You can't just make up any kind of a "Higher Power" or "god" you want, and then worship it like some Golden Calf, and expect it to perform miracles for you and grant all of your wishes, including making you quit drinking. That is the worst kind of superstition and idolatry.
Nevertheless, that is just what Bill Wilson preached:
Despite the living example of my friend [a sober Ebby Thacher] there remained in me the vestiges of my old prejudice. The word God still aroused a certain antipathy. When the thought was expressed that there might be a God personal to me this feeling was intensified. I didn't like the idea. I could go for such conceptions as Creative Intelligence, Universal Mind or Spirit of Nature but I resisted the thought of a Czar of the Heavens, however loving His sway might be. I have since talked with scores of men who felt the same way.
My friend suggested what then seemed a novel idea. He said, "Why don't you choose your own conception of God?"
That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last.
It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning. I saw that growth could start from that point. Upon a foundation of complete willingness I might build what I saw in my friend. Would I have it? Of course I would!
Thus was I convinced that God is concerned with us humans when we want Him enough. At long last I saw, I felt, I believed. Scales of pride and prejudice fell from my eyes. A new world came into view.
Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 1, "Bill's Story", Page 12."I can choose any conception of God I wish.
I can make God in my own image.
It is only necessary that I believe whatever I wish to believe.
Upon that simple beginning, I can build a whole new theology.
Will it work? Of course it will, because I wish it to!
Oh happy day! The scales are falling from my eyes. My prejudices are gone! I can see The Promised Land clearly now!
I am convinced that God will be concerned about me, and take care of me, and grant all of my wishes, because I want Him to."Yes, Bill Wilson was stone crazy.
And Bill was lying when he talked about his "icy intellectual mountain". That was just another phony act that Bill Wilson put on. Bill Wilson was a superstitious flunk-out, not an icy intellectual.
Lastly, claiming that you are going to "Turn It Over To God" and "Let Go and Let God" is just a cop-out that makes matters worse. Abdicating personal responsibility for your actions, and just "Depending on a Higher Power" to solve your problems for you guarantees failure, because "God" is not going to do your work for you. And neither will Santa Claus or Cinderella's Fairy Godmother. And that is just one more of A.A.'s dirty little secrets.
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