This website contains age-restricted materials including nudity and explicit depictions of sexual activity.
By entering, you affirm that you are at least 18 years of age or the age of majority in the jurisdiction you are accessing the website from and you consent to viewing sexually explicit content.
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.