Beyond Belief: Agnostic Musings for 12 Step Life - Finally, Daily Reflections for Nonbelievers, Freethinkers and Everyone

PREFACE

BEYOND BELIEF: Agnostic Musings for 12 Step Life

A funny thing happened to me on my way to the new millennium. I realized that I had been a closet agnostic for a lot of my recovery. I had stayed clean and sober without the white light experience of an intervening God who grants sobriety, serenity or anything Bill W.-ish. We hear “fake it until you make it” in the rooms, and that’s what I did. Decades into my faking it, I hadn’t made it, in as far as feeling the presence of God. I felt like an imposter in Twelve & Twelve meetings.

Then came the Internet. I found a community of nonbelievers in recovery. Although a minority in Twelve Step culture, we are not freaks of nature. Some of my new nonbeliever friends had their own agnostic groups and some just fit their way into the mainstream fellowship, either apologetically or obnoxiously. I am now, truly, no longer alone. I don’t have to feign belief in order to feel like I belong.

There is no shortage of daily meditation books for addicts who are predisposed to a worldview that includes a deity. But when I went looking for a daily reflection book not based on a monotheistic worldview, I couldn’t find one, so I wrote one. It took four years. Art, philosophy, religion, comedy, science and the folk-wisdom of Twelve & Twelve rooms are all drawn upon within these pages.

This book speaks in an agnostic voice. Nonbelievers have something to add to the recovery conversation. There is no bias against faith in God or other deities. Some of my best friends believe in God. I don’t consider them absurd and they don’t see me as inferior. Non-theists are not intellectual holdouts. Non-theists are not more evolved. Beliefs are like favorite colors. If I like green and you like yellow that shouldn’t interfere with our discussion of addiction and recovery.

The Big Book’s chapter “We Agnostics” draws a line in the sand: “God either is or He isn’t. What was our choice to be?” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 53) Nature abhors a vacuum and a state of nothing can’t exist in either the material or spiritual world. This kind of binary thinking made sense in the autocratic world of 1939. But in a democratic, pluralist society, all-or-nothing thinking is a cognitive distortion—a philosophical assumption that everything is right or wrong, good or evil, superior or inferior. In this millennium, people can hold opposing views and be equals in the same community. Our Traditions, lovingly and tolerantly, make room for more than one truth. That’s a good thing, because the only problem with the truth is that there are so many versions of it.

If you believe in God and I do not, we both let go... then, I don’t know. Maybe God scoops up our will, puts His hand on our shoulders and guides us in the right direction. I don’t think so but maybe you’re right. The action in the Step that we both take is letting go. The theology of what happens next is an interesting discussion but irrelevant to getting sober and living well, à la Twelve Steps. Unity is not about uniformity of beliefs; it’s about a common purpose. Firm on principles, our methods stay flexible.

In the mid-1970s, when I got clean and sober, an Alcoholics Anonymous advertisement regularly ran in my local newspaper. It said, “If you want to drink and can, that’s your business. If you want to quit and can’t, that’s our business. Call AA...” The ad included the local Intergroup phone number. What it conveyed to me was that if I wanted to drink, AA had nothing for me except warm regards. If I had no problem quitting by myself, AA would mind its own business. But if I wanted to quit and could not stay stopped, AA was one way that worked.

Our creed includes some common beliefs:

(1) Addiction is an incurable, progressive illness.

(2) One day at a time, we can stay sober.

(3) Self-reliance was insufficient for us to get and/or stay sober.

(4) Honesty, open-mindedness, self-evaluation and a willingness to make amends and help others are tools to get and stay clean and sober (recovery).

Some of us consider these tenets facts. Some of us concede that these tenets don’t hold up as facts when subjected to scientific scrutiny. Nonetheless, as facts or ideas, they are our creed. These ideas are true for us and we feel it in our guts.

Alcoholics Anonymous started as a conversation between two amateurs who couldn’t make it on their own. Others joined the conversation. They weren’t experts, either. Since 1935, there hasn’t been a generally recognized expert on addiction, prevention or recovery inside AA. As far as I know, none of the other 500 organizations that have taken the Twelve Step tenets and run with them have produced an expert either.1 I have friends in AA, NA, SLAA, OA, FA, CA, Al-Anon, GA, ACA and other Twelve & Twelve fellowships. I call myself a qualified member in some of these meetings. In other cases, I have gone to meetings to support a friend or to satisfy my own curiosity. I have read and learned new things from each group’s literature.

When referring to the Steps and Traditions, this book uses an addiction-generic, faith-neutral translation of The Steps adopted by some Twelve & Twelve agnostic groups. The Steps aren’t considered sacred by every member, certainly not every nonbeliever. Many members with a variety of worldviews interpret, omit or replace Steps in a way that works effectively for them. The agnostic interpretation of the Twelve Steps used in this book isn’t poetry and these Steps aren’t universally embraced, not even by every agnostic or atheist Twelve Step member. I find in these agnostic Steps the essence of what the original Twelve Steps ask of us. They reflect the thought and action required to combat the destructive control of addiction and the artful balancing act of living clean and sober. Every member decides to work or dismiss each Step and how to interpret them. The variation used in this book is designed to not leave anyone out of the conversation.

The notion of taking artistic liberty with the program offends those in the Twelve Step orthodoxy. Bill Wilson was quite clear about the inherent liberty that groups and their members enjoy. Buddhists replaced the word “God” with “good” so that the practice of the Steps could be compatible with their non-theistic belief. Bill wrote, “To some of us, the idea of substituting ‘good’ for ‘God’ in the Twelve Steps will seem like a watering down of A.A.’s message. But here we must remember that A.A.’s Steps are suggestions only. A belief in them as they stand is not at all a requirement for membership among us. This liberty has made A.A. available to thousands who never would have tried at all had we insisted on the Twelve Steps just as written.”2

Much of the language for the new millennium hasn’t been crafted yet. The words “atheist” and “nonbeliever” describe someone by what they are not. “Freethinker” as a description of non-theists might seem to suggest that all religious people have rigid viewpoints, which isn’t fair or true. Language lags behind culture. For example, all of us believe women and men have an equal right to vote. We no longer use the word “suffragist” to describe ourselves. One day, none of us will have to describe ourselves by what we do not believe.

Look at how far we’ve come from when the Twelve Step phenomena started. Society is more culturally diverse and more globally connected. Our understanding of addiction and recovery has expanded with our growing experience. Naturally, language evolves, too. Terms like “John Barleycorn” or patriarchal phrases like “This is the Step [Six] that separates the men from the boys” sound goofy to today’s reader.3 In time, the language in this book will sound just as dated.

Some of the newest fellowships are devoted to Century Twenty-one problems. Who, in the mid-1980s, could have conceived of addiction to online gaming? OLGA is a new millennium fellowship that presents the age-old Steps using a new-age language. Each new fellowship speaks the language of the day. For the most part, the newer the fellowship, the less emphasis is placed on God and the less the addict is referred to using a masculine pronoun.

Twenty-first century stewardship of Twelve & Twelve fellowships is in transition. Around the year 2005, the first of Generation X celebrated their 40th birthdays. In North America alone, children born between 1965 and 1980 number 51 million. Some have been sobering up, getting active and preparing to captain Team-Recovery. No second generation runs the family business just like Mom and Dad did. Gen X alcoholics and addicts are by no means Baby Boomer clones. Demographers describe this version of homo sapiens as educated, individualistic and flaunting an unabashed disdain for structure and authority. Gen X faces our age-old addiction problem with an enigmatic attitude.

Right behind Gen X we see 75 million North American Millennials (Generation Y or Gen Next, born from 1981 to 2000). These youth were wired to the net before they got wired from addiction. Before the end of this century, the new bleeding deacon will be the multi-tasking, gadget-dependent, silver-haired web-surfer.

Hey, change is not inevitable—there is always extinction. When hardening of the attitudes is allowed, organizations will reify. Members tend to vote to keep things the same, more than to embrace change. In my own recovery, I experienced population growth in Alcoholics Anonymous from less than one million in the mid-1970s to a doubling twenty years later. For the...