The Atheist View of the 12 Steps and Alcoholics Anonymous: It's Finally Stepped Up to fight for Its Vews

Dick B.:

For those in recovery concerned about the you-can-do-it-by-yourself wave, this will be short.

We know that in 1939, Bill Wilson and three others--one a secretary, one a salesman, one the son of a Christian minister, and Bill--took it on themselves to appease atheists and agnostics by removing God from the Twelve Steps and soon including all the weird concepts of spirituality, nonsense gods, higher powers that are rocks or light bulbs, and not-god-ness. See Bill W.'s own explanation of his reluctant surrender to the little group our four. Alcoholics Anonymous Coms of Age, pages 166 and 167.

It has taken decades for the unbelievers to step up and begin dismantling God, prayer, the Bible, and Christianity from the real A.A. history scene.

A telling new website has this to say:

"There is an increasing number of groups within AA that are not religious in their thinking or practice. These groups don’t recite prayers at the beginning or ending of their meetings nor do they suggest that a belief in God is required to get sober or to maintain sobriety. If the readings at their meetings include AA’s suggested program of recovery, then a secular or humanist version of the 12 Steps is shared."

Pages and pages of revised, distorted, unrepresentative history promote the theme.