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I think there's a major understanding of this part of AA. This DOES NOT mean acknowledging that you believe there is a god. The concept of a "higher power" can

I think there's a major understanding of this part of AA. This DOES NOT mean acknowledging that you believe there is a god. The concept of a "higher power" can mean anything you want it to mean. You can imagine your higher power is Gandalf, Sauron, elves at the bottom of the garden, or even some aspect of your "best self." You could imagine it to be the spirits of your ancestors or even something like the energy of the universe. The point is surrendering to something "bigger" than yourself. Don't get tied up in militant atheist perspectives.

ceejayoz 7y ago
I suspect that's a YMMV scenario that may differ enormously from AA group to AA group. My son's in Cub Scouts and we take this approach with the "duty to God" requirements (he doesn't have a duty to God, so duty fulfilled!) but some troops require a bit more than that.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> You can imagine your higher power is Gandalf, Sauron, elves at the bottom of the garden That's quite cheeky. Telling people to believe in a "higher power" simply translates into the gods in the mainstream religion in the society they live in.
- billjings 7y ago
  I mean, if we're talking about people who actually do imagine that their higher power is Gandalf, then we're talking about some pretty cheeky people here.
- ragona 7y ago
  Huh? I’ve known plenty of AA members who found the program very helpful and didn’t believe in anything even resembling a mainstream deity.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  There are people who have gotten “Jedi” on the official lists of religion. I would presume that one of them going through AA would simply surrender to the Force. Seriously or ha-ha-only-seriously, it doesn’t matter. Sure, you can surrender to the top name of whatever religion dominates your surroundings. Or you can surrender to the top name of the one your parents raised you in counter to the surroundings, or the top name of the one you found yourself drawn to as you grown up. Or you could surrender to the Invisible Pink Unicorn, blessed be Her invisible mane. Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or anything else made up to mock the idea of religion. I wouldn’t recommend surrendering to Cthulhu for healing via the AA but if you think that sounds like a good idea then go for it. Whichever deity works. If all you know is the default for your culture and you’re not down with that one, then it’s time to do some research.
- komali2 7y ago
  I'm with you - whenever a non-demoninational event goes down, or when someone says "take the higher power of your choice, could be Gandalf, it doesn't matter!" I can't help roll my eyes. It's an ignorant thing to say. Assuming a religion is "invalid" or not a "religion" if it doesn't have a godhead at all. Many don't, named or otherwise. "Higher Power." And lord forbid your chosen godhead is someone else's religion fallman. When I was growing up in SC and we'd do these school classroom prayers (public school, unconstitutional, but who's keeping score?), me being a cringy little 13 year old atheist would say shit like "hail satan" and raise ire of pretty much the entire school. So no, they don't really mean "your higher power of choice," they mean "your given godhead that I can convince myself is actually mine just under a different name."
simion314 7y ago
>The point is surrendering to something "bigger" than yourself. Don't get tied up in militant atheist perspectives. There are people that can just say "from tomorrow I will believe in God/afterlife/spirits etc. It would be so easy to live knowing that your loved ones are not gone or that if you are good enough your problems will be solved soon but for some people(like me) it is like trying to convince me that 2+2=5 and giving cancer to children has a higher purpose that we are to stupid to understand but we still should worship that "bigger" thing.
- shoes_for_thee 7y ago
  Sometimes I think that spirituality is something people either "get" or they don't. For me, to consider the very fact of existence rather than non-existence, the beauty and order of it, the people around me who have somehow manifested as conscious beings from chaos... (and on and on)... none of those things require a supreme being or intelligent creator, but the sense of awe after giving sufficient consideration is difficult to differentiate from feeling god.
  - adamisom 7y ago
    Carl Sagan and his fans (me among them) understand your sense of awe. I do think it's important not to forget that when you lose religion. I also think it's important, as Sagan probably did, for the secular world--for humanity--to reclaim it as part of being human (whether you call it spiritual or not).
  - simion314 7y ago
    I agree the fact we exist and we can consider our existence is something special but still it won't help me with believing that things will be better tomorrow or that there is an afterlife. when I was a child I wanted to become a priest, I read all the books and I was a believer, the giant mistake the priests and religion teacher made is to be dogmatic, like to still consider that "creation happened as it is said in Bible, that the world is 5000 years old and avoiding though questions with a story where X did Y and then God done Z. I seen on YT interview with smarter clerics that are not as dogmatic and acknowledged some issues and if my teachers were like that maybe I would have kept my faith. At least the priest/teachers are paid from taxes to tell our children stories and contradict science /s (this is in Romania btw)
beefok 7y ago
Please describe a 'militant' atheist perspective unironically. :) When you contrast it to any other type of 'militant', there is typically violence involved.. However, personally, I think the closest thing I could believe in is a "best self". Not that anyone chooses their beliefs, but the rest would be pretty hard to digest for any good reasons. Honestly, I just think giving up on the idea that you can do this by yourself (in the long term) is counter-productive. Especially if you have an existential crisis later in life and that 'higher power' was the only thing that kept you moving forward. Learning how to embrace self-respect/love/understanding/esteem would go so much further in the long run and would help in all aspects of your life. With each success, and learning to accept each failure -- you will be strengthening productive habits.
- reggieband 7y ago
  > Please describe a 'militant' atheist perspective unironically. :) I think of militant as unyielding and confrontational. This isn't some pejorative assigned to others, it is a term forwarded and embraced by proponents of that ideology. For an unironic perspective I suggest this New Yorker article "All Scientists Should be Militant Atheists" by Lawrence Krauss [1]. 1. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-should-be-militant-atheists https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-shou...
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  - thawaway1837 7y ago
    The first usage of militant atheist out there is in quotes. Which clearly indicates that the author doesn’t actually believe that’s an appropriate term, but is rather saying that if what is described by some as militant atheism (an adjective the author doesn’t agree with, hence the quotes) then all scientists should be atheistic enough to be described as militant by those people.
- speeder 7y ago
  Well... I did met violent militant atheists, so they DO exist. Thankfully that was many, many years ago, but stuff that happened to me: 1. Atheist stealing my bible then proceeding to play "soccer" using it as ball. 2. And Atheist + Vegan being physically threatening because I was eating meat and was christian. 3. I got hit on the back of my head with a chain, in middle of a university class, completely out of the blue, some time after an atheist classmate found out I was christian (he waited until I was busy reading something to attack me). 4. Had a group of atheists constantly bully me (for example stealing stuff, damaging my property, graffiti, etc...) All of that happened near "highly educated" people, for example inside school, academia, white-collar workplaces... After I started to interact with "normal" people (the average person of my country, that doesn't have college education, have blue collar work, or work in service industry directly in contact with people, etc...) this all stopped.
thawaway1837 7y ago
I think this depends on your specific AA. In bigger cities this is largely indeed the case. However, in smaller towns it’s not as true. That being said, these smaller towns already pressure people to believe in a higher power in most social settings, so it’s less a case of AA imposing it and more society, which is kind of to be expected in a people driven effort.
taurath 7y ago
> Don't get tied up in militant atheist perspectives. Not that you're saying its not, but I'd grasp onto this to add a point that its valid and useful to debate whether that surrendering is the best path. In my mind, what you're being asked to do is abstract and make a virtual externalization of your ego. The benefit is you can get some of the benefits of ego-depletion or ego-loss, but the side effect is that it risks further use of that mechanism to explain or stop caring about things that are more easily under one's control. This can lead to a cycle of ignorance - if every event that happens is "God's Plan", then why not give into nihilism? Its ends up being the answer to every question - if you don't understand something, then its not due to lack of effort, it must be ungodly. Note that plenty of religious people don't fall into this trap. They don't have a problem expanding their knowledge, and they leave the dieties in the periphery of understanding. Growing up amongst some extreme fundamentalist people though and seeing the downsides of dealing with all problems through faith alone, I am really lax to recommend the surrendering that AA espouses as a universal/sole truth.
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- daseiner1 7y ago
  all that and you entirely missed the point. surrender as a broad concept is necessary because alcoholism is an illogical, slippery disease. to get sober, you have to accept that you cannot do something that it seems like everyone else can
  - taurath 7y ago
    Or.... get some distance from the problem, then work on addressing the underlying reasons you go to it, while practicing not doing it. There are many paths.
fmakunbound 7y ago
If it can be anything, including imaginary things, then what's the point?
fat_cam 7y ago
As a current and active member of AA, let me re-affirm that this battle over a "higher power" exists inside the rooms of AA just as everyone is arguing about it here. A great many alcoholics let them selves get hung up on the concept of a higher power, or more specifically, the word "God". The word God appears 134 times in the first 164 pages of the Big Book. For many non religious people as well as non Christian people this presents a huge problem; how can we alleviate the burden of alcoholism without believing in God? Within the 12 steps of AA, Bill W clearly laid out the answer to this very question. Below I've copied over the first 3 steps of AA. 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. The gist of step 1 is acceptance. Acceptance that our lives are controlled by alcohol. This one is pretty easy for any true alcoholic to admit. The gist of step 2 is surrender. Step 2 states, "Came to believe a power greater than our selves could restore us to sanity." Coming to believe in something is not the same as flipping a light switch and a light coming on. Surrender here in step 2 deals with admitting that we need the help of something greater then ourselves to restore us to sanity. That power could be the love of your family, wife/husband, kids, the energy that moves the cosmos, or a fucking Zagnut bar. As long as it is a power greater then self, you're good. The gist of step 3 is faith. The key to not getting hung up here is the statement "God as we understood him". This ties directly back to "a power greater than ourselves". Seeing how the Big Book was initially written in the 1930's, and Bill W himself was a Christian, the word God appears a lot. Before the first edition was published, there was an internal fight between the founding members and contributors to the Big Book on the wording of step 3 in particular. They made a deliberate decision to say "God as we understood him" to include as many people as possible. I share this with you all because I have been and always will consider myself a non religious person. I have needed to work on the concept of a higher power time and time again. When I first started attending AA meetings I let the God/higher power thing get in the way of my recovery and relapsed many times. Only once I surrendered to the idea that a power greater than myself could alleviate my suffering, was I able to start the road to content sobriety. I hope this helps clear the air for some of you, and if there is anyone out there suffering from alcohol or drugs please find a local AA or NA meeting raise your hand and ask for help.

ceejayoz 7y ago

I suspect that's a YMMV scenario that may differ enormously from AA group to AA group. My son's in Cub Scouts and we take this approach with the "duty to God" requirements (he doesn't have a duty to God, so duty fulfilled!) but some troops require a bit more than that.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

> You can imagine your higher power is Gandalf, Sauron, elves at the bottom of the garden That's quite cheeky. Telling people to believe in a "higher power" simply translates into the gods in the mainstream religion in the society they live in.

billjings 7y ago
I mean, if we're talking about people who actually do imagine that their higher power is Gandalf, then we're talking about some pretty cheeky people here.
ragona 7y ago
Huh? I’ve known plenty of AA members who found the program very helpful and didn’t believe in anything even resembling a mainstream deity.
egypturnash 7y ago
There are people who have gotten “Jedi” on the official lists of religion. I would presume that one of them going through AA would simply surrender to the Force. Seriously or ha-ha-only-seriously, it doesn’t matter. Sure, you can surrender to the top name of whatever religion dominates your surroundings. Or you can surrender to the top name of the one your parents raised you in counter to the surroundings, or the top name of the one you found yourself drawn to as you grown up. Or you could surrender to the Invisible Pink Unicorn, blessed be Her invisible mane. Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or anything else made up to mock the idea of religion. I wouldn’t recommend surrendering to Cthulhu for healing via the AA but if you think that sounds like a good idea then go for it. Whichever deity works. If all you know is the default for your culture and you’re not down with that one, then it’s time to do some research.
komali2 7y ago
I'm with you - whenever a non-demoninational event goes down, or when someone says "take the higher power of your choice, could be Gandalf, it doesn't matter!" I can't help roll my eyes. It's an ignorant thing to say. Assuming a religion is "invalid" or not a "religion" if it doesn't have a godhead at all. Many don't, named or otherwise. "Higher Power." And lord forbid your chosen godhead is someone else's religion fallman. When I was growing up in SC and we'd do these school classroom prayers (public school, unconstitutional, but who's keeping score?), me being a cringy little 13 year old atheist would say shit like "hail satan" and raise ire of pretty much the entire school. So no, they don't really mean "your higher power of choice," they mean "your given godhead that I can convince myself is actually mine just under a different name."

simion314 7y ago

>The point is surrendering to something "bigger" than yourself. Don't get tied up in militant atheist perspectives. There are people that can just say "from tomorrow I will believe in God/afterlife/spirits etc. It would be so easy to live knowing that your loved ones are not gone or that if you are good enough your problems will be solved soon but for some people(like me) it is like trying to convince me that 2+2=5 and giving cancer to children has a higher purpose that we are to stupid to understand but we still should worship that "bigger" thing.

shoes_for_thee 7y ago
Sometimes I think that spirituality is something people either "get" or they don't. For me, to consider the very fact of existence rather than non-existence, the beauty and order of it, the people around me who have somehow manifested as conscious beings from chaos... (and on and on)... none of those things require a supreme being or intelligent creator, but the sense of awe after giving sufficient consideration is difficult to differentiate from feeling god.
- adamisom 7y ago
  Carl Sagan and his fans (me among them) understand your sense of awe. I do think it's important not to forget that when you lose religion. I also think it's important, as Sagan probably did, for the secular world--for humanity--to reclaim it as part of being human (whether you call it spiritual or not).
- simion314 7y ago
  I agree the fact we exist and we can consider our existence is something special but still it won't help me with believing that things will be better tomorrow or that there is an afterlife. when I was a child I wanted to become a priest, I read all the books and I was a believer, the giant mistake the priests and religion teacher made is to be dogmatic, like to still consider that "creation happened as it is said in Bible, that the world is 5000 years old and avoiding though questions with a story where X did Y and then God done Z. I seen on YT interview with smarter clerics that are not as dogmatic and acknowledged some issues and if my teachers were like that maybe I would have kept my faith. At least the priest/teachers are paid from taxes to tell our children stories and contradict science /s (this is in Romania btw)

beefok 7y ago

Please describe a 'militant' atheist perspective unironically. :) When you contrast it to any other type of 'militant', there is typically violence involved.. However, personally, I think the closest thing I could believe in is a "best self". Not that anyone chooses their beliefs, but the rest would be pretty hard to digest for any good reasons. Honestly, I just think giving up on the idea that you can do this by yourself (in the long term) is counter-productive. Especially if you have an existential crisis later in life and that 'higher power' was the only thing that kept you moving forward. Learning how to embrace self-respect/love/understanding/esteem would go so much further in the long run and would help in all aspects of your life. With each success, and learning to accept each failure -- you will be strengthening productive habits.

reggieband 7y ago
> Please describe a 'militant' atheist perspective unironically. :) I think of militant as unyielding and confrontational. This isn't some pejorative assigned to others, it is a term forwarded and embraced by proponents of that ideology. For an unironic perspective I suggest this New Yorker article "All Scientists Should be Militant Atheists" by Lawrence Krauss [1]. 1. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-should-be-militant-atheists https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-shou...
- deleted 7y ago
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- thawaway1837 7y ago
  The first usage of militant atheist out there is in quotes. Which clearly indicates that the author doesn’t actually believe that’s an appropriate term, but is rather saying that if what is described by some as militant atheism (an adjective the author doesn’t agree with, hence the quotes) then all scientists should be atheistic enough to be described as militant by those people.
speeder 7y ago
Well... I did met violent militant atheists, so they DO exist. Thankfully that was many, many years ago, but stuff that happened to me: 1. Atheist stealing my bible then proceeding to play "soccer" using it as ball. 2. And Atheist + Vegan being physically threatening because I was eating meat and was christian. 3. I got hit on the back of my head with a chain, in middle of a university class, completely out of the blue, some time after an atheist classmate found out I was christian (he waited until I was busy reading something to attack me). 4. Had a group of atheists constantly bully me (for example stealing stuff, damaging my property, graffiti, etc...) All of that happened near "highly educated" people, for example inside school, academia, white-collar workplaces... After I started to interact with "normal" people (the average person of my country, that doesn't have college education, have blue collar work, or work in service industry directly in contact with people, etc...) this all stopped.

thawaway1837 7y ago

I think this depends on your specific AA. In bigger cities this is largely indeed the case. However, in smaller towns it’s not as true. That being said, these smaller towns already pressure people to believe in a higher power in most social settings, so it’s less a case of AA imposing it and more society, which is kind of to be expected in a people driven effort.

taurath 7y ago

> Don't get tied up in militant atheist perspectives. Not that you're saying its not, but I'd grasp onto this to add a point that its valid and useful to debate whether that surrendering is the best path. In my mind, what you're being asked to do is abstract and make a virtual externalization of your ego. The benefit is you can get some of the benefits of ego-depletion or ego-loss, but the side effect is that it risks further use of that mechanism to explain or stop caring about things that are more easily under one's control. This can lead to a cycle of ignorance - if every event that happens is "God's Plan", then why not give into nihilism? Its ends up being the answer to every question - if you don't understand something, then its not due to lack of effort, it must be ungodly. Note that plenty of religious people don't fall into this trap. They don't have a problem expanding their knowledge, and they leave the dieties in the periphery of understanding. Growing up amongst some extreme fundamentalist people though and seeing the downsides of dealing with all problems through faith alone, I am really lax to recommend the surrendering that AA espouses as a universal/sole truth.

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daseiner1 7y ago
all that and you entirely missed the point. surrender as a broad concept is necessary because alcoholism is an illogical, slippery disease. to get sober, you have to accept that you cannot do something that it seems like everyone else can
- taurath 7y ago
  Or.... get some distance from the problem, then work on addressing the underlying reasons you go to it, while practicing not doing it. There are many paths.

fmakunbound 7y ago

If it can be anything, including imaginary things, then what's the point?

fat_cam 7y ago

As a current and active member of AA, let me re-affirm that this battle over a "higher power" exists inside the rooms of AA just as everyone is arguing about it here. A great many alcoholics let them selves get hung up on the concept of a higher power, or more specifically, the word "God". The word God appears 134 times in the first 164 pages of the Big Book. For many non religious people as well as non Christian people this presents a huge problem; how can we alleviate the burden of alcoholism without believing in God? Within the 12 steps of AA, Bill W clearly laid out the answer to this very question. Below I've copied over the first 3 steps of AA. 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. The gist of step 1 is acceptance. Acceptance that our lives are controlled by alcohol. This one is pretty easy for any true alcoholic to admit. The gist of step 2 is surrender. Step 2 states, "Came to believe a power greater than our selves could restore us to sanity." Coming to believe in something is not the same as flipping a light switch and a light coming on. Surrender here in step 2 deals with admitting that we need the help of something greater then ourselves to restore us to sanity. That power could be the love of your family, wife/husband, kids, the energy that moves the cosmos, or a fucking Zagnut bar. As long as it is a power greater then self, you're good. The gist of step 3 is faith. The key to not getting hung up here is the statement "God as we understood him". This ties directly back to "a power greater than ourselves". Seeing how the Big Book was initially written in the 1930's, and Bill W himself was a Christian, the word God appears a lot. Before the first edition was published, there was an internal fight between the founding members and contributors to the Big Book on the wording of step 3 in particular. They made a deliberate decision to say "God as we understood him" to include as many people as possible. I share this with you all because I have been and always will consider myself a non religious person. I have needed to work on the concept of a higher power time and time again. When I first started attending AA meetings I let the God/higher power thing get in the way of my recovery and relapsed many times. Only once I surrendered to the idea that a power greater than myself could alleviate my suffering, was I able to start the road to content sobriety. I hope this helps clear the air for some of you, and if there is anyone out there suffering from alcohol or drugs please find a local AA or NA meeting raise your hand and ask for help.