AA Agnostica Features LifeRing
An AA-related website is featuring an article from LifeRing Board of Directors member (and deputy Executive Director) Mahala Kephart. The article features a introductory quote from Martin Nicolaus’s book How Was Your Week. Here’s a brief excerpt from the article:
In LifeRing, we believe individuals can and must learn to stop ingesting addictive substances before worrying what to call themselves or wrestling with their religious or spiritual beliefs. In LifeRing we are united by the practice of a behavior — abstinence. That we lived long enough to begin the recovery journey at all should probably be accorded more awe and respect than is our societal norm.
The website, at http://aaagnostica.org/ is from We Agnostics, a group of atheists and agnostics within AA.
At the same site, a recent article from the New York Times is featured, and it’s worth a read as well. The article examines the place of non-religious people in AA:
This meeting, as the parting phrase suggests [the article talks of a meeting ending with the phrase “Live and let live” rather than the Lord’s Prayer], is one of a growing number within A.A. that appeal to nonreligious people in recovery, who might variously describe themselves as agnostics, atheists, humanists or freethinkers. While such groups were rare even a decade ago, now they number about 150 nationally. A first-ever convention will be held in November in Santa Monica, Calif.
See Mahala’s piece Here, and the New York Times piece, “Alcoholics Anonymous, Without the Religion” Here.
LifeRing, of course, is not anti-religion, it is simply non-religious, seeing addiction as a physical and psychological condition, not a spriitual one.
Be sure to look at the Comments under the LifeRing piece — they demonstrate a positive attitude towards LifeRing, at least in some of the comments, that we often don’t see in AA.
— Craig Whalley
I don’t want to belabor this point, but any random negative comments you may have heard from AA members about your group represent only the individuals making the comments, not the organization as a whole. I have been in AA for only five years (yay! sobriety!) and have learned to ignore, overlook or, preferably forgive ignorant, arrogant and intolerant comments from people in AA just as in the rest of the world. We’re just a bunch of people with only one thing in common. Early on, I wanted us to be better than that, and some of us are, about the same ratio as you’ll find among any other random selection of strangers.
At our best, our strength is
each other.