The God card

 Good morning,

If you remember a while back, one of my biggest problems with AA was their choice of words. Like if they didn't really care about what religion you are, then why throw capital-G God (He/Him) into every aspect of it? Like the second of the 12 Traditions is "For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority — a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern." 

To me that seems a bit dogmatic, and I typically think "the Catholics got their hooks in on that one", but in that book I'm reading it goes into more detail. In short, when AA was growing rapidly in the 40's, the founders were running into problems. Some groups were running strong and doing well, but others, usually a state or two over from the founders, would get a little carried away with the whole religion thing. And, like you do when it's 1941, gay and black people were getting turned away, women weren't allowed to sponsor and had to listen to the men. All the typical dogmatic bullshit that seems to always come with organized religion. 

The founders were in a pickle. When the whole organization is nontheistic, how do you get people to be nice to each other without playing the God card? The answer, in this case, was to play the God card. 

One of my biggest hangups with religion and the bible and AA is that words have meaning. So if I'm able to find a contraindication or inaccuracy on a cursory glance, how dumb must the people be who're drinking the koolaid? It's why I like math and dislike the New Testament. Math is math, no matter who you are or what you believe, it just is. We can prove this over and over again in different ways ad infinitum. 

The bible on the other hand is provably not the direct word of God. Therefore, someone using the bible as their "God card" justification for being a dick is a bit problematic. However if you're the founder of a budding organization, you can throw that card right back on the table ("oh I'm sorry, are you GOD? No? Then shut up and color.")  

There will be people turned away or disgusted by the word "God", and there will be racists who kick black people out of their club unless literally God tells them not to. Both of those camps exist. Which is most likely to look past the contradiction and change their opinion once they've thought it through? 

I've been thinking a lot about words and meaning. Last time I wrote about the "bless you" enigma, and I think what gets me so spun up about it is how over and over again throughout history it gets realigned to the predominant beliefs. When I'm reading the bible, I'm so compelled to dive into the historicity and figure out what and who said what and why -- which is what I consider to be the true meaning because I can't accept the "God wrote it" hypothesis. 

Earlier my dad told me the Doctor's Opinion and subsequent book of AA didn't seem very insightful and asked why I was reading it. I think there's a lot to unpack with that, because my whole conclusion was that this doctor's opinion is old as shit and has no consequence other than prefacing the book. 

The next portion of the book is Bill's Story (Bill is like the Jesus of AA) and it's basically a memoir. Reading it with a blanked-slate open mind, my initial reactions of the guy were a) he's intelligent, b) he's funny, and c) he's definitely "Group 1", probably'd be wearing a nice polo shirt to his AA meetings. But most importantly, he's right. He's right about a lot of stuff. (Side note, I like to think the historical Jesus was this way, and people just got way too carried away with his "message" in the 300 years it took to write everything down and agree on what was and wasn't real.)

Sometimes it takes him a few dozen pages of a book to explain why sometimes he uses the phrase "higher power" and other times "God"; but that's way better than having to look up etymology papers to understand backwards shit in the bible. The point is, it's intelligently thought through. It's dogmatic to a purpose, and those who are open-minded enough to look past the dogma typically aren't the one's being racist dicks.