Comment by peteyPete

I have the same fight in my life... As an atheist I push back pretty hard against any intrusion of religion in my life and depend on myself for pretty much everything, and am also the provider for others. If I'd sit on my behind and pray for good things instead of taking actions, nothing would get done, so I skip the time consuming part of dedicating a part of my life, time, brain power to all these things and instead focus on tangible things anchored in reality.

With how my brain works, I find it insulting to be told to pray the weakness away figure of speech..

That all being said, our brains, as wonderfully capable and complex as they are, are also pretty stupid and simple in other ways. Willpower and inner strength are a trained skills and mental states combined with chemical states. If the goal is to free yourself from addiction, the means of getting there don't really matter as long as they work and don't cause direct harm to yourself or others. The placebo effect is real, so if one gets strength from believing that there's a "god" or "higher power" giving them a high 5 and believes in them, then go for it. Whether I believe thats a delusion or not is much less important than the person breaking their addiction. Its a whole other fight of its own. I do think there should be as much available support for people that isn't based on feeding you religion if thats not your thing, regardless of the fact that one can attend AA+12step and not be religious and get value out of it too.

I feel like having faith in a higher power is almost like a part of your brain never grew up, in the sense that you're allowing yourself to believe in magic, like a kid. When you were a kid, that made you excited, dreamy, which puts you in a certain state. If you believe and that allows you to put yourself in a mental state where you think the end result will work out positively, whether thats because you felt empowered, you found strength to persevere, or whether you think god's got his quantum digits up your ** and is going to partially puppet you, thus relieving you of some of the pressure, strain, and allows you to get to the same end point, then good for you...

If this was a discussion about whether religions and faith in higher powers should be the guiding philosophies for humans going forward, my answer would be capital F no.. But if we're talking about current crisis response/management and addiction support, you can't rewire everyone's brains before you can start helping them out..