Our nature

My mind's a bit all over the place this morning.  Reading Heather's post this morning, got me thinking...

Alcoholism: is it a sickness or a sin?  Is it a disease?

Apparently people have opinions on these questions.  Strong opinions. And I get it.  I do.

Personally, I believe it to be a disease....when I contemplate how I've suffered from it.  Yet, this is not so easy when I see alcoholism manifested in others.  At that point, I find my sin nature wanting to debate the term disease.  Why can't they just stop - never mind that I couldn't. Yes.  Quite hypocritical.  I think the point is that we want to go easy on ourselves and hard on others.

Seems we all suffer from the sickness of pointing fingers. Isn't it our nature to judge, to condemn, to make calls on other's behavior rather than looking at our own?  'Smoking is a sin', we might say as we gorge ourselves on cheeseburgers.  Or the tightwad might look down on someone with a spending problem.  I think what we all have in common is the propensity to place anything other than God above God.  To worship material things, to try and alleviate our problems with substances or sex or shopping.  To not rely on God. That is a sickness.  Called sin.  Which we were all born with.

The Big Book says that resentment "destroys more alcoholics than anything else.  From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick." Isn't that the truth? My sponsor calls it dis-ease.  Whether our dis ease with life leads us to drink or to another form of addiction, I believe that we all grope for something to fill that God shaped hole.  The alcoholic just tends to stick with alcohol because it works...until it doesn't.

Dictionary.com defines the term disease as:

1. a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure,or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic ordevelopmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritionaldeficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorableenvironmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment.

3.

any harmful, depraved, or morbid condition, as of the mind orsociety: His fascination with executions is a disease.

4.

decomposition of a material under special circumstances: tindisease.

Well, certainly the brain functions incorrectly in the alcoholic, whether that stems from a genetic predisposition, the phenomenon of craving, or an allergy to alcohol.  I would say, too, that for the alcoholic, the consumption of alcohol causes a depraved if not morbid condition and certainly decomposition if we continue to drink.  So, for me, it's safe to say, it's a disease.  But in many ways, the whole argument could be discarded based on semantics.  

Does terminology matter if the found solution works? 

And what (or Who) is the solution?  

"Although all men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his personal salvation for himself...We can help one another find out the meaning of life...But in the last analysis, each is responsible for 'finding himself'. - Thomas Merton