Do You Personally Recommend Alcoholics Anonymous?
Question by Paigeybear: Do you personally recommend Alcoholics Anonymous?
I’m considering going to meetings to see if they can be of any help to me. I do not drink constantly, as I’m only eighteen so I can’t even buy alcohol. But I’ve resorted to stealing sometimes. And when I do drink I always drink to get drunk. I’ve never blacked out, though [well, I sometimes forget little parts of the night, but not the whole thing]. I’ve been going through a lot of changes in the past year [graduation, college, trying to find a job, etc.] and I just feel like I’ve been drinking a lot. I think about alcohol a lot, too. I’m sick of craving to drink.
So do you recommend it? And does it have many religious undertones/overtones?
Best answer:
Answer by raysny
I would NOT recommend AA.
They are a religious group that denies that they are religious. Take a look at the 12 Steps:
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.
4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
How could anyone read these and not see that it is religious? At best, AA might be considered non-denominational, but a closer examination of AA shows it is not compatible with most of Christianity with an absence of Free Will and miracles on demand. Also, AA says that God cannot cure alcoholism, only arrest the symptoms, one day at a time. To me, there are enough differences between AA’s God the the God of any other religion to make AA a stand alone religion.
Some fundamentalists see these differences as heresy:
http://www.psychoheresy-aware.org/crit12steps.html
AA is a splinter group of “The Oxford Group”, a Christian sect, also known as “First Century Christian Fellowship”. AA has been declared to be “religious in nature” by 3 Federal District Courts and 2 State Courts and that court mandated AA is a violation of the Establishment Clause.
AA has about a 5% success rate, the same as people quitting on their own. Most people who abuse alcohol and drugs, do so in their late teens and early twenties; they are experimenting with their freedoms. The vast majority, 80% once faced with adult responsibilities, quit or learn to moderate on their own.
Answer by V.L
yes it has worked for two of my family member’s :]
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