Is there already a Bloggers Anonymous? I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

Mona over at Art of the Possible thinks that Alcoholics Anonymous's "higher power" rhetoric makes it illegitimate for courts to require that alcoholics attend AA meetings:

If you or a loved one had a problem with: alcohol, narcotics, gambling, overeating, spending or any of the myriad frailties that afflict mankind, would you seek to resolve the problem by turning your/their will and lives over to the care of a toilet? Admit to a Styrofoam cup the exact nature of the person’s wrongs? Or be entirely ready to have a doorknob remove character defects? How about humbly beseeching said toilet/Styrofoam cup/doorknob to remove their shortcomings? Or admonishing a loved one that they need to seek through prayer and meditation to improve their conscious contact with a support group, praying only to the group for knowledge of the group’s will and the power to carry that out?

Think that all sounds far-fetched and self-evidently absurd? Well, the ubiquitous 12 Step model of “recovery” from various addictions — which is modeled on the original such, Alcoholics Anonymous — is predicated on this nonsense (all such programs will hereinafter be referred to collectively as “XA”) in order to lamely claim the program is not manifestly religious...

No reasonable reading of [the Twelve Steps] admonitions can be described as other than religious (and, indeed, they are the retooled tenets of an explicitly Christian, 20th century religious movement, to which both founders of AA belonged); yet XA members, probation officers, and corrections officials routinely insist that because the “Higher Power” of the Steps (HP) can even be, oh, say, a toilet, an atheist can “work the Steps.”

Entrusting one's life to a higher power can be a religious act, but mostly it's just a sensible one. Addicts understand better than anyone that the idea of a self-reliant will is a fiction. "Nobody needed booze before they started drinking," says an AOTP commenter. True enough, but a man can't separate out the part of himself that wants alcohol from the part that doesn't; you can't unbake a cake. Given that an addict, like anyone else, is a mixture of competing influences, some of which are natural and others of which used to be foreign but have since become as good as natural, trying to parse out the good from the bad in the hopes of finding a purer, stronger self could never work. Even absent theological reasons to give yourself up to God, relying on a higher power makes good atheistic sense.

I was reminded of Mona's old-by-blogospheric-standards post when I saw this forehead-slapper of a WaPo headline: 'Many recovering alcoholics depend on coffee, cigarettes.'