Hacker News Reader

Comment by IlikeKitties | Hacker News Reader

Let's not forget that the "12-step-infrastructure" is a VERY American thing based around mostly christian religious nonsense and is by design completely inaccessible for people without a belief in fairy tales. It's obvious that the modern society requires addiction counseling and rehabilitation facilities, what we don't need is even more outlets for cults of all color to pray on people in dire situations.

Just the very 12 Steps themselves are enough to show you that[0]:

> We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

> Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

> Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him

> Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

> Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

> Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

> Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

> Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

> Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

> Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

> Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

> Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program

View on HN

> Let's not forget that the "12-step-infrastructure" is a VERY American thing based around mostly christian religious nonsense and is by design completely inaccessible for people without a belief in fairy tales.

One of my old friends was a staunch atheist since middle school. He joined AA after some struggles.

He said it was no problem at all. They told him his “higher power” could be anything he chose, such as nature or the universe. The prayer part was just meditation. Nobody tried to push religion on anyone.

I don’t know if his experience was typical or not, but he didn’t think it was a problem at all.

I haven’t kept up with him for a while but last we talked he was still doing well, many years later.

Yup. The steps are definitely rooted in Christianity, but you can exercise them however you want. As you might imagine, most people suffering with addiction are not that religious (if at all) and the same thing goes in those groups.

the vast majority of the law systems surrounding the global west are rooted in Christianity. you need to pause for a moment and stop equating religion with evil.

A lot of people don't see religion as a self replicating cultural program that benefits its biological host. It provides answers for the unanswerable. It is like L_2 norm based regularization in machine learning. You need an answer and there are many solutions, so you have to have a criteria for picking one.

Turns out in the last few centuries a lot of unanswerable questions have found answers rooted in scientific progress and the new answers conflict with the previous answers, which by their very function as placeholders could not have been correct.

Only HN would compare religion to L2 regularization! That said, your perspective "self replicating cultural program that benefits its biological host" is one that I think I've seen expressed before by the philosopher/cogscientist Josha Bach, and it seemed to fit well. It's not just a cultural program, it's effectively is a "mind virus/symbiont" (depending on who you ask), in that it also modifies behavior and psychology.

You read these comments incorrectly

> I don’t know if his experience was typical or not, but he didn’t think it was a problem at all.

His experience is typical. I know have someone very close to me in AA+12-step. There is no pressure to have your higher power named "God". It could be anything; the point is to have a power higher than the one over you (the addiction).

> There is no pressure to have your higher power named "God". It could be anything; the point is to have a power higher than the one over you (the addiction).

The rejection of any "higher power" is precisely what being an atheist is for a lot of us. Accepting that we are just the result of random thermodynamic processes in a cold and uncaring universe that provides no evidence that there is any form of "higher power" than uncaring entropy could very well be the definition of modern atheism.

> The rejection of any "higher power" is precisely what being an atheist is for a lot of us.

The person I am talking about chose their child's well-being and safety as their "higher power".

The higher power has nothing at all to do with religion unless you want it to.

I looked it up, there's not a dictionary I can find that would define "higher power" as your friend did. Words have meaning, you know?

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/higher-power https://www.dictionary.com/browse/higher-power https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/higher%20power

And it's beside the point anyways because again, look at the 12 Steps, quoted directly from their website, as a canonical source [0]:

> 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

> 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

> 7. Humbly asked Him [God] to remove our shortcomings.

> 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

If your argument is that to stop alcohol addiction you need to stop using alcohol and most of the 12 Step Program is irrelevant nonsense, than we are in agreement. But they don't talk about "higher power" they literally talk about God (And they obviously don't mean Xenu here) in the majority of their steps. [0]https://www.aa.org/the-twelve-steps

> I looked it up, there's not a dictionary I can find that would define "higher power" as your friend did. Words have meaning, you know?

Meaning has context. If you're searching dictionaries for multi-word phrases that are specific to a certain context, you're not going to find the right answer.

You are conveniently ignoring the "God" part or the "prayer" part or the "spiritual awakening" part.

Why?

There's lot's of places around the world that do evidence based addiction counseling and unsurprisingly none of them require you to believe in any made up entities and spiritual nonsense.

You are a very small part of an unimaginably large universe; so you are not the ultimate power, ergo there is a higher power than you. Some people choose to call that higher power "God", but there's no reason to get hung up on that for yourself; it's easy to translate into your own terms without raising an objection.

"Prayer" has no universally accepted procedure, and can just be your own calm reflective contemplation. "Spiritual awakening" can be that moment when you as an atheist accept your non-central role in the universe, when you come to peace with the fact that there is a higher power than yourself, and you aren't the central character in its unfolding.

There are only "made up entities" when you demand that everything be understood in literally minded cartoonish definitions, rather than a more nuanced understanding of the world around us, and our place in it.

> There's lot's of places around the world that do evidence based addiction counseling

As I pointed out in a previous comment, those places have successfully rated worse than random chance. Placebos beat them on succes rates.

The highest succes rates is with AA and the 12 step. Plenty of peer reviewed articles going back 30 years back this up.

Therapy has worse rates than anything else, including placebos.

There is no need to look it up. The site addresses this specific question.

https://internetaddictsanonymous.org/for-atheists-and-agnost...

Literally a different side.

>I looked it up, there's not a dictionary I can find that would define "higher power" as your friend did. Words have meaning, you know?

Absolute premium pedantry, I rate it 10/10, 5/7 with rice

If you don't believe words having any meaning matter, why discuss in the first place?

You're missing the point: as an addict the substance is the "higher power" because it literally has power over the addict.

Switching out the addiction for a different "higher power" is the point.

Just because you don't know how how things work doesn't mean you should quote the dictionary inaccurately at people. What you are doing is lower-cognitive effort than a stochastic parrot.

FWIW, I've been atheist all my life, mentioned it multiple times on HN, and am constantly annoyed by militant atheists like you making the rest of us in this group of logical people look bad.

At the very least, at least pretend to have put some thought into your worldview. Or at least pretend that there is some logic behind this argument you want to have on the internet for worthless internet points.

I'm simply telling you what the reality is. Your complaint that reality is wrong and you are right is a common but frankly stupid PoV.

Sounds like those thermodynamics processes are your higher power then? You're overthinking it.

Overthinking is the higher power.

> Accepting that we are just the result of random thermodynamic processes in a cold and uncaring universe that provides no evidence that there is any form of "higher power" than uncaring entropy could very well be the definition of modern atheism.

and then your further rejection of the response:

> The person I am talking about chose their child's well-being and safety as their "higher power".

i understand you see the universe as uncaring, but there is care right in front of you. i hope the sunshine breaks through and you find it, too.

> The rejection of any "higher power" is precisely what being an atheist is for a lot of us. Accepting that we are just the result of random thermodynamic processes in a cold and uncaring universe

I’m somewhere between atheist and agnostic. My mental model is a bit different. While I don’t believe there is a god or some “divine entity”, I do see “the stuff of primordial existence” as some kind of “higher power” to the extent that I’m a product of it, and its laws — discovered and yet to be discovered — govern my existence. Not some anthropomorphic entity.

Put another way, those thermodynamic processes and whatever factors of existence that enable/govern them are the “higher power”, and I don’t think that is incompatible with atheism.

> between atheist and agnostic

Sounds like you're both. They're complimentary labels. It's also possible to be an agnostic theist.

the rejection of a higher power is insane - how do you rationalize anything coming into being? How do you rationalize there being a world at all in the first place?

A higher power isn't a man in the sky building the world in 7 days. A higher power is admitting that you do not know reality, that we are barely more intelligent than a monkey, and that the universe is much vaster and more mystical than what can be defined in a physics textbook.

> the rejection of a higher power is insane - how do you rationalize anything coming into being? How do you rationalize there being a world at all in the first place?

How do you rationalize the high power coming to being? How do you rationalize there being a higher power at all in the first place?

> how do you rationalize anything coming into being?

Why does it need to be rationalized at all? I don't need a rationalization for existing - beings arise, exist, change, and then they cease. The world's current existence isn't something that requires external justification, it just simply is.

I guess you could say the higher power to me would just be the continuous process that leads to existence and ceasing to exist - but to me it has no meaning, and no "power" other than simply being the way things are as I experience them.

Isn't atheism a rather big umbrella term? There's things all the way from secular humanism to agnostic atheism to new atheism to nihilism. There's many atheists who find purpose in a higher calling, such as taking care of the poor, or wonderment of the universe. Would those not be considered a "higher power"?

EDIT: one more thought: you can even think of a higher power as emergent behavior of individual parts.

> uncaring entropy

So then if you were to consider a higher power in that case it could be the set of all permutations of stochastic possibilities in the universe, or something like that. The system itself is powerful, and is "higher" than the individual.

Then your higher power is logic and reason, and the question:

"Why are you doing this?" Give it the old 5-whys.

Your thermodynamic gubbins know how to enjoy the entropy while they're temporarily in this configuration without booze too.

Or just die in pain when your liver gives in, all good options.

It seems strange that one of the steps is admitting you have no control over your addiction. I feel like the first step should be deciding that you do. But that kind of self assuredness doesn't really align well with whole surrendering to Jeebus thing.

> It seems strange that one of the steps is admitting you have no control over your addiction. I feel like the first step should be deciding that you do.

If you do, you wouldn't be addicted, now would you?

I dunno, but I'm pretty sure Jesus is not controlling my addiction, either.

What does that have to do with anything?

Plenty of atheists have succeeded with AA after failing with everything else.

There are people who quit addictions under their own power. So as the parent pointed out, it seems strange to exclude that option from the start.

in AA they call those people "dry drunks" instead of "recovering alcoholics".

if you're in treatment or AA for alcoholism - just as a single example - you're recovering. If you're merely "not drinking" then you're not recovering, you're just "not drinking."

i don't even understand why this is an issue, there are a lot of people where a 12 step program helps them recover; there are in-patient and outpatient care facilities that also can facilitate recovery.

and yes, some small segment of the population can be a "dry drunk" for the rest of their lives, but thinking you can overcome addiction by yourself is one of the reasons that addiction is prevalent.

>thinking you can overcome addiction by yourself is one of the reasons that addiction is prevalent.

This is complete BS, the majority of addicts overcome addiction without any specific treatment.

https://psmag.com/social-justice/people-addiction-simply-gro...

https://aeon.co/essays/most-drug-users-stop-without-help-so-...

I'd rather listen to a literal board certified addiction medicine specialist than some rando on the internet that links an article about "a meth user for 20 years that just quit!" and an article that talks about how the prefrontal cortex somehow magically allows people to opt out of addiction in their mid-20s.

Several "hard" drugs interfere with the brain, especially if the drug use begins when the brain is still plastic. Another thing, why does Louisiana have more opioid prescriptions than citizens? I guess these "addicts" don't count.

Do you have some kind of angle, here? "complete BS" is a bit combative, for this forum.

I would suggest that an "addict" is someone who can't "just quit" because they "want to."

there’s a kinda interesting contradiction to your logic.

someone who can stop under their own willpower doesn’t need help to stop. they don’t need AA, right…?

so why should AA etc change things to cater for people who don’t need their help?

Really, everyone who overcomes addiction does it themselves. Friends (imaginary or not) and therapists can motivate but the actual work needs to be done by the person themselves.

12 step programs disagree, to grow a flower you water it and give it sunlight and good soil(the 12 steps version of this: reversing selfishness and getting out and helping others) but you don’t actually grow the plant, the DNA, photosynthesis, electromagnetism, soil chemistry…even quantum forces(AKA a power greater than yourself) are ultimately the core of what grows the plant. Therefor when one gets sober and becomes generally content and happy in life when previously they were suicidal, AA suggests that the core of the work was done by a higher power, even though the individual was indeed responsible for watering their flower.

Admitting you have no control is how you stop having “just 1 drink”… because you don’t have control.

You are taking the “no control” thing too literally.

Right, so this all makes sense so long as you don't take it literally, don't think about it too much, and don't pay attention to the words and the things they say. It should be understood more as dadaist sound poetry.

I love this comment, thank you.

/thread

I’m surprised my example didn’t clarify things.

Literally wasn’t the right word. Maybe control just needs more context, like “control of your usage”?

I agree.

Seems like the first step should be understanding that you CAN have control over it, even if you don't currently; and that you have the agency and strength to do that without appeal to some higher power.

The admitting you have no control sounds fatalistic to me and robs you of agency/responsibility. Then you're reliant on some externality or higher power instead of finding it within yourself.

Even those who go for the higher power are ultimately doing it themselves, they've just kidded themselves something else is involved, and if that helps you find that you can have some control over it, then great, I guess?

I think this is arguing semantics at this point but a charitable interpretation could be that one does not have control over the addiction and must therefore abstain from taking a particular substance, the abstinence being within the sphere of control of the individual.

It's the difference between someone who can just drink a beer once in a while and an alcoholic that must abstain completly.

I have the same fight in my life... As an atheist I push back pretty hard against any intrusion of religion in my life and depend on myself for pretty much everything, and am also the provider for others. If I'd sit on my behind and pray for good things instead of taking actions, nothing would get done, so I skip the time consuming part of dedicating a part of my life, time, brain power to all these things and instead focus on tangible things anchored in reality.

With how my brain works, I find it insulting to be told to pray the weakness away figure of speech..

That all being said, our brains, as wonderfully capable and complex as they are, are also pretty stupid and simple in other ways. Willpower and inner strength are a trained skills and mental states combined with chemical states. If the goal is to free yourself from addiction, the means of getting there don't really matter as long as they work and don't cause direct harm to yourself or others. The placebo effect is real, so if one gets strength from believing that there's a "god" or "higher power" giving them a high 5 and believes in them, then go for it. Whether I believe thats a delusion or not is much less important than the person breaking their addiction. Its a whole other fight of its own. I do think there should be as much available support for people that isn't based on feeding you religion if thats not your thing, regardless of the fact that one can attend AA+12step and not be religious and get value out of it too.

I feel like having faith in a higher power is almost like a part of your brain never grew up, in the sense that you're allowing yourself to believe in magic, like a kid. When you were a kid, that made you excited, dreamy, which puts you in a certain state. If you believe and that allows you to put yourself in a mental state where you think the end result will work out positively, whether thats because you felt empowered, you found strength to persevere, or whether you think god's got his quantum digits up your ** and is going to partially puppet you, thus relieving you of some of the pressure, strain, and allows you to get to the same end point, then good for you...

If this was a discussion about whether religions and faith in higher powers should be the guiding philosophies for humans going forward, my answer would be capital F no.. But if we're talking about current crisis response/management and addiction support, you can't rewire everyone's brains before you can start helping them out..

Part of taking control is first admitting that you are not currently in control. Believing you are in control leads to the classic "I can stop anytime I want to" or "just one drink won't hurt". Recognizing that you can't control it is how you recognize that yes, that one drink will hurt.

“just one more”

“after this one i definitely need to stop”

“i can handle another”

“i’m fine, i can go for a bit longer”

“i can stop after this one”

“the next one will make me feel better”

^ the illusion/delusion of being in control. even when all evidence points to the opposite conclusion — that one more i had yesterday, and all the previous days, was never the last one.

when your in this shit it’s basically impossible to think your way out of it because most thoughts become “a drink will solve this” or some such. that right there is the core problem. the thinking process has become completely twisted and warped into “more is the solution”.

the powerlessness is over the compulsion, obsession and delusions in our own minds around <insert X here>.

i appreciate HN is often a more technical / scientific / rational / whatever audience who can maybe sometimes value their own thinking as paramount (coding etc. takes a lot of thinking after all). that’s not a bad thing. it just means it’ll be quite an understandably large leap for some folks to understand what it’s like at the bottom of a bottle.

edit - i’m not into the whole jeebus thing FYI

Yep that was a deal-breaker for me going to AA. I eventually just quit drinking on my own after a few years, but AA being the only option for addiction support groups in many places is a bummer.

What’s interesting to me about all this is it sounds like people are defending appropriating religious practices but de-mystifying them. Even though belief in god is explicitly mentioned in the 12 steps, people claim to have had success by just ignoring the god parts -

But at that point, why is The Twelve Steps as an institution still pedaling belief in the supernatural, when it’s ostensibly just as effective with the Christian mythology removed?

Why not make the atheist version the baseline, and allow members to mix in religion if they find it to be useful - as opposed to making religious belief the default, and allowing users to substitute other things for religion if they find that to be useful?

I think the thing that most atheists are objecting to, with ‘religion as default’ situations like this, is the way religious belief is treated as the norm. I remember growing up and going to church, hearing about how “everyone had a god-shaped hole in their heart” - and each person would inevitably find a way to fill that hole, but nothing would ever quite fit, because that hole was god-shaped and could only properly be filled by god.

So when you run up against this kind of language in a system that’s supposed to be helping people free themselves from addiction, it’s off-putting to run into language that coerces them into making themselves beholden to magical thinking and supernatural beliefs, in gods and higher powers. “It can be whatever you want” feels like a cop out - it’s merely a softened stance on what I described above - “everyone has a god-shaped hole in their heart, and it’s okay if you fill that hole with love for your daughter or pride in your work.”

It’s still a turn-off for people like me, for better or for worse - maybe it’s a filter, maybe I’m not the kind of person who would need or would do well in that kind of program.

Yes exactly that "religion by default" is what bothers me too. Good way of putting it. It's like seeing atheists as a bit disabled, and the praying as something necessary in life that atheists can do with a workaround.

All that groveling, the idea of putting your life in the hands of this entity, humbly improving my connection with them etc. There's no way I will do that.

I'm more than atheist, I'm anti-religious. I don't care what other people do, if it makes them happy that's cool for them, but I don't want any of that stuff in my life.

> It's like seeing atheists as a bit disabled

They are seen as disabled, i.e., lacking the moral core. An atheist, the thinking goes, can't be a moral person. The US political (if not cultural) mainstream has been anti-secular for quite some time. Remember George Bush Sr? He had a memorable exchange with a reporter during his presidential campaign, where he made his views clear[1]. He was only mildly exceptional in being very direct, not in the way of thinking.

[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/George_H.W._Bush_and_t...

> This is one nation under God.

This is especially egregious because "under god" was only added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954, when H.W. was 30 years old.

No but it's kinda passive aggressive isn't it? It's built on the belief that having religion is the standard.

Also, many of these staps make no sense.

I don't believe in higher powers and I don't want to humbly beg them to remove my character flaws. If I want those removed I have to do it myself.

Some of the steps make some sense but there's way too much senseless groveling in there.

The AA program is at least as informed by anarchy as it is by Christianity. Interesting history there.

AA is less anarchic in practice than is principle.

AA being used by the justice system puts it at odds with anarchy, as anarchy is whatever you and your group want it to be, which is somewhat incompatible with state-mandated fill-in-the-blank.

Bill W. wanted to introduce LSD to AA in order to help folks understand what he meant by higher power, but the centering of Judeo-Christian ideology by other early AA members almost pushed Bill W. out of his own group.

AA was subverted long ago from within by the status quo it attempted to break free from. Whether or not it functions as an alcoholic support group is a separate issue.

I’ve written more about this before on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294352

I've seen other drugs used in therapies too. MDMA phychotherapy is more common and even legal in some places. Because it can temporarily remove internal barriers that make it much easier to reach the painful spot your brain is trying to shield. And without reaching it you can't really work on it. Several of my friends have had great experiences with this but I don't do any drugs so I never tried. I think there's too much stigma on these things. In another example, in the Netherlands cannabis can be prescribed as a pain killer for chronic issues, it works better and has way less side effects than other strong painkillers.

But an official program using illegal drugs is of course a bit of an issue. Though I'm not sure if LSD was illegal in the 50s?

That is part of the issue, as AA isn't an official program at all, in that it is a nonprofit group, but it is used as a kind of stopgap/interim solution to paper over the lack of research-backed government-funded alcohol treatment programs. However, court-mandated alcohol treatment programs don't exist in many areas, so AA is a quasi-offical program that creates a very scammy web of self-interested grifters posing as helpers, some of whom actually do help in some ways while enriching themselves and exerting undue influence over others' lives. The catty-corner halfway house cottage industry is full of usually Christian-presenting faith-based and faith-adjacent flophouses for addicts, recovering and otherwise, which is a kind of revolving door of desperate people being fleeced of all of the nothing they have, up to and including their dignity, leaving only shame.

In the 50s, LSD was being used in many clinical counseling settings. Time magazine was writing about it positively. LSD wasn't scheduled in the US until 1968.

> In one study in the late 1950s, Humphry Osmond gave LSD to alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous who had failed to quit drinking.[25] After one year, around 50% of the study group had not had a drink—a success rate that has never been duplicated by any other means.[26][27][28] Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, participated in medically supervised experiments on the effects of LSD on alcoholism and believed LSD could be used to cure alcoholics.[29]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD

This is ENORMOUSLY variable based on the specific group you wind up with.

It can be extremely christian, it can be not substantially christian.

It is very much based on religious hokum. While technically you can choose anything as your “higher power” your options are either embrace Jesus (which people in the program tend to be very happy about) or essentially cosplay embracing Jesus, just with a one-word substitution.

That’s why it has been recognized as religious or “based on religious principles“ in court several times. For example, in the court case Inouye vs Kemna it was ruled that NA/AA “has such substantial religious components that governmentally compelled participation in it violated the Establishment Clause“

>It's obvious that the modern society requires addiction counseling and rehabilitation facilities is it? or is that your opinion? Why don't we look at actual evidence:

"There is high quality evidence that manualized AA/TSF interventions are more effective than other established treatments, such as CBT, for increasing abstinence. Non-manualized AA/TSF may perform as well as these other established treatments. AA/TSF interventions, both manualized and non-manualized, may be at least as effective as other treatments for other alcohol-related outcomes. AA/TSF probably produces substantial healthcare cost savings among people with alcohol use disorder."[0]

[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32159228/

That's a great resource because it's a meta study collecting data from other studies, thank you i was searching for something like that! Unfortunately your quote is misleading as it leaves out some serious issues with the evidence and studies used. I recommend reading the "Main results" parts in your link in full.

I would recommend Refuge Recovery over AA any day. It's still buddhist inspired but it doesn't ask you to believe in a deity and basically just sticks to principles of buddhism like "be nice, be compassionate, to both yourself and others"

> to principles of buddhism like "be nice, be compassionate, to both yourself and others"

Principles shared with most religions and most non-religious people are hardly a mrk of Buddhism.

Buddhism is not a theistic religion, but it still requires a lot of religious beliefs (reincarnation, enlightenment, nirvana) and a lot of concepts such as detachment.

There is a BIG difference between "not monotheistic" and "not religious".

It depends a lot on the variant of Buddhism.

There are plenty of us who do not believe in those things. In particular, we see rebirth as a way of framing what Rawls called the Veil of Ignorance

There is an extremely wide spectrum of how buddhism is practiced and I'd argue most ways are "wrong" and violate things the buddha very specifically said not to do (e.g. don't worship him).

There are no "requirements" in buddhism. there is no hell for you to go to if you do it "wrong". take from it what you want and leave the rest behind.

> here is no hell for you to go to if you do it "wrong"

My understanding is that the present life and the cycle of reincarnation is what Buddhists seek release from in nirvana. There is a hell, we are just in it.

I hardly need say that "going" to hell is misleading as its not a place, and many other religions do not believe in it (.e.g. Christian universalists).

> take from it what you want and leave the rest behind.

At some point you take so little its not the same religion anymore.

> At some point you take so little its not the same religion anymore.

sure but the point is to take what works to stop drinking, not to able to accurately call yourself a buddhist

Self compassion is a major part of any kind of recovery really, life is really dark when you hate yourself for being who you are.

But, it works, right? 12-step type programs are also widely-available and low-cost.

Practicing religion yields a lot of net-positive effects, particularly mental anguish and internal turmoil. Otherwise, people wouldn't practice them. With moderate practice, you can easily achieve a state of 100% internal peace.

> Practicing religion yields a lot of net-positive effects, particularly mental anguish and internal turmoil.

True, being religious would cause me a lot of anguish and turmoil. Just the idea that I'm not in control of my life. I don't consider that a positive of any kind. That scene from the Matrix really speaks to me and always has :)

I think for people that like it it could have positive effects. Just like team sports would have negative effects for me but positive ones for others (I'm totally not a "team player")

You can also just meditate or engage in other practices that have nothing to do with religion. Religion is unnecessary.

12-step programs have a 5-10% success rate.

> Practicing religion yields a lot of net-positive effects, particularly mental anguish and internal turmoil. Otherwise, people wouldn't practice them.

I don’t think that follows. Plenty of people practice religion because they’re terrified of the consequences of not doing it, because they’re have been indoctrinated from a young age to believe that to turn away from God is to be tortured in hell for all eternity. (Or in the case of some religions, you can be straight-up executed for leaving.)

What do alcoholics do for recovery outside the US?

In civilized countries? Get support from Doctors, licensed psychologist and addiction counselors. In less civilized countries? Die.

> In civilized countries? Get support from Doctors, licensed psychologist and addiction counselors

All of these are available and common in the US.

12-step programs and AA are available in many countries outside of the US.

There wouldn't be any evidence that these groups, specifically AA have embedded themselves into the government and law system of the united states in particular and have used their influence to force non-religious people to join their little cult meetings, right? It's all optional of course!

Anyway, here's a list of court cases/news articles where it wasn't:

https://www.courthousenews.com/atheist-fights-court-ordered-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/alcoholics-ano...

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/1995/jul/15/aa-probatio...

https://aaagnostica.org/2014/10/17/atheist-punished-for-reje...

I'm sure you can find 20 more easily. Glad i'm not american.

you really got an axe to grind, huh?

> specifically AA have embedded themselves into the government and law system of the united states in particular

You could literally say the same about any special interest group in any country.

> Glad i'm not american.

Me too, but the difference is that you don't see me thinking I know anything about UK politics or special interest groups.

I'd even wager that you've never even set foot in a meeting in an attempt to alleviate your naivety.

> I'd even wager that you've never even set foot in a meeting in an attempt to alleviate your naivety.

I don't need to join a meeting to criticize what the organization setting up that meetings is widely publicizing as a treatment for a medical condition (addiction) when what they publicize is obvious religious nonsense.

I also don't join spirit healing conventions for cancer patients or homeopathic sales events to criticize those.

You seem to have a chip on your shoulder about Christianity, and that's your right. But in the course of that you may overlook that faith-based treatment of problems is a powerful tool that serves some people well. Consider the culture of people taking a break from alcohol over Lent for several weeks each year.

I'm in the former USSR; this thing is very popular among alcoholics I know personally or have heard of from friends and relatives:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кодирование_от_алкоголизма

The article in Russian is much more thorough than the English one, run it through Google Translate or something.

There are various ways it's practiced in my area, all of them can be summarized as follows: a medical professional performs some procedure (sometimes just hypnosis, but it can get more physical), which either "cures" your alcoholism, or convinces you that you're going to die horribly if you have even a drop of alcohol. The process depends on who is doing it.

It's basically just placebo and is pretty useless in practice (most alcoholics I know haven't stopped drinking for more than a couple of months), which doesn't prevent it from being widely used.

That seems insanely dangerous. As far as I know, once you are physically addicted to alcohol, you can't even go cold turkey without risk of literally dying.

If you get DTs after drinking for months, you will get proper medical treatment as in any other country. The "coding" is usually performed after you have been sober for some time and "stabilized", so to say.

Proper (most) of the facilities which do this require people to stop drinking for at least few days before procedure, and some offer paid service isolating patient for a few days under supervision, and then do a block. In cases when patient is already delirious from intoxication these facilities can force one to go cold turkey, but at the same time put patient on the IV with some supplements and issue anti-psychotics (by doctors of course).

So in general the system is well equipped to not allow patients die from abstaining.

This is why ex-USSR countries have so many programmers - we did a lot of coding :)

As Alcoholics Anonymous operates in 180 countries quite often people outside the US do go there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholics_Anonymous#Internati...

Die by drinking and driving, mainly.

Get proper treatment by professionals.

I'm as rational atheist as they come, and was nevertheless helped, for a while, by a 12-step program. You don't need to believe anything other than that not everything in life is under your control.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531234.

>pray on people

bravo

I'm gonna leave that in.

I mean listen. If humans have to abstract a belief into something to get them through tough times then so be it.

It does not help anyone to pretend that the universe is some sort of pure logic and reasoning machine and that a human can operate that way, because we are governed by and a slave to our emotions.

Religion and God exist for a reason, and that reason is that the world is inconceivably complicated and if you dont create a mental and emotional reasoning system that helps see beyond the complexity then you are going to have a really tough time.

Now, churches and cults and all that preying on vulnerable people is a whole other subject. But God and religion is a powerful tool humans have turned to for millennia.

“Religious nonsense” is such an engineer minded thing to say.

I’m with you for sure, but the truth is systems like religion, art, design, etc all serve a functional purpose to trick the mind, calm the mind, etc.

Plenty of non-engineering types are also atheists with a dismissive attitude. Putting art and religion in the same bucket like they belong to the same thought process is a ... very engineer minded thing to say.

I would invite you to look into how modern cults started. Jonestown, Scientology, Children of God, Haven's Gate, Branch Davidians, Mormonism, etc.

It's really, really fascinating and there's tons of resources out there how they get started, how they function and why. Once you understand the functional purpose of them, you'll never look at other religions the same.

>Let's not forget that the "12-step-infrastructure" is a VERY American thing based around mostly christian religious nonsense and is by design completely inaccessible for people without a belief in fairy tales.

This is both wrong and deeply harmful. As others in this thread have pointed out, you can choose any higher power you want, whether it's a tree or the inevitable increase in universal entropy. Don't throw away the whole thing because you might have to talk to a Christian.

Free, accessible addiction help is hard to come by so it's terrible to discourage people based on misinformation and culture war bullshit.

You are mistaken if you think AA has anything to do with religion. Methinks you're just parroting what you've read without actually verifying anything. Amplifying this nonsense just causes people in need to reconsider getting help.

> You are mistaken if you think AA has anything to do with religion

Reread the 12 Steps.

Go to a meeting. There is no pushing god unless the group is explicitly religious.

I have been. There is plenty of God and God adjacent talk. This constitutes pushing.

Its Christianity with the serial numbers filed off. Pass.

My sobriety has its roots in not drinking. Not some higher power.

folks doing their best with what they've got, a huge portion of the population this language speaks to, your contempt is not helpful to them

Reply on news.ycombinator.com