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12 steppers really do have a religious response to things. I guess that's one of the few ways to fundamentally change your outlook on the world. Be nice if it wasn't an actual religious program though. And that was the key for both that rejected the pardons: they were 12 steppers.
It isn't by necessity a religious program, though I freely acknowledge its theistic roots, and the fact that many are religious and do rely on deity as higher power.
But the reason these people were capable of this bravery is stated in the article and is specifically not their piety - it's their honesty.
"Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves"
"Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it."
The most important lesson to be learned in AA has nothing to do with God and everything to do with addressing falsehoods - the lies people tell themselves and others to justify their behavior and to excuse their actions.
Through time, habit, and conscious effort and will, these people have primed their minds to be willing to accept a fundamentally difficult truth - that what we think and what we feel can be false. That the things we tell ourselves, the things we tell others, and the things we do can all be wrong.
We all have a responsibility to face those truths with courage and transparency. We have a responsibility to own our flaws and mistakes and make amends where possible. That is the guiding truth of AA. It all started with God, but it ends with the individual, and how they face those truths.
I guess I can't separate it from a religious program because fundamentally the ethics of it are theistic and not humanistic. They're handed down morals that come from a higher moral power. When you get into esoteric ethical debates with Christian apologists, and they describe atheists as being incapable of being moral, that's what they mean. They believe morals must come from something greater than ourselves and cannot come from a human source.
To put it another way, AA is remarkably similar to Aristotle's virtue ethics which was used by Aquinas to describe the origins of morality. Similar to AA's higher power, Aristotle derived the moral authority for virtue ethics from the "prime mover." Same concept, in essence.
As much as theists would claim that their morals were handed down from divinity, ultimately an athiest would understand those morals to be originally handed down from humans, and therefore humanistic.
Doesn't mean they're good morals of course, especially when corrupted by motives of power, but bad morals can be handed down by secular sources as well. The point being that theistic origins do not necessarily mean the morals themselves are flawed.
In any case, fundamentally the ethics of AA's 12 steps are technically theistic in origin and nomenclature but humanistic in nature, in that they appear to really dig down into the psychology of humans in a way that deviates significantly from their christian roots.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Alcoholics_Anonymous
The original christian prayer group believed that through God, addiction could be cured. AA has maintained from the beginning that addiction cannot be cured - a recovering alcoholic is and always will be a recovering alcoholic. Faith in God alone will not deliver salvation because addiction is not sin, it is illness, and should be treated by more than just prayer.
Honestly out of all 12 steps it's the first step that actually hits the hardest.
"We admitted we were powerless over alchohol (although you could substitute alcohol for anything really)—that our lives had become unmanageable."
As my shrink used to say "the hardest part of overcoming a problem or mistake is admitting you have a problem/made a mistake."
Unfortunately, it was formed from a prayer group, and as much as some of my fellow atheists have told me that you can be an atheist and a 12-stepper (and maybe they can deal with the cognitive dissonance), there is just no legitimately non-religious interpretation of step 11. The whole "anything can be your higher power" concept I've been told by those atheists simply cannot conform to step 11:
You substitute "God" with pretty much anything non-deistic and that sentence simply does not rationally work.
I've always suspected that the biggest reason 12-step programs like AA do work for some people is that it's a form of group therapy.
If you want to detach step 11 from it's Christian roots, you cannot just substitute "God" in its wording. That yields nonsense, as you are stating correctly.
The aim of Step 11 is "knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out." In non–religious terms I would call this aim "committment".
The means of Step 11 to achieve commitment is spirituality, spirituality being a set of basic convictions that provides meaning, purpose and a sense of belonging.
A "neutral" Meta—Step 11 might be worded something like:
"We consciously develop a healthy spiritual basis for our live, gaining motivation and comittment through it."
As any religion, philosophy, ideology or other system of basic convictions can provide this spiritual basis for an individual, the formulation of a more concrete and helpful Step 11 will differ between e.g. communists, buddhists, naturists and epicureans.
You're basically saying the 12 steps only work for atheists if they aren't the actual 12 steps. You do realize that, right?
Depends on your definition of "actual".
I totally agree that the original 12 steps cannot work for anyone not believing in an Abrahamitic god.
I'd say that you need the actual steps for other people, i.e. the steps the AA are really taking, not the steps they claim to take.
You can substitute for the universe, the program and people in it, or nature and I'd say it still works. Just how you frame prayer or meditation. One of the definitions of prayer is a solemn request. The purpose of having "God" in the 12 steps is to have a belief in something "greater" than yourself. To me the group of alcoholics who got me sober is something "greater" than myself because I truly couldn't do it alone. The prayer and meditation can just be used almost as a manifesting of intention. If I pray that I be more tolerant patient and kind to those around me, than that's more likely to be on my mind whether I'm intentionally sending that prayer to a deity, the universe, nature, or the idea of the group as a whole. I say this as a 12 stepper myself that is non religious. That being said a lot of people use God or a deity as a higher power, but just saying it's certainly not a requirement.
No. You can't. Because those make no sense when you rewrite it.
The universe only has a will if you're not an atheist.
This only makes sense if you think praying to a group will make them force you to do something. Which is nonsense.
¯_(ツ)_/¯ Hey, I guess I'm wrong, but it's been working for me when nothing else has.
If it works for you, great. As I said a while ago.
It's simpler than all that. Satanists would say God is just You, or some version of yourself that is all the things you wish you could be. The fact that you are there praying means you have a good idea of what needs to change, and are searching for the strength within yourself.
As I said, that makes it irrational. People like you say that, but when it actually comes to rewriting it, it makes no sense at all:
Dunno what you're on about, makes complete sense to me. Just requires some mental flexibility.
From a quick ddg -
Source: https://aaagnostica.org/2020/03/29/staying-sober-without-god-practical-step-eleven/
You don't have to substitute "God" directly in the steps to make them work for you. There are plenty of ways to use the ideas of the program without being limited by its theistic roots.
Of course AA works because it serves as group therapy. That should be fairly obvious to anyone who's ever heard of the concept. But the most important step in any therapeutic approach is acknowledging hard truths. That is the most important part of AA, as well.
Half the steps are devoted to honestly acknowledging our flaws and mistakes, owning them, addressing them, and making amends wherever possible. That is what these pardon refusers did here, and the world would be a better place if more people had their courage.