What's Been Missing from A.A.'s Revised Programs

Why is it that, no sooner did early AAs find the solution -- the cure--for their malady did intellectuals, academics, and publishers enable a complete revision of the solution by the time A.A.'s basic text had published a "new version" that opened  the door to nonsense gods, higher powers, "spirituality," and eradication of the role of the Creator in A.A.'s original program.

As one of A.A.'s longest sober pioneers wrote me: "Dick, if you take God out of A.A., there is nothing left!" In other words, as the Creator began to be called a Coke Bottle, a chair, a table, a light bulb, Santa Claus, "Something," "Somebody," or an undefined higher power, the power and love and forgiveness, and healing resource that the pioneers had depended upon--the power of God--began to be ridiculed, eliminated, and denigrated.

Four years after A.A. was founded, the effective, workable original Christian Fellowship program slid down the money drain and was replaced by "models," "exercises," bogus gods, and finally "nothing at all."

That need not be our remembrance. Suffering alcoholics and addicts can and should learn how their original program (summarized on page 131 of DR. BOB and the Good Oldtimers) was founded and developed on the principles of the Bible--particularly on the Book of James, Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, and 1 Corinthians 13. So said the founders. So said the early literature that quoted the founders. And so they pointed out that they had no Steps, no Traditions, no Big Books, no war stories, and no meetings like those seen today.

The answer? Learn and study and adapt old school A.A. today so that neither God, nor Jesus Christ, nor the Bible are ridiculed and discarded, but are unearthed and used today.