Demon Alcohol

I firmly believe the 12 Steps to be Divinely inspired.  How lucky are we to be born after Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob? 

Alcoholism is as old as, well... alcohol.  The day the very first vintner stepped on the very first fermented grape, wine was born.  So too was born the first alcoholic.  Ever since that day, millions … billions of people have suffered under the hopeless sea of addiction.  People lived out their wretched lives, day in, day out, drowning in their despair.  A living hell with no rest or respite.  

Today there is hope.  We have the fortune of reprieve, simply because two guys got together 70 years ago, touched by the hand of God, and figured out Alcoholics Anonymous.  

There exists a school of thought that believes alcoholism (along with libertine and suicidal personalities) results from demonic agencies.  Not to say that alcoholics are “possessed,” but only to suppose that in a weakened state of spirituality, we become defenseless to demonic influence.  In the text Biblical Demonology, Unger states, “evil does not lie in the body but in the mind, to say that it is ‘only disease or insanity’ is merely to state the fact of the disorder, and make no attempt to name its cause.”

This statement smacks of AA philosophy.  We believe, wholeheartedly, that our addiction is not our problem, rather a symptom of a bigger issue.  It is the physical manifestation of a greater hurt, wound, demon, or evil that has been visited upon our psyche. Step 1 is the only step that deals with our physical dependencies, the following 11 steps address the moral, social, and psychological disorders (or "demons" if you will) that we've fought so hard to mask by way of our substance abuse.  In Recovery, we claim our disease as a fact of the disorder and name our condition by working through the 12 Steps.

Amazingly, the only hope for overcoming our malady arrives  via  strengthening our spiritual state by maintaining a conscious contact with God, the ultimate source of benevolence and destroyer of all things evil. 

Coincidence? Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob didn't think so.

Food for thought.