Atheism

But it says its alcohol free beer on the bottle?

In my experience AA tries to exchange ones addiction to alcohol to an addiction to religion. I've noted the most feverously religious people I know became that way after AA. Religion preys on the most susceptible.

I've long complained that Christians push the queer community to the bottle then sell us their god as the solution.

The fact that one of the few institutions that exists independently to help people to get free of the crippling addiction to alcohol does so by shoving god down your throat is such an amazing let down.

Dunno if it helps at all, but the success rate for people who go through AA is the same rate as people who do it by themselves.

https://smartrecovery.org/

I put up with it for long enough to get the help I needed, but I can't stand it either. At least there were enough supportive people with actual advice kicking around. I can't attest to every community, but if you want it bad enough, it's probably worth the price of admission for the few months it takes to break the habit.

I got three years a couple months ago, and I'm not sure I would have made it without the support, but I also regret that the program teaches that you don't have the power to do it without god, just a fun reminder of how these people prey on the vulnerable.

I'm sorry about your friend, I know my life could have ended the same way pretty easily the way I was going.

I'm surprised there isn't some NHS thing. They have support groups for dieting so I would have thought there would have been one for alcoholism given how much damage it does to people and how much it must cost the NHS every year.

Sorry for the loss of your friend.

Not the original by any stretch. The story is that he made the wine because they ran out of wine while the party was still going. He just didn't want his friend's wedding reception to flop. But the host was still somewhat embarrassed because everybody liked the new wine so much more and said "hey dummy, don't you know you're supposed to serve the quality wine first, and the shit wine after we're too drunk to care?"

Pretty sure we were guzzling hooch since those first monkeys discovered a pile of half rotten fruit, ate it, vomited, then ate the rest and woke up with a prehistoric hangover. JC was just a garden variety bootlegger

Yeah I don't think they knew how to make grape juice not alcoholic back then. Grape juice just does that unless you pasteurize it, which was discovered in the 1800s by an American Methodist. It certainly wasn't low enough alcohol to be consumed by people on the wagon unless it was very fresh.

Yeah, looking at Wikipedia, the old testament says to give the dying wine so they forget their pain, you ain't getting that from kombucha. It looks like the Sumerian goddess of beer was said to be the result of a drunken hookup between a king and Ishtar, and like the Egyptians were culturally celebrating with beer, wine, and drunkenness using beers of comparable alcohol content to modern day (5% ABV).

Meanwhile here there's an estimate of Romans drinking about half a liter of undiluted wine a day. They mixed it 50/50 with water typically, which in a modern wine would put it around a modern beer in potency. We can assume it's reasonably potent wine specifically because those drinking undiluted wine in Rome faced social stigma associated with alcoholism.

I'm specifically avoiding sources speaking on Jewish history here because when I looked the Christians outnumbered the academics by a lot, which makes sense as teetotaling Protestants have issues with the amount of wine in Christianity.

Bartender: Enough drinking, mate, I'm cutting you off, just water for you from now on.

Jesus (the fairytale one): Aw, man, come on...

I always disliked that arguement because it suggests that you wouldn't have such a good life had you not had to struggle first. A claim for which there is no evidence.

I think it's entirely possible that there are entities more intelligent than humans (let's face it the bar isn't very high) but I think that's different to "higher intelligence" an entity of God like capability, I don't think that high IQ necessarily grants you access to alter the fundamental laws of reality.

What makes you think that the universe is infinite?

I'm intellgent, and I'm high.

If you are an addict, you've already surrendered to a Higher Power

This is defeatist bullshit. And yes, before anyone says it, I know from personal experience.

My partner utilized SMART Recovery when he was getting sober. It's science based and completely free of religion

Credit where credit is due. Going by newton.marvel’s logic, god gave OP alcoholism.

Don't overlook all of the death and suffering caused in his name!

He allegedly killed everything on the planet except for two of each creature, amongst a slew of other murders.

He made them alcoholic!