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
> 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.
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.
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 →
> There's lot's of places around the world that do evidence based addiction counseling
As I pointed out in a previous comment, those places have successfully rated worse than random chance. Placebos beat them on succes rates.
The highest succes rates is with AA and the 12 step. Plenty of peer reviewed articles going back 30 years back this up.
Therapy has worse rates than anything else, including placebos.
There is no need to look it up. The site addresses this specific question.
https://internetaddictsanonymous.org/for-atheists-and-agnost...
Literally a different side.
>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
If you don't believe words having any meaning matter, why discuss in the first place?
You're missing the point: as an addict the substance is the "higher power" because it literally has power over the addict.
Switching out the addiction for a different "higher power" is the point.
Just because you don't know how how things work doesn't mean you should quote the dictionary inaccurately at people. What you are doing is lower-cognitive effort than a stochastic parrot.
FWIW, I've been atheist all my life, mentioned it multiple times on HN, and am constantly annoyed by militant atheists like you making the rest of us in this group of logical people look bad.
At the very least, at least pretend to have put some thought into your worldview. Or at least pretend that there is some logic behind this argument you want to have on the internet for worthless internet points.
I'm simply telling you what the reality is. Your complaint that reality is wrong and you are right is a common but frankly stupid PoV.