Atheist Dopers who've attended AA/NA/OA/&c.: What's your higher power?

Great Debates
41

One reason so many people believe they need God to achieve sobriety is that they come into AA convinced they lack the inner strength to do it on their own. When they hit bottom they had begun to believe everybody who called them irresponsible losers. Which, at that point, they were, but the others were wrong when they told them they would never amount to anything and would die Skid Row bums. Bill W confirms and perpetuates this negative belief but offers them the “only” way out through their acceptance of a higher power that can help them along.

You might say, “There is always another way out,” but not everybody thinks like MacGyver. They reach sobriety sure that Jesus carried them for part of the way and cannot be convinced that, when there was a single set of footprints on the sand, it was theirs. I feel sorry for them like they feel sorry for me, but I feel especially bad knowing they might be one crisis of faith away from their world collapsing like a house of cards while I, with their support and love, can drag myself into the breach once more. After one of my more peaceful discussions I overheard someone say that he had never realized how much harder it was for atheists because we don’t have a higher power to fall back on. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t really have a higher power, either, and he had done it himself by drawing on his own resources, but if believing in God had gotten him this far I was not going to argue with apparent success. And I don’t even mind genuinely concerned people encouraging me toward God. I say, “No thank you, but I appreciate your interest.” All I ask for is respect for my own beliefs as I respect theirs with nobody calling me a savage or a vampire. Imagine the uproar if they were to call people of other minority groups such things! The day of it being open season on atheists is coming to the end, but I will try to stay polite.

42

I haven’t yet. I was just discharged from the group therapy program today, I start back to work tomorrow, and the next EA meeting isn’t till Tuesday, I believe. I’ll do my best to report back here after that to let you know what it was like (I can PM you if you’d like). It may very well be the case that EA isn’t for me, but I think I owe it to myself and my wife and son to check it out.
I wanted to say thank you to everyone who’s posted in this thread so far. It’s been a big help in sorting out my own thoughts on this.

43

Been in N.A. nearly 25 years. My concept of a Higher Power has changed over the years. I went from Christianity to atheism to Agnosticism to…I believe in God but I do not try to define God. I feel I am not that smart and neither are you.*

*not you personally

44

I think lots of people would be interested. And keep it in this thread, rather than MPSIMS, so we can be politely disagreeable. :slight_smile:

Didn’t take it personally. I mean, you’re wrong, but I don’t take you being wrong personally. It’s just your cross to bear. :smiley:
At tonight’s meeting the leader read a story in which a guy’s flight was diverted to Cleveland and he was seated next to a Christie Brinkley clone who asked if he would mind swapping seats with a friend of hers, who was also very pretty. He ended up next to another AA who was flying through some turbulence in his life. He and this new FoBW buddy had a good talk and, when the flight was through, the young ladies came back and thanked him for his graciousness. Then sometime after he got home his wife divorced him because she met another guy.

The lesson he got from this was NOT that he had a layover in Cleveland, that he was plucked from a seat next to a beautiful woman because he was a sap, that he spent the flight talking AA with a guy who resented that he wasn’t going to sit next to a pretty girl either (and said so), that he blew the chance to ask the young ladies out for a cup of coffee, or that his lying bitch of a wife was already cheating on him and eventually would divorce him. No, the lesson he got was that through all of these “coincidences” God guided him to where he could help the other man. I can see why his wife divorced his clueless ass.

I will never understand religious people. As for those coincidences as being acts of Jehovah? No, they were obviously sent by the good and kindly Eris, who wanted him to think he was going to get laid right up to when the plane crashed. And the plane didn’t crash because he had already missed all the signals She had sent and she wasn’t going to waste a good plane crash on somebody so stupid he couldn’t figure out that Eris had fucked him over.

45

Glurge aside, some people may think that being able to help another person is intrinsically better than focusing on picking up a hot chick,* even if you don’t buy into the “this is all part of Jehovah’s Fiendishly Clever Plan” thing.
At least that’s what I tell myself as I cry myself to sleep each night.*

**Not really. Happily married for over 20 years. But it was a good line nonetheless.

46

UPDATE: Didn’t make it to EA this week due to the fact that we’re down to one vehicle right now. Will report back hopefully next week.
I just wanted to say thank you again to everyone who has weighed in here. It’s amazing to me that when I’m having trouble sorting things out in my mind, often someone will phrase it in just such a way that it clicks in my mind and everything is clearer. It’s like an assisted epiphany, but what I liken it to when I think about things like that is a game of Tetris in which the pieces don’t rotate perfectly to 90-degree intervals. I’ve managed to stack up a few rows and leave space for the long straight piece, but then when that piece is there I rotate it just a smidge too far and get it canted on top of the space where it’s supposed to go. People like you all and the therapists I’ve been working with lately are like a little breath of wind that pushes the piece just enough so that it falls down on its own and everything clears out a little bit.
I don’t know if that analogy made sense to anyone else, but thank you for helping me sort things out when I need it.

47

I’m just new into my program. I did the first 60 some-odd days on my own, got tired of it and dragged my ass into some meetings. I’m barely over a month into the program.

I’m not agnostic. I’m an atheist. I do not believe there is a Being out there directing the universe. When people start to share about how God has a master plan, but we just don’t know it, etc., etc., I’m off in my own thoughts. Nor do I believe that there is some sort of mystical connecting power between souls.

That said, I believe that there is an element of spirituality inherit within the human mind. I think that religions such as Christianity, and teaching philosophies, such as Zen Buddhism all access this element. I think many feel a connection with what seems to be something greater than themselves, and that this is what Bill W. would have said had he not been a product of early twentieth century Protestant America.

I have no problem mentally substituting my concept for what they call God or a Higher Power.

Last week, we had a discussion meeting, and I asked about the God Thing. Many people said that they couldn’t clearly define their concept, but that it simply worked for them.

I couldn’t do that when it was time to decide to either remain in the faith of my fathers or to go on. I couldn’t see continuing to pay a tithing, professing believe in a God whose form is dictated to me, but who does not make sense. When I talked to some who said that they also had reservations, but that they stayed because it worked for them. Good for them, but I couldn’t do it.

The difference between then and now is that religion wasn’t that important for me, and I just could not see how to lie and claim that I believed in something I didn’t, especially about a God.

Sobriety is my life, because if I lose that, the rest is gone. This is a method which has proven to work for many people. Does it work for everyone? Of course not. Is it more effective that other programs? I have no idea, but I don’t care because it is working for me.

It doesn’t ask me to subscribe to a particular notion of whatever form of a god / higher power / group etc., is, not does it require me to even believe in a higher power. The 12 steps are suggestions, not commandments.

However, I see a symbolism within the steps which is not terribly different than zen, however poorly the Christian roots of the founders are covered. A Buddhist master once told me his philosophy and it was something that I could have accepted as an atheist. Letting go of the attachments* in life. Accepting ourselves and others while trying to better ourselves. Accepting pain but rejecting suffering.

Because we’re in Tokyo and not the Bible belt, I’ve never heard a reference to Jesus at AA. That’s nice. I heard enough growing up to last me.

48

I got by sometimes by praying to the spirits of my late parents. It was a kludge but it worked at the time. They were my higher power in that, had they not done what they’d done, I’d not be here to write this - thus I had no power over them and their choice in bringing me about.

Nowadays, I think of my HP as the me that I, or any decent human, could be if we worked at it long and hard enough: an ideal, perhaps unattainable in whole, but worth striving towards in the hope that some of the good parts eventually stick.

49

It made perfect sense to me, but I’m a drunk. :wink:

50

I sometimes get dismissed when I try talking about the faith of others in a meeting. I have been told by one (my fake sponsor/best AA friend) that I cannot understand the faith that AAs have because I’m one of those, and I mock their faith whenever I speak of it. No, I know how Christian faith works even if I have none at the moment (I waver between being an atheist, an animist, and a Lutheran) and I have had faith or was studying it all of my life. I do not laugh at someone else’s faith. I respect it, try to understand it, and if need be try to help others to understand their own faith better. I do not tell them that I know more about and have a clearer understanding of their religion than they do, but I generally do. (Nonconformist churches don’t always make theological sense to me, but these people are mostly Catholics and I got that in the bag.) I know that the faithful believe that God’s love and support are infinite and that a denial of that is a denial of God, a terrible sin.

Therefore, I feel a jolt of shock when one of the faithful talks about how he needs to continue to work the program to stay sober because he doesn’t have another recovery in him. I want to say that with God’s love all things are possible. All he has to do is ask for it. I mean, we talk about that at every damned meeting. But what he says is what he’s told by others in the program and “I don’t have another recovery in me” is a simple, easy to remember sound bite that is part of how AA enfeebles its members to keep them coming back, but it also gives relapsers an excuse to keep drinking. If AA is going to finally admit that there is no difference between “spiritual” and “religious” (but it won’t) it needs to get its theological ducks in order and stop with the inconsistency. Bill W and Dr Bob were not theologians, psychologists, or scientists and they need a little help.

And speaking of relapsing, the same friend objected to my saying in front of a newbie that it is common, but the door is always open for when they want to come back. I was told I was making it okay to relapse to say that most everybody does it, usually more than once. No, I was just stating a fact that newbies should know. Relapse is not an option or a vacation or anything positive. It is simply a fact of addiction that really bad relapses happen with half of all addicts and lesser ones with ninety percent (numbers taken from an AA-sympathetic website, but I think they are higher). We are cheating the newcomers by not being upfront with that because otherwise, as we hear all the time in people’s stories, they might think they were the first AAs to ever relapse. And we hear from the stories that multiple relapses are common, but new people haven’t read or heard all the stories and think their experiences are original. We need to tell the newbies that we understand that oopsies happen, oopsies have happened to us, too, and they are still welcome back through the front door whenever they feel ready with no need to feel embarrassed. The Twelfth Step is as much about seeking our own lost lambs as it is about bringing new ones into the fold.

I emphasized “front door” because I have known too many churches that insisted that the wayward humble themselves before reentering the sanctuary. AA officially believes in humility but not humiliation. Works for me.