And literally thousands of people did just that. On the Home Page we added a message that read, “Want an agnostic AA group in your town or city? Click here”. Moreover, two important things were launched in April 2013.įirst, AA Agnostica decided to help nonbelievers start their own agnostic AA meetings. And all of this is compared to 62 articles the previous year and 46 in each of the first two years of AA Agnostica. For instance, in the period between mid-June 2014 and mid-June 2015 a total of 94 articles were published, written by 50 different people. Over the next few years, we became rather busy. The growth of the website was on its way. These were written by twenty-two people from three countries: Great Britain, Canada and the United States. Nevertheless, in the first year, forty-six articles were published on AA Agnostica. Certainly, none that invited recovering alcoholics and addicts to write articles. There are very few sites that invite people to share their experience, strength and hope and at the time I didn’t know of a single such website. Early on I decided to invite people to post articles on the website. Okay, back to the first days of AA Agnostica. The book contains 20 mostly secular versions of the 12 Steps, four interpretations of each one of them and an article, “The Origins of the 12 Steps”. Published in early 2013 it is called The Little Book – A Collection of Alternative 12 Steps (with a second edition and a French version, Le petit livre jaune, published earlier this year). Indeed, I was inspired by the interest in the secular 12 steps to write a book on the topic. The Alternative 12 Steps (there are six different versions on the website these days) is the most popular menu item for people visiting AA Agnostica: roughly 150,000 viewers over the past decade, and that’s forty or so each and every day. In the early months of the website, there was plenty of pressure to remove a secular version of the 12 Steps that I had added to the menu. After a legal challenge that lasted roughly six years, we were allowed back in in early 2017. With a “God” – or a “Him” (this deity is both Christian and male) – in six of the 12 steps, a secular version of these steps was not allowed by the GTAI.
In the conference-approved Big Book, published a million years ago, God is an essential part of recovery.
Traditional AA can be rather dogmatic, and in Toronto it certainly was way back then. The groups were expelled from the GTAI for one simple reason: we used a secular version of the 12 Steps. It was initially called AA Toronto Agnostics and it was created simply to let people know about the times and locations of two agnostic meetings, Beyond Belief and We Agnostics, after the groups had been booted out of the Greater Toronto Area Intergroup (GTAI).Īt the time these were the only two secular AA groups in all of Canada. The website was created by me and another person on June 15, 2011.
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