AA Replaces Alcohol with God

For reasons too mind-bendingly intricate and treacherously libelous to gloss over here, I unexpectedly found myself at a church last Friday night attending a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. The experience was a novel one for me, though not something I would ever make a habit of.

In fact, upon walking out the door, I immediately began blasting it as "a pressure cooker of misery" - but my night there was, to say the least, very enlightening. Before, I had no clue about what actually transpires during AA meetings. Now I know. Simply put, it's Ego re-education. The fundamental hindrance regarding Alcoholics Anonymous, as I see it, is that the program presents itself as necessarily religious in nature. From the evening's opening prayer, to the reading of the group's spiritual doctrine, to the monotonous God-saturated speeches, even an idiot could grasp the underlying implication - reliance upon divinity is your only hope.

I, however, do not understand why the sick must become subservient to a "higher being" to be cured of an ailment. Why does traditional faith in God have to be the one and only pathway to overcoming life's problems? Please do not get me wrong, as I think every man should have the ability to pray to his personal deity at nearly any time and for any reason. The same is true for using substances, because that is a stipulation of actual freedom. The real question is, why can people not embrace their fellow brothers and sisters in confidence - others who are dealing with the same problems - and build with them a mutual strength to overcome pain? Why should people not learn to place sensibility above desire? Why is Alcoholics Anonymous not a humanistic experience, but rather something spiritual?

One of the many speakers during the course of the evening mistakenly blamed his former substance abuse problems on a previous devotion to "materialism." Nothing could be further from the truth, I am sure. Intoxicants are used primarily for entertainment purposes and not toward material ends. They are obviously not meant to alter the physical world, but our mindsets. Drugs provide introspection and contemplation of eternal ideals - music, art, philosophy, sex and other forms. Religion exists within this same realm. Compare the nearly universal use of intoxicants in spiritual rituals around the world and see that both fulfill a similar desire of the Id. Drugs and religion are both divine. God is an abstract principle and, unless we follow the pantheist model, transcendent of matter.

AA is simply where emotionally devastated people go to have one rickety crutch replaced by another. It is an association that advocates dropping the bottle just to pick up the Bible, praying the blues away rather than drinking them into oblivion. It is a formal endorsement for JC over JD.

Yet, if some young woman were drinking too often, then by definition she would already be paying more attention to the high than her physical world. When people get too out of tune with a substance, becoming more aesthetic, the only successful counterbalance can be a firm grounding in matter - that is, obviously not an empty consumerist materialism, but an intellectual or social variety. Why should we spend equal time on bended knee at the altar as we would otherwise over some toilet, asking agents of the invisible realm to help us subjugate our will? This should be the task of either our rational mind or society.

In advanced communities, social organizations for the ill would operate on both planes of human reality, not just one. Offering religion as a substitute for booze is just as useful as offering any other idealistic pastime - painting or poetry writing - rather than offering a faculty for material recognition. Replacing a drug with a god does nothing to fundamentally change a person but rather leaves them shackled to a purely intangible existence.