40% of Sober Alkies made it via AA

Interview: A Doctor Speaks
George E. Vaillant, M.D., joined AA's General Service Board as a Class A (nonalcoholic) trustee in 1998. He is professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, director of the Study of Adult Development, Harvard University Health Services, and director of research in the Division of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital. The author of The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited, a comprehensive study of alcoholism, George lectures widely on alcoholism and addiction and is one of the foremost researchers in the field.

This article appeared originally on the AA Grapevine Magazine on May, 2001, Vol. 57, No. 12. Available on: http://www.aagrapevine.org. 

Grapevine: In an article about alcoholism in Harvard Magazine, you were quoted as saying that 50 percent of the people brought into emergency rooms with fractures are there as a result of alcohol, but that blood-alcohol levels are never checked. It made me curious about the way medical professionals view alcoholism today. Can you tell us something about that?

George Vaillant: What happens in emergency rooms is actually much more dramatic than that. Probably 50 percent of all the people brought into emergency rooms had blood-alcohol levels over .25 - which is enough to make any nondependent person comatose, not just prone to accidents. And even though this is a clear biochemical fact staring doctors in the face, no referral is made - nothing is done about it - because when it comes to treating alcoholism, the medical profession feels so helpless, so without hope. And for a doctor, feeling powerless is reason enough to put his head in the sand.

Grapevine: Why do you think that feeling persists?

George Vaillant: You have to remember that very few doctors have ever seen a recovered alcoholic. If you're recovered, you don't have any reason to tell your doctor you're an alcoholic. And if you're not recovered, you go back to see him a hundred times, so you're forever etched in his memory. Consequently, doctors overcount the failures and have no knowledge of the successes. They don't understand that 40 percent of all recovery has probably occurred through Alcoholics Anonymous.

Grapevine: What could be done to change that?

George Vaillant: The two simplest ways that I know are both within the power of the Fellowship. One is to take your doctor to open meetings so he or she can see for themselves these well-dressed people in nice suits who look like anybody else and have been in recovery for years. It was terribly important for me to get inside of open meetings and see sober alcoholics for myself because they're terribly inspiring.
The second is to twelfth-step your doctor - not to teach him about alcohol or Alcoholics Anonymous, but to give him a list of names that motivated patients could call. Doctors aren't experienced enough in their practices to find recovering alcoholics, so recovering alcoholics must either say "I will talk with patients," or give doctors referrals. What medical professionals need is a list of referral sources, clearly typed, and some success using those referrals, so they have hope rather than hopelessness.

Grapevine: How did you, a nonalcoholic, get to know AA?

George Vaillant: I was working for an alcohol clinic where it was a condition of employment. I had to go to a meeting a month. In addition, half the staff were recovering alcoholics, and they were the first people whom I'd met at Harvard in ten years who knew anything about the disease.

Grapevine: Is there any movement afoot to establish that kind of requirement for medical students today?

George Vaillant: For the last ten years, medical students in many medical schools have been required to go to one or two AA meetings, due in large part to the activity of AA's CPC (Cooperation with the Professional Community) committee. But the problem is that in your first two meetings, there's so much going on that you don't always get the feeling of, "My God, these people are recovering." It's more about learning what a terrible disease alcoholism is and not about realizing that the people in the meeting are the same people you see in your emergency room with the fractures.
What people are only slowly learning is that you can teach medical students anything that's noble and good about people and they get it right on the exam. But where medical students learn how to be doctors is on the hospital wards and in the emergency rooms, where they're working with residents. And interns, for very good reasons, hate active alcoholics with a passion. Therefore, the educational program has to begin again after residency. And that really is something patients can do for their doctors - not by teaching them about AA, but by telling their stories and offering whatever suits them of the Twelve Steps. And, as I said, by giving them a number to call when the roof is falling in.

Grapevine: You said about 40 percent of the people who remain abstinent do it through AA. What about the other 60 percent? Could we in AA be more open, more supportive of these?

George Vaillant: Yes. You know, if you're batting 400, it's all right to miss a few. I think the fact that AA knows the answer to an extremely complicated problem is probably all right.
But it doesn't hurt at the level of GSO for AA to have humility and understand that 60 percent do it without AA. It's also true that most of those 60 percent do it with the AA toolbox: their spirituality doesn't come from AA; their support group doesn't come from AA; and what I call "substitute dependency" doesn't come from AA. But they still use the same ingredients that AA uses.
And I don't think there's anything that the other 60 percent are doing that AA needs to learn from, except: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." If you meet someone who has stayed sober for more than three years and they're pleased and boasting that they did it without AA, thank your Higher Power for another recovery. You know, there's "little" sobriety, being dry, and there's sobriety with a big S, which includes humility and not thinking that you're the center of the earth. So if someone is doing something without your help, good enough.

Grapevine: What have you discovered about AA since becoming a trustee? Or as you put it, what if anything has made you say, "Aha!"

George Vaillant: I'd never seen the General Service Manual before, and to me as a nonalcoholic, it is a great piece of world literature, like the American Constitution. It is a great contribution to human thought.
I've also learned something about spirituality. Every time there is a board weekend, I arrive thinking, "Oh my God, this is another weekend I'm not with my family." Then I spend the next two days bathed in love and acceptance that is not from my being anyone special. So I've learned another definition of spirituality: we are each like the beautiful wave that's about to crash on the beach, saying, "This is it. This is forever." Then a voice from behind says, "Don't worry, son. You're not a wave; you're part of the ocean."

Grapevine: There is still a great deal of debate about the role of addicts in AA. What are your views on that?

George Vaillant:This is a terribly important question. AAs should focus on alcoholism. They're right. They've got enough to do, and there are enough alcoholics to go around in the world that they should never fear for their primary purpose.
But because there are a lot of people with mixed addictions, it's important for individual groups that can tolerate them to be tolerant and inclusive. There are some groups that welcome white, middle-aged Protestant males. And that's okay; they should be there, even though the rest of AA may regard them as hopeless dinosaurs and politically incorrect. And there are other groups that tolerate people who spend a little bit too much time talking about their $5-million cocaine habit and not enough time talking about alcoholism. And that's the wave of the future. There are increasingly fewer alcoholics. So some groups are going to have to change.

Grapevine: What are some of the other challenges that AA faces?

George Vaillant: I think there are two, really. One is to come to some meaningful terms with the individuals who are frightened that AA is a religion. This will involve some work and growth in AA to incorporate its diversity without losing its traditions. This is in keeping with the question of keeping the first 164 pages that Bill W. wrote in the Big Book and at the same time including contemporary stories about things some groups might be horrified by.
The second challenge (and this may be more important to me as a class A trustee) is to convey to the world what an extraordinary organization Alcoholics Anonymous is - not only in its ability to cure alcoholism but in its ability to conceptualize the fact that we're all one planet.
Just as an example, groups that are supposed to know about human beings and to be peaceful - the Christian church, the psychoanalytic movement, and the peace movement - are constantly splintering and fighting with each other. And somehow for sixty years, AA has kept two million very diverse individuals, who in their past lives were often a lot less peaceful than the Christians, the psychoanalysts, and the advocates of peace, working together for a common good.
I'm not sure that's a challenge to the Fellowship, or necessary to keep people sober. It's simply to me a challenge that people appreciate the depth of this message, which is expressed more in the Twelve Traditions and Twelve Concepts that in the Twelve Steps.

Grapevine: When you spoke of religious skeptics or of those fearful that AA might have a religious agenda, were you thinking of professionals in the field of alcoholism, or alcoholics themselves?

George Vaillant: Oh, both. Alcoholics, because of the shame, are enormously sensitive to exclusion. So to say, "If you want what we have, you have to believe in a Higher Power; you have to be spiritual, or you have to fake it till you make it" is enormously threatening to some people. They're still at a point of self-absorption; the idea of depending on a power greater than themselves is something they're going to have to learn. Think of it this way: there are a lot of things parents believe, like the value of working hard and completing an education, that make no sense to an eighteen-year-old. And for some alcoholics, spirituality is like one of those things that you learn when you get older. AA has to constantly remind itself that it needs to meet people where they are and that it can only make loving suggestions.
Bill W. spells out very clearly that Alcoholics Anonymous is not a religion. And he makes it clear that there should be nothing about AA that excludes anyone who's a suffering alcoholic. But how you get people who've grown up in one tradition to understand how the world looks to people who've grown up in another takes ongoing discussion. Universality is very hard to achieve. And AA, in its effort of world unity, is constantly having to evolve. It's not a question of changing. It's a process of growth.
Copyright 2001, AA Grapevine Magazine, Inc., All Rights Reserved

Our Karma ran over your Dogma

Toronto AA Intergroup zealots (member who have an absolute belief in God) were peddling some politics to get two agnostic AA meetings out of the Toronto directory of AA. 

Most AAs are moderate about their Higher Power, talking anecdotally about God as they understand Him (her, it, they).  And then there are those who say, "These are suggestions.  I don't believe in God; I don't need a crutch to overcome a crutch, I need to learn to walk on my own."  For many more agnostics, these questions are yet unanswered.  Some are Apatheists, they don't care if the secret of the universe is unveiled today, and they won't change what they do tomorrow.  They live by their own values and do the next right thing, no matter whom or what is watching.  There are apostates who bought in hook-line-and-sinker to turning his or her will over to God when they got sober, what ever they did worked. But now, they are still seeking and have begun to doubt, grateful that they got sober but re-framing what got them that way.  We all have a narrative to what addiction is and what it did to us, how we got sober, and what living clean and sober looks like.

So here's the story:  In a divided Intergroup body (not creed vs creed) but the belief in autonomy vs the belief in one singular way to talk recovery, the literalist, buy a few votes and less than 30 groups in a city of 520 meetings, got the non-believers kicked of the list of options to newcomers or visitors to Toronto.

The idea was to suppress the idea of options in AA.  It made front page news on the Countries most read news paper and readers weighed in on the topic with candour and clarity:  Read it here:

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1002750--fight-over-god-splits-toronto-aa-groups?bn=1


You find Traditionless Father Peter Waters face and name speaking for why AA should follow Traditions and stick to its heritage.

But 21st century newcomers look different.  3 times the number of Atheists are walking in the doors that in 1960.  There are Humanists, Buddhists, Taoists and more coming our way and what is the message to be.

Bill Wilson reflects on "free-thinkers" in 1961

The Dilemma of No Faith
By Bill Wilson, April 1961

Copyright © AA Grapevine, Inc
from the April 1961 issue

      The phrase "God As We Understand Him" is perhaps the most important expression to be found in our whole AA vocabulary. Within the compass of these five significant words there can be included every kind and degree of faith, together with the positive assurance that each of us may choose his own. Scarcely less valuable to us are those supplemental expressions - "A Higher Power" and "A Power Greater Than Ourselves." For all who deny, or seriously doubt a deity, these frame an open door over whose threshold the unbeliever can take his first easy step into a reality hitherto unknown to him - the realm of faith.
      In AA such breakthroughs are everyday events. They are all the more remarkable when we reflect that a working faith had once seemed an impossibility of the first magnitude to perhaps half of our present membership of three hundred thousand. To all these doubters has come the great discovery that as soon as they could cast their main dependence upon a "higher power" - even upon their own AA groups - they had turned that blind corner which had always kept the open highway from their view. From this time on - assuming they tried hard to practice the rest of the AA program with a relaxed and open mind - an ever deepening and broadening faith, a veritable gift, had invariably put in its sometimes unexpected and often mysterious appearance.
      We much regret that these facts of AA life are not understood by the legion of alcoholics in the world around us. Any number of them are bedeviled by the dire conviction that if every they go near AA they will be pressured to conform to some particular brand of faith or theology. They just don't realize that faith is never a necessity for AA membership; that sobriety can be achieved with an easily acceptable minimum of it; and that our concepts of a higher power and God as we understand Him afford everyone a nearly unlimited choice of spiritual belief and action.
      How to transmit this good news is one of our most challenging problems in communication, for which there may be no fast or sweeping answer. Perhaps our public information services could begin to emphasize this all-important aspect of AA more heavily. And within our own ranks we might well develop a more sympathetic awareness of the acute plight of these really isolated and desperate sufferers. In their aid we can settle for no less than the best possible attitude and the most ingenious action that we can muster.
      We can also take a fresh look at the problem of "no faith" as it exists right on our own doorstep. Though three hundred thousand did recover in the last twenty-five years, maybe half a million more have walked into our midst, and then out again. No doubt some were too sick to make even a start. Others couldn't or wouldn't admit their alcoholism. Still others couldn't face up to their underlying personality defects. Numbers departed for still other reasons.
      Yet we can't well content ourselves with the view that all these recovery failures were entirely the fault of the newcomers themselves. Perhaps a great many didn't receive the kind and amount of sponsorship they so sorely needed. We didn't communicate when we might have done so. So we AA's failed them. Perhaps more often than we think, we still make no contact at depth with those suffering the dilemma of no faith.
      Certainly none are more sensitive to spiritual cocksureness, pride and aggression than they are. I'm sure this is something we too often forget. In AA's first years I all but ruined the whole undertaking with this sort of unconscious arrogance. God as I understood Him had to be for everybody. Sometimes my aggression was subtle and sometimes it was crude. But either way it was damaging - perhaps fatally so - to numbers of non-believers. Of course this sort of thing isn't confined to Twelfth Step work. It is very apt to leak out into our relationships with everybody. Even now, I catch myself chanting that same old barrier-building refrain, "Do as I do, believe as I do - or else!"
      Here's a recent example of the high cost of spiritual pride. A very tough-minded prospect was taken to his first AA meeting. The first speaker majored on his own drinking pattern. The prospect seemed impressed. The next two speakers (or maybe lecturers) each themed their talks on "God as I understand Him." This could have been good, too, but it certainly wasn't. The trouble was their attitude, the way they presented their experience. They did ooze arrogance. In fact, the final speaker got far overboard on some of his personal theological convictions. With perfect fidelity, both were repeating my performance of years before. Quite unspoken, yet implicit in everything they said, was the same idea - "Folks, listen to us. We have the only true brand of AA - and you'd better get it!"
      The new prospect said he'd had it - and he had. His sponsor protested that this wasn't real AA. But it was too late; nobody could touch him after that. He also had a first class alibi for yet another bender. When last heard from, an early appointment with the undertaker seemed probable.
      Fortunately, such rank aggression in the name of spirituality isn't often seen nowadays. Yet this sorry and unusual episode can be turned to good account. We can ask ourselves whether, in less obvious but nevertheless destructive forms, we are not more subject to fits of spiritual pride than we had supposed. If constantly worked at, I'm sure that no kind of self-survey could be more beneficial. Nothing could more surely increase our communication with each other and with God.
      Many years ago a so-called "unbeliever" brought me to see this very clearly. He was an M.D. and a fine one. I met him and his wife Mary at the home of a friend in a midwestern city. It was purely a social evening. Our fellowship of alcoholics was my sole topic and I pretty much monopolized the conversation. Nevertheless, the doctor and his lady seemed truly interested and he asked many questions. But one of them made me suspect that he was an agnostic, or maybe an atheist.
      This promptly triggered me, and I set out to convert him, then and there. Deadly serious, I actually bragged about my spectacular spiritual experience of the year before. The doctor mildly wondered if that experience might not be something other than I thought it was. This hit me hard, and I was downright rude. There had been no real provocation; the doctor was uniformly courteous, good humored and even respectful. Not a little wistfully, he said he often wished he had a firm faith, too. But plainly enough, I had convinced him of nothing.
      Three years later I revisited my midwestern friend. Mary, the doctor's wife, came by for a call and I learned that he had died the week before. Much affected, she began to speak of him.
      His was a noted Boston family, and he'd been Harvard educated. A brilliant student, he might have gone on to fame in his profession. He could have enjoyed a wealthy practice and a social life among old friends. Instead, he had insisted on being a company doctor in what was a strife-torn industrial town. When Mary had sometimes asked why they didn't go back to Boston, he would take her hand and say, "Maybe you are right, but I can't bring myself to leave. I think the people at the company really need me."
      Mary then recalled that she had never known her husband to complain seriously about anything, or to criticize anyone bitterly. Though he appeared to be perfectly well, the doctor had slowed down in his last five years. When Mary prodded him to go out evenings, or tried to get him to the office on time, he always came up with a plausible and good-natured excuse. Not until his sudden last illness did she know what all this while he had carried about a heart condition that could have done him in at any moment. Except for a single doctor on his own staff, no one had an inkling. When she reproached him about this, he simply said, "Well, I could see no good in causing people to worry about me - especially you, my dear."
      This was the story of a man of great spiritual worth. The hallmarks were plain to be seen: humor and patience, gentleness and courage, humility and dedication, unselfishness and love - a demonstration I might never come near to making myself. This was the man I had chided and patronized. This was the "unbeliever" I had presumed to instruct!
      Mary told us this story more than twenty years ago. Then, for the first time, it burst in upon me how very dead faith can be - when minus responsibility. The doctor had an unwavering belief in his ideals. But he also practiced humility, wisdom and responsibility. Hence his superb demonstration.
      My own spiritual awakening had given me a built-in faith in God - a gift indeed. But I had been neither humble nor wise. Boasting of my faith, I had forgotten my ideals. Pride and irresponsibility had taken their place. By so cutting off my own light, I had little to offer my fellow alcoholics. At last I saw why many had gone away - some of them forever.
      Therefore, faith is more than our greatest gift; its sharing with others is our greatest responsibility. So may we of AA continually seek the wisdom and the willingness by which we may well fulfill that immense trust which the Giver of all perfect gifts has placed in our hands.

silkworth.net

20Questions about AA Freethinkers and Agnostics

For years of my sobriety I was a closet atheist.  Fake-it-until-you-make-it was a fix-all suggestion from my sponsor which came into play with almost every area of transition to sober life.  Acting as-if helped me find my value system and break from my narcissistic alcoholic ways.  Twenty years later I was still feigning belief in God. 

Because I thought believing and belonging (to the fellowship) were synonymous, I kept my doubt to myself and danced around God-talk with anecdotal avoidance.    As I became more comfortable with my disbelief and speaking about it, I found more AA members that don`t practice AA with a God-conscious focus.  I have found AA meetings that were secular and over the last five to 10 years there has been heated discussion between liberal and conservative members.  It`s an important and emotional discussion that continues around coffee pots.  Here is my own experience in the form of the most asked questions I have faced, or dare I say, ``concerns`` in what I will call: 20 questions about We Agnostics of the 21^st century.

1)  Isn’t shunning God a form of intellectual pride?

 Dr. Bob closes his Big Book talk with “If you think you are an atheist, an agnostic, a skeptic, or have any other form of intellectual pride which keeps you from accepting what is in this book, I feel sorry for you.”  This is a divisive statement. It was a statement that was reasonable for the times.  If Dr. Bob knew the scores of sober agnostics in our midst today, would he have used more inclusive language?  Some atheists feel smugly superior, just like some believers do. Most doubters and nonbelievers want everyone to be welcome as equals in the fellowship, not being expected to adopt anyone else’s belief or deny their own. 

2)  We Agnostics is a chapter devoted to you isn’t it?

The Big Book suggests that disbelief is a dangerous form of self-will and a one-way-ticket to relapse.  Some of our members take exception with the idea that their God-free efforts are second-rate. Today, doubters and atheists are counting days, years and decades of continuous sobriety. 

3)  Don’t Agnostic meetings change the words in the 12-steps?  That’s against the rules so that can’t really be AA.

Some meetings use a “God-free” adaptation of the 12-steps and others don’t.  There are no universal conventions among agnostic meetings.  We are autonomous like any meeting.  The 12 steps are important principals.  We stay firm on principal and flexible on method; the wording is not sacred.  We work step without imposing a deity.   If AA was created in the 30s ½ way around the world and Bob and Bill were Buddhists the language would have been quite different but they could have come up with 12 steps to recovery and enlightenment that would have worked just as good as the Big Book first edition wording.  Our experience is that the steps work as a secular exercise.

Non-believers speak a different language than believers.  We take the same steps to recovery.  The action isn’t significantly different – just the wording.  Think of agnostic steps as AA in a different language – when a hand reaches out for help, we want the hand of AA always to be there – no matter what the language.

4)  Aren’t you afraid that General Service will shut you down? 

AA service works as an upside-down pyramid scheme.  Groups are at the top. All levels of service are below with General Service Office at the bottom, serving the groups and service structures above. GSO doesn’t dictate rules to meetings; it works for us and conducts business on our behalf.  We have traditions, not rules so there is no enforcement, punishment or banishment. 

Some Intergroups have discriminated against free-thinker/agnostic groups and won’t print them in the directory.  Maybe they have lost sight of the intent that AA is a mosaic, not a melting-pot.  General Service has greater commitment to Tradition and autonomy.

5)  If we let agnostics and atheists change the steps won’t that open the door to any number of forms of mutilation of our sacred program?  Woman will want the patriarchy out of AA.  Young people will want to refer to God as we understand the dude.

So what if they do? I heard a member proudly declare that a woman’s meeting wanted to change the steps to gender neutral, “but we shut them down.”  He thinks AA was saved from ruin.  I don’t. 

AA didn’t allow African Americans to join AA at one time.  The idea of Gay friendly meetings being recognized in meeting books was once controversial.    Young people’s Groups had some hurdles to cross to be accepted as an AA sub-culture but still part of the whole.  I remember when some AA’s thought churches going non-smoking would be the end of carrying the message.  None of us are comfortable with change.  But AA has adapted before and if and when it stops adapting, extinction is inevitable.

6)  Why isn’t AA good enough for you the way it is?  AA has been so successful – why mess with it?

AA works. How successful we are, is fodder for lively debate.  It’s not unpatriotic to expect more from your country.  It’s not divisive to suggest that AA can adapt to acknowledge people getting sober in AA without God.  We know we are a small subculture.  We don’t want all of AA to change. We exercise our tradition-given autonomy to speak our truth in an authentic way and to extend our hand to newcomers who believe as we do.  That is no threat to AA’s survival.  Rather, we expect our population to grow as fewer newcomers take a pass on our way of life because of our dogma and practices of the steps with a God-centered interpretation.

7)  There is no 12-steps without “God as we understand him.”  How do agnostics stay sober?

Ours is a program of action.  It isn’t what we believe and it’s not what we think that gets us sober.  It’s what we do.  Agnostic steps demand the same workload.  Without a God-consciousness there is less delegating, so maybe it’s more work.  Agnostics face the same hurdles as anyone else in recovery and we have the same experience, strength and hope.

8)  How do you do Step 2 and 3 without God?

“Came to believe and accept that we needed strength beyond our awareness and resources to restore us to sanity” is one of the alternate interpretations of Step 2. It’s not poetry, but it is authentic to many of us.  Again, there is no Agnostic Central Service so many free-thinker groups have drafted steps from scratch while others use agnostic steps that have been around for a while.

Higher power, inner power, power of example – for every member of AA our belief is as individual as our finger print.  There aren’t two camps of AAs: Believers and doubters. Each one of us has a unique way of practicing each step.  Some agnostics articulate the third step as “The key is letting go.  I let go and don’t know.  I just let go.” Others see Step 3 as learning to accept life on life’s terms.

9)  How do you do you work Step 5?

If we are being brutally honest and someone else (a human) is present, it doesn’t really matter what other force is listening.  We still get the benefit.

10) How can there be a Step 6 without God?

We prepare ourselves for change in Step Six.  Like anyone, we look forward to a life that is less encumbered by our short-comings.  Most of us don’t expect a force or deity to grant us anything – not serenity, sobriety, wisdom or courage. Buddhists claim that enlightenment comes from within. We learn from those around us and we commit ourselves to better living.  “Faith without works is dead” is maybe a oft misquoted bible passage which suggests acting good is better than praying to be good; doing the next right thing is more of what Step Six asks the non-theist than asking for the strength to do the next right thing.  Values, our own values, our own inner voice guides us.

11) Step 7 is about Humility.  Can you be humble if you’re not a servant of God?

Humility is a universally accepted principal and practice that all AA’s believers and doubters adapt to as part of sober living.

12) Step 11 is all about prayer and meditation.  Who do you pray too if you don’t believe a deity is listening?

Free-thinkers meditate.  Mindfulness is another tool, like meditation, that fosters awareness and peace.  AA literature espouses the virtue of meditation.  A lot of the talk in the 12 & 12 about meditation is really more about prayer.  Some of us pray.  The secretary of my group calls himself the “praying atheist.”  The benefits of prayer are anecdotal perhaps but they do suggest that putting problems, goals and insights out there, out-loud sometimes, is a positive exercise for sober life.  For some of us, we meditate, some pray, some don’t.

13) Bill Wilson said, “Either God is everything or he is nothing, what shall it be?”

Mark Twain said, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”  Both are alienating statements.  No one has to prove what they believe any more than defend a favorite color.  We need not resolve the questions of the universe.  It’s good enough that everyone respect each other. Nobody’s beliefs are contradictory to the principals behind the 12 steps.

14) How do you practice the traditions without God?

Only one tradition mentions God.  Tradition Two suggest that where there is democracy (group conscience) that there is God’s will.  I think we all believe in the very democratic style of AA and all the other traditions are spiritually based secular concepts that are hard for anyone to argue with once they have studied them and seen them work in practice. 

15) Aren’t you going to kill newcomers by inviting them to dismiss God?

It sounds crazy but I have heard members say just that when they learned we were starting an agnostic meeting in my city.  We were amazed how many people found us online or in the directory and were drawn to our AA group.  Many had been introduced to AA in treatment but felt that regular attendance would be contrary to their core-beliefs.  They like our meeting.  We encourage them to go to other meetings and take what they like – leave the rest.  We tell them, “belief in God isn’t contagious and having someone waving a proselytizing finger at you is not very likely.”  We aren’t looking to dictate to anyone about personal belief.  Everyone is welcome at our meeting, like any other.

16) How do you run a meeting?

There are no prayers at our agnostic meeting.  We close with the Responsibility Pledge.  Other groups change the “Serenity Prayer” to a credo by just leaving out the word “God.”  Sometimes we have a speaker, once a month we read a tradition from the 12 and 12 and discus it.  Most of the time we read a chapter from Living Sober – a secular, common sense approach to getting and staying sober.  Other meetings vary from discussion, step study to speaker.  We have a GSR and we participate in all levels of service like any other meeting such as working in PI and treatment centers.

17) What does Appendix II in the Big Book mean about spiritual awakenings of the educational variety?

The first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous gave the impression that sobriety came only from a God-conscious experience but that notion is erroneous.  Many of our awakenings are secular events born of an open mind and honest exploration. The point is that mental, physical and spiritual recovery is wide open to interpretation.  In Middle America in the mid-20^th century, being open minded may have meant both Catholics and Protestants putting their differences aside.  Today it means so much more.

18) What do words like Free-thinker, humanist, doubter or realist mean?

Why can’t a devout Christian or Jew consider themselves liberal or freethinkers?  Of course they can.  For our purposes, “freethinker” is defined as someone who considers the immaterial world, the question of a deity or the hereafter, open ended. 

19) Aren’t you afraid of what you’re doing to AA as a whole?  You will face considerable opposition.  The mere thought of how you conduct yourself is blasphemy to many a strict AA member. 

Some of us will smile and say, “Blasphemy is a victimless crime,” but we know where our opposition is coming from.  Concerned souls love AA and want to protect it so it will be here for them and newcomers.  Through the traditions there are dark warnings that AA’s survival requires vigilance and stewardship.  The classic literature also says that “more will be revealed,” suggesting that AA will be subject to change.  Adaptation is a cornerstone to survival.  We agnostics love AA and care about our future, too.

20) How can someone find an agnostic or Free-thinkers AA meeting?

If you live in a metropolitan centre there may be an agnostic meeting where you are – spend some time with us.  Everyone is welcome.  If you live remote and finding a meeting is improbable, there is http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/aa_freethinkers_meeting/ an online meeting and community that I am part of and I expect if you do a web-search, you’ll find more.  If you want to start a meeting,https://secularaa.org/meetings/ has maps and lists for finding secular meetings + formats for running meetings.

I am not speaking on behalf of anyone.  These are actual questions I have been asked and answers in my own words, based on my own experiences.