• TurtleSoup@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      Honestly out of all 12 steps it’s the first step that actually hits the hardest.

      “We admitted we were powerless over alchohol (although you could substitute alcohol for anything really)—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

      As my shrink used to say “the hardest part of overcoming a problem or mistake is admitting you have a problem/made a mistake.”

    • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I guess I can’t separate it from a religious program because fundamentally the ethics of it are theistic and not humanistic. They’re handed down morals that come from a higher moral power. When you get into esoteric ethical debates with Christian apologists, and they describe atheists as being incapable of being moral, that’s what they mean. They believe morals must come from something greater than ourselves and cannot come from a human source.

      To put it another way, AA is remarkably similar to Aristotle’s virtue ethics which was used by Aquinas to describe the origins of morality. Similar to AA’s higher power, Aristotle derived the moral authority for virtue ethics from the “prime mover.” Same concept, in essence.