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We have just been talking about the GA steps and accepting a "Higher Power" in the group this evening. GA isn’t religious and I was reminded of a post I’ve seen here in the past. Anyway i promised to find an agnostic version of the steps and here it is…
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol- that our lives had become unmanageable.2. Came to believe and to accept that we needed strengths beyond our awareness and resources to restore us to sanity.
(Original: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.)
3. Made a decision to entrust our will and our lives to the care of the collective wisdom and resources of those who have searched before us.
(Original: Made a decision to turn our wills 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 ourselves without reservation and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
(Original: Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.)
6. Were ready to accept help in letting go of all our defects of character.
(Original: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.)
7. With humility and openness sought to eliminate our shortcomings.
(Original: 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 meditation to improve our spiritual awareness, make recovery a priority and to discover the power to carry out that way of life.
(Original: 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 a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
GA isn’t religious and we CAN recover with or without any religious belief.
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For me personally the GA rooms are my higher power. I couldn’t stop gambling on my own, i can with GA – by definition that, for me, makes GA a “power greater than myself”.
We can all find our own higher power. Maybe one of the reasons that is important is that we allowed gambling/addiction to be our higher power and control our lives for a long time.
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this has been suggested to me by other members more than once, at the first time I thought I don’t need to comment on it, but somehow I am triggered to respond to it now. so bear with me.
as an atheist ( which is on the far right compared with agnostic which is in the middle between the two sides).
I have attended GA once online (there is no GA where I am living) and right from the start a lot of red flags were raised in my mind,
it looks like a cult for me, taking a book as the ultimate reference, a book written in the 50s for AA, and then tweaked to fit Gambling, and the core message on it is surrendering to a higher power and asking it to give us the strength to overcome this addiction. this all sounds wrong to me. and tweaked it more to fit the atheist by just changing the understanding of the higher power really doesn’t help.
these are a lot of changes to the narrative of that book. if GA or AA fits with your beliefs and works for you then good. we owe ourselves to do whatever that we can do to overcome this addiction.for me, I found SMART a better choice but the problem with SMART is the general nature of it, it is designed for all types of addictions, so sitting in a SMART meeting hearing from people with drugs or alcohol addiction sometimes I really can’t relate, but their methodology is a science-based approach that keeps changing and not fixed to old books.
so finally no need to tweak the message more, keep it in its original format if an atheist finds help in GA meeting it will be from listening to the other’s experiences and learning from them, and getting support from them. it will have nothing to do with adding a higher power or changing the understanding of what a higher power means.
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Hi DE. My own take on the “Higher Power” comes from the phrase “A power greater than ourselves.”
I couldn’t stop on my own so if nothing was stronger than me on my own what chance did I have? Then I looked around a room of people just like me, none of whom had been able to stop on their own but many of whom now had. My own HP has nothing to do with the G word or any divinity, but I am happy that there was something in that room stronger than myself, it meant I knew I could stop.
Some people get put off by the G word, or use it as an excuse, which is why I posted this version, it never bothered me – I vary between agnostic anbd athiest myself.
BTW I have been to many actual GA rooms and a few of the zoom ones – some are better than others but I can say that no two that I have been to are the same. So if you have just been to the one I wouldn’t rule out getting to another one.
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