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5 Comments (and one trackback)

• #1 by Joseph M. Soehngen on November 9, 2009 - 3:36 pm

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  Before you read this book, read the four books about AA that are on the following web site – morerevealed.com. You need to know what you’re getting into. If you have a drinking problem, go on the net and look up Rational Recovery, Moderation Management, SMART recovery, Secular Organizations for Sobriety, Women For Sobriety, Men For Sobriety.
  Rating: 1 / 5

• #2 by James Blackman on November 9, 2009 - 3:57 pm

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  Nasty little book. I have tried to find an ounce of humanity in this book, and I cannot find it.

  Bill Wilson should not, in all acounts, be trusted – espcially as something as delicate as the mind. He has an agenda, and the critics are trying to work out what it is.

  I spent 2.5 years in the program, and it was like manipulative, nasty, and hopeless.

  Do not underestimate the power of Alcoholics Anonymous
  Rating: 1 / 5

• #3 by Reginleif II on November 9, 2009 - 4:39 pm

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  While I myself haven’t been in AA, I’ve attended Overeaters Anonymous and Emotions Anonymous — yep, “Emotions” Anonymous,” because I guess if we just surrender our emotions unto our H1er P0w3r, He’ll (capital “H”) take them away and leave us good little Borglings untroubled by any nasty thoughts or feelings. Feh.

  Other Amazon reviewers slamming “The Big Book” (and if you don’t think they’re trying to glom some prestige off the Wholly Babble, you weren’t paying attention) have laid out all my objections to it. Perhaps not quite how I’d have laid them out, but I see no need to re-invent the wheel tonight.

  However, I’ll note that while the negative reviewers by and large set out detailed and well-written explanations of their contempt for this book, the positive reviewers seem mainly delighted to regurgitate their cult’s dumb little slogans and insult the negative reviewers, mainly by implying that they didn’t “work hard enough” at their own sobriety. I especially liked the dude whose review was titled, “Life is better with God,” then called the negative reviewers “idiots” in the first line. Yeah, buddy, I guess that “serenity” thing is working out really well for you.

  One thing I will echo: Check out Charles “Chaz” Bufe’s book _Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure?_ Although Jason Gold did a good job of CliffNoting Bufe’s book, I still highly recommend reading it on your own, especially the latest edition, in the foreword to which Bufe recounts all the vitriolic hate mail he got from those serene, loving, doG-infused goose– oops! there I go again — 12-steppers.
  Rating: 1 / 5

• #4 by Zulu Warrior on November 9, 2009 - 5:16 pm

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  1. 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.

  First there is the propaganda technique of “everybody’s doing it”: “AA or a similar Twelve-Step program is an integral part of almost all successful recoveries”.
  
  That is a complete falsehood. The vast majority of the successful people recover without A.A. or any “support group”. It’s what “everybody” is doing.
  
  Then they use the propaganda techniques of use of the passive voice and vague suggestions: “It is widely believed that not including a Twelve-Step program in a treatment plan can put a recovering addict on the road to relapse.”
  
  It is widely believed by whom? And what do those unnamed people know? What are their qualifications? Are they doctors? Medical school professors? Or salesmen for a 12-Step treatment center? Why should we care what some unnamed invisible fools allegedly believe, anyway?
  
  The authors also use the propaganda technique of fear-mongering: you will be “on the road to relapse” — you will probably die — unless you practice Bill Wilson’s Twelve Step cult religion.
  
  And then the fluff-headed Pollyanna attitude is outrageous: Just going to the wonderful A.A. meetings is supposedly all that is needed to fix some alcoholics.
  
  But since A.A. has a zero-percent success rate above and beyond the normal rate of spontaneous remission, that cannot possibly be true.

  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

• #5 by what I have in my heart, I take to my grave on November 9, 2009 - 7:09 pm

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  if god is what you want, this is the book for you. If is a way to seperate your self from the horror of alcohol abuse, look else where. By reading the previous reviews, all I see is a bunch of name calling. AA members learn to seperate themselves from the so called NORMIES, and only find understanding through surrounding themselves with other alcoholics. This upsets them, and leads to the attacks you read here. Understand, this is a book review, not a whos right or wrong blog. After reading this book, I have deducted that the teachings are cult like and support no scientific fact. The version of the book has been updated over time, but still contains the premise originally written over 69 years ago. 69 years? You are going to treat a behavior problem with a technique that old? Its like cutting off your leg to treat a broken ankle. Things have changed, along with the treatment of substance abuse. About the authors, You have the internet USE IT. William Wilson, writing the book was going through withdrawls and under the influence of a drug called belladonna. Any one would report “seeing god” under those circumstances. Wilson was unfaithfull to his wife, with new members of AA, this is called 13th stepping. Most of all he plagerised other authors to develop his program. The Steps were stolen from a man named Buchman, who wanted control through his religous beliefs. Please, if you are getting mad at my review, Check the internet or other books that support my statements. Support your recovery.
  Rating: 1 / 5

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