|
Copyright © 2001, A. Orange Christian religions would call the Twelve Steps heretical, if they would bother to read them carefully. Theologically, there are all kinds of things wrong with them. Imagine someone going to confession, and saying to the priest, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six months since my last confession. I've done all kinds of things since then, but none of them is my fault. I am powerless over everything, and I have no control over my actions. I turned my will and my life over to the care of God quite some time ago, and now God controls everything, and anything I do wrong is God's fault. If I do something good, it is because God makes me do it, so I can't accept any praise. If I do something bad, it is because God makes me do it, so I can't accept any blame." The priest isn't going to accept that cop-out for a minute. And what if that person continues with his confession, "I have been defeated by sin, and have no power over it. That is why I gave my will and my life to God, so that He can do something about it. God is the only hope I have of not being destroyed by sin. So all I can do is Let Go and Let God." The priest isn't going to accept that one either. The priest will tell that person to get off of his lazy ass, and quit feeling sorry for himself, and get to work at fixing himself and battling sin. And the last thing the priest will say is, "Nobody is powerless. You can resist temptation, so do it." The priest is right, and he clearly sees what could come of this nonsense: Imagine a horny teenager who says, "I am powerless over my sexual urges. I am driven to have sex all of the time. I can't keep my hands off of the girls. So I joined Sexaholics Anonymous, and turned my will and my life over to the care of God, and humbly asked Him to remove my shortcomings. Well, He hasn't gotten around to it yet, so I can't help but gleefully jump on all of the pretty girls, day and night, until God gets around to fixing me. It isn't my fault. It's all God's fault, because He isn't doing His job." Logically, the kid has a point, if we believe in the Twelve-Step bull droppings. Step one says, "We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol." Step two says, "We came to believe that only a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." Step three says we "turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God". Step seven says, "We humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings." So there it is: You are powerless and insane, so you let God have the steering wheel; God runs your life, and has control of it, and he gets the credit or blame for what happens next, and God fixes you, or fails to fix you. You don't have to do a thing anymore. "Let Go and Let God" is a very popular AA slogan. All Christian religions emphasize the idea that you are responsible for your own actions. And so do Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism (more properly called Vedantic religions). And so do Native American religions. I just can't think of another religion, anywhere in this world, besides Alcoholics Anonymous (and its parent, Buchmanism, a.k.a. The Oxford Group Movement, a.k.a. Moral Re-Armament), that pushes the idea of you not controlling yourself, of you not controlling your drinking, of you not being responsible for your own actions, of you being powerless over any temptation or vice, and of you not ever being able to change that. In truth, even AA is confused on this issue. Step one clearly, unequivocally, declares that we are powerless over alcohol. Step two clearly, unequivocally, says that we believe that only God can restore us to sanity. Step three clearly, unequivocally, says that we are turning our wills and our lives over to the care of God. AA members surrender to God, because, they say, they have already tried running their own lives, and have failed, and will die unless God takes over and runs the show. And when a member does something good, the standard line is to say, "But I can't take any credit for that, God gets the credit, because that is Who is running the show now." When someone stays sober for a year or more, all of the members celebrate and thank and praise God for performing that Miracle. But when an AA member does something bad, like relapse, the member gets the blame. Suddenly everybody forgets about God, and whether He was running the show. That is not logically consistent, to put it mildly. I can just see Mr. Spock of StarTrek saying, "That is not logical. Whatever the causal agent is, it is responsible for both its meritorious actions and its reprehensible actions. And the most likely causal agent is the member himself."As an insurance against "big-shot-ism", we can often check ourselves by remembering that we are today sober only by the grace of God and that any success we may be having is far more His success than ours. The AA theologians try to dodge the inconsistency by declaring that some people have really turned their lives over to God, and some people haven't. Some are holding back a little, and keeping a little of their ego still inflated. And when those people do their own will, rather than the Will of God, then that is when they get into trouble. That is a rather depressing view of the human race. People's wishes are always bad? Anyone who does what he wishes to do will always do evil? Is it evil to wish that your child gets to eat? Is it evil to willfully insist that your family and friends not suffer harm? (This is what is called a Gnostic heresy: the idea that all goodness is in Heaven, and this material world is all evil, and is the realm of Satan. And Buchmanism is loaded with that heresy.) Common sense tells us that the vast majority of Americans are not members of AA. Neither have the vast majority of Americans surrendered their wills and their lives to God, in the style of AA. Most people still have their own egos, their own wills, and their own desires. Nevertheless, most people do good things every day. Most people do almost nothing but good, every day. Thus, the inherent true nature of people must be mostly good. Certainly not all good, not angelic, but more good than bad. No matter how bad the world looks some days, people are still far more good than bad. Our world would self-destruct if that were not so. Undoubtedly, there have to be some AA members who have not turned their wills or their lives over to God; lots of them, actually. They may have thought about it, but not quite gotten around to doing it. Or they may have discovered the truth: that it is extremely difficult to do, almost impossible to really do. That the only people who have really shed their egos and their desires and totally surrendered to God are saints, real genuine saints, and those things are as rare as hen's teeth. So rare, in fact, that we are fortunate if there is just one present on this planet at any given time. What strikes me as one of the most tragic parts of this whole twelve-step routine is the millions of people around the world who are wasting their time pretending that they have turned over their wills and their lives to the care of God, or wasting their time, and going through all kinds of frustration, trying to hand over their wills, and finding out that the darned things won't go away, that they are tied to the owner as if with a rubber band, and just snap back. And that the harder you try to get rid of your will or your desires, the more strongly they just come back to you. This stuff is really old hat. Us Hippies were talking about it back in the sixties, and it was thousands of years old then. One of the popular Zen stories tells of a student who had been working for ten years to gradually rid himself of all desires. He went to his Zen master and asked, "But Master, how do I get rid of the desire to be rid of all desires?" And the master smiled and answered, "Now you really do have a problem, don't you?" Alas, neither Frank Buchman nor Bill Wilson knew much about Buddhism or Hinduism, or ego loss, or human psychology, or Zen, or the whole process of really surrendering to God, or infinity, or eternity, or your Higher Power, or whatever you want to call it. And neither Buchman nor Wilson had a clue about the reality that even if you succeed in that surrendering process, that it is just temporary, and you will return to normal reality again all too soon, like in just a few minutes; that only a few rare souls can stay out there for any length of time at all. The rest of us mere mortals are still stuck with our wills, our lives, our egos, and our desires. Now we might have a moment of inspiration, and do something good while divinely inspired, or we might just have a good moment and do something good without God forcing us to do it... Thus it becomes basically impossible to tell whether the good things an AA member does are due to his or her own inner goodness, and good wishes, or due to God's goodness. It is just goofy logic then to insist that all of the good actions of AA members are done by God, and all of the bad actions are done by the members themselves. But if we dump that brain-damaged logic, then we blow a huge hole in the AA theological edifice. The whole game is based on surrendering control of your life to God, and becoming a good little robot, or a good little puppet on a string. And being good, and staying sober, is considered to be evidence that you have surrendered to God, and God is keeping you out of trouble. And the more years of sobriety you have, the closer you are to God. Obviously. But alas, that logic breaks down again when old-timers relapse. I have just recently listened to the stories of a guy who had 9 years of sobriety and then relapsed, and a woman who had 18 years off of drugs and then relapsed. Tragic. Sad. But even more tragic was their inability to even understand what happened in their lives. The guy only said, "I just got stupid for a while." The woman said, "It's so wonderful. Now that I have gone out and used and come back, I know that I don't ever have to relapse again." And everybody cheered and clapped. I couldn't help but wonder, "Did you know that you had to relapse before the last time? Were you saying to yourself, 'Even though I have 18 years of success, I know I will have to relapse at least once more, just for the Hell of it.' Huh? I don't think so." They just didn't have a clue about what really happened, or wouldn't admit to having a clue. If that is true, then they are sitting ducks for another relapse, because they won't know how to prevent it the next time any more than they did the last time. AA and NA dogma says that you just cannot stay clean and sober for that long without working the Twelve Steps and getting God's help. (If you could, then who needs the Twelve Steps?) Anyone with 9 or 18 years of sobriety has obviously long since worked the steps, many, many times over, and has turned his or her will and life over to the care of God. Obviously, long ago, according to standard dogma. So where did the will to relapse suddenly come from? How can someone without a will of his own suddenly get the will to relapse? Inquiring minds want to know. Our friend Spock would say, "That is not logical. Something without any will cannot wish to get a will. If we assume that a rock is an inanimate object without a will of its own, then we can see that a rock cannot suddenly wish to learn calculus, or wish to take a drink, or wish to get a free will of its own. On the other hand, when a human suddenly wishes to take a drink, and does so, after 9 years of not drinking, then we must assume that the human has a will of his own, and had one even before the desire to drink came along."
Apparently, some of the AA faithful are capable of thinking
along these same lines, but
they seem to burn out a few critical brain cells at just the
moment when they almost hit on the truth. This is from
STEP 3: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. To turn my will and our life over?? This sounded like some kind of brainwashing to me. Was AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) some kind of cult? It turned out that AA is not a cult. I have the right to take my will back any time I want. This guy just doesn't seem to be able to understand what "will" means. You can't willfully take your will back if you have no will. And you can't "want" to take your will back if you have no will. In this context, "want" and "will" are the same thing. And to say that you have the "right" to take your will back is some kind of a joke. It is like saying that you have the "right" to defy gravity. If you don't have the physical ability to do so, then the right is useless. Logically, to take it one step further, if the man with 9 years of sobriety had really turned his will over to God, then God must have given it back. And the same is true of the woman with 18 years off of drugs. So you give your will to God, and He turns around and gives it right back to you, and also sticks you with all of your usual problems again? That isn't how the AA true believers like to tell the story... Then, to really flog this dead horse one more time, we can ask, "Why did God choose to give that guy his will back, after 9 years of taking care of him? Of course God knew what would happen. As soon as God decided to give that guy his will back, his fate was sealed. His relapse was as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun. So that was a really mean thing to do, giving the guy his will back... Why would God do that? It couldn't be because God was unhappy with something he had done, because he had not done anything. God had his will, and ran his life for him. Until, suddenly, God didn't feel like doing it any more. Why not?" Inquiring minds want to know. The really bad thing about those old-timers who relapse is that they threaten to bring the whole logical structure down; they threaten to collapse the whole house of cards. They are living proof that the Twelve Steps don't really work. I mean, if the Steps won't even save people who have done them for 9 or 18 years, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
 Another heretical part of the Twelve-Step religion is AA's dogma that says, "Once an addict, always an addict. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic." Christian religions believe that people can be saved, that they can be salvaged or redeemed, that they can always be made into something better. And one way or another, the other major religions of the world also say essentially the same thing. They all agree that you can work on yourself, and resist temptation, and make yourself into a better person. Only AA says that there is no hope for you, ever, that you are powerless over your sin -- alcoholism -- and cannot manage your own life, and that you cannot ever recover, and that the only thing you can do is essentially give up on yourself, and hope that God takes over and does something useful with you, and maybe makes you into something good. So, in total despair, you turn your will and your life over to God in Step 3. Just as a funny side note, the true believers don't seem to notice what comes next: Logically, there is no point in printing Steps 4 through 12, because you don't have any will of your own any more, not after Step 3, so you can't work the rest of the steps. God is in control now, and He may have you doing anything He wishes: washing dishes in an orphanage, or going to Disneyland, or helping a farmer in Kansas with his harvest, or just anything. You won't do Steps 4 through 12 unless God wants you to, and there is little point in you doing them after God has taken over. Those steps mostly deal with things like listing all of your bad points, and confessing them to God. God already knows all of that garbage, so there is no point in wasting your time doing that, not when you could be doing something useful, like volunteering at a charity. So don't print Steps 4 through 12. If God really wants you to do them, He will tell you what they are when you need to hear it. So did we just reduce AA to a three-step program, or what? But back at the ranch, back in the main stream of thoughts here, we were talking about the AA heresy that no one can resist temptation, or make himself into something better. AA says that you must always continue to attend meetings, and practice the Twelve Steps, for the rest of your life, because you are only "in recovery," and can't ever finish it, and get recovered. "Nobody ever graduates from this program, not ever," the faithful brag. AA doesn't seem able to distinguish between an unchangeable condition, like the genes someone inherits, and a changeable condition, like one's behavior. I will agree that, unless genetic engineering makes some fantastic advances real soon, I am pretty much stuck with all of the genes that I inherited. And one of them does seem to be a gene for alcoholism. But after that, all bets are off. The gene does not force me to drink. The gene changes how my body reacts to alcohol, and changes how I feel when I drink it, but the gene doesn't force me to drink. I don't have to do it. I can quit, and I have quit. And I can recover from the effects of having drunk too much, and live a different life. As the Christians would say, "I can do good. I can choose good over evil." Those who believe that wallowing in powerlessness forever is a good thing to do might consider this Biblical passage, John 10.33:
Somehow, I get the impression that "knowing your place", and staying in your place, isn't quite what Jesus believed in. How do you read that? Jesus also used the phrase "children of God" more than once, as in, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be known as the children of God." What do children of God grow up to be? I don't think that "Bigger children of God" is the correct answer.
One of the biggest heresies in the Twelve Steps is the demand for a Miracle in Step 7: We "Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings." No matter how humbly we ask for it, and no matter whether we do it on our knees, like the original version of Step 7 said, it is still a demand for a miracle, not just a polite request. We have made absolutely no preparations for taking care of ourselves should God decide not to grant us a miracle. Remember, we declared in Step 1 that we were powerless over alcohol, and in Step 2, we declared that we were insane, so in Step 7 we demand a miracle; we demand that God actually change us, and take away the desire to drink, or else we will drink ourselves to death. That is very much like this temptation of Christ in Matthew 4.5:
Then the Devil took Jesus to Jerusalem, the Holy City, set him on the highest point of the Temple, and said to him, "If you are God's Son, throw yourself down, for the scripture says, You do not throw yourself off of a precipice, demanding that God save you before you hit bottom, and you don't demand that God keep you from drinking, or else you will kill yourself on booze. In fact, AA has it exactly backwards: Many Christian believers will do something like give up drinking alcohol for Lent. They do not say, "God: you must take away my desire to drink or else I will drink myself into a stupor every night of Lent." No, they say, "I can control my actions. I will voluntarily give up the pleasure of drinking alcohol for Lent, to show my devotion to God." And to say that ordinary people can control their drinking, and give it up for Lent, but alcoholics cannot, is baloney, and a cop-out. It is just spiritual laziness, demanding that God fix what the alcoholic could fix by himself. And the alcoholics most assuredly can fix their problems themselves -- there are millions of them doing it, including me, and doing it without the insanity of the AA Twelve Steps. In fact, more people recover from alcoholism without AA and the Twelve Steps than do it with them, by a factor of more than 10. More people recover without any support group of any kind than with one. AA won't tell you that; that's one of the biggest dirty little secrets AA has. AA dogma says, "Nobody can do it alone." The truth is, most of the people who recover do it that way. As a matter of fact, our current President, George W. Bush, says that he just quit drinking when the consequences of heavy drinking got to be too much. He says he didn't use AA. And this time, I believe him. Guess where George B. would be today, if he had had a sponsor who said, "George, don't let anything get in front of your recovery. Just keep coming to the meetings, and doing The Steps, and don't let some outside interest like politics interfere with your recovery." The Bible has more to say about miracles on demand: Matthew 12.38:
Jesus just didn't like people demanding miracles, did he?
Yet another heresy in the Alcoholics Anonymous dogma is the concept of inherited sin. That is an old idea, one that the ancient Jews believed in. Jesus Christ was asked whether a man who was born blind was blind due to his own sin, or the sin of his parents. Essentially, Jesus said, "Neither. We aren't playing that game any more. Paradigm shift time. He is blind for the greater glory of God." And Jesus healed the blind guy. (John 9:1) But AA still believes in inherited sin. An alcoholic is born with the gene for alcoholism, so he is born with the spiritual disease (read: "sin") of alcoholism. He is guilty and damned and condemned to Hell the instant the sperm hits the egg. And the only salvation available to him is to accept AA and the Twelve-Step program with its Higher Power as his savior. This effectively makes Alcoholics Anonymous one of the strangest deviant sects of Calvinism around: They believe in predestination with a nasty genetic twist. Occasionally, at some meeting, one of the faithful will entertain you with stories of how he was an alcoholic and dysfunctional, even as a child, even before he took his first drink. (I wish I were making this stuff up, but I'm not. Those bozos really are that crazy.) And he wasn't talking about codependency, or being an ACOA -- adult child of alcoholics. He wasn't talking about having been made maladjusted or neurotic by an out-of-control alcoholic parent (although he might well have been). He was talking about being a dysfunctional person, an alcoholic, because he was born one. He was talking about having been born with a hereditary "spiritual disease."
One problem that any Christian will have with Alcoholics Anonymous is the organization's abandoning of the Bible. The Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, is their new Bible. Some members claim to still use the Bible; I sometimes hear a bit of lip service to the Bible like, "Keep the Big Book next to the Good Book," but you won't see a Bible at a meeting, and you won't hear it quoted. Everybody is carrying the Big Book, and all readings come from it, or from a similar book of daily meditations, also written by Bill Wilson and other members of AA. In addition, AA has essentially abandoned Jesus Christ. The AA faithful believe that Bill Wilson is superior to Jesus Christ when it comes to dealing with alcoholism, and you will hear Bill Wilson quoted a hundred times more often than Jesus Christ. (As a matter of fact, I can't really remember the last time I heard Jesus Christ quoted in an AA or NA meeting...) The AA Big Book does not contain the word "Jesus" anywhere, not even once. Bill Wilson raves constantly about "God", but doesn't talk about Jesus Christ at all. There is one and only one mention of "Christ" in the book, and it is Bill Wilson's statement that before his hallucinatory experience on belladonna, his "spiritual experience," he didn't have much use for Christ: With ministers, and the world's religions, I parted right there. When they talked of a God personal to me, who was love, superhuman strength and direction, I became irritated and my mind snapped shut against such a theory. To Christ I conceded the certainty of a great man, not too closely followed by those who claimed Him. His moral teaching -- most excellent. For myself, I had adopted those parts which seemed convenient and not too difficult; the rest I disregarded. Apparently, Bill continued to disregard a lot of that stuff even after he "saw the light," or saw "the God of the preachers," because Bill never mentioned Jesus or Christ again, not anywhere in the Big Book. The word "God" appears in the Big Book 106 times, but there is no mention of "Jesus Christ", not one. Alcoholics Anonymous is not a Christian religion, no matter what some members say. It is a religion all right, in spite of the denials of the members who claim that it is only a "spiritual program." Alcoholics Anonymous is a Buchmanite religion. AA believes in and practices the teachings of Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, another man who had little use for Jesus Christ, preferring his own beliefs and teachings to those of Jesus. In spite of that fact that Bill Wilson tried to hide the strong connections between Frank Buchman and AA, Buchman's Oxford Group got two mentions in the Big Book, while Christ got only one. For that matter, when you consider the fact that Jesus's first miracle was changing water into wine at a wedding party, there might be a real problem with Jesus being a member of AA...
Possibly the greatest heresy in the AA dogma is this: "Anything can be your Higher Power: a teacup, a doorknob, a stone." Most Christians are more accustomed to the idea of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost. And I can't imagine Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus, or Jews being too happy with such a Higher Power, either.
We have not completed the job of ripping apart Buchmanism or the AA religion. Far from it. I don't know if it is worth the bother to do all of it, but I feel like mentioning this item: The AA members don't seem to realize it, but every time one of them "shares" the sentiment that they are feeling so grateful because their Higher Power rigged events to make things turn out so good for them, they open up an incredibly nasty can of worms. When I hear one of them yammering mindlessly like that, I always want to ask, "Since your Higher Power is controlling every little detail of this world, I have to ask, why did your Higher Power start the War in Vietnam? Two million innocent people were killed over there, besides making all of the guys of my generation very unhappy. And then the war spread to Cambodia, and another two million people got killed there. This is nothing new. Theologists have been debating this question for thousands of years. And they keep coming up with the same problem: If you believe in a God who can and does control every little detail of this world, then God is responsible for all of the bad stuff that happens, as well as the good stuff. Some religions can deal with this. Hinduism has many gods, and some of them are evil or demonic. Kali and Shiva come to mind as two of the Destroyers. Buddhism recognizes that there is duality in all things, so creation and destruction, or good and evil, or love and hate, or light and dark, are two sides of the same coin, and you can't have one without the other. Judaism sees God as observing the world from above, and not interfering with human affairs down here. Christianity mostly takes that approach, but many sects are very mixed up on the subject. An incomplete religion like Buchmanism, or the AA religion, has a problem when the believers want to declare that God has complete control of the world when he is doing favors for AA members, but does not have control of the world when bad things are happening to non-members... I call those religions incomplete because they are not thoroughly thought out. They are not philosophically or logically self-consistent. They are little more than collections of unconnected superstitions. It is ridiculously Pollyanna-ish to say that God is controlling the world and doing favors for me, but God is ignoring the rest of the world, so God isn't responsible for any of the bad stuff that happens elsewhere. The AA or Buchmanite believer is likely to answer, "That bad stuff is caused by people who are doing their own will, rather than obeying the Will of God." Nope, that is just dodging the issue. If God has control over this world, then God has to relinquish control to allow some little fool to cause trouble. Imagine this scenario: I see a child carrying a gun into his school, to shoot up the place. Imagine that I can easily take the gun away from the kid, and keep him from hurting anyone. But instead of doing that, I say, "That youngster has free will. I will let him exercise his free will." If I were to really do that, then I would be criminally responsible for some kids getting shot. It's called "Negligent Homocide." I can't get off of the hook by saying that I simply chose to not control the situation, that I gave the child free will, and I allowed the kid to do whatever he wished just because he was being rebellious and self-seeking, and did not wish to do my will. No, I wouldn't get off of the hook that easily. And the Higher Power who micro-manages the world doesn't get off of the hook that easily either. He ends up getting the blame for everything. Allowing bad people to do bad things to this world is controlling the world just as much as not allowing them to do it. The answers that most religions have come up with are:
But AA members don't have the benefit of either of those two
religious doctrines. AA theology tries to be half-and-half.
AA members claim that God is running their lives, and keeping them
from drinking, but God isn't responsible for any bad stuff.
So they have opened that nasty can of worms, and bought into the
whole puzzle. They end up with a religion that is illogical, and
is not self-consistent -- a religion that contradicts itself:
Some AA members claim to have the answer: God gives Free Will to all people, and lets them do whatever they wish. And it's usually evil. God only interferes in this world to help a few people, those who are seeking and doing God's Will. That leaves AA members with an even more callous and cruel God than any other religion around here is describing. God is so mean and unloving that he will allow children to be beaten and raped, old ladies to be murdered, and whole populations of Tutsis or Bosnians to be slaughtered in genocidal wars, and God doesn't give a damn about those people because they aren't groveling before him, confessing all of their sins, and begging for knowledge of God's Will and the power to carry it out? God only loves the Buchmanites and the AA members, and everyone else in the world can just drop dead? AA just gets weirder and weirder.
Secret Agent Orange working with www.AAdeprogramming.com |