Not God Quotes

“The need to escape the private prison of the narrow self is one of the themes that undergirds and finds expression in all the great religions of mankind.”
― Ernest Kurtz, Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous

“would keep Wilson going, always reaching out for unattainable goals, for only by so reaching would he attain what — hidden from him — were God’s goals. This acceptance that his dissatisfaction, that his very “thirst,” could be divine was one of Dowling’s great gifts to Bill Wilson and through him to Alcoholics Anonymous. Another was to prove less happy from the Jesuit’s own point of view. Bill spoke of his own difficulties in prayer and his continuing problem in conveying the meaning of his “spiritual experience” to other alcoholics. There was a move afoot within the fellowship just then, he told Dowling, to change that phrase in the Twelfth Step to “spiritual awakening” — it seemed to Bill an attempt to mask rather than to clarify the role of the divine in the alcoholic’s salvation. Tartly, Father Ed offered a succinct response: “If you can name it, it’s not God.” Years later, Wilson would paraphrase the expression back to Dowling as a partial explanation of his difficulties in accepting the Catholic faith.43 +”
― Ernest Kurtz, Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous

“finitude.”
― Ernest Kurtz, Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous

“Influenced by the events surrounding him, Bill Wilson began and ended his portrayal of A.A.’s Twelve Steps as “a way of life” by stressing the continuing necessity of the total deflation of even a raised “bottom” and the persistence in even the “recovering alcoholic” of childishness, immature grandiosity, and infantile defiance.”
― Ernest Kurtz, Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous