1. We admitted we were powerless over addiction—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood God.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all areas of our lives.

Possible solutions to this conflict:

• avoid AA groups completely
• attend, but ignore anything that's overtly religious, including 4 of the 12 steps
• whenever "god" or "higher power" is mentioned, substitute:
  • "my conscience" or "my superego"
    (after all, in relgious people, it's the superego that is responsible for generating the religious feelings... instead of saying "my superego is in contact with god", say "my superego is [the part of me that's creating the idea of] god")
  • "group conscience" — the collective conscience of the recovery group, the group-as-a-relationship
  • "mother nature" or "science" or something unexplained that's bigger than themselves

other pages about this

• rather long page