> 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.
> 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.
There are perfectly rational things that qualify as higher powers even if one doesn’t have religious belief. Those vast physical laws, the trajectory of the universe, the grand story of humanity, our quests for understanding.
Rejecting religion doesn’t mean rejecting wonder, and doesn’t make it too much harder to find something more significant than myself.
You will find AA chapters with religious overtones, and you will find many more that take those steps to set perspective about things bigger than you and beyond your complete understanding.
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.
The supermassive black hole is also just a small part of an unimaginably large universe. But if you got too close to it, you would indeed find it is a higher power than yourself, lol.
But the higher power in the AA context is a deep recognition that we are subordinate to the laws of nature. Which is indeed a kind of higher power; we are subordinate to the laws of nature, and can not exert our own will to overcome them. It is that recognition and submission to reality that can engender a humility and peace essential to recovery from addiction.
It only represents incoherent nonsense to someone who is very literally minded and can not integrate relatively simple concepts into their own rigid mental framework.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
^ 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>.
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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.
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).