Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

STEP TWO

ideas. We who had won so handsomely in a walk turned
into all-time losers. We saw that we had to reconsider or
die. We found many in A.A. who once thought as we did.
They helped us to get down to our right size. By their ex-
ample they showed us that humility and intellect could be
compatible, provided we placed humility first. When we
began to do that, we received the gift of faith, a faith which
works. This faith is for you, too."

Another crowd of A.A.'s says: "We were plumb disgust-
ed with religion and all its works. The Bible, we said, was
full of nonsense; we could cite it chapter and verse, and we
couldn't see the Beatitudes for the ‘begats.' In spots its mo-
rality was impossibly good; in others it seemed impossibly
bad. But it was the morality of the religionists themselves
that really got us down. We gloated over the hypocrisy,
bigotry, and crushing self-righteousness that clung to so
many ‘believers' even in their Sunday best. How we loved
to shout the damaging fact that millions of the ‘good men
of religion' were still killing one another off in the name
of God. This all meant, of course, that we had substituted
negative for positive thinking. After we came to A.A., we
had to recognize that this trait had been an ego-feeding
proposition. In belaboring the sins of some religious peo-
ple, we could feel superior to all of them. Moreover, we
could avoid looking at some of our own shortcomings.
Self-righteousness, the very thing that we had contemp-
tuously condemned in others, was our own besetting evil.
This phony form of respectability was our undoing, so
far as faith was concerned. But finally, driven to A.A., we
learned better.