Beyond Belief: Agnostic Musings for 12 Step Life: Finally, Daily Reflections for Nonbelievers, Freethinkers & Everyone Book

When Joe C went looking for a secular daily reflection book for addicts and alcoholics he couldn't find one. That was frustrating. So, he thought, "What about writing one?" The idea was immediately dismissed. Didn't he joke for years about one day writing the definitive work of 12 Step Life: As Joe Sees It?

"I wondered," Joe recalls, "if the idea of a book wasn't an ego-feeding proposition. But I kept thinking about it and came to see the proposition as something more than an all-or-nothing scenario. What were the greatest ideas or musings I ever heard in recovery circles? Where did these ideas come from? What did I get out of them? This is how Beyond Belief: Agnostic Musings for 12 Step Life came to be."

In answering these questions, Joe realized that over 36 years of sobriety he had been to 10,000 meetings, utilized hundreds of resources—books, therapies, programs and exercises. Joe thought about what the top 500 best ideas, experiences and ways of approaching life he had learned in recovery. He evaluated what were the most profound or effective. From 500 ideas, came 500 short essays from which the 365 most cohesive were gathered together for this book.

The best ideas come from anywhere one explores with a playful and open mind, from skeptics and religious people, fundamentalists and doubters, economists and entertainers, philosophers and marathon runners, artists and sociologists, enduring truths from the ages and the crazy wisdom of the rooms. These ideas were not predicated on what to believe. They were concepts to entertain and exercises to try on for size. The collection wasn't a war of worldviews. These experiences and insights are beyond belief.

Beyond Belief contains an extensive Bibliography, End notes and an index of 120 subjects. The paperback offers a more contemporary language than most of the over 800,000 daily devotionals that are bought each year. The eBook version has over 1000 hyperlinks and may be the most interactive recovery tool so far this century.