Conventional AA meetings can be both religious and conformist. Religiosity: There can be a lot of God on placards and in readings and in Conference-approved pamphlets and books on literature tables. And meetings can...
By life-j Introduction In a history of secular AA we need to talk about groups and individuals whose purposes are at odds with ours. Some of them are actively fighting inclusion of non-believers as...
Since the very beginning, there have been special composition groups in Alcoholics Anonymous. And their acceptance, sadly, has always posed a problem. “‘Special’ groups have always been viewed with suspicion, alarm and sometimes outright...
Let’s begin by looking at some dates of historical significance. May 31, 2011. Two agnostic AA groups, Beyond Belief and We Agnostics, are voted out of the Greater Toronto Area Intergroup (GTAI) and off...
As time passes our book literature has a tendency to get more and more frozen – a tendency for conversion into something like dogma. This is a trait of human nature which I am...
Service, not Governance One of the co-founders of AA, Bill Wilson, wrote this in the July, 1946, Grapevine: So long as there is the slightest interest in sobriety, the most unmoral, the most anti-social,...
Chicago It all began, ironically enough, in a church, the Unitarian Universalist Church. And it was started by a guy by the name of Wilson, but not Bill, Don Wilson. Don was a member...
The “God” part in the 12 Steps comes from Bill Wilson. The rest of it, “as we understood Him”, was Jim Burwell’s contribution. But let’s start at the beginning… AA’s soon-to-be co-founders met on...
Two agnostic groups – We Agnostics and Beyond Belief – were booted off of the official list of AA group meetings in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) on May 31, 2011. This was done...
I went to my first AA meeting when I was in rehab back in 2010. It was a speaker meeting and there was a fellow on stage who talked about how he owed his...
A few days ago I got an email from a woman, Emma. It was not at all an unusual email and followed a rather common motif. Emma had spent a bit of time reading...
By Robin R. A History of Agnostics in AA is a timely book that should be read by all AA members, nonbelievers and believers. It accurately portrays the experience and the history of agnostics...
