He's got a point...

Drunks don't know when to quit, can't limit their intake. If you have to think/plan moderation, you can't do it.
(or you can do it just long enough to get yourself in REALLY big trouble).

As a recovering alcoholic AND an atheist, the Shaw quote is interesting to me on a lot of levels. Alcohol (like religion) tends to narrow perspectives; Moreover, gives you a kind of tunnel vision where the main thing you think about is the next big binge (or in the case of the Religious, consider how they really denigrate this life in focusing on the big reward of Heaven in the afterlife).

It's an addiction. In the case of alcohol, there may be a genetic pre-disposition to it. I know that I love to drink--anything, really; diet coke, iced tea, whatever.
Even as a kid my mom would deliberately move my drink away from me at meals and make me eat my food FIRST before she would let me wash it down with a beverage.
That odd oral compulsion mixed with alcohol was bound to lead to disaster.

I suspect, though, the reason some--painfully few, though--religious people become atheists is not unlike the reason some drunks dry out and recover to lives of semi-sane sobriety again...it "doesn't work for them" any longer. The negatives begin to outweigh the positives, it becomes a barrier to real growth and progress in life, in relationships, etc.

Yeah, I attend AA. Yes, in AA meetings I'm a very much in-the-closet atheist. My real path to recovery has been much more thanks to the pioneering work of Jack Trimpey than Bill W. Rational Recovery (www.rational.org) helped me find a way to achieve sobriety without swapping one delusion (raging, in-denial alcoholism) with another (Gawd). But the folks in AA are a real diverse crowd; yes, there are plenty of God-botherers there, and those heavy "God" meetings really make me roll my eyes, at least mentally. Those are the meetings where I usually sit with my arms folded, staring intently at the back of the chair in front of me. But sometimes--often enough really, people drop the God-talk and just tell there stories like ordinary, fallible human beings, and there's real connection and human understanding there, and THAT's why I keep coming back....i care about people's stories, not about those programmatic "Steps" (I can't get past Step 1, for obvious reasons--but it's good enough for me). Jack Trimpey writes that "some of you may have to play 'the recovery game' and attend AA, but you also have to get better", and RR shows how to do it. RR can work for religious people, too, but RR and SOS (Secular Organizations for Sobriety) are real lifesavers for atheists batting a substance-abuse addiction.

Too many atheists with still drink/drug themselves to death because AA is so much better known and is moreover keen on promoting the idea that their way is the only way that works--which is bollocks--and they will NOT refer an atheist to RR or SOS, nor do courts recognize RR or SOS as valid, secular alternatives to the AA monopoly.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about AA. I know it helps a lot of the people in the meetings I attend, and I do recognize that the sobriety we share and all strive for has been a VERY GOOD THING in all our lives, regardless if a Higher Power had anything to do with it or not. I can mentally secularize at least some of the AA "message", mostly because I'm a creative, Liberal-arts trained kind of person.

One thing I've really noticed is that once I threw away my beer goggles, life really did become a whole lot richer and fuller and I became more even keeled and less bitterly pessimistic all the time. I still tilt that way naturally, so it's an especially good thing someone with my sunny disposition stays clear of alcohol.

Atheist forums like this one and others on the web are a great service to "recovering religionists", because, like recovery programs from various and sundry drug additions, it shows the former addict a different way of thinking and a new and better way of living life on its own terms.
One of the funniest pictures I saw was of a goth-esque woman wearing a tattered gray t-shirt looking mildly pissed off, smoking a cigarette, with the words "Recovering Catholic" written on the t-shirt. That was laugh-out-loud funny for me.

Thanks for the thought-provoking post.
-JJR

If your statement is that alcoholics are more sensible than religious people, I would have to disagree, I think they're both loons. While too much religion may stunt your mental developement and cause you to act crazy too much alcohol can do the same and has the well known effect of poisoning the liver (and does anyone really considder drunks sane? I admit watching someone come back to the dorms plastered and watching as they try to insert their key into the door is ammusing, but that's not the point). I would also disagree that alcoholics know when to stop, if they did, they wouldn't be alcoholics, they'd be heavy drinkers. That's why institutions like AA exist. Maybe there needs to be that kind of place for people seeking to recover from religion?

I've never understood what people see in alchohol. You get drunk and then you have to contend with who/what you slept with the previous night. Plus it tastes nasty, way too bitter.

I appreciate the point. Many's the time I've passed by a bar at midday and seen guys drinking beer and laughing, and wished I could be in there too.

Sounds like someone has read Dostoevsky...

"You better start giving me some inner peace before I mop the floor with you." - Homer S.

or

"Pinky, you excel at random." - the Brain