Step 5

"Repentance is the activity of reviewing one's actions and feeling contrition or regret for past wrongs. It generally involves a commitment to personal change and resolving to live a more responsible and humane life. In religious contexts it usually refers to confession to God, ceasing sin against God in order to gain forgiveness or absolution. It typically includes an admission of guilt, a promise or resolve not to repeat the offense; an attempt to make restitution for the wrong, or in some way to reverse the harmful effects of the wrong where possible."

Of course, this is ignoring NoAAUK's suggestion(s). LOL!

NoAAUK,
agreed. AA is & was about a drunk & unemployed loser Wilson creating a group to earn a living & nothing more. Wilson copied Buchman s steps & methods meetings @ a members house. Buchman was also an unemployed loser who like Wilson couldn't hold a job. Buchman failed miserably @ any Minister post he held. He made the young male students @ Oxford very uncomfortable with his constant attempts to get the boys to confess & discuss their sexual experiences & feelings. I figure Buchman was trolling for sex hoping to find out a boy was a homosexual. Buchman was a homosexual but he did not live truthfully he was in the closet. Understandable for the times & his attempted Minister career. Using religion to exploit & manipulate people for financial, sexual or control gain is the oldest con in the world. So Wilson like Buchman used religion to live off of vulnerable followers. Nothing Wilson or Buchman said, wrote or told others to practice had anything to do with genuine spirituality or the good things in life such as decency & kindness to self & others. Both Wilson & Buchman were evil self serving individuals & they & what they did had nothing to do with God or anything good, decent or honorable. It has always been about losers like Wilson & Buchman getting over on people with jobs, homes & assets. It was about money, power, abuse, exploitation, manipulation & control nothing more.

"It seems plain that the grace of God will not enter to expel our destructive obsessions until we are willing to try this".

Wow.
It seems palin that God will not "enter" and do special favors for us unless we practice this cult religion ritual. Good catch. What a bunch of sick, self-deluded garbage.

MS,
I know. How can anyone take Wilson's billshit seriously? Wilson plainly knows when God will or will not enter another person's life or problems. Wilson knows everything so do AA members. They like Wilson were always telling my self & others what God wanted & how God felt & thought. Wilson was of course just lying he was copying Buchmans rap & lies. Both guys desperately needed a gig & to control people to live off of. What con is better than to rap you are a guru & have a special communication with God & know what God will or won't do & how God feels & thinks. Just a typical con using religion to exploit, manipulate & control. And just a typical con target group desperate & vulnerable addicts downtrodden & battered & easy to control. Buchmans targets were not as vulnerable so his cult shriveled up to tiny insignifcance. Wilson's cult & con outlasted & survived due to the target group. Wilson had better con instincts than Buchman.

Yeah. A woman at my wifes workplace went to a week long 'session' with a filthy rich Lady Guru from India. Cost her $5000 for a week of wisdom. 28 people attended. Do the math suckers.

extortion/blackmail. The trouble is most folks don't set out fully aware of the game they're stepping into (no pun intended). Most folks believe they are doing the right thing to relieve themselves of secrets thru confession in the catholic church, thru disclosure in the therapists office, or thru the telling of secret behavior with an AA sponsor.
The trouble is that the old human propensity to control & dominate people with the information obtained then spreads like a cancer in the back of the minds of everyone participating in this game. So you have poured out your guts to a sponsor in the hope that it will relieve the compulsion to ever drink again, when in fact, having no idea what that sponsor could, would, or might do with that information, is actually enough to make you want to drink again if you start to think about it. So instead of worrying about it, the good AA just follows suit....finding people to sponsor themselves so they too can be the beneficiary of someone elses secrets - thus having the same power another has over them.
And on it goes. I knew someone who took his 5th across the country to a complete stranger in an old AA clubhouse. He flew home afterward and never saw those folks again. That of course raises another whole set of questions.
Ideally, humans educate themselves and develpe an ethical system that is closely related to the golden rule and begin to practice that through out life. Eastern thought, western religions, humanism, no religion at all but a moral code all serve to guide us through life.
No one needs the 12 steps anymore.
There may have been a time and place, like 1935 for some of the principles of AA to help those drunken bums, but most of those practices are purely ritualistic now. Useless. Serve no real practical need or function.
AA is dead.

So, assuming one believes the bullshit of Step 4 the "fearless moral inventory" step (which doesn't have shit to do with acquiring an addiction, or recovering from one!), WHY would one have to verbally, or in writing, the "moral inventory" list of Step 4 to ANY HUMAN BEING in Step 5. I mean, if you write down you are a scum-sucking, bottom dweller in Step 4, and verbalize all that content in Step 5, you have just handed a "sponsor", or the cult-group, EVERYTHING THEY NEED TO USE AGAINST YOU (and put it on the Internet if someone wants!). WHY would anyone BE THAT FUCKING STUPID??? Or from a different perspective, as Melanie Solomon explains in "AA Not The Only Way", why does Step 4 only focus on the "wrongs"? What if you do something RIGHT (like stay sober another day!). I guess that would not be acceptable to verbalize in a "Step 5" revelation, would it?