Naturally Incapable of Rigorous Honesty and Suffering From Grave Emotional and Mental Disorders

Every AA meeting opens up with this prayer:

Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. There are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.

If you have any independent thought, you will soon grow extremely tired of its astounding degree of condescension, blaming, arrogance, and shockingly blatant effort at manipulation.

"Rarely have they seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path"

Wow.  It sounds like AA is very effective!  This is a lie.  Even AA admits it.  They qualify this statement by "thoroughly."  If it doesn't work for you, it's your fault--you didn't follow their (simple) path thoroughly enough.  It's your fault!  You can't even follow a simple program!!

The truth is that people who quit on their own have an equal, if not higher, success rate than those that follow AA's path.  The problem isn't with the person, it's with the program.  AA simultaneously falsely legitimizes itself as effective when it is not, and then bashes the poor alcoholic when AA doesn't work for him/her.  Charming.

"Men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.  There are such unfortunates."

This is perhaps the most condescending statement I've heard anyone utter.  The idea that a group of deluded, unthinking, unquestioning sheep could know myself better than I do is outrageous.  They can't even accurately assess their own lives or critically assess the AA program.  They unquestioningly accept what Bill W. says as the truth.  If they are unable to question themselves critically, they are in no position to do so to me.  But they do, and take pity on me as a hopeless case...an "unfortunate" who they turn their backs on.

People who fail are either:

"naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty"

I always snorted when someone said this.  If AA members lived in a manner demanding rigorous honesty they would realize:

• that AA has been repeatedly shown, using rigorous double-blind, placebo-controlled trials, to be utterly ineffective in achieving sobriety.  The likelihood of success is just as high in those that stop drinking on their own.  One major study showed that people who attend AA are 9-times more likely to binge drink, compared with those who do Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT).  Even AA's triennial survey admitted to the ineffectiveness of its program.  But AA members reject these pieces of evidence.  They are in a constant state of denial, which is ironic because that's how they dismiss others (like myself) who disagree with them. 
• that the evidence for a Christian God, which is what AA is based on, is nonexistent.  Combine this with the many suspect, self serving reasons to believe in such a god (fear of death, fear of others unlike us, fear of change, selfloathing, etc...), and all this god talk begins to sound like a type of psychosis.  I heard many testimonies about personal visits and conversations from God by people in AA meetings.  I was scared that such delusional people were, not just walking the streets, but approved of by society.
• they are, in no way, superior to me in being capable of being honest with myself. Not only am I incapable of being rigorously honest, but I'm naturally incapable of even grasping it!  I was evidently born defective mentally, and cannot operate at the high plane of mental functioning that average AA members are able.  And even more, I'm so stunted intellectually and/or morally that I'm incapable of realizing it!
• they were wasting half their lives at AA meetings in dark damp church basements where all anyone ever talks about is how great the program is, how close to death they were, and how they would be dead if it weren't for AA.  Say it enough times, and people will believe it, maybe, is what they are shooting for.  This is also called "brainwashing."  Look into it.

 "suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders"

I guess my doctors are all incompetent.  I must be bipolar or schizophrenic and they missed it.  Maybe I should trust AA instead of them, especially since they're so rigorously honest, unlike my physicians.

"many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest."

So all you have to do to succeed at AA is have the capability of being honest.  I guess "honest" really in the language that AA uses means "gullible."  It certainly doesn't mean believing the truth.  It means believing the lies that AA tells you, and then spouting off constantly about how wonderfully it works.

This mean-spirited, "kick 'em when their down," attitude is common to christian fundamentalists.  It's not the version of Christianity taught in the older, more traditional forms of Catholicism, Protestantism, or other religions.  The christian "born again" fundamentalists are a sick, twisted, selfish, and hateful lot.

I don't know which is more shocking to me:  that society has such a beneficent view of the AA, or that people in AA can be such gullible idiots.  Society doesn't really know that much about AA.  Most people only know of someone who has gone to meetings.  If they had gone themselves, or have read the lunatic rantings of Bill W. in the "Big Book" that is read like scripture in every meeting and followed with blind obedience, I'm sure they would think differently.

The sad fact of the matter is that there are many people truly helpless at the hands of alcohol.  They are decent people who, for some reason, cannot stop drinking.  They are suckered into the scam that AA will save them, if only they are subservient enough and give up all critical reasoning ability.  Why trust medical researchers and physicians, when you can trust a former drunk's uncritical, uneducated religious rantings in the basement of a church?  The fact that AA preys on these, the real "unfortunates," is the worst aspect of this entire sham.