Originally Posted by Taiman

and I posted alternatives. The numbers are AA's own numbers and documented, why do you feel the need to attack my post?

p.s. here comes the AA dogmatism.

But here come the facts:

For many years in the 1970s and 1980s, the AA GSO (Alcoholics Anonymous General Service Organization) conducted triennial surveys where they counted their members and asked questions like how long members had been sober. Around 1990, they published a commentary on the surveys: Comments on A.A.'s Triennial Surveys [no author listed, published by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., New York, no date (probably 1990)]. The document has an A.A. identification number of "5M/12-90/TC". The document was produced for A.A. internal use only. It has a graph on page 12 (Diagram C-1) that shows that newcomers drop out, relapse, leave, or disappear at a staggeringly high rate.8 Averaging the results from the five surveys from 1977 to 1989 yielded these numbers:


81% are gone (19% remain) after 1 month;
90% are gone (10% remain) after 3 months,
93% are gone (7% remain) after 6 months,
and 95% are gone (5% remain) at the end of one year

Originally Posted by Taiman

Perhaps you didn't know that Spencer was arguing against fundamentalism and religious dogma in the debate about the origins of man. He was trying to get people to listen to Charles Darwin's ideas.