~February 16th... "Self-righteousness"...???

2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.


What can we believe in?
A.A. does not demand belief;
Twelve Steps are only suggestions.
Importance of an open mind.
Variety of ways to faith.
Substitution of A.A. as Higher Power.
Plight of the disillusioned.
Roadblocks of indifference and prejudice.

Lost faith found in A.A.
Problems of intellectuality and self-sufficiency.
Negative and positive thinking.
Self-righteousness.
Defiance is an outstanding characteristic of alcoholics.
Step Two is a rallying point to sanity.
Right relation to God.


Problems of intellectuality and self-sufficiency.

Now we come to another kind of problem: the intellectually self-sufficient man or woman. To these, many A.A.'s can say, "Yes, we were like you - far too smart for our own good. We loved to have people call us precocious. We used our education to blow ourselves up into prideful balloons, though we were careful to hide this from others. Secretly, we felt we could float above the rest of the folks on our brainpower alone. Scientific progress told us there was nothing man couldn't do. Knowledge was all-powerful. Intellect could conquer nature. Since we were brighter than most folks (so we thought), the spoils of victory would be ours for the thinking. The god of intellect displaced the God of our fathers. But again John Barleycorn had other


Negative and positive thinking.
Self-righteousness

Another crowd of A.A.'s says: "We were plumb disgusted with religion and all its works. The Bible, we said, was full of nonsense; we could cite it chapter and verse, and we couldn't see the Beatitudes for the 'begats.' In spots its morality was impossibly good; in others it seemed impossibly bad. But it was the morality of the religionists themselves that really got us down. We gloated over the hypocrisy, bigotry, and crushing self-righteousness that clung to so many 'believers' even in their Sunday best. How we loved to shout the damaging fact that millions of the 'good men of religion' were still killing one another off in the name of God. This all meant, of course, that we had substituted negative for positive thinking. After we came to A.A., we had to recognize that this trait had been an ego- feeding proposition. In belaboring the sins of some religious people, we could feel superior to all of them. Moreover, we could avoid looking at some of our own shortcomings. Self-righteousness, the very thing that we had contemptuously condemned in others, was our own besetting evil. This phony form of respectability was our undoing, so far as faith was concerned. But finally, driven to A.A., we learned better.



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