A New World

[djewleu]

We all know that low IQ folk tend to be religious & superstitious.
As your IQ increases your religious beliefs are questioned by yourself.
Religions foster superstitions - and one terrible side effect is to emotionally molest young children with religious indoctrination that is going to distress them for a long time - the case on this topic here.
Religion, like Christianity, is not - never - going to help the world to be a better place to live in.
On the contrary: it develops a distorted personality of fear, and produces - among the more fundamentalist and bigoted - a culture of threatening & cursing those who disagree with its content.
We have the apostle Paul - and Jesus, too - cursing the entire opposition to his weird gospel - the gospel he said he received via a private revelation!
Well, I can also say I received my own interpretation of his gospel via a private inspection.

...

Religion is intellectual insufficiency.

[mitchellmckain]

Religion is intellectual insufficiency.

What is your religion then?

[djewleu]

Are you in any way related to the KJV-only baptist church of Peter Ruckman?

Yes, Peter Ruckman is the hero of many of the members there and the teacher or mentor of most of the preachers who go through there. The church's pastor is a graduate of Ruckman's Pensacola Bible Institute.

I just knew it!
Ruckman is now an institution of confrontational dogmatism - a bigot like America never had one before.

I read some 20 of his books - and I know how virulent & rasping the guy is.
He is the typical DIVISIVE-bad-fruit-bearing Christian a city is disgraced to have, I lament to say.
Any pastor trained by this insolent character can only have a large part of his brain shrunk to unrecoverable religious delusion.

[Moonwood the Hare]

I think you have been very brave

Thank you, Moonwood (if you were talking to me). I don't know how I could agree, though. I think I've been too scared of my parents or others to do sooner what I needed to do. I didn't tell them when I first came to conclusions opposite theirs. After they did find out, I waited for them to come back to me and continue inquiring about my beliefs. That didn't happen, so I just waited around for anything else. Eventually, I knew my life had to move on, though.

It takes a lot of guts to make that kind of break. They proably don't know how to deal with it.

[Moonwood the Hare]

But I wish you understand this well: drug addiction can be helped WITHOUT any religious intervention.

Why would I want to disagree with that. Why would I want to disagree that religious belief can be addictive and destructive. You believe God does not exist and also blame him for not acting in the way you think he should.

In my opinion, addiction would be better helped without religion because pressure does not do any good.

I'm inclined to think different approaches work with different people so something like AAs approach which has a Biblical basis can work well for some people and less well for others.

[JustJim]

I'm inclined to think different approaches work with different people so something like AAs approach which has a Biblical basis can work well for some people and less well for others.

I remember my first AA meeting, and listening to an old-timer explain that AA wasn't religious. Then they ended the meeting holding hands and saying the Lord's Prayer. LOL....

Anyhow, of course AA is based on religious beliefs by its founders (Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob) in the Christian God. Later, they added "as we understood Him" to the third and eleventh steps in the Twelve Steps of AA, in order to incorporate beliefs in God other than their own, but they still assumed people believed in some kind of God or other "higher power". Here are the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. See for yourselves if you think they're "religious" in nature:

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.

The rehab programs I worked in (I was a substance abuse counselor for over 25 years) ALL required patients to attend a minimum number of AA meetings per week, often requiring them to attend 90 meetings in the first 90 days of recovery. They often had to turn in signed forms to verify they'd been to their meetings, although there was no way we could (or would) check up on them, and AA's anonymity prevented AA meeting chairpeople from signing their actual names to the forms. (I wish I had a nickel for every "Mickey Mouse" signature I saw on forms my patients turned in.) In my last year before I retired, I finally got the people in charge to accept alternatives to AA for those who didn't believe in God or other "higher powers".

As Father Joe Martin said in many of his lectures, AA operates on the foundational believe that, "I can't handle it. God can. I believe I'll let Him." That works for MOST people in recovery, but not all. It wouldn't work for me....

Jim

[Moonwood the Hare]

I know some drug and alcohol workers who dislike the approach. This seems to be because of people saying things like I am an alcoholic but have not had a drink for 30 years. Eric Berne the founder of transactional analysis says that if you say something like that you have never escaped the alcoholic game and that the alcoholic who devotes his life to telling others is still trapped in the same game.

[Keep The Reason]

For the record, Save Our Selves non-religious sobriety meetings are avaailable:

SOSSobriety.org

[mitchellmckain]

Eric Berne the founder of transactional analysis says that if you say something like that you have never escaped the alcoholic game and that the alcoholic who devotes his life to telling others is still trapped in the same game.

That seems to presume that alcoholism is some kind of mind game when far more often chemical dependency is a physiological condition. Berne's comment seems to me like telling a schizophrenic that as long as they keep taking their medication for schizophrenia then they are "still trapped in the same game". It all goes to show that however helpful paradigms like Berne's transactional analysis can be, it is very foolish to make it into some kind of theory of everything.

[JustJim]

I know some drug and alcohol workers who dislike the approach. This seems to be because of people saying things like I am an alcoholic but have not had a drink for 30 years. Eric Berne the founder of transactional analysis says that if you say something like that you have never escaped the alcoholic game and that the alcoholic who devotes his life to telling others is still trapped in the same game.

Alcoholics who identify themselves as alcoholic after 30 years of sobriety are aligning themselves with the medical and AA model that would say they still have the disease, but are in remission as long as they don't drink. It would be similar to a diabetic who still identifies as diabetic after successfully maintaining normal blood-sugar levels for 30 years by a combination of diet, exercise, and medication. Their diabetes doesn't go away, even though they no longer have any of the symptoms that earned them the diagnosis. When long-time-sober alcoholics resume drinking, they quickly return to the symptoms they experienced before they stopped drinking, in the same way a diabetic's symptoms would return if he/she stopped doing the things that maintained normal glucose levels.

There are many treatment professionals who haven't bought into the medical model for substance dependence. The medical model is so widely accepted in the treatment business because it facilitates insurance coverage for treatment and rehabilitation. If it wasn't a disease (it's classified as a mental health disorder in the DSM), insurance companies wouldn't pay for treatment. And it seems to work well for a lot of people.

Personally, I found the most effective treatment was a "what works, works" approach. For those who responded well to a medical model approach and fit well into the Alcoholics Anonymous scheme of things, more power to them! To those who didn't, other approaches worked just as well. Reality Therapy (a la William Glasser) has been used with great success with alcoholics and other drug addicts, for example. Transactional Analysis has been valuable in helping people see how they got where they are and why it's so hard to escape their 'programming', but it's not really of much value in helping them to change their behavior, which is what really matters. Knowing why they drink abusively doesn't usually help them stop drinking.

KTR: Thanks for the SOS plug. It's like AA without the religious connotations.

Anyhow, this is a little off the track, I think.

Jim

[Moonwood the Hare]

Eric Berne the founder of transactional analysis says that if you say something like that you have never escaped the alcoholic game and that the alcoholic who devotes his life to telling others is still trapped in the same game.

That seems to presume that alcoholism is some kind of mind game when far more often chemical dependency is a physiological condition. Berne's comment seems to me like telling a schizophrenic that as long as they keep taking their medication for schizophrenia then they are "still trapped in the same game". It all goes to show that however helpful paradigms like Berne's transactional analysis can be, it is very foolish to make it into some kind of theory of everything.

It can be both.

[Moonwood the Hare]

I know some drug and alcohol workers who dislike the approach. This seems to be because of people saying things like I am an alcoholic but have not had a drink for 30 years. Eric Berne the founder of transactional analysis says that if you say something like that you have never escaped the alcoholic game and that the alcoholic who devotes his life to telling others is still trapped in the same game.

Alcoholics who identify themselves as alcoholic after 30 years of sobriety are aligning themselves with the medical and AA model that would say they still have the disease, but are in remission as long as they don't drink. It would be similar to a diabetic who still identifies as diabetic after successfully maintaining normal blood-sugar levels for 30 years by a combination of diet, exercise, and medication. Their diabetes doesn't go away, even though they no longer have any of the symptoms that earned them the diagnosis. When long-time-sober alcoholics resume drinking, they quickly return to the symptoms they experienced before they stopped drinking, in the same way a diabetic's symptoms would return if he/she stopped doing the things that maintained normal glucose levels.

There are many treatment professionals who haven't bought into the medical model for substance dependence. The medical model is so widely accepted in the treatment business because it facilitates insurance coverage for treatment and rehabilitation. If it wasn't a disease (it's classified as a mental health disorder in the DSM), insurance companies wouldn't pay for treatment. And it seems to work well for a lot of people.

Personally, I found the most effective treatment was a "what works, works" approach. For those who responded well to a medical model approach and fit well into the Alcoholics Anonymous scheme of things, more power to them! To those who didn't, other approaches worked just as well. Reality Therapy (a la William Glasser) has been used with great success with alcoholics and other drug addicts, for example. Transactional Analysis has been valuable in helping people see how they got where they are and why it's so hard to escape their 'programming', but it's not really of much value in helping them to change their behavior, which is what really matters. Knowing why they drink abusively doesn't usually help them stop drinking.

KTR: Thanks for the SOS plug. It's like AA without the religious connotations.

Anyhow, this is a little off the track, I think.

Jim

I actually wonder with AA to what extent they have applied Christian ideas about sin to the model in the sense that you are always a sinner by nature rather than because of your actions. I wouldn't know how far self knowledge can go in dealing with a problem that has such a strong physiological basis. It does seem though that a basically religious approach works well for some people.