Enough is enough! My long Weekend at Jesus' is officially over. I'm back, 'though I took the opportunity to choose a new nickname (Angiebot's officialy gone, long live Flamencabot) and a new avatar from now on. I must admit I didn't go full "Christiany": I skipped the Lord's day rituals, and spent most of my Sunday creating some sci-fi of my own instead. Not very honest to the Lord, but more rewarding, by far.
Anyways, the topic I wanted to bring you is the "Twelve Steps", a program to recover from an addiction, which some of you may be familiar with. One of the people I love the most, who is an agnostic, went through this program because of alcoholism. I felt very curious about the religious aspect, because I've read that submission to a superior entity is needed. He explained he ignored the religious aspect. But as they're written, I guess that would be hard.
. The only website I could find with a religion-free "Twelve Steps" program was this: http://aaagnostica.org/2015/07/26/rewriting-the-12-steps-for-atheists/
These are the originals Steps, according to http://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11.Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12.Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
I don't have any serious addition (apart from smoking), but I'm interested in the topic, and I'd like to know your opinion on this program, wheter you're a believer or an atheist; if you made it through this program or others, or what "steps" would you change (if any).
P.S. I hope my recient ex-fellow believers excuse my jokes. Here's the last one:
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@Flamencabot
Personally, I'd forgive you anything, including all of your sins and past comments. Like you, the only addiction I've ever had is to nicotine. I've been a smoker since I was about 11 years old, which means a nicotine stained career of 60 years. And I'm still alive ( I think ) , still active and still relatively healthy. Certainly, smoking will probably kill me one day, But I look at it like this: The moment we're conceived we're infected with a disease called 'life' for which there is no cure. All of us are dying anyway, and what you see as being the cause makes no real difference. So, enjoy life in whatever way seems best to you, provided you don't do it in such a way that makes life miserable for others.