This is marked as a "top highlight." Add me to the list. As a 20-year sober member with a couple of graduate degrees, I related to not only this, but most of what you wrote. I could also rattle off the names of at least 10 long-term members who would bristle at the idea that AA doesn't work for some people, or, worse, that other things could, would and do. They, like so many others, treat AA and its literature as some kind of gospel. When they do, I am that asshole. When they put a box around a god (lowercase intentional) "as we understood him" that limits it to a Judaeo-Christian capital "G" god, I blow that box up. With all those years, you'd think they'd have developed a greater perspective, but for too many, their perspective has narrowed just a single very fine line. No wonder so many few us as a cult.