“Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” Rom. 7:20 (NIV)

I attended my first AA meeting in 1986. Roughly a third of my days since then have been “sober”. But I have never been a good AA. The longest stretch of continuous sobriety was around three years, but that stretch was without AA. My adult life has been punctuated by periodic episodes of abstinence.

So, I reckon I’ve attended a few thousand AA meetings in my life. I have affection for the AA fellowship and have no desire to disparage the beneficial impact it has had on innumerable lives (including mine).

But seriously, is this the best we have been able to do as a society to deal with addiction? How can the pseudo-medical establishment dispense millions of prescriptions to Xanax every day and at the same time offer nothing to addicts and alcoholics besides AA? How can the medical establishment charge upwards of $30,000 to provide so-called “treatment” and then turn all these folks over to AA (or NA)?

I know it’s an intractable problem. But how irresponsible is it for medical doctors who claim to be “experts” in addiction to dump addicts and alcoholics back on the streets and expect AA to take care of them? AA has its own anachronistic definition of addiction (allergy). It does a pretty good job of diagnosing the chronic, male alcoholic of 1940. Bill Wilson did an amazing thing (for those who have any experience of the subject, his 12 Traditions are much more significant than the 12 steps).

But the emphasis on “spiritual recovery” is a joke when introduced by an MD writing scrips for benzos.

There is a phenomenon of physical addiction. Anyone who uses opiates for a sufficient period of time will become physically addicted. That’s pretty easy to comprehend. But alcohol doesn’t work like that. The vast majority of alcohol users are not addicts. Some become chronic. The definition of addiction has been stretched to include anyone that has a problem with self-control.

This is misguided. As some of you may have noticed, I am a bit interested in Weakness of Will (akrasia). I continue to puzzle at the impotence of the human will. The fact that AA has been successful (although I believe it is waning in influence) has more to do with a particular religious point of view. Many of us are aware that, like St. Paul we do what we do not want to do. We feel powerless. AA offers a solution: there is a God (of your own understanding) who will do for you what you can’t do for yourself. He will be your power.

But it is a lie. There is no God that does such a thing. And deep down we already know that. And it’s not just picking up a drink or shooting up, it’s your whole life.

I’m not condemning those who believe that this is the case. St. Paul had a wonderful solution to the puzzle. God knows that you’re a sinner, but He loves you anyway, and His grace is sufficient. He made you the way you are (fucked up) to demonstrate his love and glory.

I don’t believe it, but I get it.

Drinking and drugs are disruptive forces that affect society (that’s why they are sanctioned). But what about all the other deficiencies we have? Don’t we all fall short? Don’t we all imagine that we could do more or be better if we only applied ourselves properly and did what we ought to do (according to our own conscience)? Our will is weak. We all fall short. We are all less than we could be. That’s the human condition. It’s not sin. We’re not powerless. We’re just weak.

In my continuing quest to find a power greater than myself who can aid me in aleviating my severe akrasia I have had a recent insight into the spiritual domain that might work. Since the greatest obstacle to faith in such a being, in my view, is the problem of evil, I think I have found a way to avoid it altogether.

The trick is to limit the scope of activity of this higher being. If you make the thing omnipotent then it has to be responsible for everything and that gets you into trouble with little deformed babies and Nazi atrocities and all that kind of stuff. So in keeping with my severe solipsistic tendencies I simply limit the scope of this being’s activity to me.

Since I kind of like the expression Spirit of the Universe I have modified it to Spirit of My Universe or SOMU.

SOMU is concerned only with what happens to me. SOMU is not responsible for what is happening in Libya, nor is it his will that Kim Jong Il continues his tyrannical rule over the poor North Koreans. Nor did SOMU have anything to do with historical atrocities like Hitler or Stalin since these terrible events preceded my existence.

Now I do have some issues with how SOMU has been handling my life. In fact, I’m not sure that I’ve alleviated that problem of evil after all. But since SOMU is concerned only with his perfect plan for my life, then I have to have faith that whatever evil things have happened to me happened because that’s what SOMU wanted to happen. Maybe to teach me a lesson or something. Maybe SOMU punishes me sometimes when I get out of line. But it’s OK, because he is only doing it to help me and his raison d’etre is 100% me all day and all night.

But now that I know about SOMU, maybe we can start making some progress on some of my problems. Maybe SOMU can help me quit smoking. Or if SOMU doesn’t want me to quit smoking, maybe he can give me a couple hundred extra dollars every month and some health insurance in case I get lung cancer. He already helped me quit drinking. Now maybe if he could just make the anxiety go away during the eighteen or nineteen hours of the day that I am conscious. But whatever happens, it’s OK, because now I know that SOMU is on it!

What a relief.

I can’t create my own god any more than I can create my own language. If I posit the existence of a god, I can just as easily posit its non-existence, therefore the authority that I would want it to have would be undermined.

But what if I am only indirectly involved in the creation of this god? What if I introduce an element of chance in its creation? Certain characteristics of this deity are now no longer subject to my will alone, but attain a degree of independence. It is within my power to create an environment, or better, an apparatus, that could be utilized to determine the characteristics of this deity. But the outcome would be outside the scope of my will and, though I might reject it, I cannot deny its independence.

Revelation then, could be induced by a properly constructed apparatus that incorporates a relevant degree of chance into the process.

Sartwell in (Faith-Based Atheism) provides a better exposition of what I was getting at in my post Gloating over the Death of God. He points out, rightly, that the choice for atheism is not perfectly rational, and does not absolve its adherents from personal responsibility for that choice. As he says, “…the contest between science and faith, while it’s a real rivalry, is a contest between two faiths.” The arguments against the existence of God, or more correctly, the refutations of the arguments for the existence of God, are sound and convincing. But they do not have the status of logical necessity, as some atheists seem to believe.

The first real philosopher I ever read was Bertrand Russell. And I didn’t read him for his philosophy; I read his classic atheist treatise Why I am Not a Christian. I was still in high school, and a budding materialist. But something about the tone of his book didn’t sit right with me. I recently got another taste of it after reading Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great. There is so much ammunition at hand when one takes on religion, it seems to become irresistable to the religious antagonist not to pick up stones and start hurling them in every direction. It was true of Russell, whose philosophical writing was not considered polemical, and it is true of Hitchens.

Skepticism about God–regarding his existence, properties and so forth–is intellectually necessary, in my view. In the absence of direct revelation, I cannot understand faith, and yet it exists everywhere. But I cannot argue that just because so many believe it, it has to be true, since upon examining the details of such faith amongst a wide variety of individuals, first hand, over many many years, I have never detected any rational basis for faith even among the most intelligent adherents. At the base of it all is–I was going to say infantilism–but instead I will leave it at emotionalism.

I cannot rejoice over the inevitable end of meaning entailed by the lack of a god-perspective in the universe. We are end-oriented creatures, with a conscious awareness of time. Our teleological prejudice litters our language. It is inescapable. We cannot merely be, we must persistently strive toward. And what is the reward of all that striving? Merely being. It’s a joyous circle or a vortex of doom.

Religion is the ultimate world-creating activity. Its aim is to stitch all of the little threads that dangle off of us into one tidy tapestry of truth. Science cannot replace it, and though I respect my “Realist” and atheist brethren for their attachment to scientific truth (reality), I can’t be comforted by it. What difference does it make to me whether a rock is a billion years old or a hundred years old? Science must be admired, respected and encouraged. But constitutive answers are not exhaustive.

So I won’t be gloating over the death of God. Would the world be a better place without religion? Not with humans in it. It is impossible. We create worlds. That’s what we do. I don’t know why.