In today’s podcast we meet Yvonne H. from the Mainely Agnostics Group in Portland, Maine. The group celebrated its first anniversary in June of this year, which pleased Yvonne a great deal. It was here where she learned to become comfortable with following her own path in the program, and as a result she is sober and […]

It was nice to catch up with Benn and talk about Step Ten, the first of the three maintenance steps. This step calls for us to continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong, to promptly admit it. It can be done as a review at the end of the day, or as a […]

Jeb B. is a founding member of the Freethinkers in AA Group in Denver, Colorado. The group meets Monday nights from 6:30 pm to 7:45 pm, and Saturday morning from 9:30 am to 10:45 am. Both are open meetings and held at the Secular Hub located at 3100 Downing Street in Denver. However, you won’t find […]

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure to start my day with a cup of coffee and a chat with an AA friend, Cope C. from the Many Paths group in Urbana, Illinois. Cope does a lot of work here at AA Beyond Belief, helping with design and many of the images that we use […]

Ed grew up in New York in a typical New York family with the typical New York dysfunction. As a teenager, he somehow avoided the rite of passage of  getting drunk at keggers in the park, and it wasn’t until after he had been in college for six months that he began to experience heavy drinking. By the time he was 25, he […]

There were exactly three occasions when I saw my father cry; the night he learned that his grandmother died, the night his wife (my mother) died, and the day I told him that I was an alcoholic. I was in my 20’s and living on my own, and though my father knew in a general […]

Last week we published Mark C.’s story in which he described from his own experience, the insidious progression of alcoholism and the challenge he faced as an atheist in AA. Today, we are posting a podcast that goes into more detail with what Mark describes as a “holy war” at his home group, and how he learned to […]

Pat N. will be a keynote speaker at the We Agnostics, Atheists and Freethinkers International AA Convention that will be held in Austin, Texas from November 11th through the 13th of this year, and he was kind enough to visit with me for a podcast to share a little of his story, and to talk […]

Chris grew up the son of an Anglican priest in a city in Saskatchewan originally founded as a temperance colony. At the time he started drinking as a teenager, there were a lot of legal restrictions with respect to alcohol—a legacy of the temperance movement. When he went to Japan in 1985 as an exchange student, he found a society that […]

When I first met Erica in March of 2015, her confidence was shaken, her sobriety was fragile, and she was facing a life or death situation. She needed to stop drinking, and having experienced past success in AA, she felt it was still her best hope. Yet, something was different this time, and it frightened her. She no longer felt that […]