It's a rule of nature: If there is food available, something will come along to eat it. No matter whether the 'food' is dung balls in Africa or sulphur in boiling water in volcanic vents at the bottom of the oceans, something has evolved to feed on that energy source.

Well, sick and confused alcoholics are available cult-food, so Alcoholics Anonymous evolved to feed on them.

On page 228 of the Big Book, Marty Mann learned that "We cannot live with anger."

Ms. Mann did not say whether her anger was justified; she just gave it up.

Are all AA members to just give up all anger? Apparently so. Hitler shoved the Jews into the ghettos, and then into the concentration camps, and then into the gas chambers, and then into the ovens, and the Bill and Bob team had absolutely nothing to say about it, all through World War II. They didn't get angry about it at all.

They also had nothing to say about anything else that Hitler or Stalin or Tojo did. They didn't even have an opinion about World War II at all. None of it made them angry.

Nothing has changed in the following 55 years. A.A. still has no opinions about racism, poverty, sexism, religious bigotry, genocide, oppression, or ethnic cleansing.

The official A.A. policy is that A.A. will not get involved in "outside controversy." Such cowardly hiding inside of A.A. from all of the problems and strife of the real world is inexcusable.

Real people have opinions on issues.

It is hardly something to brag about like Bill Wilson does, claiming that "... we are sure that our way of living has its advantages for all."   (The Big Book, the Forward.)

Bill Wilson also said:

It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us. If somebody hurts us and we are sore, we are in the wrong also. But are there no exceptions to this rule? What about "justifiable" anger? If somebody cheats us, aren't we entitled to be mad? Can't we be properly angry with self-righteous folk? For us in A.A. these are dangerous exceptions. We have found that justified anger ought to be left to those better qualified to handle it.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William Wilson, page 90.

What pathetic nonsense. We can't be angry? We must always be passive doormats, and not get angry, no matter what anyone else does to us? Only "normal" people can handle righteous anger, and we cannot, because we are just stupid pathetic alcoholics?

And we shall have no opinions on "outside controversies", because we are just too feeble-minded to handle such issues?

The real world isn't an outside controversy.

Life isn't an outside issue.

The First Step of Alcoholics Anonymous is a real disaster for many people. Step One declares that:
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.

When I really believed that I was powerless over my addictions — when I believed that I wouldn't ever be able to quit smoking and drinking, and stay quit forever, I despaired of my life, and resigned myself to my fate, and worked on drinking and smoking myself to death. I didn't stop drinking and stay quit until I came to believe that I was not powerless over alcohol or tobacco — until I came to believe that I could fight and win the war for my own good health, for my own survival.

I think that the "powerless" doctrine of A.A. has a reverse effect for a lot of people. It did for me.

— Or maybe I should call it a "straight-forward" effect. The straight-forward, logical thing to do is to go from declaring that you are powerless over alcohol to declaring that there is no point in even trying to quit drinking, because you won't succeed, because you are powerless over alcohol. You are doomed to a horrible death, and the best you can do is just stay stoned and kill the pain as much as possible until the bitter end.

It is the strange backwards logic of A.A. that says,

• "Declaring powerlessness makes you powerful and gives you the strength you need to quit drinking."
• "Therefore dependence, as A.A. practices it, is really a means of gaining true independence of the spirit."   Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 36.

Oh no it doesn't, and oh no it isn't.

"Enlightened" counselors will say, "Of course we know that this nutty raving about God, and this religious or spiritual or superstitious stuff that is the heart of the A.A. and N.A. programs doesn't really work, but if the patients think that it works, and it helps to keep the patients off of drugs and alcohol, then the delusion is a good thing. It has some kind of a helpful "placebo effect". It might save their lives. So let's encourage it."

— And that is how the counselors who are hidden members of A.A. or N.A. succeed in getting the government to financially support and promote their cult religion.

One day at a time is a rotten way to quit drinking or drugging. It maximizes the pain of quitting. It is like the old band-aid-on-hairy-leg problem. If you pull the band-aid off slowly, you can feel every hair pull out one by one, and it really prolongs the torture. The merciful thing to do is yank fast and get it over with quickly. Quitting drinking or drugging is like that too.

The "one day at a time" thing came into existence because so many members of A.A. were having trouble facing the prospect of never drinking again. So the leaders invented the idea of, "Well, just quit for one day, you can do that, can't you?"

It may sound like a good idea, but isn't, because it leaves the door wide open to relapse: "Well, I'll quit one day at a time for the next five days, and then relapse for the weekend, and then quit one day at a time for five more days..."

It allows the Addiction Monster (really, the Base Brain Limbic System) to keep its hopes up, expecting more drink tomorrow or next week. The Addiction Monster weakens, and quiets down, when it loses hope. But if you quit one day at a time, then it never loses hope.

Don't quit one day at a time; quit forever, all at once.

Exercises:

• When you awaken in the morning, say to yourself,
  • "Another morning, and not sick and hung over. Good. Another day, sober. Good."

  • "With beauty before me I walk.
    With beauty behind me I walk.
    With beauty all around me I walk.
    Heyaho, it's a good day to live sober."

  • Inhale deeply. Feel your lungs, throat, and chest.
    If you haven't quit smoking, do so. You just got a good reason.
    If you have quit, say "Thank God! Doesn't that feel better?"
    If you never smoked, say "Thank God!"
    

  • Good morning,
    good morning,
    good morning.
    Thank you Lordy,
    for another day of life.

• When things are going good for you, think to yourself, "It gets easier, doesn't it? It's easier to get things together, and keep them together, when you aren't always either drunk, hung-over, or sick and tired."

You have to be light-hearted to be a Creature of the Light. Maybe that works the other way, too: You have to be a creature of the light to be light-hearted.

What exactly is it that God values? I mean, while you are an alcoholic out there, drunk on the streets, God doesn't like you and doesn't help you quit drinking, or so the A.A. story goes.

Then, you go to a bunch of A.A. meetings and do the Twelve Steps, and suddenly, God loves you and takes care of you and keeps you from drinking any more alcohol.

But what part of the program is the magic stuff? What really gets God off of his ass and gets Him to help you? What makes God like you?

• Declaring that you are powerless over alcohol, in Step One?
• Declaring that you are insane, in Step Two?
• "Surrendering utterly" and turning over control of your will and your life to the care [and direction] of God, in Step Three?
• Confessing all of your sins, moral shortcomings, and character defects, in Steps Five and Seven?
• Making amends to all whom you have harmed, in Step Nine?
• Conducting séances and seeking and doing the Will of God, in Step Eleven?

Oh, and a thought — if it's Step Eleven that does the trick, or all twelve of them, why do you stop drinking at Step One, or even before you do any of the Steps? For that matter, how can you quit drinking and then go to A.A. and do Step One, declaring that you are powerless over alcohol? You can't possibly be powerless over alcohol if you already quit it. And Nan Robertson wrote in her promotional book, Getting Better Inside Alcoholics Anonymous, that the majority of newcomers to Alcoholics Anonymous had already quit drinking.

ADDICTION IS:
like when you say,

• "I've really got to stop doing this stupid stuff, it's killing me.
• I feel so bad, just awful, like I'm a'fixin' to die.
• I'll just do a little more of this right now so I can get my head straight and feel a little better right now."

There is no universal solution because there is no universal problem.

We are now seeing the results of ten years of allowing business criminals to write the rules about how executives will conduct business. Enron, WorldCom, Waste Management, Sunbeam, stock "analysts" and brokerage houses touting worthless stocks, and the entire Dot-Com Dot-Con high-tech bust, are glaring examples of that. For 10 years now, corrupt politicians have allowed corrupt business executives to write or rewrite the laws pertaining to the expensing of options, tort reform, stock market manipulation, accounting standards, and the accounting firms mixing auditing and consulting practices.

We have had the same kind of corruption going on in the "recovery" industry, where Alcoholics Anonymous and its clones, and organizations like the Hazelden Foundation, have been allowed to rewrite the rules, to define alcoholism and addiction, and to declare that their recipe for recovery is the only acceptable remedy, that the Buchmanite cult religion is the only effective cure for alcoholism or drug addiction.

It shouldn't then come as any great surprise that Alcoholics Anonymous has been no better at curing alcoholics than Enron was at managing the nation's energy supply (particularly California's electricity).

It shouldn't come as any surprise that the "tough-love" clones of Synanon, which was itself a deformed clone of A.A., have proven themselves to be more effective at killing children than at getting them off of drugs.

When the criminals are allowed to write the laws, trouble follows.

[Not to brag too much, but I wrote that more than 5 years ago, back around 2004.
And we thought that the economy was bad then, and that Enron was a big scandal?
Ha! We had not even heard of A.I.G. or "credit default swaps", or Lehman Brothers, or Goldman Sachs, or mortgages "under water".]

People won't quit their bad habits until they are ready to give them up. Pressuring people into quitting has not and does not work. Even if we succeed in forcing people to quit for a while, they will just go back to using their drug of choice as soon as they get out of our control.

We fear that those people will never quit, that they will just die first. That may be right. Still, there isn't a lot we can do about it.

When I speak to people about why they should quit drinking, smoking, or doing drugs, I try to not be a nag. If you are a nag, all that you will succeed in doing is making people dislike you. I try to just keep quietly saying my little piece, so that I will keep planting the suggestion that life might feel better without harmful substances. Perhaps it will eventually get a few people to quit a little sooner.

When people say that treatment works, that strikes me as a very odd thing to say. When you come right down to it, what they are really saying is that some "treatment" program will make someone want to quit drinking. The real reason that people quit drinking is because they want to. People have to really intensely want to quit drinking, for them to quit and successfully stay quit. For "treatment" to work, it would have to be able to make people want to quit drinking. That isn't possible unless "treatment" is some kind of a mind-control program that can change people's minds, even against their wills.

It is funny that when people pay Hazelden $26,000 for a 28-day stay, they are actually paying Hazelden to make them want to quit drinking. That they will go without drink or drugs for the 28 days that they are in the treatment center is a given, but if they start drinking or drugging again after they leave, then they say, "It didn't work. The program didn't work." But what that really means is, "My resolve to stay quit wasn't clear and strong enough. I didn't want sobriety enough to resist temptation."

Anyone who would pay $26,000 dollars to a treatment center must already want to quit. They must pretty intensely want to quit, unless they are so rich that $26,000 is nothing to them. So they already want to quit, but they are still paying someone else to make them want to quit, anyway. What's wrong with this picture?

Speaking of mind control, Bill Wilson wrote that the A.A. Twelve-Step program really was a mind-control program. Unfortunately, the goal of the mind control is something other than making people quit drinking.

In Appendix II, Spiritual Experience, which he inserted into the second and third editions, Bill wrote:

Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James [in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience] calls the "educational variety" because they develop slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before he is himself. He finally realizes that he has undergone a profound alteration in his reaction to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by himself alone.
The Big Book, third edition, page 569.

So the beginners cannot see what the program is doing to their heads, how all of the guilt-inducing Steps are affecting their minds, but the other people can.

Likewise, Bill wrote:

So, practicing these Steps, we had a spiritual awakening about which finally there was no question. Looking at those who were only beginning and still doubting themselves, the rest of us were able to see the change setting in. From great numbers of such experiences, we could predict that the doubter who still claimed that he hadn't got the "spiritual angle," and who still considered his well-loved A.A. group the higher power, would presently love God and call Him by name.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William Wilson, pages 108-109.

So that's how Bill Wilsons says the Twelve Steps and the rest of the A.A. program will affect your mind.

Bill Wilson and Robert Smith had still not emerged from the dark ages, and they seemed resentful of anyone else who had.

An acquaintance of mine has an unusual sobriety program: He goes out every afternoon with a nun as she makes her rounds and does her job. He says that it keeps him sober.

Who knows whether accompanying a nun really makes him stay sober — whether there is a genuine cause-and-effect relationship there. He says that it works for him.

More power to him. Who cares whether it really works, or whether it really is the cause of his sobriety?... As Alan Leshner, the former head of NIDA said, "Look, if swinging a dead cat over your head helps, then I'm all for it."

Ditto, and megadittos.

But watch out. That does not mean that the cat swingers get to set up a clinic and suck lots of money out of the government and health insurance industry because they make grandiose false claims that the Cult of the Dead Cat has a very high success rate and is very spiritual too...

The only two organizations that you can't ever quit are the Mafia and Alcoholics Anonymous. And they both use threats of death to keep people coming back.

Dr. Ruth Fox wrote that alcoholics can't return to normal drinking. That isn't true. Often, they can return to normal drinking within mere hours of starting. The problem is just that what an alcoholic feels is normal is a bit much by some other people's standards.

Questions to ask Steppers:

1. How do you certify sponsors as qualified drug and alcohol rehab counselors and advisors?

2. How do you keep unscrupulous sponsors from sexually exploiting the newcomers?

3. How do you determine the effective success rate of the A.A. program?

4. What improvements in the program have been made in the last 50 years?

5. How do you figure out what works and what doesn't, so that you can improve the program?

6. How do you weed out the neurotics and the nut cases, and the crazies and the sadists, and keep them from becoming harmful sponsors?

7. Why don't you explain to us what kind of tests you apply to the oldtimers to determine whether they are mentally, spiritually, and morally fit to act as everything from drug and alcohol counselors to spiritual advisors to the newcomers?

8. How do you keep the fanatical true believers from telling newcomers not to take their doctor-prescribed medications?

9. How do you manage your group so that sexual predators cannot become sponsors who thirteenth-step the attractive young newcomers?

10. How do you keep the nut-cases from dispensing completely insane advice about recovery? (Speaking of which, how do you warn the newcomers about Bill Wilson's insane raps in the Big Book and '12X12'?)

11. How many of the A.A. members are successful 20-year old-timers? Out of the claimed 2 million members worldwide whom A.A. is supposedly keeping sober, how many of them actually have 20 or more years of sobriety?

12. While doing Step 11, how do you distinguish between the Voice of God and the voice of old lizard brain?

This year, 300,000 American teenagers will take the S.A.T. tests to determine their futures.

This year, 430,000 Americans will die of tobacco-caused diseases like emphysema and lung cancer. They won't need to worry about their S.A.T. scores.

Does the uncertainty of quantum mechanics introduce free will into this Universe?

If the little subatomic particles can go where-ever they feel like going, and their future paths cannot be predicted, do they have free will?

Does their freedom cascade down through Chaos Theory to us, leaving us free, or at least randomized?

The answer is, "No."

"Free Will" implies control over your actions, and that you have the ability to act out your will.

Being free to perform random senseless acts is not the definition of free will; it is the definition of insanity.

To some Steppers:

You want to quit drinking?

Putting a loaded gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger is a sure-fire way to quit drinking. It never fails.

What? You don't want to do that?
You don't want to die?
You object to blowing your brains out?

Then why is it okay with you to blow your brains out with cult religion?

Why is mental and ethical suicide so much more attractive than physical suicide?

'Mental suicide' means: throw "Reason" and human intelligence into the trash can, and "just believe" and "just have faith" in Bill Wilson's crazy grandiose proclamations.

'Ethical suicide' means: throw away your morals and ethics, and start telling lies to desperately sick people, telling them that the A.A. cure works great, when it obviously doesn't.

Every so often, the otherwise excellent TV program "The West Wing" contains a clumsy plug for Alcoholics Anonymous. A recent one was in a February 2005 episode where Leo, the former White House Chief of Staff, was recovering from a heart attack, and he grumbled that his stubborn nurse/housekeeper was "doling out Vicodin like an A.A. sponsor."

The authors of the script probably thought that they were being very clever or funny or hip there, but it wasn't funny. They were far too dense to see the implications of what they were really saying.

• First, off, for an A.A. sponsor to confiscate a sponsee's bottle of pain pills that a doctor prescribed, and dole them out as the sponsor sees fit, is no less than four felonies, a couple of them federal:
  1. Practicing medicine without a license. Unless the sponsor is a doctor, then he has no business over-riding the orders and prescriptions of a real doctor, and deciding how the patient will take the medications.
  2. Acting as an unlicensed pharmacist, dispensing a class A narcotic without a federal license. I.E.: distribution of narcotics.
  3. Possession of a controlled substance — narcotics — without a doctor's prescription.
  4. Possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute.

• Secondly, it is rather odd for the script writers to be implying that Leo, Chief of Staff of the White House of the most militarily powerful nation on Earth, needs a sponsor to supervise him and tell him how to live and how many pain pills he may take.
  • Are they trying to say that Leo is "powerless"? Powerless while running the White House?
    
  • The script writers are saying that Leo is qualified to advise the President on whether to nuke some other country off of the face of the Earth, and whether to arrange the assassination of an Arab terrorist leader, but not qualified to supervise himself and control his own behavior and drug and alcohol consumption. Can't they see the contradiction?
  • Where did that invisible sponsor get his medical and psychological training? What makes him so special?
  • What credentials and education does that sponsor have to qualify him to supervise and advise White House staff and senior administration officials?
  • Does Leo's A.A. sponsor have a security clearance? If not, isn't it a threat to national security for him to hear Leo "sharing"?
  • Likewise, if Leo goes to A.A. meetings, has everyone in the meeting room been investigated and given Top Secret security clearances? If not, why not? We can't have just any old alcoholic bozos listening in on Leo's innermost thoughts and feelings. Nor can we have foreign spies listening to Leo's confessions.

• The attitude of the script writers is actually demeaning to alcoholics. The writers are implying that anyone who ever had a drinking problem has to be controlled and supervised by an A.A sponsor for the rest of his life — nobody ever recovers — not even if he quit drinking many years ago and has gotten his life together and has risen to the top levels of government. The recovered alcoholic supposedly still has to have a hidden master practicing "tough love" on him, controlling his consumption of medications, and making him behave himself.

• There is a subtle implication that the A.A. system of sponsors actually works and accomplishes something good. The medical and scientific studies say just the opposite — that sponsors don't help the sponsees at all.

It would be nice if the hidden Steppers who plant such nonsense in the West Wing scripts would knock it off and quit degrading a good show.

Lastly, I am left with a question: Do the West Wing script writers really know how many of the current White House officials are actually under the control of Alcoholics Anonymous sponsors? Care to name names?

What about George W. Bush? Who is his sponsor? Who supervises his whiskey and cocaine consumption?

Where are the White House leakers now that we need them?

In Milton's famous classic, Paradise Lost, the fallen angel Lucifer declared that he would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Bill Wilson made the same choice.

1. Moral Model
   — Addicts are held responsible for both the cause and cure of addiction.

2. Disease Model
   — People are not responsible for either addiction or the cure.

3. Spiritual Model
   — Attributes responsibility for addiction but not its cure to the addict.

4. Biopsychosocial Model
   — Holds the addict responsible for curing the addiction but not responsible for the development of the addiction.

Curiously, Alcoholics Anonymous does not use the spiritual model. A.A. says that it believes that alcoholism is a disease, but they don't use the disease model either. They pull a bait-and-switch stunt there, where they start off by telling the newcomers and outsiders that alcoholism a disease, and that it isn't the alcoholics' fault — "a disease is respectable, not a moral stigma" — but then A.A. switches to the moral model and tells the new members that alcoholics drink because they are so bad.

Sex perverts who are serial killers may kill several children, or, if they are especially deadly, they may kill 50 or 75 or possibly even 100 children. But sex perverts cannot manage to kill thousands upon thousands of children. Or tens of thousands of children. Or hundreds of thousands. Or millions. It takes a politician to do that.

Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon actually incorporate several of the worst characteristics of life in an alcoholic's family.

• When you are the child of an alcoholic, you cannot tell the truth about Daddy — Daddy won't stand for it. (That would be 'disrespectful'.)
  Likewise, you cannot tell the truth about A.A. or Al-Anon.
  Sitting in a 12-Step meeting parrotting the lines about how great the 12-Step organization is isn't really much different from parrotting the lines about how wonderful life is with an alcoholic Daddy.
• Both the alcoholic Daddy and the 12-Step cult have an inability to tolerate criticism.
• Personal attacks on critics. If you dare to say how bad Daddy's drinking is, he'll attack you and talk about how bad you are.
  Likewise, if you criticize A.A. and Al-Anon, they will say that you are the one who is at fault, that you suffer from "spiritual diseases" and "defects of character".
• You are always wrong. It isn't Daddy's fault, it's yours. After all, you are such a burden on him. He has to support you, even though he never wanted any children, really.
  A.A. and Al-Anon also teach you that it's all your own fault, that you are the defective one.
• You must pretend that life with Daddy is wonderful, and Daddy is a great father. Just minimize and deny all of the negative aspects of life with an alcoholic. After all, it's 'fun' — it's an adventure.
  Likewise in A.A. — you should "fake it until you make it" and "act as if".
• And don't feel your own feelings. Stuff your feelings. When the children are crying, Daddy's usual response is, "Shut up or I'll really give you something to cry about."
  Then A.A. and Al-Anon teach us that "Feelings Aren't Facts. Stuff Your Feelings."
• Children of alcoholics get no respect or consideration from the alcoholic; they get abused.
  Likewise, members of A.A. and Al-Anon also get no respect. They also get abused.
• Alcoholic Daddy says that you owe him your life, because he gave you your life.
  Likewise, cults like A.A. and Al-Anon teach us that You Owe The Group because wonderful A.A. saved your life.

Counselors will of course tell you that counseling alcoholics works great — that is good "treatment" for alcoholism or that it "helps" alcoholics. Obviously, those statements are self-serving, and intended to keep counselors employed. But there is no evidence that counseling makes alcoholics quit drinking. None. Zilch. Zip. Nada. Not a single valid medical or scientific longitudinal controlled study showed that counseling made alcoholics quit drinking. Not one.

And still, alcoholics are sent to counseling just like how they are sent to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings — more out of habit or desperation than because of any good medical thinking.

**     "It is difficult to get a man to understand something
**     when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
**        ==  Upton Sinclair

In A.A., God doesn't seem to know what he is going to do next. The Almighty is undecided about the future of the human race until some A.A. member gets on his knees and begs God to do something, at which point God changes his mind and decides that He, Lord and Creator of the Universe, really should do what the A.A. member says.

Obviously, God does not actually have any "Great Plan" for Life, the Universe, and Everything — not if the plan can be constantly changed by the nagging requests of some A.A. members who get on their knees and pray.

When people talk about various "programs for recovery", like Alcoholics Anonymous or SMART, one of the first questions they ask is, "Does it work?"

I regard that as a bogus question. It is fraught with faulty assumptions. I always answer, "No, it doesn't work. You work. Or you don't work." I shove the responsibility for success back onto the questioner.

The truth is, A.A. does the same thing, but simultaneously denies it. They say that you are powerless over alcohol, so you can't quit by yourself, but then they say that you must must work a strong program, and make the program work. "It works if you work it."

Whenever people talk about "the program working", they are actually making some very odd statements. It's like somebody pays $15,000 or $30,000 to stay at some treatment center for 28 days, where they will dry people out, or detox them, and get them off of whatever their problem drug is. Then the "clients" get out — they "graduate" — and then a few weeks or months later, they relapse and go back to their old bad habits. Then they say, "It didn't work."

What didn't work? It didn't do what, exactly?

"Well, it didn't brainwash me into not wanting drugs and alcohol any more. It didn't make me not take drugs or drink alcohol. I paid them $15,000 or $30,000 to brainwash me and make me not want to get high any more, but the brainwashing didn't work at all. I still want to get high, and I still do, just like I did before. So it was a total waste of money."

Well, the problem is that there really isn't any such brainwashing program where you can buy instant sobriety. The "treatment programs" and "treatment centers" can't make you want sobriety. They can't change your mind around and give you a new mindset. They will hint that they can, and they take your money, but they don't actually deliver the goods.

When somebody declares, "Oh, A.A. is just the greatest thing. I could never quit drinking before A.A.. A.A. saved my life.", does that prove that A.A. works?

No. The only thing it proves is that he believes that A.A. is great.

Can we just dismiss his declarations as just so much "proof by anecdote"?

Yes. Not only can we, but we have to, because A.A. is just a cult that brainwashes its followers into believing that A.A. works great.

The only thing his enthusiastic declarations prove is that A.A. is very effective at making a few people believe that A.A. is very effective at making people quit drinking. (And that A.A. is also very effective at making some people cast a blind eye at the glaring evidence of failure that is always right in front of them.)

When the oil runs out, the Space Program will end. We just won't have the spare energy required to be blasting things into orbit. Nor will we have the surplus wealth required to run a big expensive program that yields no immediate returns.

We won't go to Mars, and we won't go to the stars. When the oil runs out, the eternal night will close in and the human race will be trapped on Earth forever.

Once upon a time, we had a narrow window of opportunity to go somewhere. The powers that be — those pompous posturing politicians — have squandered that priceless chance.

It was pretty much a one-time deal. We won't get that chance again for 60 million years, and I can't guarantee that we will still exist in 60 million years.

Hey sponsors! When one of your sponsees commits suicide, be sure to do a thorough "fearless and searching" moral inventory about it, and "find your part in it".

The 12-Step groups are not "self-help" groups.
They are really "elf-help" groups.

The first thing that the 12 Steps teach you is that you are powerless over your problem, and your life is unmanageable. That's Step One.

Then Step Two tells you that you are insane, and only a "Higher Power" can restore you to sanity.

Then Step Three instructs you to surrender your will and your life to "God as we understood Him", which could be anything from a "Group Of Drunks" to Santa Claus to one of his elves.

Then in Step Seven you beg "God as we understood Him" to remove all of your "defects of character".

So the 12-Step groups really are "elf-help" groups. You don't repair yourself, you wait for a spirit or elf or something to do it for you.

If treatment is necessary or even somehow helpful for quitting drinking, how can treatment centers demand that the patients stop drinking at Day One of the program, before they have gotten any treatment?

If I say something like, "You know, penicillin isn't really very good for treating staphylococcus infections, and it is totally useless against things like MRSA staphlococcus and anthrax", people respond in a sensible manner like,
"Yes, you are right. If somebody has infections like that, they are better treated with Keflex or dicloxacyllin or streptomycin — anything but penicillin."

But if I say, "You know, Alcoholics Anonymous isn't really very good for treating alcoholism," the A.A. true believers scream,
"You are heartless and immoral! You don't care how many alcoholics you kill! You are doing a great disservice to those who are seeking sobriety!"

That alone is proof that Alcoholics Anonymous is a cult religion, not a cure for alcoholism.

One thing that I have learned for sure in my 60 years on this planet is that God does not fix football games. Praying for your favorite team to win is futile and a waste of time and energy.

I suspect that the A.A. approach of assuming that God will fix your alcoholism for you will get about the same success rate as praying for football victories.

If the thought of quitting drinking forever makes you feel like you are going to lose your best friend, then alcohol is probably your worst enemy.

Either you defeat your demons, or else they will defeat you. Everybody has demons to fight. Like Christ said, everybody has his cross to bear.

Starting off by declaring that you are powerless over alcohol is giving the demons an unfair advantage.

A.A. often claims to be Christian, or "based on Christianity", or that the Twelve Steps are "based on the Bible".

Nothing could be further from the truth. Christ often spoke about taking care of the poor — feed the hungry, clothe the naked, take care of the little children, and heal the sick. A.A. does not do that.

Ask an A.A. member when the last time was that his A.A. group got involved in any kind of a charity project. The answer will be "never". A.A. has an official policy of never, ever, dispensing charity, or getting involved in any kind of charitable activities. (That is another policy that Alcoholics Anonymous inherited from the fascistic Oxford Group.) Bill Wilson even instructed A.A. members not to help alcoholics:

The minute we put our work on a service plane, the alcoholic commences to rely upon our assistance rather than upon God.
The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Working With Others, page 98.

So don't help the alcoholics, and don't perform any services for them. Bill says that they must learn to rely on God.

The A.A. answer to everything is, "Join A.A., go to meetings, and sit on your duff talking."

That isn't Christianity, or "compatible with Christianity".

What is worse than a narcissist?

A narcissist who believes that he is speaking for God.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If all you have is cult religion, everything looks like a spiritual problem.

What Frank Buchman demonstrated is that you can simply make up any kind of screwy philosophy and occult nonsense that you like and call it Christianity, and many people will accept it, or at least tolerate it, just because you call it Christianity, no matter how far removed from real Christianity it actually is. They stupidly assume that if you call it Christianity then it must be a good thing.

There are many different flavors of "Christianity" now, and most of them do not adhere to what Jesus Christ actually taught.

• Economic cults like Amway teach that money equals virtue, and that making millions of dollars is the key to Heaven. That of course directly contradicts Christ's teachings about how difficult it will be for a rich man to get into Heaven.

• FLDS, the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints, teach that getting four wives is the key to Heaven, and they still maintain that their church is "Christian".

• Other churches teach hatred of Gays and Lesbians, and yet they still claim to be Christian.

• And other churches teach hatred of various "others", like abortionists, or Jews, or Blacks, or Liberals, and they still claim that their teachings are "Christian".

• And other groups teach a very conservative militaristic philosophy that is basically fascism, and yet they too claim to be Christian.

It seems like every Devil that comes around is Christian.

People think that a duel of the wizards proves who is really a holy man, and favored by God. People think that miracles prove that someone is a genuine prophet. Many a fake holy man, like Rev. Jim Jones of the People's Temple (where 914 followers committed suicide for Jones by drinking cyanide Flavor-Aid®) routinely staged faked miracles to wow his audience and increase their "faith".

Some of that belief in magic tricks comes from the Old Testament story where Moses performed magic tricks to prove that he was a genuine messenger from God. The Pharoah's "wise men" threw their staffs down on the floor, and they turned into snakes. So Moses threw his staff down, and it turned into a snake too, but then Moses's snake ate all of the Pharoah's snakes, supposedly proving that Moses had superior magic. But that was all just a wizard's duel. It makes for entertaining fairy tales, but proves nothing. (The Walt Disney cartoon movie about King Arthur as a boy with Merlin as his teacher also featured a wizard's duel where Merlin got into a fight with a bad witch.)

Note that Jesus Christ never engaged in wizard's duels to prove that he was a prophet or a messenger from God or the Son of God. In fact, Jesus refused to even put on magic shows. He condemned the Pharisees for demanding to see a miracle, and called them evil.

When a true believer and a rational person talk about the truth, they are using the same word but they are talking about very different things.

• When a rational person says, "Two plus two equals four. That is the truth," he means that we can clearly demonstrate the truth of that statement by adding things together. We can group objects together and see with our own eyes the truth of two plus two adding up to four.

• When a true believer says that his beliefs are the truth — for example, insisting that everything in the Bible is The Truth, and the unquestionable Word Of God — he means something else. He means that he won't tolerate anyone refuting the validity of his statements or questioning the truth of those stories. He fervently believes that if he fervently believes that some things are true, that they will become true. (And if you don't believe, then you break the spell and ruin the magic.)

  Alas, all of those beliefs are false. Simply believing that something is true will not make it true. Two plus two will not add up to three or five if you believe it strongly enough.

Bill Wilson wrote that...

People of faith have a logical idea of what life is all about.
The Big Book, 3rd & 4th Editions, William G. Wilson, We Agnostics, page 49.

No they don't. There is nothing "logical" about faith. Bill Wilson was misusing the word "logical". There is nothing "logical" about blind faith in a cult religion.

Faith is belief in spite of a total lack of evidence, or faith is belief in spite of contradictory evidence.

Logic is a thought process where one examines the facts and the evidence and then draws conclusions from them, using inductive or deductive reasoning.

Now I'm not knocking all faith. I think that some faith can be a good thing. It can certainly brighten your day sometimes, and get you through hard times. But let's be honest about what the words mean. "Faith" is not "logical".

Faith says, "I believe anyway, in spite of a lack of evidence, and in spite of evidence to the contrary."

Such faith can be a big problem. For example, consider the puzzle of rays of light traveling to us from distant stars. Some of those stars are so far away that it takes the light from them millions or even billions of years to get here, in spite of the fact that light travels very, very fast, at 186,000 miles per second (or 300 million meters per second).

Now some people believe that the world was created only 10,000 years ago. They read the Old Testament, and interpret some lines of text as meaning that the world was created rather recently, in the big scheme of things.

But they have a problem with the light that has been traveling towards us from distant stars for millions or billions of years. How could that light be on a path to us from stars millions and billions of years away if the world was created only 10,000 years ago?

So they believe that God created the Universe complete with the light already on the way, in mid-journey, and some of the rays of light appeared to have already completed 99% of their journey towards us at the moment of Creation.

Thus, they believe that God created the world in a way that would deceive us, and fool us into believing something that isn't true. They believe that God deliberately created the illusion that the world and the Universe were already billions of years old at the moment of creation.

I have a problem with that. It is Satan who is called "The Great Deceiver", not God. To believe that God would deliberately create the world in a way that would deceive us and lead us away from "God's Truth" is a very strange kind of faith, not logical at all, and it says that their idea of God is that God not a benevolent Being Who has our best interests at heart. No, their God is the Great Deceiver, and He wants to fool us into believing untrue things. In essence, they are saying that Satan, not God, designed this world.

That is not my kind of faith. Whatever the Spirit of the Universe is, I don't think It is that kind of a dishonest, malevolent Being.