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Comment by IlikeKitties

1 day ago

I looked it up, there's not a dictionary I can find that would define "higher power" as your friend did. Words have meaning, you know?

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/higher-power https://www.dictionary.com/browse/higher-power https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/higher%20power

And it's beside the point anyways because again, look at the 12 Steps, quoted directly from their website, as a canonical source [0]:

> 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

> 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

> 7. Humbly asked Him [God] to remove our shortcomings.

> 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.

If your argument is that to stop alcohol addiction you need to stop using alcohol and most of the 12 Step Program is irrelevant nonsense, than we are in agreement. But they don't talk about "higher power" they literally talk about God (And they obviously don't mean Xenu here) in the majority of their steps. [0]https://www.aa.org/the-twelve-steps

10 comments

IlikeKitties

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Aurornis  1 day ago

> I looked it up, there's not a dictionary I can find that would define "higher power" as your friend did. Words have meaning, you know?

Meaning has context. If you're searching dictionaries for multi-word phrases that are specific to a certain context, you're not going to find the right answer.

  • IlikeKitties  1 day ago

    You are conveniently ignoring the "God" part or the "prayer" part or the "spiritual awakening" part.

    Why?

    There's lot's of places around the world that do evidence based addiction counseling and unsurprisingly none of them require you to believe in any made up entities and spiritual nonsense.

    • ta8645  1 day ago

      You are a very small part of an unimaginably large universe; so you are not the ultimate power, ergo there is a higher power than you. Some people choose to call that higher power "God", but there's no reason to get hung up on that for yourself; it's easy to translate into your own terms without raising an objection.

      "Prayer" has no universally accepted procedure, and can just be your own calm reflective contemplation. "Spiritual awakening" can be that moment when you as an atheist accept your non-central role in the universe, when you come to peace with the fact that there is a higher power than yourself, and you aren't the central character in its unfolding.

      There are only "made up entities" when you demand that everything be understood in literally minded cartoonish definitions, rather than a more nuanced understanding of the world around us, and our place in it.

      3 replies →

GeoAtreides  20 hours ago

>I looked it up, there's not a dictionary I can find that would define "higher power" as your friend did. Words have meaning, you know?

Absolute premium pedantry, I rate it 10/10, 5/7 with rice