It’s not a disease...sex, drugs, alcohol, video games, porn...these are choices on giving in to temptation...God makes it clear that He always gives us a way out...He says to flee, He says He wont allow more than we can bear. It is hard to fight off these, but we can if we choose.
gluttony is a sin
Alcoholism actually is a heritable disease. The body doesn’t process alcohol in the alcoholic the way normal drinkers do
>>...these are choices on giving in to temptation...God makes it clear that He always gives us a way out...<<
Nearly all children sexually abused by someone they trusted fall into some sort of dysfunction. It is a symptom of masking emotional distress. Drugs/alcohol/pornography/hyper-sexualism/self mutilation/suicide...you name it.
Were these children able to discern “The Way Out”? Other peoples sin wounds these folks and they often spend a lifetime reconciling/healing/trusting/breaking the chains of addiction.
Sorry fella...it’s not always so cut and dry.
It's not a disease, unless you twist language the way liberals do. Dr. Silkworth did not call it a disease. He called it an allergy. If you have an allergy to poison ivy, it means you have a reaction to it. Most people can understand that since most people are allergic.
With the boozehound, it's like a reverse allergy. Instead of breaking out in hives - which make you try to avoid the thing you're allergic too, he breaks out in cravings. This is why he doesn't stop when he has one.
Drunks DO process booze differently, very differently. I guarantee it.
Also keep in mind that it's ultimately Sugar Addiction. Alcohol is sugar -> except that it's SuperSugar. So for most people - they get something for alcohol. For the boozehound, it's just a much more 'heavy' drug.
If it were something that didn't cause intense desire, boozehounds would say 'hey this stuff is different with me, I can't eat it' just as people with shellfish allergies avoid it like the plague.
But, desire being what desire is, when a mans feelings and emotions are brought into the fray, he tends to lie to himself, because being honest means an end to the thing he desires.
It's neither a sin nor a disease. It IS AN ALLERGY ... or you could even say 'an abnormal reaction.' How many of you, when you wake up with a bad hangover, your first thought is 'oh, I could take care of this with a shot of vodka' rather than 'I need asperin I'll never do that again.'
Many of you would really really have to try to even drink enough to get a bad hangover. Not us! Our PROBLEM was partially that we could handle our booze. We could stay up many many hours with our central nervous system taken out of the equation whereas most of you would have been asleep and or choking on your vomit 20 drinks ago.
It's a combination of character and a biochemical allergy.
How quickly is someone willing to be honest with themselves in the face of negative consequences to self and other? How negative is the problem booze is solving. Usually the boozehound has a problem which is very painful but which he has given up (faith) that it can be solved. In such a situation, boozing, even despite the consequences, is a rational choice. I didn't say a good one -> but given his assumptions (lacking faith, his assumptions are incorrect,) that the pain will never end, it's rational.
In life, we will be faced with challenges. Some people are born without a foot, or an eye. But some overcome that.
The booze hound is born with a predisposition to experience alcohol the way some overweight people experience a donut. But multiply that times 100.
Now, the interesting thing is that once you're a year away or so from having a drink, and then really at three years - mostly at a year (this is a physical phenomena) -> the biochemical karma is gone, the craving is gone.
When drunks don't take the first drink ... they are fine. The allergy is only set off by the chemical.
However if you take a person who is merely born with the allergy, he won't necessarily take to booze the way many do. USUALLY there needs to be the presence of something negative, stressful, ongoing, and unsolvable.
That's why so many drunks come from dysfunctional families. The whole chain requires some serious negativty, because in order to endure the costs of being an early drunk, the cost benefit analysis has to work out. The costs are high - but if they are less than the problem the booze is solving, then the drunk will continue to develop the allergy into an addiction to the sugar.
Then one day, as he's been telling himself 'I drink too much but I'm not an alcoholic' ... one day he says ... 'uh oh, no I realize I'm f*cked and I can't quit.'
At THAT point he better have enough humility to reach out for help ... and enough humility to admit to himself 'I am not the most powerful thing in the world' ... or he will die, or at the very least, is going to cause almost as much misery in the world and to his family as a liberal voter.
Now I can't take my experience and generalize it all alcoholics ... and in some ways I know the best of them because I know the ones who got through it.
I also know I have zero desire for a drink ... may that continue! ... but it supports the notion that the original problem is an allergy to the substance. That is ... if you never take the first drink again ... you're probably fine.
It is obviously more complex than that.
But no, it's not a disease, unless you twist the language. It BEHAVES like a disease, and if you TREAT it like a disease ... that's smart. But, it's an allergy. And, it's not a sin of overindulgeance. It IS likely a sin of pride -> in that you can be moronic enough to think you are more powerful than alcohol for so so so long despite all the building evidence in your devolving life to the contrary.
Is it a SIN? we're all sinners - that's built into us. In Buddhism it's the same as saying we're given to delusion. It's just a manifestation of sin itself, of delusion, and we all have it. It's at the basis of all the named sins - delusion, not seeing the world as it is.
So, for example, to call a drunk a sinner, is a little bit like a retarded child calling the kid sitting next to him a dummy. It's TRUE maybe ... but ... in context ... it's kind of silly.