Comment by Aurornis
19 hours ago
> Let's not forget that the "12-step-infrastructure" is a VERY American thing based around mostly christian religious nonsense and is by design completely inaccessible for people without a belief in fairy tales.
One of my old friends was a staunch atheist since middle school. He joined AA after some struggles.
He said it was no problem at all. They told him his “higher power” could be anything he chose, such as nature or the universe. The prayer part was just meditation. Nobody tried to push religion on anyone.
I don’t know if his experience was typical or not, but he didn’t think it was a problem at all.
I haven’t kept up with him for a while but last we talked he was still doing well, many years later.
> I don’t know if his experience was typical or not, but he didn’t think it was a problem at all.
His experience is typical. I know have someone very close to me in AA+12-step. There is no pressure to have your higher power named "God". It could be anything; the point is to have a power higher than the one over you (the addiction).
> There is no pressure to have your higher power named "God". It could be anything; the point is to have a power higher than the one over you (the addiction).
The rejection of any "higher power" is precisely what being an atheist is for a lot of us. Accepting that we are just the result of random thermodynamic processes in a cold and uncaring universe that provides no evidence that there is any form of "higher power" than uncaring entropy could very well be the definition of modern atheism.
> Accepting that we are just the result of random thermodynamic processes in a cold and uncaring universe that provides no evidence that there is any form of "higher power" than uncaring entropy could very well be the definition of modern atheism.
and then your further rejection of the response:
> The person I am talking about chose their child's well-being and safety as their "higher power".
i understand you see the universe as uncaring, but there is care right in front of you. i hope the sunshine breaks through and you find it, too.
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> The rejection of any "higher power" is precisely what being an atheist is for a lot of us.
The person I am talking about chose their child's well-being and safety as their "higher power".
The higher power has nothing at all to do with religion unless you want it to.
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Sounds like those thermodynamics processes are your higher power then? You're overthinking it.
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> The rejection of any "higher power" is precisely what being an atheist is for a lot of us. Accepting that we are just the result of random thermodynamic processes in a cold and uncaring universe
I’m somewhere between atheist and agnostic. My mental model is a bit different. While I don’t believe there is a god or some “divine entity”, I do see “the stuff of primordial existence” as some kind of “higher power” to the extent that I’m a product of it, and its laws — discovered and yet to be discovered — govern my existence. Not some anthropomorphic entity.
Put another way, those thermodynamic processes and whatever factors of existence that enable/govern them are the “higher power”, and I don’t think that is incompatible with atheism.
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Then your higher power is logic and reason, and the question:
"Why are you doing this?" Give it the old 5-whys.
Your thermodynamic gubbins know how to enjoy the entropy while they're temporarily in this configuration without booze too.
Or just die in pain when your liver gives in, all good options.
> uncaring entropy
So then if you were to consider a higher power in that case it could be the set of all permutations of stochastic possibilities in the universe, or something like that. The system itself is powerful, and is "higher" than the individual.
Isn't atheism a rather big umbrella term? There's things all the way from secular humanism to agnostic atheism to new atheism to nihilism. There's many atheists who find purpose in a higher calling, such as taking care of the poor, or wonderment of the universe. Would those not be considered a "higher power"?
EDIT: one more thought: you can even think of a higher power as emergent behavior of individual parts.
the rejection of a higher power is insane - how do you rationalize anything coming into being? How do you rationalize there being a world at all in the first place?
A higher power isn't a man in the sky building the world in 7 days. A higher power is admitting that you do not know reality, that we are barely more intelligent than a monkey, and that the universe is much vaster and more mystical than what can be defined in a physics textbook.
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It seems strange that one of the steps is admitting you have no control over your addiction. I feel like the first step should be deciding that you do. But that kind of self assuredness doesn't really align well with whole surrendering to Jeebus thing.
> It seems strange that one of the steps is admitting you have no control over your addiction. I feel like the first step should be deciding that you do.
If you do, you wouldn't be addicted, now would you?
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Admitting you have no control is how you stop having “just 1 drink”… because you don’t have control.
You are taking the “no control” thing too literally.
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I agree.
Seems like the first step should be understanding that you CAN have control over it, even if you don't currently; and that you have the agency and strength to do that without appeal to some higher power.
The admitting you have no control sounds fatalistic to me and robs you of agency/responsibility. Then you're reliant on some externality or higher power instead of finding it within yourself.
Even those who go for the higher power are ultimately doing it themselves, they've just kidded themselves something else is involved, and if that helps you find that you can have some control over it, then great, I guess?
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Part of taking control is first admitting that you are not currently in control. Believing you are in control leads to the classic "I can stop anytime I want to" or "just one drink won't hurt". Recognizing that you can't control it is how you recognize that yes, that one drink will hurt.
“just one more”
“after this one i definitely need to stop”
“i can handle another”
“i’m fine, i can go for a bit longer”
“i can stop after this one”
“the next one will make me feel better”
^ the illusion/delusion of being in control. even when all evidence points to the opposite conclusion — that one more i had yesterday, and all the previous days, was never the last one.
when your in this shit it’s basically impossible to think your way out of it because most thoughts become “a drink will solve this” or some such. that right there is the core problem. the thinking process has become completely twisted and warped into “more is the solution”.
the powerlessness is over the compulsion, obsession and delusions in our own minds around <insert X here>.
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i appreciate HN is often a more technical / scientific / rational / whatever audience who can maybe sometimes value their own thinking as paramount (coding etc. takes a lot of thinking after all). that’s not a bad thing. it just means it’ll be quite an understandably large leap for some folks to understand what it’s like at the bottom of a bottle.
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edit - i’m not into the whole jeebus thing FYI
Yep that was a deal-breaker for me going to AA. I eventually just quit drinking on my own after a few years, but AA being the only option for addiction support groups in many places is a bummer.
Yup. The steps are definitely rooted in Christianity, but you can exercise them however you want. As you might imagine, most people suffering with addiction are not that religious (if at all) and the same thing goes in those groups.
the vast majority of the law systems surrounding the global west are rooted in Christianity. you need to pause for a moment and stop equating religion with evil.
You read these comments incorrectly
A lot of people don't see religion as a self replicating cultural program that benefits its biological host. It provides answers for the unanswerable. It is like L_2 norm based regularization in machine learning. You need an answer and there are many solutions, so you have to have a criteria for picking one.
Turns out in the last few centuries a lot of unanswerable questions have found answers rooted in scientific progress and the new answers conflict with the previous answers, which by their very function as placeholders could not have been correct.
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What’s interesting to me about all this is it sounds like people are defending appropriating religious practices but de-mystifying them. Even though belief in god is explicitly mentioned in the 12 steps, people claim to have had success by just ignoring the god parts -
But at that point, why is The Twelve Steps as an institution still pedaling belief in the supernatural, when it’s ostensibly just as effective with the Christian mythology removed?
Why not make the atheist version the baseline, and allow members to mix in religion if they find it to be useful - as opposed to making religious belief the default, and allowing users to substitute other things for religion if they find that to be useful?
I think the thing that most atheists are objecting to, with ‘religion as default’ situations like this, is the way religious belief is treated as the norm. I remember growing up and going to church, hearing about how “everyone had a god-shaped hole in their heart” - and each person would inevitably find a way to fill that hole, but nothing would ever quite fit, because that hole was god-shaped and could only properly be filled by god.
So when you run up against this kind of language in a system that’s supposed to be helping people free themselves from addiction, it’s off-putting to run into language that coerces them into making themselves beholden to magical thinking and supernatural beliefs, in gods and higher powers. “It can be whatever you want” feels like a cop out - it’s merely a softened stance on what I described above - “everyone has a god-shaped hole in their heart, and it’s okay if you fill that hole with love for your daughter or pride in your work.”
It’s still a turn-off for people like me, for better or for worse - maybe it’s a filter, maybe I’m not the kind of person who would need or would do well in that kind of program.
Yes exactly that "religion by default" is what bothers me too. Good way of putting it. It's like seeing atheists as a bit disabled, and the praying as something necessary in life that atheists can do with a workaround.
All that groveling, the idea of putting your life in the hands of this entity, humbly improving my connection with them etc. There's no way I will do that.
I'm more than atheist, I'm anti-religious. I don't care what other people do, if it makes them happy that's cool for them, but I don't want any of that stuff in my life.
> It's like seeing atheists as a bit disabled
They are seen as disabled, i.e., lacking the moral core. An atheist, the thinking goes, can't be a moral person. The US political (if not cultural) mainstream has been anti-secular for quite some time. Remember George Bush Sr? He had a memorable exchange with a reporter during his presidential campaign, where he made his views clear[1]. He was only mildly exceptional in being very direct, not in the way of thinking.
[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/George_H.W._Bush_and_t...
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No but it's kinda passive aggressive isn't it? It's built on the belief that having religion is the standard.
Also, many of these staps make no sense.
I don't believe in higher powers and I don't want to humbly beg them to remove my character flaws. If I want those removed I have to do it myself.
Some of the steps make some sense but there's way too much senseless groveling in there.
The AA program is at least as informed by anarchy as it is by Christianity. Interesting history there.
This is ENORMOUSLY variable based on the specific group you wind up with.
It can be extremely christian, it can be not substantially christian.
It is very much based on religious hokum. While technically you can choose anything as your “higher power” your options are either embrace Jesus (which people in the program tend to be very happy about) or essentially cosplay embracing Jesus, just with a one-word substitution.
That’s why it has been recognized as religious or “based on religious principles“ in court several times. For example, in the court case Inouye vs Kemna it was ruled that NA/AA “has such substantial religious components that governmentally compelled participation in it violated the Establishment Clause“