Should an atheist be court-ordered to attend AA

EvilSmurf

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On another forum I frequent a member was telling the story of an atheist she worked with being caught for DUI for the 3rd or 4th time and being forced to attend AA meetings. Considering steps 2 and 3 of their 12 step program are heavily rooted in religion, should one be forced to attend this program if one is an atheist? Shouldn't other, non-religious treatment methods be used?
 
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

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

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

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 to remove our shortcomings.

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

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

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

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.

12. 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.
 
Wow, is it a requirement that everybody has to go through these twelve steps?
 
Yes, and the sneaky way they get around it being court ordered and therefore government endorsed religion is in the wording "God as we understand him." Your god can be a rock or a tree they say. As if it's sane to "Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of" a rock or a tree.
 
Interestingly when Penn ^ Teller covered AA on one of their shows the figures they dug up of success rates were around 5%. Pedople who successfully gave up drinking on their own? About 5%.
 
Hmm, and all this time I thought AA was just a bunch of people meeting to talk about how hard it is to stay sober and helping each other not to fall off the wagon.

How wrong can you be!
 
wollery said:
Wow, is it a requirement that everybody has to go through these twelve steps?
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Oh, yes. Otherwise, you're not "working the program."

I wasn't in it--my ex was. If anything, it only enabled him and made him worse, not better.
 
Our local Rationalist Society had a guest speaker some years back, an attorney who worked with these issues.
He was itching to take on such court-mandated programs on separation grounds, pointing out that AA not only promotes belief in a "higher power", but is inneffective as well.
There are a variety of secular alchohol-abuse programs with equal or better success rates.
 
Ausmerican said:
Yes, and the sneaky way they get around it being court ordered and therefore government endorsed religion is in the wording "God as we understand him." Your god can be a rock or a tree they say. As if it's sane to "Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of" a rock or a tree.
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Naa build an alter the the judge, and go to court to worship him.
 
wollery said:
Hmm, and all this time I thought AA was just a bunch of people meeting to talk about how hard it is to stay sober and helping each other not to fall off the wagon.

How wrong can you be!
Click to expand...


I've heard stories that AA groups can turn into much more than just people helping each other out. One of my girlfriend's friends described to us how the AA group she went to turned into a bit of a cult. The group thought that our friend couldn't handle quitting on her own, and tried pressuring her into staying with the group. Eventually it got to the point where she had to cut off contact with AA completely.
 
As one who participated in one of these court ordered A A meetings, I can say without doubt that they are useless. We would leave the meetings and go to our favorite tavern to bend elbows with one another.

I quit when I wanted to because I wanted to; not because of intervention, mortal or divine.
 
Kopji said:
One more reason atheists should not drink.
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And do what the religious AA people want you to?

This thread is making me thirsty. Should I go for trappist beer or cistercian wine? Now that's my kind of religion...
 
EvilSmurf,

Did that person know whether her coworker contested the judge's ruling? I realize that the person had committed a crime, so he/she may have felt that this was a minor punishment relative to what was feared. Having said that, if there are other, non-religious support groups, why couldn't the person attend one of those instead?
 
Well, in Soapy Samworld he would be spending five years in jail for the first DWI offence and the second would involve a permanent solution of his difficulty.So no, I'd say making him join AA as well would be cruel, unusual and superfluous.
 
Ausmerican said:
Interestingly when Penn ^ Teller covered AA on one of their shows the figures they dug up of success rates were around 5%. Pedople who successfully gave up drinking on their own? About 5%.
Click to expand...

Only 5% of people quit drinking on their own? That seems really low.
 
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