A good point to slip a little of the AA program in here I feel.
"When, therefore, we speak to you of God, we mean your own conception of God. This applies, too, to other spiritual expressions which you find in this book. Do not let any prejudice you may have against spiritual terms deter you from honestly asking yourself what they mean to you."
I feel like I am quite secular in my beliefs. When I started this journey I was quite anti god, and still today have a strange antagonistic reaction when certain religious figures are mentioned by name in a meeting. Thankfully it is rare, and of course it is my problem to deal with. I stayed away from one particular meeting for more than twenty years because it used the Lords prayer to close.
Oddly enough, today my home group does just that, and I am quite happy about it. Perhaps I was so desperate back then, that I was more interested in getting a result than arguing about the means, and it has grown on me over the years.
What would AA look like of you took the god bit out? Essentially the whole thing as a story of how some drunks sobered up using a spiritual experience idea that seems to have had its beginnings with Carl Jung and Rowland H, and a chain of events from there. We would have to rewrite history, deleting all reference to god, or remove all the charaters who recovered that way, which would include me. Yikes.
One element of this that remains a concern for me is a talk I heard from professor Doug Selman, head of the NZ National Addiction Council, Psychiatrist, and someone who has spent more than thirty years rsearching alcoholism, initlally setting out to prove AA doesn't work.
Just picking out a brief part of his talk, it was along the lines that there is a small group of AUD sufferers at the most extreme end of the scale for whom the only solution is some kind of conversion experience. (He explained that as a scientist he could not use the words "spritual experience" ) He stated medical science has no solution for this group, and no real progress has been made since about 1967 in this area.
If that's true, and I am in that group, what hope would I have if the spiritual element was cast out of AA?
Maybe leave AA as it is, and make use of the many other organisation such as those mentioned by Jeffrey AK?