However I did give her 2 stars because some of the information is useful whether you are an adult child of an alcoholic or not.
Rating: 2 / 5

Orange papers verbatim:\

Orange Papers verbatim:

The A.A. God:

The A.A. God is the generic brand that comes in a plain white box at the supermarket.

The A.A. God has a lot of will. He has a Will for everything and everybody, and everybody is supposed to do something to please God. Apparently, the A.A. God did not succeed in making the world the way that He wanted it to be, so both He and his followers have to be constantly changing things, trying to get it right.

The A.A. God is an authoritarian male figure Who closely resembles an Old-Testament patriarch, like Charlton Heston playing Moses.

The A.A. God is a dictator.

The A.A. God wants you to be a slave forever.

The A.A. God loves you the most when you are grovelling on your knees, confessing what a worthless sinner you are. Only then will the A.A. God do favors for you.

The A.A. God is highly illogical, if not outright insane. First, the A.A. God will stick you with the genes for alcoholism and make you a born alcoholic, then He will wish you weren’t an alcoholic and an excessive drinker. Go figure.

The A.A. God has a grand plan for you: First, incurable alcoholism, and then, more incurable alcoholism.

The A.A. God is so harsh that He will condemn you to a horrible painful death by alcohol unless you properly perform your sycophant duties every day. The A.A. God routinely kills alcoholics who don’t Work the Steps thoroughly.

When the A.A. God heals alcoholics, He only fixes them for one day at a time. For some unknown reason, God’s magic wears off after 24 hours.

The A.A. God micromanages the world. He is constantly tweaking everything, pulling millions and billions of puppet strings to make things happen differently, to make things turn out exactly the way He wants, and to convenience some of his followers.

The A.A. God cheats at solitaire.

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 Alcoholics Anonymous… (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.

Neither are the Twelve Steps based on any of the teachings of Jesus Christ. (They are based on the teachings of Dr. Frank Buchman.)

Alcoholics Anonymous simply has no need for, and no use for, Jesus Christ. A.A. worships Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob, not Jesus Christ.

Rating: 1 / 5

Here’s a bit of proof of Woititz’ absurdity:

For Woititz’ dissertation, she did a study that compared Alateen teens to similar teens with alcoholic parents. Her study proved that the teens that weren’t affiliated with Alateen had higher self-esteem and were happier people. Wanting to forward her theories, however, she concluded that the REASON non-Alateen teenagers had higher self-esteem was because they were “in denial”.

So, in conclusion, we should join one of these 12 step groups based on folklore and decades old pseudo-science and lower our self-esteem and happiness level. Then, according to Woititz, we will be healthy–albeit unhappy with lower esteem.

Where is the common sense in this country?

Please, instead of this book, pick up “The Diseasing of America”, by Stanton Peele. Or, Wendy Kaminer’s “I’m dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional”. Start focusing on healthy behavior instead of wallowing in self-pity with these 12-step pity-parties.
Rating: 1 / 5