Atheists - prove it.

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Alcoholism is a delusion that one needs alcohol. AA is a delusion that some magic can help one to stop taking alcohol. Treating delusion with delusion. Nice. :lol

I can't help but be critical when he LIES about it and prostitutes his addiction recovery as "evidence" of a deity, when in fact he believed BEFORE his recovery and was a practicing Christian WHILE he was a drunk.

Then why did god NOT managed your life before AA?

This god you claim to be non-intervening does all that, huh?

She was too busy NOT managing the billion who are chronically-hungry and the millions more in late stage AIDS.

Yes, and all of that came about only after the original A.A. had first shown there was any hope for any real alcoholic at all, and then doctors began getting all upset about being left out of the mix after Marty Mann had "sold out" and helped alcoholism come to be called a disease -- no such verbiage in "A.A.", the book -- and then today's high-dollar, insurance-covered "treatment" ultimately get started, ad naseum.

Sad.


Nope, and once again:

"Believe in" did not even get Dorothy back to Kansas.

Alcohol addiction and alcohol abuse have been considered symptoms of an unhealthy mind for quite a good deal longer than 1935.
Alcoholism is a disease by almost every criterion. Sorry. No conspiracy theory here.


You cannot simultaneously hold two mutually-exclusive beliefs:
that there is no god,
and that said non-existent god with existent properties emergent of his NON-existence

will somehow intervene in your life and yet NOT be an intervening god.


"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."


Your troll is showing.

I was a Christian who thought he knew, but did not, and then when I first got to A.A./AA, I outright refused to read the chapter "We Agnostics" (because I still thought I knew something but then ended up drinking again a year later). So overall, I believe it would be most accurate to say I was a delusional agnostic (with "agnostic" simply meaning something like "one who does not know" (even if/when he thinks he does)).

You are not hearing well here:

1) "Belief in" is irrelevant -- "belief in" does not accomplish anything for anyone;
2) I had to abandon my "belief in" in order to eventually actually recover.


I am not ...


To have what?

Would you truly prefer not having free will?

I do not understand what you are saying there, but I certainly will do all I can to try to help end any disturbance you might be feeling.


Certainly, and that is/was my point.

Close, but no cigar there.

Everybody everywhere needs something in order to "feel okay" (or whatever) in life as we presently know it, and the very best (and originally-intended) way to get such needs met and/or satisfied is through healthy interactions with other people. My AS/HFA is certainly not the reason I used to drink as I did, and yet neither am I the first Aspie who ever turned to the bottle while feeling so terribly odd, unusual, isolated or whatever else within all of society around me.

Today's AA offers at least "earth-bound fellowship" (my own term) for people who might now prefer to have that in place of drinking, and the original A.A. I happen to embrace had simply first taken that to a higher level ...

(back in a moment after I reboot so I can get my task bar back ... )

Edit: There are just too many hotkeys I do not know how to avoid when I try to type fast! In any case ...

"... 'I know I must get along without liquor, but how can I? Have you a sufficient substitute?'
"Yes, there is a substitute and it is vastly more than that. It is [fellowship with other people rather than turning to the bottle to escape whatever it is you cannot presently stand while/when sober] ..."
(page 152)

Last edited by leejosepho on 09 May 2011, 11:19 am, edited 1 time in total.

Whereas my reason for changing course was similar to yours, but I have simply used a different approach to resolution. I had Tourettes and severe AS, and I held the belief that I could improve my situation by making demands of God, my parents and the world in general. When I doubted God, I was even angry enough and arrogant enough once to demand that he prove to me somehow that he existed.

But then it finally struck me that I was making a complete fool of myself. I stopped asking God to help me when there were obvious things I could change about my own behavior and decision-making. I stopped asking my parents to either change my medication--which they would not believe was harming me--or give me their permission to stop taking it, and I simply started flushing the pills when they were given to me to take.

Finally, I stopped asking the "bullies" at my school to quit picking on me because I was finally forced to realize that I was being a loud, obnoxious a**hole and in many cases driving otherwise peaceful, charitible folk to treat me like crap. In fact, it turned out that a lot of behaviors I had taken, in my defensiveness, to be bullying were actually desperate, if clumsy, attempts to reach out and be a friend to me.

In a word, I stopped asking others to change my life for me because I realized that I didn't have a right or entitlement to crap. I realized that I was a nothing, a termite crawling on a tiny particle orbiting a photon emitted from an insignificant atom on the outskirts of a single molecule of an essentially useless substance. I faced the fact that the only person who would ever care whether my life was happy or miserable was me, and I had done a miserably poor job of making my life a happy one up until then.

However, I have realized since that time that I had an incorrect outlook on what religion was there for. Now, when people hear that concession, they almost always ask me why I don't "try it out" since I have a better idea now of how it actually works and what it is actually for. The simple answer is exactly the fact that I feel strongly that I comprehend a lot of its inner workings and see much of it as superfluous to the parts of it that are worthwhile. I think that there is a working component of religion that is highly effective for helping some people, but the rest of it is hypostatization and magical thinking.

On the other hand, I have been forced to realize that the comprehension I have of the subject is not something that I can easily communicate to others. I am actually largely a lot better off simply being friendly and agreeable with people over the topic. I find that I get along with people a lot better that way.

I guess I didn't catch the first thread. I sometimes ridicule Christianity, usually for two reasons: (1) I think it's ridiculous, and (2) I think it's important to offend the offendable (that's because I value free expression, and offending the offendable is the best way of pushing free expression).

I'm not going to try to convince you to abandon Christianity. If I'm talking to people online, I'm very rarely - perhaps never - aiming to persuade them to agree with me. I don't desire for everyone to have the same beliefs as me; rather I'm a pluralist and I value diversity. I'm interested in expressing my own beliefs and learning about others' beliefs.

I can tell you why I'm an atheist, though. No convincing was required. I never had much exposure to religion as a kid: my dad's an atheist and my mum kinda likes the community aspect of Church but doesn't believe any of it. At school, although they sometimes weren't presented this way, I never saw religious stories as anything more than fantasies that maybe had some useful moral lesson (I just assumed they weren't true because they seemed so silly... nobody would need to explicitly state that Humpty Dumpty isn't real, either). I spent a lot of time reading or watching programs about the universe, evolution, ancient history, etc, and many religious propositions didn't seem compatible with those. So, I've never felt the slightest temptation to accept religion.

As for god/s, I've just never encountered any convincing evidence. The same is true of all entities we classify as supernatural/paranormal. My worldview has always been grounded in mainstream science. I've always been an atheist, even before I was aware of the term, and I've always been tempted towards materialism/physicalism.


.

Ironically, your story sounds to me a lot like your benefits came from giving up your free will to your god, when you talk about letting him take control of your life.

Since you earlier in the thread talked about your experience as "evidence" for your god, I'll just point out that there's no real evidence for any god in it. To this atheist, it looks like you gave up the idea that you just gave up your sense of control, and that permitted you to conform to an Alcoholics Anonymous formula for kicking alcohol addiction. That that formula credits a god doesn't prove one exists.

It does, however, provide evidence that a belief in God can be useful. Some beliefs may be useful even if they are false.

Because, and as I have been trying to get across to Bethie:

Because He does not intervene or interfere and/or in any way impose His own will over my own or yours or anyone else's. Rather, and here is how I try to share with others about that matter:

1) How long have you been giving life "your very best shot"?
2) Answer: How long have you been alive?!
3) How well is your way working for you?
4) If life as you now know seems fine for you, or even close, please do not change much of anything;
5) If that ever changes, everything must change ... and God, if you might so choose, can make that happen for you.