A woman convicted over her part in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot said she rejected Trump's pardon because it would be a "slap in the face to Capitol police officers."
It isn’t by necessity a religious program, though I freely acknowledge its theistic roots, and the fact that many are religious and do rely on deity as higher power.
But the reason these people were capable of this bravery is stated in the article and is specifically not their piety - it’s their honesty.
“Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves”
“Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”
The most important lesson to be learned in AA has nothing to do with God and everything to do with addressing falsehoods - the lies people tell themselves and others to justify their behavior and to excuse their actions.
Through time, habit, and conscious effort and will, these people have primed their minds to be willing to accept a fundamentally difficult truth - that what we think and what we feel can be false. That the things we tell ourselves, the things we tell others, and the things we do can all be wrong.
We all have a responsibility to face those truths with courage and transparency. We have a responsibility to own our flaws and mistakes and make amends where possible. That is the guiding truth of AA. It all started with God, but it ends with the individual, and how they face those truths.
I guess I can’t separate it from a religious program because fundamentally the ethics of it are theistic and not humanistic. They’re handed down morals that come from a higher moral power. When you get into esoteric ethical debates with Christian apologists, and they describe atheists as being incapable of being moral, that’s what they mean. They believe morals must come from something greater than ourselves and cannot come from a human source.
To put it another way, AA is remarkably similar to Aristotle’s virtue ethics which was used by Aquinas to describe the origins of morality. Similar to AA’s higher power, Aristotle derived the moral authority for virtue ethics from the “prime mover.” Same concept, in essence.
It isn’t by necessity a religious program, though I freely acknowledge its theistic roots, and the fact that many are religious and do rely on deity as higher power.
But the reason these people were capable of this bravery is stated in the article and is specifically not their piety - it’s their honesty.
“Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves”
“Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”
The most important lesson to be learned in AA has nothing to do with God and everything to do with addressing falsehoods - the lies people tell themselves and others to justify their behavior and to excuse their actions.
Through time, habit, and conscious effort and will, these people have primed their minds to be willing to accept a fundamentally difficult truth - that what we think and what we feel can be false. That the things we tell ourselves, the things we tell others, and the things we do can all be wrong.
We all have a responsibility to face those truths with courage and transparency. We have a responsibility to own our flaws and mistakes and make amends where possible. That is the guiding truth of AA. It all started with God, but it ends with the individual, and how they face those truths.
I guess I can’t separate it from a religious program because fundamentally the ethics of it are theistic and not humanistic. They’re handed down morals that come from a higher moral power. When you get into esoteric ethical debates with Christian apologists, and they describe atheists as being incapable of being moral, that’s what they mean. They believe morals must come from something greater than ourselves and cannot come from a human source.
To put it another way, AA is remarkably similar to Aristotle’s virtue ethics which was used by Aquinas to describe the origins of morality. Similar to AA’s higher power, Aristotle derived the moral authority for virtue ethics from the “prime mover.” Same concept, in essence.
Honestly out of all 12 steps it’s the first step that actually hits the hardest.
“We admitted we were powerless over alchohol (although you could substitute alcohol for anything really)—that our lives had become unmanageable.”
As my shrink used to say “the hardest part of overcoming a problem or mistake is admitting you have a problem/made a mistake.”