Common Sense Recovery: An Atheist's Guide to Alcoholics Anonymous by Adam N

Author:Adam N [N, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: AA, Recovery, Self Help
ISBN: 9781082712203
Google: KgNpyAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1082712205
Publisher: AA Agnostica
Published: 2019-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

We Agnostics are not Broken

The word spiritual is used a lot in AA. We are taught that we need “to pick up the set of spiritual tools laid at our feet” (p. 25), that we must live by a simple set of “spiritual principles”. But spirituality is a vague, even meaningless term. What exactly are we saying? Certainly the tools of recovery are very profound in their impact. They are all-encompassing. They change our actions, but more essentially our values, emotions, our entire lives even. They bridge the gap between the psychological and the social and are too big for either category. Being so all-encompassing and important, so big, it is understandable that the words to describe them might elude us.

I suspect that this is all there is to it. Spirituality, like god, is a concept we employ simply because we have come to the edge of our current understanding, have pushed no further, and it is at this point that our words fail us. Like our ancient ancestors facing a volcano or hurricane, our understanding of the processes at work is undeveloped, simple, riddled with caulk and imaginary filler. We are in awe and, quite literally, speechless, so we attribute the big thing before us to something magical or supernatural. Being in awe is fine, but it seems out of place when dealing with something so obviously medical, psychological, social, scientifically understandable and, importantly, life threatening as alcoholism and drug addiction.

Understanding that spirituality and god are terms employed when people have come to the edge of their comprehension helps me on a daily basis when I sit in AA meetings and listen. Whenever I hear god, spirit or higher power, and can avoid falling into resentment or giving in to feelings of alienation, I try to think of it as a kind of shorthand for the life sustaining, beneficent values, attitudes and actions. I just delete the religious implications and substitute my own understanding. I have always had to do this. The difference for me this time around is that I no longer feel like I am cheating, or faking it, or hanging on until I finally “come to believe”. This is it. I have arrived. I am exactly where I need to be. I am entirely at ease, even proud, to be an atheist.

Contrarily, the AA main line advises that, if we agnostics and atheists hang around long enough, we should eventually come around to the more religious point of view. We will “come to believe”. Our higher power will now be called god. We may join or re-join an established religious tradition. Like it or not, this is a main theme in Alcoholics Anonymous. Quoting the tenth tradition does nothing to change this flagrant fact.

The chapter in the Big Book entitled “We Agnostics” is a very thinly veiled argument that some form of belief in god, however you can come to understand it, is necessary for recovery. In some ways the emphasis on open-mindedness in the Big Book points in exactly the opposite direction from mine.

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