Truths to Counter the AA Cult #8: Admissions of Powerless is a Hoax

 

From the Orange Papers

The A.A. First Step, where people are supposed to "admit" that they are "powerless over alcohol", is a hoax.

People are not "powerless" over their desires to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, take drugs, or eat too much. Being sick, and having a messed-up life from too much drinking, is just that — being sick. It isn't "powerlessness." Having difficulties quitting is not "powerlessness", it's having difficulties quitting. Saying that your drinking has really gotten out of control doesn't mean that you are powerless over it.

The "powerless" doctrine of Alcoholics Anonymous is one of their most central religious beliefs. It is one of those points where A.A. radically departs from Christianity or any other mainstream religion of the world, and enters the realm of bizarre cult religion. Christianity teaches people to be responsible for their actions. So do all of the other major religions of the world.

A.A., on the other hand, teaches that people are incapable of running their own lives and must surrender control of their lives to the A.A. group [cult] and a "Higher Power" who will control them, and do the quitting for them. Thus A.A. is teaching the doctrine that is common to so many cults — that you cannot make it without the cult. Bill Wilson wrote:

Remember that we deal with alcohol — cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power — that One is God. May you find Him now!
The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William Wilson, pages 58-59.

Thus the real purpose of Step One is to prepare the new members for Steps Two and Three, where they will confess that they are insane, and then surrender their wills and lives to "God as they understand Him" and Alcoholics Anonymous. That is the standard cult demand that members surrender to the cult, pure and simple.

The Big Book tells us that,

It helped me a lot to become convinced that alcoholism was a disease, not a moral issue; that I had been drinking as a result of a compulsion, even though I had not been aware of the compulsion at the time; and that sobriety was not a matter of will power.
The Big Book, 3rd Edition, Doctor, Alcoholic, Addict, page 448.

On the contrary, sobriety is most assuredly a matter of will power and self-control. Nobody else is going to do the quitting for you. Nobody else CAN do the quitting for you. Nobody else is going to hold your hand every Saturday night.

But Bill Wilson kept insisting that the truth was just the opposite. In his second book, written a dozen years later, he wrote:

We had approached A.A. expecting to be taught self-confidence. Then we had been told that so far as alcohol is concerned, self-confidence was no good whatever; in fact, it was a total liability. Our sponsors declared that we were the victims of a mental obsession so subtly powerful that no amount of human willpower could break it. There was, they said, no such thing as the personal conquest of this compulsion by the unaided will. ... It was a statistical fact that alcoholics almost never recovered on their own resources.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William Wilson, page 22.

That is distortions, falsehoods, and outright lies. The true part of that is, "Yes, the sponsors did tell such falsehoods to the newcomers." But nobody is "powerless" over alcohol, and will power most assuredly can break the addiction, and self-confidence is a big help.

The statement that "It was a statistical fact that alcoholics almost never recovered on their own resources" is a blatant lie, for two reasons:

• First off, MOST of the people who recover from alcoholism, like 75 or 80 percent of them, do it alone, without A.A. or any "treatment" or any "group therapy" program of any kind. The Harvard Medical School says so. But Bill Wilson didn't want people to know that; they would realize that they don't need to be dependent upon A.A. for their recovery.

• The other reason that "statistical" statement is a lie is more subtle: Bill was implying that the A.A. way yields a higher success rate than people trying to quit drinking by themselves. That is completely false. Bill's cult religion program had, and still has, a horrendous failure rate. Many tests have shown that getting no 'treatment' at all is better than A.A. 'treatment' or help. Fewer people die, fewer people get rearrested for public drunkenness, and fewer people go on intense drinking binges when they don't get any Alcoholics Anonymous. And more people quit drinking and stay quit if they don't get any Alcoholics Anonymous "help".

Bill Wilson would have been much closer to the truth if he had written,

"It was a statistical fact that alcoholics almost never recovered in Alcoholics Anonymous. More than eighty percent of the newcomers were gone in a month; ninety-five percent were gone in a year, ninety-nine percent were gone in ten years. You have no conception these days of how much failure we had."

Nobody is powerless over urges, cravings, or temptations. Just because you feel an urge or a craving doesn't mean that you have to give in to it, and feed it. The way to quit drinking is not to expect God to just magically remove all desire for drink. The way to quit is to just not give in to the cravings that will inevitably come. And lots of alcoholics do succeed in quitting drinking by doing just that.

I'm not the only one who has noticed this contradiction. Herbert Fingarette wrote in his book Heavy Drinking: If the alcoholic's ailment is a disease that causes an inability to abstain from drinking, how can a program insist on voluntary abstention as a condition for treatment? (And if alcoholics who enter these programs do voluntarily abstain — as in fact they generally do — then of what value is the [disease] notion of loss of control?) Heavy Drinking, Herbert Fingarette, page 74.

Bill Wilson declared that he was "powerless" over every urge or craving he ever had, no matter whether it was a thirst for alcohol, cravings for cigarettes, greed for money, or the urge to cheat on his wife Lois by having sex with all of the pretty young women who came to the A.A. meetings. That's one of the more novel and creative excuses for cheating on your wife, but it doesn't wash.

Truths to Counter the AA Cult #7: AA Offers No Spiritual Experience, Just a Lot of Bitterness

 

From the Orange Papers

The A.A. formula for "spirituality" is broken, and doesn't work.
Doing the Twelve Steps and forcing people to wallow in guilt and shame for years does not:

• enlighten them,
• or make them spiritual,
• or give them intense "religious experiences" or "spiritual awakenings",
• or "liberate them from ego",
• or release them from "the bondage of self".
• or fill them with "Serenity and Gratitude".

You cannot get rid of your ego, or the "bondage of self", just by saying or praying that you wish to be rid of your ego. You might as well pray for your left foot to disappear.

"Stuffing your feelings" for years leads to neurosis and mental illness, not spirituality. Real live feeling human beings cannot feel only "Serenity and Gratitude" for years and years... When members then condemn themselves and feel guilty and inadequate for not having the proper "Serene and Grateful" attitude, that just makes matters worse. Then they can feel guilty about feeling guilty.

One 24-year A.A. old-timer said,

I have also noted how angry so many of the "old timers" are. I have observed that closely and concluded for myself that the problem is that most people have a lot of grief in their lives and in a way, AA is always focusing on losses. At the same time, there is nowhere to go with grief as it isn't allowed. So the sadness gets stuffed leaving only the anger to be dumped out in the meeting, usually aimed at someone who isn't getting the program or was foolish enough to tell the truth about their selfish life. Notice that sometime. Old timers in AA are often an angry lot: a mask of serenity with a seething cauldron underneath.

The "Founding Fathers" of A.A. discovered all of that the hard way.

Throughout the first 164 pages of the Big Book, Bill Wilson raved about the fantastic religious or spiritual experiences that members could expect to get after they had practiced the Twelve Steps enough. But members complained that they weren't getting The Big Experience, or seeing God, from doing Bill's 12 Steps. So Bill toned down the terminology to just a "spiritual awakening". And then he toned it down some more, and some more. Eventually, the promised spiritual experience was reduced to nothing but an "educational experience". See the description of that process in the Bait-And-Switch web page.

Truths to Counter the AA Cult #6: AA is Religion, not "Spiritual"

 From the Orange Papers

There is nothing moral or spiritual about trying to shove the funny Buchmanite religious beliefs of Bill Wilson on everyone else.

1. • It is not moral or spiritual to tell people that:
     • "It's isn't a religion, it's spiritual."
       It's a religion.

     • "It's isn't a religion, it's just an easy-going, spiritually-oriented quit-drinking program."
       It's a religion.

     • "You should not reveal the religious nature of the program to new prospects; 'We might arouse their prejudices'."
       That's called "deceptive recruiting". It's also called "lying". There is nothing moral or spiritual about it.

     • "Don't tell the newcomers too much stuff too fast. Don't emphasize the religious feature. Dole out the truth to prospective recruits and newcomers 'by teaspoons, rather than by buckets.'"
       That's called "deceptive recruiting". It's also called "lying". There is nothing moral or spiritual about it.

   • It is not moral or spiritual to keep making up screwy "spiritual diseases" like compulsive shopping or being a diabetic, or being an abused child of an alcoholic, or being a victim of incest, and then declaring that only a life spent doing the Twelve Steps will save the sufferer from a life of sin.

   • It is not moral or spiritual to mislead people and make them think they are getting great therapy and great treatment for what ails them, when all they are getting is quack medicine. That keeps the people from seeking some other medical treatment that could really help them.

   • Likewise, it is not moral or spiritual to tell sick people who are having troubles that their problems are of their own making, and that all that they need to do is Work The Steps and Work A Strong Program harder, rather than seek help from a doctor or psychiatrist.

   • And it is not moral or spiritual to tell sick people that the answer to all such problems is "Work The Twelve Steps, Get A Sponsor, And Read The Big Book".

   • It is not moral or spiritual to shove an ineffective "spiritual" treatment program on people who are seeking medical treatment for a deadly illness.
     In fact, it is hard to understand how people who are otherwise pretty okay, nice, honest people can actually do it. They rationalize their actions by saying that the A.A. program saves lives, but they cannot help but see the huge failure rate of A.A. if they have been around A.A. for very long. So that rationalization doesn't really wash. They are in denial about what A.A. really is, and they are in denial about the immense A.A. failure rate, and they are in denial about what they are really doing.

   • It is not moral or spiritual to use judges and parole officers — the criminal justice system — to coerce people into the Alcoholics Anonymous organization. But they do it all of the time.

   • Foisting quack medicine on critically-ill people is criminal fraud and manslaughter.

   • Buchmanism is actually a very heretical and anti-Christian religion. Dr. Frank Buchman claimed that his religion was completely compatible with Christianity, but that wasn't true at all. Frank Buchman was just trying to fool people into becoming his followers. Buchmanism is grossly heretical, and occult, and directly opposed to many of the teachings of Jesus. See The Heresy of the Twelve Steps.

Truths to Counter the AA Cult #5: Hurt People Can't Help People

 

From the Orange Papers

Going to A.A. meetings and doing the Twelve Steps for a few years does not necessarily make people into wise and knowledgeable alcoholism recovery counselors, suitable to be sponsors and advise and supervise the newcomers.

1. Often, the program doesn't even accomplish Step Two for the old members, "restoring them to sanity."
   And it doesn't guarantee that they won't relapse.
   And it doesn't stop them from being sexual predators or neurotic control freaks, either.

   It is a myth that A.A. sponsors are wise and knowledgeable and able to give sage advice. A.A. propaganda is always telling stories about sponsors who are able to perceptively psychoanalyze their sponsees and always come up with just the right answer to solve the sponsees' problem and guide him or her towards sobriety and spirituality. That is just so much wishful thinking, and it is just another part of the Big Lie — part of the story that A.A. is a great treatment program. They don't want to tell you that healthy, wealthy, and wise people simply do not join A.A. and become sponsors. They don't want to tell you that you are likely to get some neurotic power-tripping fool who has simply memorized several dozen slogans, and he will just spout one at you in every situation.

   The truth is that A.A. is managed at the grass roots level by incompetents who literally do not know what they are doing. They have no training in treating alcoholism; they are just people who have been members of A.A. and "worked the program" for a few years, and still they presume to act as doctors, ministers, priests, and recovery counselors to the newcomers.

   (Often, they use an illogical false equality here, and point to a room full of A.A. members and say, "Look at these people. We have thousands of years of experience in drinking in this room." Yes, they have, together, accumulated many years of experience in drinking, but that is not the same thing as having thousands of years of experience in getting other people to sober up. By A.A.'s broken logic, the best counselors would be old alcoholics who are still drinking, because they have even more years of experience in drinking.)

   A.A. sponsors often feel entitled to tell their sponsees not to see a doctor or get counseling or psychiatric treatment, and to just trust the 12-Step program to heal them. Even worse, many A.A. sponsors feel qualified to tell newcomers not to take their doctor-prescribed medications. That has caused immense harm and grief, and even psychotic breakdowns, hospitalizations, and deaths.

   You can read about the A.A. "no medications" horror stories here:
   http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-no_meds.html

   The more incompetent someone is in a particular area, the less qualified that person is to assess anyone's skill in that space, including their own. When one fails to recognise that he or she has performed poorly, the individual is left assuming that they have performed well. As a result, the incompetent will tend to grossly overestimate their skills and abilities. == "Unskilled and Unaware of It", by Alan Bellows, March 25, 2006 http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=406

   One of the most interesting pieces of new "recovery" research, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, no less, has shown that newcomers do not benefit from getting sponsors. In a recent controlled study, a group of new Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous members who got sponsors did no better than another group who didn't get sponsors. But strangely enough, the sponsors did better than other members who did not act as sponsors. It seems that getting their egos stroked by acting as puffed-up, all-wise, all-knowing sponsors, ordering the wimpy newcomers around, helped the sponsors to stay clean and sober, even if it didn't help the newcomers any.
   

   The use of incompetent amateur counselors has led to much suffering and many deaths. They are not "the experts on addiction," like they claim, and the war stories of some old alcoholics are not more valuable than a college education and medical school:

   "Here was a book that said I could do something that all these doctors and priests and ministers and psychiatrists that I'd been going to for years couldn't do!"
   The Big Book, 3rd Edition, page 473.

   "Here I am, a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, a Fellow of the International College of Surgeons, a diplomate of one of the great specialty boards in these United States, a member of the American Psychiatric Society, and I have to go to the butcher, the baker, and the carpenter to help make a man out of me!"
   The Big Book, 3rd Edition, page 348.

   A.A. members are not inherently qualified to work as recovery counselors, priests, ministers, doctors, psychologists, or psychiatrists. They are not inherently qualified to decide that newcomers should stop taking the medications that real doctors have given them, and just trust the Twelve Steps to heal them, but A.A. and N.A. are notorious for telling newcomers not to take their meds.

   A friend who has been in and out of A.A. for 30 years described how he saw the true believers talk a mentally-ill man into quitting his medications, and then the poor guy committed suicide. After the funeral, my friend said to the A.A. sponsors:

   "He was a mess, but before you got your hands on him, at least he could say his own name. When you were done with him, he couldn't even do that."
   

   A flawed idea that AA is built upon: The idea that a deeply flawed person will cure another deeply flawed person. A dynamic fraught with peril. == Anonymous

Truths to Counter the AA Cult #4: AA is Not a Safe Space

 

Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are not safe havens where newcomers will find unconditional love and acceptance, expert advice on recovery, and wise, self-sacrificing helpers.

Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are ceremonies where irrational beliefs and bad advice are commonplace. Dissenting voices and criticism of the A.A. program are not appreciated or "loved." Sexual exploitation of newcomers, especially of, but not limited to, women, is also all too common.

A.A. meetings are religious rituals more than they are therapy sessions. Every meeting is begun by reciting the contents of pages 58 and 59 from the Big Book, which contain the Twelve Steps, and statements that everyone there got sober by doing the Twelve Steps, and that "RARELY HAVE we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path", except for people who are defective — people who are "constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves" — people who were born that way — and people who thought that they "could find an easier, softer way."

Actually, it is A.A. that is being dishonest with itself. Those statements are cherished religious beliefs and wishful thinking, not facts. The A.A. old-timers have seen millions of people fail while practicing the Twelve Steps, but they just play "blame the victim" with those failures.

A.A-founder Bill Wilson wrote many such dishonest and grandiose things in the Big Book, and A.A. will not admit that those statements are completely untrue, or even question or test their validity. The true believers just go on with the ritual, and proclaim that Bill Wilson was a genius and a saint.

The official A.A. manual that was published in 1940 declares that their attitude towards alcoholics is:

The moment he wittingly drinks so much as a drop of beer, wine, spirits, or any other alcoholic drink he automatically loses all status as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. A.A. is not interested in sobering up drunks who are not sincere in their desire to remain completely sober for all time. http://www.midlandaa.org/images/pamphlets/akronmanualforaa.pdf

So, you have no status and they are not interested in helping you if you slip, or if you will not follow their rules exactly. So much for the "unconditional love" that they brag about giving to newcomers.

But why do so many judges then sentence people to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings when A.A. says that it is not interested in helping them?

Also notice how that statement makes Alcoholics Anonymous a cherry-picking program — they only want the winners for members. They cannot then claim that they made the members quit drinking, or saved their lives, or helped millions to quit drinking, or that they have a great success rate. A.A. only wants those people who have already chosen to quit drinking. But that is the whole battle. Really sincerely deciding to quit drinking forever is the most important factor in gaining and keeping sobriety. A.A. contributed nothing to those people who have already arrived at that decision before coming to Alcoholics Anonymous. A.A. just takes the credit for other people's work.

The numerous A.A. horror stories show just how unsafe A.A. really is:
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-horrors.html

Truths to Counter the AA Cult #3: AA is About AA, Not Sobriety

From The Orange Papers:

1. Alcoholics Anonymous isn't just about quitting drinking:

   • Alcoholics Anonymous is really about Alcoholics Anonymous.

   • Alcoholics Anonymous is also a cult religion, one that uses alcoholism as a hook to get people to join. (The sister organization, Narcotics Anonymous, uses drug addictions in the same manner.) A.A., N.A., and all of the other 12-Step clones have the goal of getting everyone to practice "The Twelve Steps", which include commandments to seek knowledge of, and carry out, the will of God, as they hear God dictating His orders. The cofounder and leader of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, plainly declared:

     At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God...
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, page 77.

     And:

     Remember that we deal with alcohol — cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power — that One is God. May you find Him now!
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, pages 58-59.

     A.A. began as a branch of another cult religion called "The Oxford Group", which was the creation of an evil fascist renegade Lutheran minister named Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, who actually admired Adolf Hitler and praised the Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler as a "wonderful lad".

     Dr. Buchman declared,

           "I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler...
           The world needs the dictatorship of the living spirit of God.   ...
           ... Human problems aren't economic. They're moral and they can't be solved by immoral measures. They could be solved within a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy, and they could be solved through a God-controlled Fascist dictatorship."
     The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament; A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement, Tom Driberg, 1965, pages 68-69.

     The cofounders of Alcoholics Anonymous, William Griffith Wilson and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, were both enthusiastic true-believer members of the Oxford Group cult, and they simply adapted Buchmanism to their own ends when they created Alcoholics Anonymous. For all practical purposes, Alcoholics Anonymous is simply Frank Buchman's cult religion dressed up in a different suit of clothes.

   • And, for all practical purposes, Bill Wilson was a fascist, just like Frank Buchman, and Bill was pushing a fascist philosophy (and A.A. still does):

     Follow the dictates of a Higher Power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world, no matter what your present circumstances!
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, page 100.

     Why all this insistence that every A.A. member must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.'s remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant?   ...
     Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A. ...
     Then, and only then, do we become as open-minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be.
     Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 24.

     (The "conviction" that Wilson was talking about there is Frank Buchman's practice of making new converts find themselves guilty and 'convict' themselves of lots of sins.)

     Besides a seeming inability to accept much on faith, we found ourselves handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. Many of us have been so touchy that even casual reference to spiritual things made us bristle with antagonism. This sort of thinking had to be abandoned. Though some of us resisted, we found no great difficulty in casting aside such feelings. Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon became as open minded on spiritual matters as we tried to be on other questions. In this respect alcohol was a great persuader. It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness. Sometimes this was a tedious process; we hope no one else will be prejudiced for as long as some of us were.
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Pages 47 and 48.

     If you disagree with Bill Wilson's crazy cult religion, then you need to get beaten into a state of reasonableness...

     [A.A. members are] impersonally and severely disciplined from without.
     Private letter, William G. Wilson to Dr. Harry Tiebout, 9 Nov 1950, quoted in Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, by Ernest Kurtz, page 129.

     We alcoholics are undisciplined. So we let God discipline us in the simple way we have just outlined.
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William Wilson, Chapter 6, Into Action, page 88.

     Really now. Such masochistic grovelling.

     We saw we needn't always be bludgeoned and beaten into humility.
     Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, page 75.
     

     In 1955, at the A.A. twentieth anniversary convention, Bill said of alcoholics,

     They would not stand for the rather aggressive evangelism of the Oxford Group. And they would not accept the principle of "team guidance" for their own personal lives. It was too authoritarian for them.   ...   In other respects, too, we found we had to make haste slowly. When first contacted, most alcoholics just wanted to find sobriety, nothing else. They clung to their other defects, letting go only little by little. They simply did not want to get "too good too soon."   ...   The Oxford Groups' absolute concepts — absolute purity, absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love — were frequently too much for the drunks. These ideas had to be fed with teaspoons rather than by buckets.
     Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, (1957), pages 74-75,
     and
     Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, Ernest Kurtz, page 46.
     

     So Bill Wilson was feeding his favorite Oxford Group "principles" (cult dogma) to the new alcoholics a little bit at a time; giving them just as much as they would tolerate, but not enough to drive them away. Bill was just gradually converting them to his "authoritarian principles".

     And then Bill Wilson sang the praises of dictatorships:

     Therefore we [AA] have the full benefits of the murderous political dictatorships of today but none of their liabilities.
     Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, pages 105—106.

     The full benefits of murderous dictatorships? What benefits? Benefits for whom? And what liabilities of murderous dictatorships does Alcoholics Anonymous not have?

     In A.A. there is active still another form of association, a form of which the world is today in great doubt. It has its virtues, nevertheless, especially for us of Alcoholics Anonymous: I am speaking of dictatorship. In A.A. we have two dictators, and we profit and grow through both. One is John Barleycorn, who is never very far from the elbow of each of us. The other is the Father of Lights, who presides over all men. God is saying to us, "Learn my will and do it." And John Barleycorn is saying to each of us, "You had better do God's will or I will kill you!"
     Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, (1957), page 225.

     Note how Bill Wilson bemoaned the fact that dictatorships had gone out of fashion. (After World War Two, the western nations had "great doubts" about the "virtues" of dictatorships.) But Bill was a faithful keeper of the flame — he was keeping the dream alive — people could still "grow and profit through dictators" in Alcoholics Anonymous.
     (Also note that in Bill Wilson's idea of a "profitable dictatorship", Bill Wilson always got to be the dictator, and he also got all of the profits, too.)

   • The A.A. religion pushes a concept of God that is worse than medieval.
     • According to A.A., God is a fascist dictator, an authoritarian, vindictive Old-Testament-style patriarchal God Who will kill you with a painful slow death by alcoholism if you don't
       • believe in Him, and
       • surrender to Him, and
       • constantly confess your sins to Him, and
       • grovel before Him, and
       • Seek and Do His Will every day.
     • According to Bill Wilson, God uses "the lash of alcoholism" to drive people into the A.A. religion, where they will find endless "Serenity and Gratitude" while working as slaves of God.

   • The manual of Alcoholics Anonymous is also named Alcoholics Anonymous, but is popularly called "The Big Book". All of Chapter Four of the Big Book, "We Agnostics", covers just one subject: how all agnostics and atheists must be converted to having the same religious beliefs as the author Bill Wilson. (It is not about how to quit drinking.) Wilson actually instructed people to abandon human intelligence and reason, and embrace blind faith in "the realm of the spirit". And then the recruiting manual in Chapter Seven of the Big Book teaches that other people's religions are inferior to A.A. beliefs, because those other religions didn't keep those people from drinking. (As if the goal of all religions is to keep people from drinking.)

   • The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are not "spiritual principles", they are cult practices that Bill Wilson got from Dr. Frank Buchman's Oxford Groups. The Twelve Steps are a recipe for building a cult religion, not a formula for quitting drinking:
     • The Twelve Steps do not even tell you to quit drinking, or to help anyone else to quit drinking, either.
     • The Twelve Steps don't even mention sobriety, recovery, or health, but they do mention surrender to the cult, and going recruiting for the cult, and guilt-inducing confession sessions.
     • The 12 Steps also mention God, directly or indirectly, in 6 of the 12 steps. The Ten Commandments of Judeo-Christian religions mention God fewer times than that — only 4 or 5 of the 10 commandments refer to God, directly or indirectly¹ — but the A.A. true believers still insist that A.A. is not a religion.
     • Seven of the 12 steps, Steps Four through Ten, are designed to induce guilt in members by having them make long lists of every sin they ever committed, and every fault, moral shortcoming, and defect of character they have, and then they have to confess it all to another member and God. Then they make another list of everybody they ever hurt or offended, and confess that, and try to make amends. And then they have to repeat the whole process again, and again, for the rest of their lives.
     • The Twelve Steps tell people to surrender their wills and their lives to "God" or "Higher Power" or the A.A. group, and to pray to "God" or "Higher Power" or the A.A. group, and then the Twelve Steps tell people how to pray and what to pray for, but the A.A. true believers still insist that A.A. is not a religion.

   • Twelve-Step enthusiasts declare that the Twelve Steps will cure anybody of anything, just like good old-fashioned snake oil. They claim that the Twelve Steps are equally appropriate for everybody from alcoholics to drug addicts to gamblers, from compulsive shoppers to emotional wrecks to rape victims, from divorcees to diabetics, from schizophrenics to fat people. The 12 steps really do have just as much to do with being a rape victim as they have to do with being an alcoholic — absolutely nothing.

     The 12-Step true believers can make such sweeping grandiose claims about the broad applicability of the Twelve Steps because those Twelve Steps are not really about alcoholism at all. The Twelve Steps have absolutely nothing to do with alcoholism; they are all about converting people to belief in a cult religion, and then recruiting more new cult members and indoctrinating them. That's what those practices did for their creator, Dr. Frank N. D. Buchman, and that is what they still do. So the 12 steps really are equally applicable to everything from drug addiction and alcoholism to compulsive shopping and being a rape victim, because The Steps have nothing to do with any of those things.

   • Even the children of alcoholics are supposed to do the Twelve Steps in organizations like ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics), Al-Anon, and Alateen. Obviously, the Twelve Steps can't really be a program for quitting drinking, because those children don't drink alcohol, and they never have. Yet the wives and children (and even close friends) of alcoholics are all supposed to be indoctrinated into practicing the guilt-inducing Twelve Steps, just because they have some relationship with an alcoholic and have supposedly been infected with a "spiritual disease" called "co-dependency".

James O'Keefe, and True Scouts' Honor

 

Dear Arthur, I found my Eagle Scout portrait going through files from the office flood. Two things occur to me looking at this photo of me taken 20 years ago: 1) The passage of time no longer scares me as it once did; and 2) I often forget how formative Scouting was. Scouting taught me to do a lot of uncomfortable, necessary things. There were parts of Northwestern New Jersey, both mountainous and remote, where I did all the outdoorsy things like shoot, hunt, navigate, build a shelter, sail a boat, perform CPR, apply a tourniquet, etc. But the most important moment I recall was at my Eagle Scout “Board of Review” conference in January 2003 when the Scoutmaster/Counselor asked me a final question: What do I want to do with my life? I told him I didn’t know, but I went on a rant about the media. I recognized that the news media portrayed events much differently than they existed in reality, and I wanted to do something about that — that things were not as they seemed, and seldom as they should be. The counselor suggested in a serious tone that I should consider journalism. That was the first and only time anybody ever suggested that, and it stayed with me. A year or so later at 19 years old, I founded the Rutgers Centurion, a monthly magazine. A year or so after that, I started ambushing professors with a video camera, which was an extremely uncomfortable thing for an introvert to do, but like all the other things I learned in the woods, I felt it necessary. Be Brave, James

Truths to Counter the AA Cult #2: Addiction is Not Incurable

From the Orange Papers:

Drug and alcohol addictions are not incurable, progressive diseases that usually end in death.

1. And they are also not "spiritual diseases." The truth is that most people spontaneously recover, and simply "mature out of" addictive behavior. Eventually, most of them simply get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and wise up.

   (Please note that I am not trying to minimize the horrors of alcoholism, or its deadliness. If 51% of all alcoholics recover on their own, that is "most people." That still leaves a lot of fatalities.)

   Alcoholism is most assuredly not a disease "which only a spiritual experience can conquer", like Bill Wilson wrote. There is no such thing as a "spiritual disease", and alcoholics do not suffer from "spiritual diseases" that are caused by "resentments" (like Bill Wilson wrote in the Big Book, on page 64).

   The "spiritual disease" of alcoholism resembles the "spiritual disease" of "candyism", which is the illness that children get from eating too much ice cream and candy.

   The Alcoholics Anonymous definition of alcoholism is so goofy that A.A.-member therapists won't even agree with this statement:
           "Alcoholism is caused by drinking alcohol."
   

   The A.A. founder Bill Wilson declared that alcoholism is a "spiritual disease" that is caused by

   1. sins,
   2. moral shortcomings,
   3. wrongs,
   4. defects of character,
   5. resentments,
   6. instincts run wild,
   7. character defects, representing instincts gone astray,
   8. self,
   9. self-will run riot,
   10. desires that have far exceeded their intended purpose,
   11. The Seven Deadly Sins
   12. a willful and irresponsible ego,
   13. failure to practice religious precepts properly,
   14. failure to practice Step Five properly,
   15. selfishness,
   16. self-seeking,
   17. self-centeredness,
   18. more selfishness
   19. defective relations,
   20. nagging wives,
   21. nagging wives again, "throwing her husband into a fit of anger"
   22. serious character flaws,
   23. faith that isn't accompanied by "self-sacrifice and unselfish, constructive action",
   24. personal secrets that we have not confessed,
   25. inherited genes or inherited sins,
   26. conditions that we couldn't correct to our entire satisfaction, and
   27. another unconfessed personal secret...

   Notice that drinking alcohol is not on that list. Bill Wilson considered everything but drinking alcohol to be the real cause of alcoholism:
           "Our liquor was but a symptom." (The Big Book, William G. Wilson, page 64.)
           "After all, our problems were of our own making. Bottles were only a symbol." (The Big Book, William G. Wilson, page 103.)
   

   Alcoholics Anonymous actually teaches that alcoholics are "born that way", and have "character defects" like "alcoholic thinking" and "reacting wrong" that can be traced back to early childhood, even to a time before the alcoholic ever had his or her first drink:
   

   Those who do not recover are ... men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way.
   The Big Book, 3rd and 4th Edition, page 58.

   A.A. co-founder Doctor Bob also declared that his alcoholism was caused by selfishness:

   Unfortunately for me I was the only child, which perhaps engendered the selfishness which played such an important part in bringing on my alcoholism.
   The Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, "Dr. Bob's Story", page 172.

   Another A.A.-promoting book declared:

   "...it wasn't because my wife left me that I started to drink, or because my mother didn't love me. It was because I have always been a potential alcoholic."
   Delirium Tremens, Stories of Suffering and Transcendence, Ignacio Solares, Hazelden, 2000, page 29.

   Fact: I've also always been a potential astronaut, and a potential Nobel Prize winner, and a potential rock and roll star, and a potential saint, too, but it never happened. I certainly was not doomed to those fates, without any choice in the matter.

   So what was the real reason that guy became an alcoholic? How about, he felt bad, and wanted to feel good? How about, he was an abused child of an alcoholic parent, growing up in a dysfunctional family, and that's why he was always different, and felt different, even from early childhood?

Truths to Counter the AA Cult #1: It Doesn't Work!

Today, I am so grateful to Daddy God for all the good that He has done for me through His Son Jesus Christ.

The more that I learn about Him and the New Covenant--Christ and Him Crucified--the more angry I become when I realize that for a large part of my life, I was in bondage to a cult because I was lied to for years and years that this "cult" was a normal expression of Christian faith.

This cult is called Alcoholics Anonymous. 

To make a long story short, my mother was a "Stepper Mom," totally knee-deep (or rather head-deep) I will be sharing the Twelve Things You Need to Know about the AA Cult via this blog site.

All of this information comes from the "Orange Papers," and that website and creator deserve all the credit.

I am merely a grateful, blessed, saved, redeemed messenger calling out one of the most pernicious, yet subtle, false gods in our society today.

Orange Papers Link

First Secret:

The Twelve Steps do not work as a program of recovery from drug or alcohol problems.

• The A.A. failure rate ranges from 95% to 100%. Sometimes, the A.A. success rate is actually less than zero, which means that A.A. indoctrination is positively harmful to people, and prevents recovery. Some tests have shown that even receiving no treatment at all for alcoholism is much better than receiving A.A. treatment:

• One of the most enthusiastic boosters of Alcoholics Anonymous, Professor and medical Doctor George E. Vaillant of Harvard University, who was also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (AAWS), showed by his own 8 years of testing of A.A. that A.A. was worse than useless — that it didn't help the alcoholics any more than no treatment at all, and it had the highest death rate of any treatment program tested — a death rate that Professor Vaillant himself described as "appalling". While trying to prove that A.A. treatment works, Professor Vaillant actually proved that A.A. kills. After 8 years of A.A. treatment, the score with Dr. Vaillant's first 100 alcoholic patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking.
  (Nevertheless, Vaillant still became a Trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he still wants to send all alcoholics to A.A. anyway, to "get an attitude change by confessing their sins to a high-status healer." That is cult religion, not a treatment program for the "disease of alcoholism".)

• The A.A. dropout rate is terrible. Most people who come to A.A. looking for help in quitting drinking are appalled by the narrow-minded atmosphere of fundamentalist religion and faith-healing. The A.A. meeting room has a revolving door. The therapists, judges, and parole officers (many of whom are themselves hidden members of A.A. or N.A.) continually send new people to A.A., but those newcomers vote with their feet once they see what A.A. really is. Even A.A.'s own triennial surveys, conducted by the A.A. headquarters (the GSO), reveal a high dropout rate. But the triennial survey does not count all of those people who only attended a few A.A. meetings, or even dozens of meetings, before quitting A.A. — they don't qualify as "A.A. members", and they are not there to be counted. (That amounts to "cherry-picking".) If we included them, then the numbers would be much worse.

  Similarly, the leader of A.A. in Australia reported:

  "Our 1992 Survey showed that only 5% of newcomers to AA are still attending meetings after 12 months. This is a truly terrible statistic. Again we must ask 'Where does the fault lie?'"
  — Dr Ron Whitington, Chairman of AA Australia General Service Board
  Comments made in AA Around Australia, Spring Edition, 1994; Commenting on a survey of more than 100 of Australia's AA groups

  And also note that the apparent five percent of A.A. newcomers who are still left after one year is exactly the same number as the usual rate of spontaneous remission among alcoholics — five percent per year. That is, in any randomly-selected population of alcoholics, approximately five percent per year will finally get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and they will just quit drinking. And the Harvard Medical School says that 80% of those successful quitters do it by themselves, alone, without any "treatment program" or any "support group". If we subtract the normal spontaneous remission rate for alcoholism of five percent per year from A.A.'s claimed success rate of five percent, we get zero for A.A.'s real effective cure rate. A.A. does not actually make anybody quit drinking; it just takes the credit for the people who were going to quit anyway. A.A. is just taking the credit for peoples' efforts to save their own lives.

  And then it gets worse: The attrition continues, and it isn't just because the old-timers all die of old age. Barely one percent of the newcomers to A.A. get a 10-year coin for sobriety, and only 3/4 of one percent get the 11-year coin. Only half of one percent — 5 out of a thousand — get the 15-year coin, and only one in a thousand gets the 20-year coin.

• Alcoholics Anonymous does not have a success rate or a retention rate. What Alcoholics Anonymous really has is a churn rate. The story of A.A. is routinely: another hundred people lured or coerced in, and then another hundred people leave. Look here for much more about the A.A. churn rate.

• The Twelve Steps are actually a hopelessly bad program for recovery:
  
  • Cult religion is not a good cure for alcoholism, and A.A. most assuredly is a cult religion.
  • One of the biggest problems with the Twelve-Step program is the learned helplessness caused by the First Step, where people are taught to confess that they are "powerless over alcohol." This leads many people to believe that once they have a drink, that a full-blown relapse and total loss of self-control is inevitable and unavoidable. So some people go on suicidally-intense binges, thinking that it is pointless to try to resist temptation.²
  • Step Two is just as bad: it teaches people that they are insane, and that only a Supernatural Being can restore them to sanity — which means that they are helpless, and cannot heal themselves.
    
  • Then Step Three teaches a lifestyle of infantile narcissism and passive dependency, where A.A. members turn control of their wills and their lives over to "the care of God as we understood Him", and then they expect God to take care of them and run their lives for them, and solve all their problems, and wait on them hand and foot, and do all of the hard work for them from then on... "Let Go And Let God" is their official motto, their lifestyle, and their approach to problem-solving.
  • Then Steps Four through Ten induce guilt in the members by forcing members to make lists of all of their sins and flaws, and "defects of character" and "moral shortcomings", and confess every intimate dirty little secret to another A.A. member who isn't even ordained clergy, or even sworn to secrecy.
  • In Step Eleven you are supposed to "channel" God and receive psychic work orders and power.
  • Then Step Twelve tells you to go recruiting, to draft more alcoholics into this madness.

• There is also experimental evidence that the A.A. teachings about powerlessness lead to binge drinking. In a controlled study of A.A.'s effectiveness, court-mandated offenders who had been sent to A.A. for several months were engaging in five times as much binge drinking as the no-treatment control group which got no A.A. "help".

• A.A. boosters and propagandists constantly repeat the Big Lie that A.A. works great, and A.A. with its Twelve Steps is the way that everybody recovers:

  One way or another Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or a similar Twelve-Step program is an integral part of almost all successful recoveries from alcohol or drug abuse. In fact, it is widely believed that not including a Twelve-Step program in a treatment plan can put a recovering addict on the road to relapse. For some people, regular participation in such a mutual self-help group is all that is needed to become and remain sober.
  The Recovery Book, Al J. Mooney M.D., Arlene Eisenberg, and Howard Eisenberg, pages 40-41.

  All three of those sentences are untrue. The truth is just the opposite of what they are telling us:

  1. Far more people recover without A.A. than with it. The good, unbiased, medical research shows that the vast majority of people who successfully recover from alcoholism — like 75 or 80% of them — actually do it without any Twelve-Step program, or even any "recovery group" or "treatment program" of any kind. Contrary to everything you have ever been told by 12-Step promoters and recruiters, doing it alone, quitting without any treatment program, or any "support group", or any cult religion, is actually the "time-tested, proven" method that really works for most people. And the research also shows that A.A. is actually very harmful: it raises the rates of binge drinking, re-arrests, and death.

     The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health, performed the 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. For it, they interviewed over 43,000 people. Using the criteria for alcohol dependence found in the DSM-IV, they found: "About 75 percent of persons who recover from alcohol dependence do so without seeking any kind of help, including specialty alcohol (rehab) programs and AA. Only 13 percent of people with alcohol dependence ever receive specialty alcohol treatment." http://www.spectrum.niaaa.nih.gov/features/alcoholism.aspx

     The Harvard Mental Health Letter, from The Harvard Medical School, stated quite plainly: On their own There is a high rate of recovery among alcoholics and addicts, treated and untreated. According to one estimate, heroin addicts break the habit in an average of 11 years. Another estimate is that at least 50% of alcoholics eventually free themselves although only 10% are ever treated. One recent study found that 80% of all alcoholics who recover for a year or more do so on their own, some after being unsuccessfully treated. When a group of these self-treated alcoholics was interviewed, 57% said they simply decided that alcohol was bad for them. Twenty-nine percent said health problems, frightening experiences, accidents, or blackouts persuaded them to quit. Others used such phrases as "Things were building up" or "I was sick and tired of it." Support from a husband or wife was important in sustaining the resolution. Treatment of Drug Abuse and Addiction — Part III, The Harvard Mental Health Letter, Volume 12, Number 4, October 1995, page 3. (See Aug. (Part I), Sept. (Part II), Oct. 1995 (Part III).) And note that the Harvard Medical School says that the support of a good spouse is more important than that of a 12-Step group. But A.A. says just the opposite: "Dump your spouse and marry the A.A. group, because A.A. is The Only Way."

  2. So it doesn't matter how many people believe that not including A.A. in a treatment program will lead to relapse — it still isn't true.
  3. And then just going to A.A. meetings does not fix alcoholics. It tends to make them relapse and binge drink, and even die.

  Also notice all of the propaganda tricks that the authors used there:

  • First there is the propaganda technique of "everybody's doing it": "AA or a similar Twelve-Step program is an integral part of almost all successful recoveries".
    That is a complete falsehood. The vast majority of the successful people recover without A.A. or any "support group". It's what "everybody" is doing.

  • Then they use the propaganda techniques of use of the passive voice and vague suggestions: "It is widely believed that not including a Twelve-Step program in a treatment plan can put a recovering addict on the road to relapse."
    It is widely believed by whom? And what do those unnamed people know? What are their qualifications? Are they doctors? Medical school professors? Or salesmen for a 12-Step treatment center? Why should we care what some unnamed invisible fools allegedly believe, anyway?

  • The authors also use the propaganda technique of fear-mongering: you will be "on the road to relapse" — you will probably die — unless you practice Bill Wilson's Twelve Step cult religion.

  • And then the fluff-headed Pollyanna attitude is outrageous: Just going to the wonderful A.A. meetings is supposedly all that is needed to fix some alcoholics.
    But since A.A. has a zero-percent success rate above and beyond the normal rate of spontaneous remission, that cannot possibly be true.