“God bless” is an interesting thing to see in there. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone except Bayliss publicly make a reference to religion, and with him it’s usually a self-deprecating remark about growing up in a super Catholic family but ending up a degenerate.
AA is a religious org, right?
They ask you to give yourself up to a higher power, so basically. My biggest problem with AA and NA is they want you to give up personal responsibility.
Yes i have addiction issues, but its my fault i was a fuck head. No one else is responsible for the bed that i make but me.
not in theory, but often in practice.
The program definitely doesn’t ask you to “give yourself up” to a higher power. The spiel is that willpower alone isn’t enough to overcome addiction, and you need to find something bigger than yourself to do that.
Whether that is true is def debatable. But I have met people who have chosen all sorts of non “diety” entities as their higher power. Nature, Qi, communities, etc. People use plenty of non-religious mechanisms to stay sober from meth, dope, crack, etc for decades after being pretty hopelessly addicted.
AA gets a bad rap, and a lot of is justified…but a lot of it just whining. They are a MASSIVE organization with almost no paid employees. They are NOT monolithic. Some groups are more religious, some believe marijuana is the devil, others believe it is inconsequential, some groups treat psychedelics like the devil, others don’t, some groups don’t even let you talk about drugs, some groups bring drugs to the forefront.
This is fair. I never felt pressure to embrace any specific “power,” but i was very much told that it wasnt all my fault and that i need to rely on something else to move on. Could have been the meetings, but it seemed to really want to make you think that you arent responsible for your own life decisions and recovery.
I spent 3 years of my life heavily involved in AA. I worked all 12 steps with a sponsor, sponsored other people, ran meetings, did service work, cleaned up peoples houses after suicides, organized events, blah blah blah
I never once got the message that “you aren’t responsible for your own life decisions and recovery.” The message is very clearly “you are responsible for doing real spiritual work to overcome your addiction”
Now, I totally understand that people want to debate that spiritual work is a real mechanism for overcoming sobriety. But I have seen it work enough that I personally am sold on it. With enough science and evidence, I could certainly be persuaded otherwise.
I don’t think AA is required to get sober, but I do lean towards the spiritual path being a great way to overcome nasty addictions.
Maybe different people hear the message differently? I was also not in any place to be hearing any message about spirituality and higher powers at the time. I just didnt want to die and i hated the person i was. Being jaded on a topic can often turn you off and put blinders on. I attended 5 AA meetings and 7 NA. I am not an expert on the organization and am simply speaking from my own experience and perception.
Of course, and that’s why I brought up that AA is not monolithic and there are millions of people involved with it worldwide with a full spectrum of competing ideologies and agendas.
But regardless of what people “say”, in the book (manual lol), it never suggests people aren’t responsible for their recovery.
And hey, I also said pretty clearly that I don’t think people need AA. It is likely an outdated, problematic, and crude way of getting sober. But it works for many people and is repeatable. Which is why it is prolific.
additionally, basically all of these people are drunks and drug addicts…a population that is notorious for lying, manipulating, and doing every other seedy thing under the sun.
egos are a tricky thing, and addicts are generally pretty terrible at controlling them lol
I think it serves a purpose for the people it is meant to serve a purpose to. It still helped me think and gave me a place to vent. I dont have any animosity against the organization, it just wasnt for me. I was laser focused on mind over matter and loving myself/others enough. Looking back, maybe that could have been my “power,” but i was too focused on thinking willpower and spirituality were different things.
anyways, in proper bort fashion this shit is completely off the rails
And for the record, I still think it is unexpected weddings
Unexpected weddings are Jake’s higher power
Some guy who was out of the loop came up to me at Pisgah asking why Jake wasn’t on stage, and that he traveled there from TN because Jake is his favorite. I kept it vague and said there were some theories floating around but nothing too concrete, and he hasn’t been on tour for a couple months at this point with no indication of when he’d return.
I REALLY regret not telling him that he’s missed 2 months of shows due to a string of last minute destination weddings.
Siri play Higher love by Steve Winwood
That’s wild to me that you could travel for UM and not be remotely aware of the situation. On another hand, I admire their ability to be off of the cesspool that is social media.
Most UM fans (especially now) are absolutely clueless and awful
I keep telling @bluish to bring this Stasik fangirl to the jamband cringe thread but unfortunately it hasn’t happened yet.
Being a celebrity fan is never a good idea
I would love to see some of the people I saw at the UM show at Pisgah get torn apart on the bort
met a dude from Connecticut who rode his motorcycle all the way to Arkansas to see Twiddle at Wakarusa. worst part was Twiddle ended up performing.
