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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
https://internetaddictsanonymous.org/for-atheists-and-agnost...
Absolute premium pedantry, I rate it 10/10, 5/7 with rice
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.