Aa history Lovers 2010 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page
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> hardly alone in treating the word amends as a singular noun, or even > alternating between singular and plural interpretations of the word. > > Uncertainty over how to treat amends is far from new. The Oxford English > Dictionary has examples of amends used in a distinctly singular fashion all
> the way back to the fifteenth century. The English essayist Joseph Addison > wrote of making "an honorable amends," and T. S. Eliot, in his poem > "Portrait of a Lady," posed the question, "How can I make a cowardly amends
> / For what she has said to me?" > > Amends came into English from the Old French word amendes, meaning "fines" > or "penalties," the plural of amende, meaning "reparation." But while the > singular form persisted in French, it dropped out of English, leaving us > with a plural noun that has no proper singular equivalent. Something similar
> happened with other words in the language, like alms, odds, pains and > riches. > > Noah Webster tried to sort out this confusion in his 1789 book, > "Dissertations on the English Language." Webster held that "amends may > properly be considered as in the singular number," but concluded that > judgment of the word as singular or plural was ultimately "at the choice of > the writer." He saw the word means as a parallel case: if means expresses a > single action to achieve a result, it can be thought of as singular despite > the -s ending, but if it encompasses more than one action, it can take the > plural reading. > > Sadly, idioms don't always accord with logical argumentation. The singular > version of means survives in the frozen phrase, a means to an end, but > singular amends has never made much headway in standard English. Make an > amends is vastly outnumbered by make amends in written use, though it is > likely more popular in everyday speech, as Tiger Woods demonstrated when he > went off-script. Notwithstanding illustrious predecessors like Addison and > Eliot, it's best to make amends and not an amends, lest your act of > contrition turn into a grammatical squabble. > =============================================
From: Dougbert . . . . . . . . . . . . 10/17/2010 9:57:00 AM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Hi history lovers, Do you have any history about this meeting format? How many of this type of meetings exist? I need evidence that this type of meeting does exist and is working.
request
they provide me a time and space for a "Free Thinkers" meeting. As I understand it . . . Free Thinkers meetings are A.A. meetings that allow Buddhists, Hindus,
Muslims, Jews, and Christians to find a way to make the 12 steps help bring about the recovery of people who are skeptical about traditional Christian dogmas. I know there are a lot of these type of meetings in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. But this will be the first in ultra-conservative Christian Orange County, California. Can anybody provide me with a meeting format and how to structure and run this type of meeting? I need some examples of what Free Thinkers do in an A.A. meeting so I can show proof they do exist, and we should have one. Any help would be appreciated. Metta, Deep Bows, dougbert spiritual warrior IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 6953. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: Free Thinkers meetings From: Laurence Holbrook . . . . . . . . . . . . 10/17/2010 7:33:00 PM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII From Laurence Holbrook, Anders Byström, Jim S. (planternva2000), Michael Dunn,
pvttimt, Charley Bill, Dick Chalue, and David G (chiefret1995) - - - - From: "Laurence Holbrook" (email at LaurenceHolbrook.com) Live & learn - a google search turned up hundreds of Freethinkers groups - very
few had anything to do with recovery specifically. Interesting to note that one such group, Freethinkers of Colorado Springs, had a
speaker from SMART Recovery to address the group earlier this year: http://www.freethinkerscs.com/?q=node/431 More pertinently, I did find a some AA Freethinkers: http://www.aaagnostics.org/ and http://www.aa-freethinkers.org/ There is also an Agnostic AA NYC group with a preamble, steps etc - virtually every site I checked acknowledged they got information from this NYC group: http://agnosticaanyc.org/ The NYC group posted 'scripts' that might be helpful: http://agnosticaanyc.org/documents.html And they also had a fairly extensive meeting list that one might 'luck out' and
finding a close by meeting: http://agnosticaanyc.org/worldwide.html And they did have an email address for questions and comments: postmaster@agnosticaanyc.org Hope this info is helpful Larry - - - - From: Anders Byström (agbystrom at gmail.com) Hiya Metta! I live in Sweden and one difference I've experienced between the meetings in Sweden and the US is that we almost never end our meetings with the Lord's Prayer, otherwise it's pretty much the same. Some ppl in the meetings talk about
"God" others use "Higher Power" and etc., etc. I use the word "God" mostly for
convenience cause I'm a bit lazy .... but by that word I don't imply any Christian view of God, and I often state that at meetings to show newcomers that's ok.
makes
that very clear. So by that I would like to think that any real AA meeting is what you would call a Free Thinkers meeting. But I kinda catch on to what you say though. Cause from time to time in the Swedish fellowship we've had groups that have tried to "make" AA Christian - which it is not. We are a Fellowship of the Spirit, NOT a society of religious dogma. So if you have concerns, why not just set up a meeting that adhere to AA's Traditions and call it for what it is - an AA meeting? Love and Service Anders Byström Gothenburg, Sweden
yahoo.com) I apologize in advance if this offends anyone, but I feel compelled to answer
from my own personal experience. The writer gives the impression that AA meetings are for Christians only, probably since the word "God" is used quite frequently. In my 3+ decades of unbroken AA membership I've been privileged to sponsor a Laotian immigrant who
is a Buddhist, An Iranian immigrant who is a Muslim, a Catholic priest, all of whom are still sober, and a Jew, who died sober. I also correspond with a sober Sikh.
the Twelve Steps. Jim S. - - - - From: Michael Dunn In my work, every year for 25 years I traveled to Chicago in the fall for 10 days. I attended several Atheist/Agnostic meeting there. See: http://www.chicagoaa.org/meetings/
Quad A
groups - AA for Atheists and Agnostics. I'm sure that site has a contact email, they should be able and willing to help
you. Michael - - - - From: (pvttimt at aol.com) Based on my interpretation of Traditions Four and Five, it strikes me that you
can run your meeting any darn way you please, as long as it doesn't affect AA as
a whole, or other groups. As for the club, if they won't give you time or space, go set it up someplace else. - - - - From: Charley Bill Hi Dogbert, We do indeed have meetings in Orange County that stray from the Christian-centric AA. I attend one on Fridays at 8 in Cypress. It is a book study meeting and we study anything that will help us understand and work a good
recovery program. I see a "We Agnostics" in Cypress at 8 on Mondays at 5691 Vonnie Lane near Walker and Lincoln. There used to be several agnostic/atheist meetings in this location. I know several members who are not Christians in any sense who are fine AA members. It can be done in Orange County. This meeting and probably others are already in existence and are listed in the
directory found at http://www.oc-aa.org/default.htm If you have any flack at all from the Club (please note there are no "AA" Clubs
-- the Fellowship does not have clubs -- see the Traditions) I think you would
be better off starting the meeting in a room at a church. Find one that already
hosts an AA or Alanon meeting or both and ask them for a room. Be sure you can
afford the contribution they expect. You just say it is for an AA meeting and
do the other advertising/publicity on the club bulletin board and in the monthly bulletin from the Central Office, and notices to all meetings in your area of interest. Please let me know how things work out. If you'd like to come with us on Friday
nights in Cypress, let me know and I'll give you address, directions, etc. If you want more coaching on how to open a new meeting, please write me direct at my home email address: - - - - From: Dick Chalue (dickchalue at yahoo.com) Why not use the regular format? As it is stated MANY times IN THE BIG BOOK, "GOD
AS WE UNDERSTAND HIM" is YOUR conception of God NOT anybody else's God but YOURS. Religion is the politics of spirituality and this is a spiritual program, not religious. Dick Chalue - - - - From: "chiefret1995" (chiefret1995 at yahoo.com) I've never hear of Free Thinkers meetings. It's my understanding that "God as we
understood him" is all inclusive and excludes no one's particular beliefs. I know of no Christian dogma in AA but I have heard of it in some meetings, meetings which usually don't last long.
From: Tom Hickcox . . . . . . . . . . . . 10/19/2010 10:18:00 PM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII I use AAWL/ABSI daily and have done so for a while. It is a part of my daily P&M, comes in handy when I need to come up with a topic when I chair, and is useful as a quick reference for sharing at meetings.
tells us, "It is felt that this material may become an aid to individual meditation and a stimulant to group discussion, and may well lead to a still wider reading of all our literature." At the time of publication, the three books he described as A.A.'s basic texts, the Big Book, 12x12, and A.A. Comes of Age, were in use and he was communicating with the membership regularly thru the A.A. Grapevine. What was the need for yet another book? That said, I assume he chose what went into the book, or am I mistaken? If Bill didn't, who did? What were his views on the final product? He died shortly after its publication. Given his general decline in health, I doubt that he could promote it very vigorously. Tommy H in Baton Rouge IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 6955. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: Make amends? or make an amends? New York Times article From: Steve Flower . . . . . . . . . . . . 10/17/2010 4:52:00 PM
(steve1290 at gmail.com) This is one of those many, many things that make my brain itch in meetings. I "make amends," whether I am speaking of one thing/person combination or a dozen. "To make amends" is a single action, not a set of actions. I do not "make an amend" to one person and then "make several amends" to multiple persons. The idiom is "make amends," whether the thing being dealt with is singular or plural.
contract...") meaning to correct or change. The thing which happens when I amend a contract is "an amendment" or "some amendments." But "making amends" is not the creation of "amendments," either. "Amends" is a noun, singular or plural. Dictionary.com suggestions this: amends –noun ( used with a singular or plural verb ) 1. reparation or compensation for a loss, damage, or injury of any kind; recompense.
I (hopefully) wouldn't say that I was making restitution*s* ... I would make restitution, whether to one person or several. In the same way, "making amends"
is a singular act towards one or many subjects. Perhaps someone with more training in language arts could explain it better. But regardless: please, please, please - there is no such thing as "an amend."
Gently but firmly correct those who are sure they believe otherwise. Steve Flower Urbana, Illinois - - - - From: "J. Lobdell" (jlobdell54 at hotmail.com) On the "an amends" matter, the phrase in any form is so largely used in A.A.,
and so little mostly outside A.A., and amends so confused with the act of amending, that it's hard to come to any conclusion of more than historical interest -- in which connection it might be pointed out that amends (or an amende honorable) were historically usually made openly and publicly, or announced publicly, which seems to continue in one of Bill W's examples (of the
man who stood up and apologized to the man he had wronged before the whole congregation). Since the medieval form is amendes (Fr), where the final -s- is silent unless followed by a non-aspirated vowel, there was no difference in pronunciation between singular and plural until just about Shakespeare's time.
alcoholic) had been willing to make amends to Aaron Burr (who quite possibly inherited the tendency toward alcoholism from his grandmother, a Hopkins by birth, and may well have been an active alcoholic), the famous duel might never
have taken place -- but then, drinking alcoholics have never been good at making
amends. (Amend[e]s honorable[s] were the remedy against a duel). - - - - From: Dov W (dovwcom at gmail.com) I too am English and I too have a limited grasp of the language, but at one time
I counted myself among the believers that the answer to Life the Universe and
Everything in life lies in the Big Book. I am no longer as convinced as I was,
but, as it happens, the Big Book does shed interesting light on the singular usage of nouns that always take the plural form. One needs look no further than "The Doctor's Opinion" for discussion of "a means
to an end" where "means" (even though it ends in an s) is treated as a singular
noun: "In the course of his third treatment he acquired certain ideas concerning a possible means of recovery". The moral of the story may be that when it comes to the English language appearances can sometimes be deceptive. - - - - From: bruceken@aol.com (bruceken at aol.com) I'll answer that as soon as I put on my pajamas. (Then I'll start by first trying to figure out why "my pajamas are" instead of "my pajamas is.") Bruce K. IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 6956. . . . . . . . . . . . How many angels can stand on the head of a pin? From: Dov W . . . . . . . . . . . . 10/17/2010 5:53:00 PM
and
Glenn C. - - - - Original question from Laurie Andrews (jennylaurie1 at hotmail.com) And how many angels exactly can stand on the head of a pin? - - - - From: edgarc@aol.com (edgarc at aol.com) Show me the pin . . . - - - - From: Dov W (dovwcom at gmail.com) As for the question of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, nothing obvious comes to mind from the Big Book, but I would humbly suggest that the answer would be less angels if they are drunk and more angels if they are sober.
From: Jonathan Lanham-Cook (lanhamcook at gmail.com) 37 ... apparently :-) - - - - From: "J. Lobdell" (jlobdell54 at hotmail.com) Though it has come to be a proverbial attack on pedantic accuracy, the question
about angels on the head of a pin (or dancing on the point of a needle) actually
encapsulates a matter of great importance in the spiritual life, which is the
relationship of the spiritual and the physical. - - - - From: Glenn Chesnut (glennccc at sbcglobal.net) Modern people who want to make fun of the nit-picking quality of some medieval
theology, like to say that people in the medieval European universities used to sit around arguing about how many angels could stand on the head of a pin. In fact, no medieval theology professors ever put this question up for a formal
disputation among their students, because the answer was too simple. Each angel
was "pure form" and contained no "matter." Things that contained no matter had
no spatial location. Therefore you couldn't say that an angel was actually located anywhere in space, even though the angel (as good Swedenborgians later on also knew) could communicate with an individual human being who was located at a specific physical location. Or as Jared Lobdell put it in modern fashion, angels were purely spiritual beings, who were not bound into the physical fabric of the kind of space and time which scientists talk about their formulas. Angels existed up in that "fourth dimension of existence" of which the Big Book spoke on pages 8 and 25 ("I was soon to be catapulted into what I like to call the fourth dimension of existence" and "we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed"). Real medieval disputations were held over questions that were far more intellectually challenging :-) For example, if a mouse creeps into a church and climbs up to the tabernacle which contains a piece of the consecrated communion bread, and eats it, has the church mouse eaten the body of Christ? If you say "yes," then the Catholic communion service is cannibalism. If you say "no," because the mouse has no Christian faith, then you are claiming that the physical presence of Christ in the bread and wine is merely subjective, and instead of being a good Roman Catholic, you have become a Zwinglian Protestant of the worst sort :-) Medieval alcoholics loved to sit around in medieval inns and drink pint after
pint of good brown ale, and argue about this kind of nit-picking question. If they had had access to the internet, I am sure they would have had even more fun! IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 6957. . . . . . . . . . . . RE: A.A. Way of Life/As Bill Sees It From: J. Lobdell . . . . . . . . . . . . 10/21/2010 9:03:00 AM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII The story I've heard is that Bill originally intended The A.A. Way of Life to be
something along the lines of Living Sober -- practical suggestions for living
the sober (A.A.) way of life -- and he looked through his materials from over
the years to see what he had. But he was close to seventy years old, not in very good health, and with time
breathing over his shoulder, he put book excerpts and notes from letters together as a kind of (what the French would call) livre de pensee ("thought-book" almost like the old "commonplace-book"), so it would get done
and published before his death. > To: AAHistoryLovers@yahoogroups.com > From: cometkazie1@cox.net > Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:18:10 -0500 > Subject: [AAHistoryLovers] A.A. Way of Life/As Bill Sees It > > I use AAWL/ABSI daily and have done so for a while. It is a part of > my daily P&M, comes in handy when I need to come up with a topic when > I chair, and is useful as a quick reference for sharing at meetings. > > I am wondering what prompted its production. In the forward Bill > tells us, "It is felt that this material may become an aid to > individual meditation and a stimulant to group discussion, and may > well lead to a still wider reading of all our literature." > > At the time of publication, the three books he described as A.A.'s > basic texts, the Big Book, 12x12, and A.A. Comes of Age, were in use > and he was communicating with the membership regularly thru the A.A. > Grapevine. What was the need for yet another book? > > That said, I assume he chose what went into the book, or am I > mistaken? If Bill didn't, who did? What were his views on the final Yüklə 25,47 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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