that we're operating in a system with a static set of rules; a feeling that nobody has the capacity to declare humanity forfeit by fiat (but instead has to "work for it" through regular physics, in a way that we might be able to defend against through other physics); etc. It's a feeling that the universe is a fair game rather than a rigged one, at least on the quantum-chromodynamics level.
when I was a child I wanted to become a priest, I read all the books and I was a believer, the giant mistake the priests and religion teacher made is to be dogmatic, like to still consider that "creation happened as it is said in Bible, that the world is 5000 years old and avoiding though questions with a story where X did Y and then God done Z. I seen on YT interview with smarter clerics that are not as dogmatic and acknowledged some issues and if my teachers were like that maybe I would have kept my faith.
At least the priest/teachers are paid from taxes to tell our children stories and contradict science /s (this is in Romania btw)
Don't blame 'religion' in general for such things when frankly only a tiny group of people actually believe that; mostly American frankly.
And also contemplate that there might be reasons why spiritual affiliations have a tendency towards dogma - it's a powerful social instrument. Almost all groups of every kind are dogmatic, it's what we use to 'fill in the blanks' and for most of illiterate or semi-literate history it was 'good enough'. It can be used for good or evil surely, but it's pragmatic.
Everyone seems to be arguing about religion but not focusing on what aspects of it might relate to the ostensible success of AA.
Within the 12 steps of AA, Bill W clearly laid out the answer to this very question. Below I've copied over the first 3 steps of AA.
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
The gist of step 1 is acceptance. Acceptance that our lives are controlled by alcohol. This one is pretty easy for any true alcoholic to admit.
The gist of step 2 is surrender. Step 2 states, "Came to believe a power greater than our selves could restore us to sanity." Coming to believe in something is not the same as flipping a light switch and a light coming on. Surrender here in step 2 deals with admitting that we need the help of something greater then ourselves to restore us to sanity. That power could be the love of your family, wife/husband, kids, the energy that moves the cosmos, or a fucking Zagnut bar. As long as it is a power greater then self, you're good.
The gist of step 3 is faith. The key to not getting hung up here is the statement "God as we understood him". This ties directly back to "a power greater than ourselves". Seeing how the Big Book was initially written in the 1930's, and Bill W himself was a Christian, the word God appears a lot. Before the first edition was published, there was an internal fight between the founding members and contributors to the Big Book on the wording of step 3 in particular. They made a deliberate decision to say "God as we understood him" to include as many people as possible.
I share this with you all because I have been and always will consider myself a non religious person. I have needed to work on the concept of a higher power time and time again. When I first started attending AA meetings I let the God/higher power thing get in the way of my recovery and relapsed many times. Only once I surrendered to the idea that a power greater than myself could alleviate my suffering, was I able to start the road to content sobriety. I hope this helps clear the air for some of you, and if there is anyone out there suffering from alcohol or drugs please find a local AA or NA meeting raise your hand and ask for help.
So, either you actually believe that a Zagnut bar is an agent that can help you out of your desparate situation by using its special powers. Or you are intentionally obfuscating the rather obvious fact that indeed, people do not need to surrender to anything or anyone, because obviously it's not the Zagnut bar doing the work, but rather exclusively they themselves.
I have a hard time going to the gym consistently. I know it's good for me, but I just don't like going very much. so I make plans with other people to go to the gym together. if I flake, often they say something about it the next day, which is annoying but ultimately helpful. acknowledging that I can't (or at least probably won't) go to the gym consistently on my own, I have voluntarily created a system where there is a social cost to not going. I still have to do all the work myself, but the other people help me stay on track.
The point here is that there is no "higher power" involved. It's other people or you yourself, or possibly both, neither of which in any meaningful sense qualifies as a "higher power", and either of which has a completely unambiguous, non-confusing term to refer to it: "Other people" and "yourself". The point is that it is dishonest to then pretend that somehow a Zagnut bar could plausibly be an agent helping you instead of simply saying the obvious: It's most certainly not the Zagnut bar, so what's left is you yourself and/or other people.
I think the point is that you need some sort of mind hack to escape the paradigm of will vs. desire which has been a losing battle thus far for most addicts. it is ultimately your will that prevails, but you have to trick yourself otherwise for it to work.
No, of course, noone does, that's the point. Possibly, some people somehow think that they do (and even that seems a bit unlikely to me), but it just is a nonsense concept: You can, as a matter of semantics, not surrender to something that doesn't exercise power. You might as well be saying that you need to wash yourself, but you can also do so by looking at a horse. Looking at a horse makes you washed as much as following instructions of a candy bar makes you do anything, for lack of any washing effect in one case, for lack of any instructions in the other.
> I think the point is that you need some sort of mind hack to escape the paradigm of will vs. desire which has been a losing battle thus far for most addicts. it is ultimately your will that prevails, but you have to trick yourself otherwise for it to work.
That might well be the case, yep. And I see two big problems with not clearly stating that that is what's (likely) going on: In more than one place, it seems to cause harrassment of atheists, and I am not so sure it's actually helpful for mental health when people externalize the credit for the work that they have done themselves. And also, even if that's a hack that is needed in the "therapeutic context", a discussion about the scientific evidence of the efficacy certainly is not a place for such intentionally onfuscating language.
Where did I make the claim that logic could be used to cure alcoholism?
> The use of surrender is to admit you don't know how things work. At least not to the point to actually cure yourself of addiction.
Which doesn't make a Zagnut bar an agent that has power, does it?
Again, the point is surrender. I am in no way saying the Zagnut bar is doing anything but inspiring hope in the alcoholic. And you are 100% correct that the work comes from inside, not a candy bar. But without the surrender of self-will, nothing else is possible. Steps 1, 2, 3 are saying I am powerless over alcohol, that I cannot stop on my own, and need to have faith in a higher power of my own understanding to make it through this thing alive.
So, you think that a candy bar is a power, in any way whatsoever?
> A lot of people let them selves get hung up on the higher power bit because they can't abstract the idea of surrendering to a non quantifiable or tangible thing
Because it's nonsense?
> (hence the Zagnut bar for those who can't surrender to the idea of love or the ideas of forces of nature)
Which makes it only more nonsensical?
> Believe me, I was one of those people for a long time. But my suffering got so great that I eventually had to admit to myself that I cannot do it on my own and I need to find something I hold sacred and dear.
... and then you did it yourself, thus demonstrating that you were simply wrong about not being able to do it yourself.
> It's better to believe a Zagnut bar could restore me to sanity, then to continue to kill myself with alcohol and drugs.
Only if that actually "restores you to sanity". And if it does, it was still you who "restored yourself to sanity".
> Again, the point is surrender. I am in no way saying the Zagnut bar is doing anything but inspiring hope in the alcoholic
Yes, you are. You are saying it's "a higher power". It's not. It's a candy bar. Possibly a candy bar that is inspiring hope in an alcoholic.
> And you are 100% correct that the work comes from inside, not a candy bar.
So, why all this dishonest mumbo-jumbo about a "higher power"? Mind you, this is not a therapeutic setting, this is a discussion about scientific evidence of efficacy.
The point is surrendering to something "bigger" than yourself. Don't get tied up in militant atheist perspectives.