Comment by 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.
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.
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> 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.