Step 3 Genetic Memory Of God
(excerpt)
Step Three: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to God as we understood him.
In this Step, AA continues their indoctrinative strategy of hiding the program’s religiosity by making up false meanings for the religious elements that they are trying to shield from questioning. According to AA if we talk to a chair, or anyone or anything else, we may consider that our Higher Power. In this Step that Higher Power is changed; no longer is it anything we choose but is now called God.
When we entered AA, we were told that the program is not religious and we were simply asked to admit we have an alcohol problem (our lives are unmanageable). Then we were told that we need a Higher Power to help us solve our problem but we were assured that that can be anything we choose- the group, our mother, a chair. Now we are told that that Higher Power- SURPRISE! - is actually God.
AA in their Big Book chapter “We Agnostics”; “Actually, we were fooling ourselves, for deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is there. For faith in a Power greater than ourselves, and miraculous demonstrations for that power in human lives, are facts as old as man himself”.
In this Step, AA continues their indoctrinative strategy of hiding the program’s religiosity by making up false meanings for the religious elements that they are trying to shield from questioning. According to AA if we talk to a chair, or anyone or anything else, we may consider that our Higher Power. In this Step that Higher Power is changed; no longer is it anything we choose but is now called God.
When we entered AA, we were told that the program is not religious and we were simply asked to admit we have an alcohol problem (our lives are unmanageable). Then we were told that we need a Higher Power to help us solve our problem but we were assured that that can be anything we choose- the group, our mother, a chair. Now we are told that that Higher Power- SURPRISE! - is actually God.
AA in their Big Book chapter “We Agnostics”; “Actually, we were fooling ourselves, for deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is there. For faith in a Power greater than ourselves, and miraculous demonstrations for that power in human lives, are facts as old as man himself”.