[giraffe_lady]

> Someone who's forced into the program, by court order, or by family

Yeah this is the main problem. AA explicitly requires religious practice, it is only an appropriate approach for people who are already believers or wish to become so.

[fragmede]

Not exactly. To adapt with the times, many chapters have adopted a "whatever your higherr power is" attitude. So you do have to have something to refer to, but there's no scripture reading, and it can be things like "other people" or "sunsets" or even "the people running our simulation".

Not all chapters have adopted this, but you can simply not return to a meeting that isn't a good match for you - and there are many reasons, not just religiosity, for a given meeting not being a good match for a given individual.

[giraffe_lady]

I used to travel for work (ending with the pandemic in 2020) so I've been to hundreds of distinct AA meeting groups. I would say at that point it was probably still 80%+ of meetings using at least one christian prayer, usually the lord's prayer.

In big cities you can definitely find ones that are more careful about the higher power language but they are still a small minority and so for example if you're newly sober and trying to hit meetings every day, or at odd times, they may not meet all your needs. And if your city is big enough to have a lot of meetings like this and you want them, it probably also has smartrecovery groups which are likely a better fit for a more secular person anyway.

The really interesting thing is finding the little pockets where they're catering to a different community that is a local majority. I've said traditional jewish prayers at AA in skokie il, muslim ones in dearborn mi.

But regardless of your personal higher power, sincerely doing things like "turning your will over to" it or "asking [it] to remove your shortcomings" is religious practice, straightforward, no question. Some people are simply not interested in this at all, no matter how disconnected from any specific tradition.

[fragmede]

That's a question for a priest or philosophy professor, and won't be solved in the HN comments section. The underlying principle is that it's a disease that overrides your conscious brain, and you have to give in that fact before you can make progress curing the disease. Like, your brain can be absolutely screaming don't go in that bar, don't go in that bar, and where do you end up? Puking your guts out in that bar's bathroom.

That's hugely shameful when that's the third time that week, and it's only Wednesday. Processing that internally, without coming to grips that it really isn't you doing that seems impossible without "turning your will over" to the god of burritos or whatever else you want as your higher power. That doesn't absolve you of the harm you've caused yourself and others, but it does help you move on to the next step, one of which is up make amends (if it won't cause more harm).

Look, I'm not saying AA is the be-all-end-all of addiction treatment. It isn't. One of the AA things is they say there's no medication for when we're on a thread discussing medication for addiction! But the very first meeting I went to, there was a young woman who was militantly atheist but was years sober and had really turned her life around. If being in the same room as people reciting the Lords prayer will throw you into apoplectic fits, don't go. If you're suffering and need help, and are able to be in the same room though, I do honestly and fervently believe it's worth trying, if only because ozemoic isn't cheap while AA meetings are free to attend.

[giraffe_lady]

I thought it was pretty clear reading my comment but let me be explicit: I didn't go to thousands of AA meetings out of anthropological curiosity. I know what addiction is like and what AA has to offer.

My point was that AA is religious, and so is not an appropriate activity for the state to compel participation in. You were saying it's not religious, and now you're saying well, it doesn't matter that it is. I think it does.

I'm a (more or less) lifelong christian fwiw. I'm not speaking about my own discomfort but I have observed that people without a preexisting religious practice, or a desire to acquire one, do not have high success rates in AA.

[fragmede]

Apologies, I wasn't trying to have you feel like you needed to state that explicitly.

My personal opinion is still that there exist meetings and chapters that aren't religious. There are also some that absolutely are. You're free to disagree that non-religious ones don't exist. More to the point though, I don't think ratholing on an HN comment thread on the exact degree of the religioslity of "turning your will over to" the god of "really neat looking leaves" vs "it's spiritual, not religious", vs no, it's actually religious, even if we were able to reach some common ground; I don't think that's going to change underlying psychology or nature of addiction.

If all someone ever gets from going to meetings is how much they hate Christianity, yeah, they're not going to get relief and aren't likely to succeed. But if someone's able to get over that hump and find the right meetings where it's not too overbearing for them, I know it's possible for people to succeed.