This week we continue We Agnostics, next week we will finish this chapter up. 
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Honestly, im glad you keep posting this stuff weekly.
I read it, take it in.
Thank you for your doings.
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These pages were the start for me in finding some sort of a power greater than myself. It was interesting to realize that I had been having faith in things all along. That I had worshipped materialistic items and other people all my life. I truly thought i didnt havs faith in anything!
I learned that I had the ability to have faith and had the ability to worship, it was just placed onto the wrong things.
These pages were very much a turning point for me 
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Thank you Mandi 
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For a few days, “24 hours a day” has been dipping into this chapter. When I first got sober, I would pick a prompt, like the daily entry or a study guide question, and journal on it. So here is today’s entry and my thoughts:
Thought for the Day
“Who are you to say there is no God? This challenge comes to all of us. Are we capable of denying that there is a design and purpose in all of life as we know it? Or are we willing to admit that faith in some kind of Divine Principle is a part of our make-up, just as much as the feeling we have for a friend? We find a great Reality deep down within us, if we face ourselves as we really are. In the last analysis, it is only there that God may be found. When we find this Reality within us, we are restored to our right minds.” Have I found the great Reality?Meditation for the Day
“Behold, I make all things new.” When you change to a new way of life, you leave many things behind you. It is only the earth-bound spirit that cannot soar. Loosen somewhat the strands that tie you to the earth. It is only the earthly desires that bind you. Your new freedom will depend on your ability to rise above earthly things. Clipped wings can grow again. Broken wings can regain a strength and beauty unknown before. If you will, you can be released and free.Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may be freed from things that hold me down. I pray that my spirit may soar in freedom.
The conversation about “the Great Reality” has been muddied throughout history by arguments and wars about the purely human instinct for security. That instinct for security has been perverted into a drive for power and control. Where power and control intersect with spirituality, there we find many of the organized religions throughout history.
In my experience, there is atheism and agnosticism that arise from a rejection of organized religion, to the extent that even the fundamental principle of all religions is rejected. That principle is to accept that there is much beyond our five senses that is real and has impact on the course of our lives. Even apart from the “design and purpose” quoted in the thought of the day, the principle that there is some Energy that we cannot explain but that we can experience, to me this is “the Great Reality”. Our spirits, the animating force in us, can co-exist with the physical law of the conservation of energy (and via special relativity, the conservation of matter as well). The Spirit, the Divine, cannot yet be quantified, and to my thinking this is because it is categorically different from physical energy. But it acts the same - if the chemical energy that is present in a living being is converted to another form in “death” of that being, what do we consider happens to the Spirit of that being?
I think of Spirit as a sort of unimaginably vast ocean of energy. When a person or a pet transforms from living to something else, I interpret that their share of Spirit is returned to that vast ocean. There are certainly other lines of thought that can grow from that interpretation.
I like the reference, in the meditation, to the “earth-bound spirit”. To me, this means that I think far too much about Spirit instead of experiencing it in me and in you. The limitations I have in my physical life are to a great extent self-imposed, they are willful (though many times subconscious) decisions that I make, actions that I take, attitudes that I adopt. I do pray today that my spirit may soar, even though I might not recognize that new flight path for a little while.
Blessings on your houses 
today.
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I can’t even tell you how much I love this, thank you for sharing!
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I never get tired of How it Works, even though we read it at every meeting of my HG. It has such a quality of language and a readable rhythm. Half measures availed us nothing, yuppers I can relate. Tried them! And there are different accounts of how God–Of Our Understanding–came to be added to the text. I know one is Rev. Shoemaker, a friend of Oxford Group’s Frank Buchman. And another is the A Vicious Cycle story subject, named Jim, an atheist or agnostic, wanted the qualifier. I’m glad it was added. I’m a poor sleeper and found an AA history podcast. Then it kept awake, imagining what it was like back then.
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For me in this reading, there really isn’t anything that doesn’t hit home for me. Even in hearing it ALL the time over the years in meetings, it still is absolutely true! For me, this truly is the easier and softer way….I was 2 years sober before I surrendered to this program as I balked and balked, thinking I knew best. However, holding onto my old ideas just allowed me to repeat a lot of the same issues in my life and be a dry drunk. I stood at that turning point, asked for help and literally the next morning AA arrived on my doorstep in an undeniable and divine way. I’m forever grateful for this and this program that has given me a new design for living because my way absolutely did NOT work.
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Thank you!
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