We Agnostics or Whatever

Reading on in Chapter 4 of the Big Book Alcoholics Anonymous I pause at:

• "Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a Power greater than myself?"
• Faced with alcoholic [compulsive eating] destruction, we soon became as open minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions. In this respect alcohol [food] was a great persuader. It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness. Sometimes this was a tedious process.
• Everybody nowadays, believes in scores of assumptions for which there is good evidence, but no perfect visual proof. And does not science demonstrate that visual proof is the weakest proof?
• ...our perverse streak comes to the surface and we laboriously set out to convince ourselves it isn't so. 
• ...thinking we believe...
• ...our human intelligence was the last word, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of all. Rather vain of us, wasn't it?
• Actually, we used to have no reasonable conception whatever. We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting....
• ...a degree of stability, happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves.

People whose job it is to sit through trials, both jury and non-jury, know well the reliability of eye-witness testimony. How reliable is it? Not very. Yet those people who have attended few trials, who find themselves in the jury box, put heavy weight on what people think they saw. Many wrongful convictions have occurred in that manner. "And does not science demonstrate that visual proof is the weakest proof?" 

A while ago, some friends of mine worked with an email message going around wherein an animated gif (a moving drawing) appeared to be spinning in circles. Depending on how you perceived it, she could be turning clockwise or counterclockwise. A friend of mind, unable to see her turning right no matter how hard she worked, was significantly impacted by the branding as a left-brain person. Yet it's in staring at an optical illusion, trying to analyze it and mentally conquer it, we reach frustration. It can't be done intellectually. 

I don't think it matters whether you approach finding the God of your understanding from a position of steeped in theology and doctrine or one of adamant disbelief in one aspect. The thoughts and convictions previously reached stand in the way of making it not a matter of working on understanding but of accepting like a child, just grabbing hold of the parent's hand and going, trusting. And I don't know how a sponsor helps a person make that leap from the head to the heart. My words don't seem to be doing the trick. 

So, have I fully made that leap? I firmly believe that's true. I believe it in my head, but MUCH more importantly, I believe it in my heart. Comments and suggestions as to what to tell a person sponsored, though, are mightily welcome.