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62 Years of Proven Effectiveness While AA may not be the answer for everyone, it is for many thousands of alcoholics and others. 12-Step programs are popular in many places now, based on the Steps to recovery first written in this book. Alcoholics Anonymous has never been on any best seller list, but it has sold over 20 million copies. This is good reason to take seriously what the authors say in this book. I can add my personal testimonial: the 12 Steps have changed my life for the better. Given the choice between potential death or 12 Steps, I will take the Steps! a way of life that works this book gave me a working relationship with power grater than myself ,that deepens day bye day. I owe my life to this book. TO BE READ AGAIN & AGAIN a great book. each time i read it i gain many new insights. the stories at the end of the book reached me 1st. years later i began a serious "working of the steps". through that serious work i did undergo a "profound personality change" which has served me quite well. if a person can accept the sometimes old-fashioned language there is really a lot here that can be profoundly helpful. AA is not the only answer for the alocoholic but it has worked for millions so should at least be taken seriously. In my experience many things heard in an AA meeting do not reflect the premises in this book. So a person has to be smart. read the book, listen at meetings(if you go) but think, read & contemplate. After 20 years of sobriety i return to this book over & over. Not only for a deep comfort but for inspiration & guidance. one last thought: i don't take myself or "everything" so seriously, but i do take my sobriety seriously. good luck - it is a life "second to none". AA isn't for everyone AA isn't for everyone, only those who can't stop by themselves, it's pretty simple. And as you can see from some previous reviewers, "SOME ARE SICKER THAN OTHERS". Only the most closed and narrow minded won't be able to make it work. All it takes is a little willingness and honesty. Everyone dies someday and in one aspect, an alcoholic has 3 choices. Die Drunk, Die drunk and having failed at AA, Die sober. Just beyond me though at how some people can be so hateful of those striving for the third option or the "cult" that brings it all together. Throw your Sponsor and Big Book away!!! One problem that any Christian will have with Alcoholics Anonymous is the organization's abandoning of the Bible. The Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, is their new Bible. Some members claim to still use the Bible; I sometimes hear a bit of lip service to the Bible like, "Keep the Big Book next to the Good Book," but you won't see a Bible at a meeting, and you won't hear it quoted. Everybody is carrying the Big Book, and all readings come from it, or from a similar book of daily meditations, also written by Bill Wilson and other members of A.A.. In fact, reading aloud from the Bible at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is usually forbidden. The Bible is considered "outside literature". Reading aloud at meetings from anything but A.A. "Council Approved" (and A.A.-published) literature is forbidden. In addition, A.A. has essentially abandoned Jesus Christ. The A.A. faithful believe that Bill Wilson is superior to Jesus Christ when it comes to dealing with alcoholism, and you will hear Bill Wilson quoted a hundred times more often than Jesus Christ. (As a matter of fact, I can't really remember the last time I heard Jesus Christ quoted in an A.A. or N.A. meeting...) The third edition of the A.A. Big Book does not contain the word "Jesus" anywhere, not even once. Bill Wilson raved constantly about "God", but didn't talk about Jesus Christ at all. There is one and only one mention of "Christ" in the entire book, and it is Bill Wilson's statement that before his hallucinatory experience on belladonna, his so-called "spiritual experience," he didn't have much use for Christ: With ministers, and the world's religions, I parted right there. When they talked of a God personal to me, who was love, superhuman strength and direction, I became irritated and my mind snapped shut against such a theory. To Christ I conceded the certainty of a great man, not too closely followed by those who claimed Him. His moral teaching -- most excellent. For myself, I had adopted those parts which seemed convenient and not too difficult; the rest I disregarded. The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, chapter 1, Bill's Story, pages 10-11. Apparently, Bill continued to disregard a lot of that stuff even after he "saw the light," or saw "the God of the preachers", because Bill never mentioned Jesus or Christ again, not anywhere in the Big Book, not ever. The first edition of the Big Book contained one story, "My Wife and I," that contained a line mentioning Jesus Christ: Here were these men who visited me and they, like myself, had tried everything else and although it was plain to be seen none of them were perfect, they were living proof that the sincere attempt to follow the cardinal teaching of Jesus Christ was keeping them sober. That story was dropped from the second, third, and fourth editions. The word "God" appears in the first 164 pages of the Big Book (which William G. Wilson either wrote, co-authored, or edited) 106 times, the word "Power", as in "Higher Power" or "that Power, which is God" appears 22 times, the divine "Him" appears 26 times, and the divine "His" is used 15 times, but there is no mention of "Jesus Christ", not one single mention. Alcoholics Anonymous is not a Christian religion, no matter what some members like to say. It is a religion all right, in spite of the denials of the members who claim that it is only a "spiritual program." Alcoholics Anonymous is a Buchmanite religion. Alcoholics Anonymous is just Frank Buchman's crazy "Oxford Group / Moral Re-Armament" religion, only slightly edited by William G. Wilson and Dr. Robert H. Smith. Basically, Alcoholics Anonymous believes in and practices the teachings of Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, another man who had little use for Jesus Christ, because he preferred his own beliefs and teachings to those of Jesus. Bill Wilson did not invent the theology of A.A. -- he merely copied it from Frank Buchman. In spite of that fact that Bill Wilson tried to hide the strong connections between Frank Buchman and A.A., Buchman's Oxford Group got three mentions in the third edition of the Big Book, while Christ got only one. (The first two mentions of the Oxford Group are in the Forward to the Second Edition, and the third is on page 218 of the third edition, in the story "He Thought He Could Drink Like A Gentleman".) For that matter, when you consider the fact that Jesus' first miracle was changing water into wine at a wedding party, there might be a real problem with Jesus being a member of A.A.... (John 2:1 to 2:11.) I am reminded of a contemporary critic of Frank Buchman's Oxford Group, Pastor H. A. Ironside, who criticized Buchmanism by saying that it was not a Christian religion, in spite of Buchman's claims that it was, because everything in Buchmanism would still be possible even if Jesus Christ had never been born. The same thing is true of Alcoholics Anonymous. A.A. would not have to change one word of the official church dogma even if Jesus Christ had never been born. The sacred Twelve Steps of Bill Wilson do not mention Jesus Christ, and do not require Jesus Christ in order to work, and the Twelve Steps don't even require Jesus Christ to have ever existed. Alcoholics Anonymous simply has no need for, and no use for, Jesus Christ. A.A. worships Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob, not Jesus Christ. The Twelve Steps do not work as a program of recovery from drug or alcohol problems. The A.A. failure rate ranges from 95% to 100%. Sometimes, the A.A. success rate is actually less than zero, which means that A.A. indoctrination is positively harmful to people, and prevents recovery. Some tests have shown that even receiving no treatment at all for alcoholism is much better than receiving A.A. treatment: One of the most enthusiastic boosters of Alcoholics Anonymous, Professor George Vaillant of Harvard University, who is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (AAWS), showed by his own 8 years of testing of A.A. that A.A. was worse than useless -- that it didn't help the alcoholics any more than no treatment at all, and it had the highest death rate of any treatment program tested -- a death rate that Professor Vaillant himself described as "appalling". While trying to prove that A.A. treatment works, Professor Vaillant actually proved that A.A. kills. After 8 years of A.A. treatment, the score with Dr. Vaillant's first 100 alcoholic patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking. (Nevertheless, Vaillant is still a Trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he still wants to send all alcoholics to A.A. anyway, to "get an attitude change by confessing their sins to a high-status healer." That is cult religion, not a treatment program for alcoholism.) The A.A. dropout rate is terrible. Most people who come to A.A. looking for help in quitting drinking are appalled by the narrow-minded atmosphere of fundamentalist religion and faith-healing. The A.A. meeting room has a revolving door. The therapists, judges, and parole officers (many of whom are themselves hidden members of A.A. or N.A.) continually send new people to A.A., but those newcomers vote with their feet once they see what A.A. really is. Even A.A.'s own triennial surveys, conducted by the A.A. headquarters (the GSO), say that: 81% of the newcomers are gone within 30 days, 90% are gone in 3 months, and 95% are gone at the end of a year. That automatically gives A.A. a failure rate of at least 95%. But the GSO does not count all of those people who only attend a few meetings before quitting -- they don't qualify as "members". (That amounts to "cherry-picking".) If we included them, then the numbers would be much worse. And also note that the claimed five percent of A.A. newcomers who are still left after one year is exactly the same number as the usual rate of spontaneous remission among alcoholics -- five percent per year. That is, in any randomly-selected population of alcoholics, approximately five percent per year will finally get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and they will just quit drinking. And the Harvard Medical School says that 80% of those successful quitters do it by themselves, alone, without any "treatment program" or any "support group". If we subtract the normal spontaneous remission rate for alcoholism of five percent per year from A.A.'s claimed success rate of five percent, we get zero for A.A.'s real effective cure rate. A.A. does not actually make anybody quit drinking; it just takes the credit for the people who were going to quit anyway. A.A. is just taking the credit for peoples' efforts to save their own lives. The Twelve Steps are actually a hopelessly bad program for recovy: Cult religion is not a good cure for alcoholism, and A.A. most assuredly is a cult religion. One of the biggest problems with the Twelve-Step program is the learned helplessness caused by the First Step, where people are taught to confess that they are "powerless over alcohol." This leads many people to believe that once they have a drink, that a full-blown relapse and total loss of self-control is inevitable and unavoidable. So some people go on suicidally-intense binges, thinking that it is pointless to try to resist temptation.2 -- Step Two is just as bad: it teaches people that they are insane, and that only a Supernatural Being can restore them to sanity -- which means that they are helpless, and cannot heal themselves. Then Step Three teaches a lifestyle of infantile narcissism and passive dependency, where A.A. members turn control of their wills and their lives over to "the care of God as we understood Him", and then they expect God to take care of them and run their lives for them, and solve all their problems, and wait on them hand and foot, and do all of the hard work for them from then on... "Let Go And Let God" is their official motto, their lifestyle, and their approach to problem-solving. Then Steps Four through Ten induce guilt in the members by forcing members to make lists of all of their sins and flaws, and "defects of character" and "moral shortcomings", and confess every intimate dirty little secret to another A.A. member who isn't even ordained clergy, or even sworn to secrecy. In Step Eleven you are supposed to "channel" God and receive psychic work orders and power. Then Step Twelve tells you to go recruiting, to draft more alcoholics into this madness. There is also experimental evidence that the A.A. teachings about powerlessness lead to binge drinking. In a controlled study of A.A.'s effectiveness, court-mandated offenders who had been sent to A.A. for several months were engaging in five times as much binge drinking as the no-treatment control group which got no A.A. "help". A.A. boosters and propagandists constantly repeat the Big Lie that A.A. works great, and A.A. with its Twelve Steps is the way that everybody recovers. See also:
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