The Kawartha Freethinkers
By Bob K It must be almost three years since Jim M. first came down from Peterborough to see what we were doing at our Whitby Freethinkers meeting. As a long sober secularist in...
AA Agnostica Blog
Chapter 4: Early History
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...
Chapter 3: The “God Bit”
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...
SOAAR
By Steve V. All Are Welcome Group, Windsor, Ontario Secular Ontario Alcoholics Anonymous Roundup (SOAAR) was the “brainchild” of a few AA agnostic members last spring. They sent out a message to the local...
Chapter 2: Rejection
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...
Chapter 1: An Agnostic in AA
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...
Introduction: Time to Rally
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...
Review: A History of Agnostics in AA
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...
The Search for Self-Esteem
By Bob K One needs to be a certain age, I expect, to be familiar with the 1964 Dobie Gray classic The “In” Crowd. Perhaps younger folks have heard it on the oldies station....
Staying sober without keeping the faith
On Tuesday, by a two-thirds majority, the Greater Vancouver Intergroup Society voted to “list all groups that wish to be listed”. This is, after almost three and a half years, a reversal of its...
The Watering Down of AA
By Bobby Beach Not a New Thing On any given day, the AA world witnesses a remarkable volume of whining about the watering down of Alcoholics Anonymous. Various individuals, groups, and institutions comprise the...
Beyond Belief Agnostics and Freethinkers
In January of this year the discrimination against agnostic groups by Intergroup in the Toronto area ended as a result of a settlement mediated by the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. In the very next...
No God? No Problem: Atheism in AA as a Human Right
By Jesse Beach Originally published in The Fix (February 21, 2017) As Bill W. wrote in 1946, “Anti-God, anti-medicine, anti-our recovery program, even anti-each other — these rampant individuals are still an AA Group...
Letting others know about us
The theme continues today. It’s all about letting those in conventional AA know about we agnostics in AA, and our groups and meetings. One way to do that is to write an article about...
