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[ Link here = http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters250.html#Mary_C ]
Date: Tue, July 19, 2011 5:00 pm (answered 22 July 2011) Hi, I agree with you about the amount of work a book takes. My daughter created an excellent book but chose to self-publish due to the time and energy promotion takes. I'm from old-school publishing, so maybe I need to get with the new wave.
Hi again, Mary,
Thanks for the letter. Self-publication isn't necessary; I have an offer from a publisher. But it's the
work and time to get a book done properly.
Speaking of that, I feel that many of the instances you discuss about the mistreatment of women in early AA days (and I applaud you for making those points) are not dissimilar to how women were treated in those days. Of course, women varied then as they do now. I watched a film about Lois, and I felt like yelling, "Leave that jerk!" She hung on with him as if he were her lifeline, not the other way around.
Yes, people have often wondered why Lois stayed with Bill. I know that in the later years, it
was because she was afraid that she couldn't get anybody else, and Bill was getting rich
from his A.A. books, and had bought the house in the country, and she didn't want to lose
all of that. Francis Hartigan, Lois' secretary, went into that in
his biography of Bill Wilson.
But earlier? Maybe she was freaked out by being a spinster. She was 28, and Bill 22,
when they married. Maybe she thought that Bill was her last chance at marriage and happiness.
I see women often who fit that mold — that the goal of marriage is so dominant, that they will make what appear to me as insane compromises. At any rate, I think a healthy criticism has to separate out those common attitudes, and those that are unique to the story at hand. Yes. You disagreed with me saying that people need the program, and I had to reread what I said, because I did not recall that. What I meant is that there are many people who need help. Not that they need Alanon or AA per se. My point was that when people seek, all they find is an old-fashioned program with lingo that sounds like 1940's film noir. Someone like you, having done so much research and thinking on all these issues, could offer a great deal. Okay, I get your point. I quite agree. Some people really desperately need some help, and that is why it is so important that they get real help, and not quackery. I can say from experience, the least successful way to talk to people in cults is to call their life path a cult. Or make other frontal attacks. But guiding people through the reasoning process with respect and caring can accomplish a lot. When I call A.A. a cult, the audience I want to reach and warn off are the people who haven't already joined and drank the koolaid. I have very little success with people who are committed A.A. members, so there is not much point in me tailoring my message to them. As a person who has watched loved ones die from drinking, I felt like I would be glad if their life was one giant AA meeting, if that meant they would still be alive for me to see, hold, hear, hug.
I know what you mean. I have often wondered whether we could set up a good cult that would harness
the esprit de corps and energy and enthusiasm of a cult and use it for benevolent purposes,
and help people.
But alas, that experiment has already been tried, in both
Rev. Jim Jones' People's Temple, and
in
Charles Dederich's Synanon.
For a while, both of those organizations had the reputation of having a wonderful new way to
clean up alcoholics and drug addicts. For a while.
Both of those organizations ended in tragedy and failure.
There just seems to be something about cults that doesn't work. Like "power corrupts, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely."
And maybe a foundation of lies, deceptions, and deceit doesn't support a wonderful glistening castle
of "spiritual recovery".
At the same time, if I were told that the only way to survive were to hang out with a bunch of geezers whose only joy was the next smoke, and whose theology ranked about at a 3rd grade level, I may just chug vodka until I died too. Take care, Mary
Yes, really. And you have a good day too.
== Orange
[ Link here = http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters250.html#Lisa_G ]
Date: Wed, July 20, 2011 1:22 pm (answered 22 July 2011) Dear A. Orange, I wrote to you about a week or so ago asking where you went to meetings and about how do you know that AA is the same way everywhere. I received your response at the end of my work day and only glanced at it enough to see that you posted a link and mentioned some other ways/groups out there in which to get sober. Your email got deleted by mistake...if its not a problem, could you email me your response again (if you saved a copy) or tell me again the link/letter you were referring to and those other groups. Thanks! Okay, retransmitted. No problem. I am gonna check out your orange paper website some more (it's a lot to look at) but from what i see so far you don't acknowledge that any good at all has come from AA.....in the section that is suppose to point out a few good things about AA....it seems to be written with malice and sarcasm. Although i do LOVE AA.....i do agree with some of what you write. I look forward to hearing from you again. Lisa
Hello again, Lisa,
I really was not being sarcastic when I made up
that list of "What's Good About A.A.?".
I was scrounging and straining my brain to find anything good to say about A.A.
Giving A.A. every benefit of the doubt. If that list sounds sarcastic, maybe there is a message
there. If that's all that we can find to say good about A.A., maybe A.A. has a problem.
I admit that yes, sometimes my voice is harsh and critical, and even sarcastic. There is a reason for that.
A.A. makes grand claims about sobering up millions of alcoholics and saving their lives, but it turns
out that it's a lie. A.A. does no such thing.
Let's get the discussion out of the realm of A.A. for a minute. Imagine that a friend of yours has breast
cancer. You learn that she is going to a clinic down the road. That clinic has a great reputation for
saving a lot of women. But then you find out that what they are really doing is giving the women
colloidal gold injections and telling the women to pray a lot. It doesn't cure the women.
As the treatment fails to help your friend, some grinning salesman yammers slogans about how breast cancer is a
spiritual disease that requires a spiritual cure, and
"RARELY HAVE we seen a person fail, who has thoroughly followed our path...
The ones who fail are just the ones who are incapable of being rigorously honest with themselves.
They seem to have been born that way."
How would you feel about that?
Have a good day now.
== Orange
Date: Wed, July 20, 2011 4:06 pm (answered 22 July 2011) Mister T, If you produce a dead-tree edition of your work, have you considered a title? Long Island Bob O.
Hello again Bob,
My favorite title is, "Second Fiddle to a Goose".
But that would never fly, so it would probably be just "The Orange Papers".
Have a good day now.
== Orange
Date: Wed, July 20, 2011 5:34 pm (answered 22 July 2011) Terrance, I attached a link to a web page. You may have read this before, but, there is something very important in the text that I have never noticed. It is a quote from George Vaillant describing the cult like environment of AA. It really caught my eye. Take care and I hope you're well! Michael T. McComb (MeMay) Please do not hide my full name. http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/aacultbk01.htm
Okay, Hello again, Michael,
Yes, I really like that article.
I also have it listed on my links page a couple of times. Maybe I should mirror it here.
Yes, George Vaillant is a strange one. He clearly admitted that A.A. did not work.
His 8-year-long
project of tracking alcoholics
and seeing what the A.A. success rate really was
only proved that A.A. had a zero-percent success rate coupled with an "appalling" death rate.
And Vaillant also declared that A.A. functions like a cult,
and indoctrinates like a cult. And then he insisted that all
of the alcoholics should get shoved into A.A. anyway, so that they can
get an "attitude change" from confession of sins to a
"high-status healer".
Then Vaillant declared that sobriety isn't even really the goal:
Personally, I decided that George Vaillant is insane. Not just a little bit funny in the head, but really gone insane.
He seems to have devoted his life to transforming people through his favorite cult religion.
He doesn't even seem to care that A.A. is more likely to kill people than help them.
He still wants them in A.A. confessing their sins.
I regard
Dr. Harry Tiebout as the first Resident Mad Scientist of A.A.,
and Dr. George Vaillant as the most recent one.
Oh well, have a good day anyway.
== Orange
Date: Thu, July 21, 2011 6:28 pm (answered 23 July 2011) You make a lot of claims, with no evidence to back up what you are saying. You take something that someone said, and totally warp it to support your opinion. Very poor job. You could have made your point without writing page after page of incoherent babble.
Hello Rick,
Thanks for the letter. What you are demonstrating there is a complete
reversal of reality.
It is A.A. that has no evidence or facts backing up its claims of success.
I have lots of evidence backing up what I say.
Everything I say is backed up with facts. You can start with the file
The Effectiveness of the Twelve-Step Treatment,
which lists all of the doctors' reports of tests of A.A. to see what it really does to alcoholics.
A.A. was a total failure. No doctor ever found A.A. to work in a properly controlled test.
Even
a doctor who later became
a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous found that
A.A. didn't work to sober up the alcoholics.
A.A. just raised the death rate.
Then you can continue with the insanity of Bill Wilson and his grandiose claims:
The Funny Spirituality of Bill Wilson and A.A.
There, Bill Wilson is the single-most-quoted person. He clearly revealed his madness with
his own statements. That is facts.
Then you might want to check out The Bait and Switch Con Game,
which reveals, with quotes from A.A. and Bill Wilson, the deceptive recruiting claims of A.A.
And on and on. Everything I say is backed up with evidence and facts.
Have a good day now.
== Orange
Date: Thu, July 21, 2011 2:10 pm (answered 23 July 2011) Hey Orange, I hope this is your email address. It is mentioned somewhere on your site, but i didn't see any real 'contact' section or anything that gives an official working addy.
Hello Michael,
Thanks for the letter. Yes, you found the right email address. I thought the email address was
pretty easy to find. It is listed at the top and bottom of every page. Just mouse-over the
name "Orange", and it's there. And then every letter in the last 8 years or so has the signature
at the bottom. But maybe I should list it even more obviously on the text pages.
Anyway, I've been reading over your site for a few days now, and while you are maybe a little more harsh than i might be at times, this is exactly what i've been feeling about AA for a long time. I started going to AA meetings about 5 years ago because i had a serious problem with drinking and some of my relatives had similar problems, done AA and I was told and got the impression everywhere I looked that AA was THE way people stop drinking. So I went off and on for two years and really tried to 'like' it, but so much about it always rubbed me wrong and I wasn't really sure why. Of course, all of the dogma told me this must be because there's something wrong with me (I'm constitutionally dishonest, etc.). So it just regularly made me feel bad about myself. I tried the 'Steps' but really could never get past step 2 because i'm completely not religious at all. So I basically hit a wall right there. And no, i'm not going to "pray" to a doorknob and ask it to "remove my shortcomings" for me! What kind of insulting drivel is that?! I tried doing some of the Guilt steps like step 4, where i wallowed in guilt and shame writing down a bunch of awful crap, but step 5 was always scary. Why the heck would i want to tell some alcoholic stranger all the 'negative' things about me or any humiliating or embarrassing actions in my whole life? Again, of course, the reason that came across loud and clear was that I don't want to do this because I'm a dishonest, disreputable sinner. (The fact that it is a scary and unpleasant ritual for which nobody can show me any empirical evidence that it is necessary or helpful to stop my drinking has nothing to do with it of course.) Anyway, I went back to drinking after a while but am committed again to ending that stage of my life. I went to an AA meeting a few days ago and it was the same feeling again. There are things I like about the meetings. It provides some group support and social interaction with others trying to solve the same problem, and there's a lot of nice people in AA. It's just "The Program" that I think is a giant load of mumbo jumbo, and your writings really capture a lot of my feelings on this exactly. That said, there is something I've thought about The Steps that you touch on, but there's something about the language that is off too. The last meeting I went to for example had people saying how they were on like their third or fourth time through some particular step, and it dawned on me that these are not "Steps". You touch on this often, how you're never finished doing these "steps". You're just supposed to keep doing these rituals over and over again every day for the rest of your life. So really there is a language problem here. "Steps" imply a staircase. You do "the steps" of a staircase to get from one floor to another and then you arrive at the different floor you wanted to reach. If the staircase has 12 steps, then you climb the first step, then the second, and so on until you reach the 12th, then you're on the different floor where you wanted to go and you're done with the steps. Instead, with "The 12 Steps", when you finish the 12th step you just arrive back at step 1 again, and start all over. And then you just keep doing this forever. That is not a staircase, it's a gerbil's wheel. So i guess really they should be renamed The 12 Spokes! Anyway, love the site and keep up the good work.
Thanks.
As you said, there is zero evidence that confessing your sins in Steps 4 through 7 causes anyone to
quit drinking. Those are really the steps of
a brainwashing program
that will convert newcomers into true believers.
Bill Wilson merely wrote down
the indoctrination practices of Frank Buchman's cult religion, and called them the 12 Steps.
Those Steps don't even tell you to quit drinking alcohol. That isn't what Frank Buchman's religion was about.
About the endless repetition of the Steps, yes, it's actually programmed into the Steps.
Step 10 sets up an infinite loop:
"[We] Continued to take personal inventory and when we were
wrong promptly admitted it."
So that really means repeat Steps 4 and 5 in particular, and then
confess again in Steps 7 and 9, over and over again, forever.
So how many times do you have to do the loop before you will quit drinking? They don't say.
I think you might like SMART. Have you heard of that? Since you like the group support
and community and socializing, but don't
like the crazy irrational cult religion, I think you will really like SMART. I found it to be like a breath
of fresh air. There are also other good groups that I don't want to slight, like SOS and Lifering and WFS.
Here is the list:
Have a good day now.
== Orange
Date: Thu, July 21, 2011 3:22 pm (answered 23 July 2011) One would wonder what inspired you to spend so much time arguing against something that is just trying to help, but it seems you missed the main point of the thing. It is just about sick people trying to help each other. The point is to not be alone — that it takes a group to work through quitting — that it is really hard to change... It was invented for sick people by sick people...what do you expect? The point is:
It does help.
Hello Rhonda,
Thanks for the letter.
You say that A.A. "something that is just trying to help".
"Just trying to help" isn't good enough. "Trying to help" is failure.
A solution to the problem of alcohol abuse and alcohol addiction has to really help.
It must actually work. A.A. does not work.
You claim that "It does help." Please back up that statement with some facts. What properly-controlled medical study or research found that A.A. increased sobriety in alcoholics? There isn't any such research. All of the properly-done studies have found A.A. to be a total failure. Even a doctor who was in love with A.A. and became a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous found that A.A. didn't work. He spent eight years tracking alcoholics and trying to show that A.A. works, and in the end, he had to admit that all that he had proven was that A.A. had an "appalling" death rate, higher than any other method of treating alcoholism. While you are claiming that A.A. does help, please tell me what the A.A. success rate is. If we send 1000 randomly-selected alcoholics to A.A., how many of them will be sober a year later? Five years later? Ten years later?
Lastly, this attempt at dodging the issues clearly reveals that A.A. is a failure: "It was invented for sick people by sick people...what do you expect?" Well of course we cannot really expect anything good from a mentally-ill alcoholic who joined a cult religion and then hijacked a branch of it and made it into his own cult. But A.A. was supposed to be something good. Something that would save alcoholics' lives. But it's just the ravings of a sick lunatic who was just repeating the fascist dogma of a Nazi sympathizer. I guess we can't expect anything better from Bill Wilson. Oh well, have a good day anyway. == Orange
[The next letter from Rhonda_R is here.]
Date: Thu, July 21, 2011 9:27 pm (answered 23 July 2011) Insurance companies are in the business to make money. If they collect more premiums than they pay out for damages, then they make a profit. And they do. Insurance companies know odds better then Jimmy the Greek and curb their bets wisely. Then why in the world would insurance companies pay to send people with alcohol and drug problems to "treatments centers" that utuilize the 12 step programs that they would KNOW do not work. Insurance companies could care less if a person drinks like a fish. But they do care if their policy holders kill someone driving drunk or burn their houses down while loaded etc. etc. The answer is simple. Insurance companies promote AA because in the BIG picture AA helps them make a profit. Lets do some simple math. Lets say there are 60,000 AA meetings per day going on in the US alone. And lets average the meetings to only 15 "members" per meeting. That appears to be about three quarters of a million people sober for that 24 hour period of time. That adds up to a heck of a lot of people that arent out that specific day loaded behind the wheel of their car killing someone or bending up thier fenders while stoned. If the average male sobers up at age 48 then the fewer days that person is not swacked out of his mind the safer he is from causing damage to society that insurance companies pay for.... Especially in todays world of "deep pocket" lawsuits by greedy lawyers. Drunk surgeons and pilots can be expensive too, so why not funnel them through the doors of AA and piss test them on a routine basis. Or do "90 meetings in 90 days." Insurance companies don't care about the "churn rate" at AA meeting halls. They only think about the maximum number of non drinking days during a alcoholics drinking career. AA without realizing it is actually making insurance companies profits by warehousing drunks who will drink again off and on for the average of 30 years. By the way, I heard this from a drunk insurance executive once during my drinking days. Interesting......
Hello again, Tom,
Thanks for the letter. Now that is interesting. Unfortunately for that drunk insurance executive,
he got his facts wrong. A.A. does not reduce drinking,
A.A. increases binge drinking.
So the insurance companies are losing money by supporting 12-Step treatment.
I wonder if that executive got replaced in the economic downturn.
Have a good day now.
== Orange
Date: Fri, July 22, 2011 1:30 pm (answered 22 July 2011) Hello, I have tried to register twice for your forum, using the email addresses <deleted> and <deleted>. Each time I got an automatic email saying that my registration was pending approval. I have not gotten any later acceptance or rejection email notices since these emails. Thank you for your assistance. I hope both you and your site are well. You have a very interesting web site. noname (please do not publish this email; if you must, thank you for removing my name and addresses.) [NOTE: I'm publishing this letter, with names removed, because many people are having the same problem.]
Hi noname,
I'm sorry about the difficulties that you are going through.
The Russian spammers are hammering the web site and creating thousands
of fake logins, so that they can then use them to post spam ads
for everything from fake Viagra to London call girls.
I'm having a lot of trouble finding the real people in the mess.
Unfortunately, the Drupal forum system doesn't give me a way to
find users by email address, otherwise I'd approve you right now.
Can you tell me the user names you registered under? I can only
search by user name. And which one do you prefer to use? I'll clear
the other one.
Thanks, and have a good day.
== Orange
P.S.: To everybody: If you registered for the forum, and haven't gotten approved within 3 or 4 days, then
definitely send me an email telling me about it, and be sure to mention what user name you registered under.
Again, I can search the registrations by user name, but not by email address.
But do also tell me your preferred email address, in case I need to recreate the registration.
Thanks.
[ Link here = http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters250.html#Andrew_M ]
Date: Thu, July 21, 2011 10:40 pm (answered 23 July 2011) Hi orange This is a few weeks old now and may have already been mentioned, but I thought it might be of some interest: Crikey, I wasn't expecting the link to be that enormous! I happened on it in a search when I was wondering if that nice Dr Shipman of Manchester, England was ever in aa or na for his addiction to diamorphine.
All the best
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the link. (It is huge, isn't it? Now we know why you need 2 Gigabytes of RAM just to browse the web.)
I only recently, during the Charlie Sheen circus, learned that Martin Sheen was a true believer Stepper.
Now it's obvious, isn't it? They are re-enacting the "My Name Is Bill W." fairy tale, which is a complete
fabrication that has little connection to reality.
I really wish I could ask Martin Sheen a few pointed questions like,
Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob were such arrogant Oxford recruiters that they actually felt
entitled to shove their Oxford Group cult religion cure on sick
alcoholics regardless of the patient's wishes or beliefs — the patient
didn't get any say in the matter of religious conversion.
William Borchert's script for the Hallmark made-for-TV movie "My Name Is Bill W" glossed over the
cult recruiting routine, and repeated
the fairy tale about how Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob were recruiting for some new unnamed
"save-the-alcoholics" organization in Akron in the spring of 1935.
No, they were recruiting for the fascist Oxford Group cult, and they were using the standard
heavy-handed Oxford Group recruiting techniques, too.
Oh well, have a good day anyway.
== Orange
[The next letter from Andrew_M is here.]
There are more discussions of the movie "My Name is Bill W."
here
and
here.
[ Link here = http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters250.html#Andrew_M2 ]
Date: Sat, July 23, 2011 4:15 am (answered 24 July 2011) Bore da from North Wales, Orange Freemasonry isn't really a particular hobby horse of mine, but as I live in a place jokingly (?) known as "Freemasonry-on-Sea", it is very in your face and hard to ignore. I spend a lot of time in local antiquarian bookshops and have become quite intrigued by the more arcane writings of freemasonry in the public domain, which do introduce various ideas which I find disturbing as a Christian. There is also the matter of the cunningly devised strategies of secret societies, whereby they hide the true agenda of the movement from both the lower orders and from outsiders. They have this in common with organised crime syndicates and secret societies. This is not to say that everybody in the freemasons is consciously badly motivated. The great majority of them are probably not, although I and many others might consider them misguided. However, behind the public facade of altruism and benevolence, any thinking person who looks at how this organisation operates and is aware of the many very real and documented cases of high-ranking masons having connections with politicians, police, the judiciary, the church heirarchy, organised crime and the secret services must surely come to the conclusion that there is, at very least, a high potential for serious corruption on occasion, if only in the cases of occasional rogue lodges. To their credit, many in mainstream masonry are becoming more open about the "craft", opening up their membership lists to public scrutiny and publishing details of some of their rituals and ceremonies, but this does not appear to be true of all lodges or all regions. I haven't looked into this subject in any great depth and I don't think it would be very good for my mental or physical health to do so at any future time. Anyway, I have better things to do with my time and enery (such as learning the guitar, drawing and painting and vegetable gardening) than to look into such a murky and time-consuming subject. Suffice it to say that a search on Youtube for an independently made TV program done by investigative journalists poses some very interesting and serious questions. The title is: "Brothers in the Shadows" It's quite shocking. I will leave it to you and your readers to make your own minds up about whether there are parallels between how freemasonry operates and whether they are significant. I have no way of proving this, but if I were a gambling man I would put a lot of money on Bill having been a mason at some time, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if he were kicked out as Dr Bob is alleged to have been. I have nothing further to say on the subject of freemasonry and I would caution anyone brave enough to stick their head over the parapet on this one to leave a signed and witnessed document with a trustworthy lawyer to the effect that they are of sound mind and have no intention of harming themselves, to be opened in the event of their death or serious "accident" etc. OH, one last thing, for what it's worth: http://events.ohio.com/akron-oh/venues/show/4764025-greystone-hall
Best wishes
Date: Sat, July 23, 2011 4:43 am Hi again, Orange I really DO have nothing more to say on the subject of freemasonry, but I failed to provide a proper link to that film so here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a48rJD11H3Y The beach in question (at the start of the film is where I walked our my dogs. All the places shown are very well known to me and my freinds and neighbours.
Cheers
Hello again, Andrew,
Thanks for the input.
I also don't know much about the Masons, but I do find them interesting.
In the USA, they brag about how many of the Founding Fathers of the country were Masons.
That mirrors your observations about how many politicians and police and
judges and other high-ranking authority figures are members.
This line really rings a bell:
That is the standard cult characteristic of
Different Levels of Truth:
Yes, it sure does sound cultish.
Have a good day now.
== Orange
[The next letter from Andrew_M is here.]
[ Link here = http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters250.html#Zodiac ]
Date: Fri, July 22, 2011 2:07 pm (answered 24 July 2011) You didn't answer the question orange. ???????
Hello again, James or Zodiac,
You didn't ask a question. You made two accusations:
That is
the propaganda trick of asking a question that really makes a statement.
That is the same trick as the question,
"Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"
You are trying to imply that I'm running this web site only to get attention, and that the
reason that I tell the truth about A.A. is because somebody hurt me.
Wrong, and wrong.
The truth that you are trying to avoid is this: It does not matter whether I want attention.
It does not matter whether somebody hurt me. It does not matter whether I have a resentment.
A.A. still fails to get the alcoholics to quit drinking. A.A. is still a fraud and a hoax.
Have a good day.
== Orange
[The next letter from James_B is here.]
Last updated 8 March 2013. |
