Is It Loving to Call Alcoholics Worthless Drunks?

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All right, Tim, the question for today's episode is, is it loving to call alcoholics worthless drunks?

It seems like, yeah, a lot of people, they really recoil at the idea of calling someone a drunk, and then if you add worthless to it, then that seems to be adding.

Insult to injury. Or insult, insult to insult. Insult to insult, yeah. So part of it is, there's two parts of this kind of question in general, and that is the question, what should you call the person who is mastered by alcohol?

So that's part one. And then should you add colorful adjectives on it like worthless? That's just another part of the discussion.

But I think most people are predisposed to basically treat any kind of vice that a person's engaged in right now with sympathetic language in general.

So we really don't have much of a category for speaking very harshly against people who are engaged in any of these things at all.

And when we lean on this kind of quasi -medical, psychological, therapeutic language, like alcoholism in general, we lean on that kind of language even though it's not really very precise as to what we're even talking about.

So we lean on this stuff, and then you can kind of imagine a scenario where an individual said, you're at someone's funeral, the dad's dead, the guy who's been drunk his whole life is dead.

But then you have the pastor, you have all of his kids just basically telling good stories about him and lionizing him essentially that he suffered from alcoholism for years and years and years and it finally got him, right?

So it got him, right? And then that's just their way of kind of not saying the obvious, right?

That he was just a guy who… Drank himself to death. Drank himself to death, came home every few weeks, beat his wife, yelled at the kids and all that.

It's just their way of trying to still honor him somehow. But certainly, I think for a lot of people, they lean on that kind of quasi -medical sounding language, alcoholism kind of language as a way of getting them off the hook from having to actually deal with the nature of what's actually happening in these kind of scenarios.

And we've talked about this before, but isn't it the type of thing where, you know, as Christians, we can read the

Bible and know that for someone who is addicted to alcohol, that's a morally negative category that they've put themselves in.

But then, you know, people who have not subjugated themselves to God and his word, who are openly rebelling against him, what they're trying to do is they're essentially trying to explain the same kind of phenomenon minus the morality of it, right?

So, they're trying to explain it as if there was no sort of spiritual aspect to this in any way whatsoever.

It must have a physical explanation, which is why they go to the addiction thing.

You know, hey, it's just your brain. Your brain is telling you that you need this, even though it's harmful for you, right?

Is that right? Yeah, I mean, so when you think about this, like, word in general, alcoholism, it really is kind of a disputed word in general.

Meaning that, I mean, not even the psychologists agree that it's the best use of the word anymore. So, right now,

I mean, the predominant DSM diagnosis for this is what's called alcohol use disorder. But that really isn't…

They actually call it a disorder? Yeah. Wow. Alcohol use disorder, right?

Wow. You know, there isn't really broad agreement on this definition or this word in general anymore.

But people still use it, and it's still therapeutic kind of language. And I mean, functionally, it's doing the same thing as alcohol use disorder.

It's basically just kind of defining a… What they're doing, whether you say alcohol use disorder, you say alcoholism, right?

Whatever you're saying, what it's doing is it's putting the emphasis not on the behavior that the individual is engaged in, but it's basically a way of sheltering a person from, like, moral categories and moral thinking as what you described.

Yeah. It's blame shifting. It's blame shifting. Right. I mean, it's the same kind of thing that, you know, is happening with, like, a term like kleptomaniac, right?

Mm -hmm. The Bible has a term for that. That's a thief. Yeah. Right? But the

Bible has a term for, you know, an alcoholic. The term for an alcoholic is a drunk. That's what the term is.

That's the biblical term. So the Bible would describe an alcoholic as a drunk, right? Sure.

In the same way the Bible would describe a thief as a thief. But then the issue is that if you use those terms, there's great hope that, like, let the thief no longer steal, but let him work with his hands so he may have something to give.

Now, when you put it in this, like, therapeutic kind of language, like suffering from alcoholism or suffering from alcohol use disorder or whatever, when you put it in that kind of language, what ends up happening is you have this situation where this person feels like he's afflicted with this thing that's kind of like cancer, like this quasi -medical diagnosis, like he's afflicted by, right?

Mm -hmm. So then he's suffering from this thing. And that's the way that everyone talks about it, like they're suffering from alcoholism as if it's just this thing, right?

Yeah, it's an outside thing that's affecting me that I have zero control over. Right, right.

Other than whatever, you know, fake treatment someone gives me. Right, yeah.

So, I mean, the first rule of Alcoholics Anonymous is to say, you know, hey, I'm Tim, I'm an alcoholic or whatever, right? And so, like, the issue there, though, is that that gives rise to the kind of movie where you can imagine the kind of movie where the guy's been, like, quote -unquote sober for, you know, a few years.

He goes to the hotel room and, like, all of a sudden he looks inside the mini -fridge or whatever and it's full of alcohol, and then he goes on a bender all night, right?

Because he just can't, like, he's an alcoholic. That's who he is. Like, all he can do is just abstain, right, or remove himself from it because the moment he sees it, like, the disease is just going to attack him and it's going to get him and it's going to take him, right?

And so – and that's just, you know, that's the way that Alcoholics Anonymous teaches people to think about these things.

It's just, like, the way people – that's the common way people think about it is that, like, they're an alcoholic.

They have some kind of genetic predisposition to alcoholism. You know, they just – like, this thing just grabs them and gets them and they can't do anything about it.

It's just a physical problem. And, you know, so in the best -case scenario, what people do is they'll say, well, hey, yeah, but isn't there something like addiction that can happen once you're chemically mastered to this substance?

And it's like, yeah, but, yeah, sure, yeah. I mean, you know, yeah, you can get addicted to caffeine too, right?

Right. Yeah, you know, talking about the whole, like, hey, is it some sort of chemical thing and maybe that's what – you know, hey, we can't put all the blame on the person because,

I mean, it's not like they're, you know, trying – it's not like they're consciously regulating all the chemicals in their body, right?

And it's like, well, I mean, everything that you ever feel is a chemical reaction, you know, but the

Bible doesn't make distinctions based off of chemical reactions in your brain.

So every time you get happy, that's a chemical reaction happening in your brain, right?

Right. Every time – you know, like when you're – when a child is born, the mother has, like, a ton of oxytocin dumped into – her brain dumps it into her body essentially to, you know, help her, like, essentially ignore all of the trauma that she faced in birthing the baby so that, you know, she loves the baby.

And you see this in the hospital if you've ever had kids. Like, your wife is just, like,

I mean, starstruck by the newborn baby that has been destroying her body for nine months.

That's a chemical reaction. But then that doesn't mean that there's not moral and spiritual consequences for these things still, right?

Yeah, I mean, yeah. So I think with any kind of – there's any number of things that you can get addicted to.

There's any number of chemicals that you can put in your brain. I mean, like, you can get addicted to caffeine. You can get addicted to alcohol.

And, yeah, I mean, you know, if you get addicted – let's say you get addicted to caffeine. You drink caffeine for a certain period of time, like, high doses of caffeine.

Then you're not really going to be able to function to the same level while you're addicted to caffeine. You're going to get headaches. You're going to have blurred vision.

You know, all that's going to happen. But then no one would describe that as, like, a caffeine -holic, right? Caffeine -a -holic or something.

Or caffeine – whatever you want to call it. They just call you an enthusiast.

Yeah, so they word it as a passion. Caffeine -a -holic, you know. No, but that's not even a word.

I mean, no one's going to describe it in the language of addiction, right? So, I mean, in that way – I mean, most normal people aren't.

Like, you know, maybe you can find a DSM category or whatever. But, like, the issue, though, is that you can turn from that.

It's just the path is going to be a little bit more painful, right? So you can dig yourself out of it. And, you know,

I mean, I've dug myself out of caffeine addiction multiple times, right? To where I'm totally addicted to caffeine.

You know, I go through a period of intense suffering for a few days, and then I move on, right? So, I mean, obviously, like, you can – like, there are chemical dependencies on certain things, and that's fine.

But, like, the issue is you don't want to – like, you want to put the emphasis on the behavior because the behavior can change, right?

Despite how bad you feel, how bad it feels to climb out of it, you can change your behavior. And that's where the Bible puts the emphasis on.

It doesn't identify you with a particular vice that you're performing. So part of the question is just, you know, trying to answer the question as it relates to what's the most helpful way to view this.

I mean, the Bible obviously describes this as drunk. I mean, that's what the Bible says. Like, you're a drunk. And so it's obviously loving to use – like, the issue is it's obviously loving to use the language that the

Bible would use there. And, like, we used to call – so the other part of the question, though, is it's, like, talking about, like, a worthless drunk.

And that feels like, you know, as you said, like adding insult to injury, right? Yeah. I mean, it feels like adding insult to injury.

But the issue is that, like, that's how society used to view men who instead of going to work, they just sat around all day drinking alcohol and then came home.

Or they went to work, you know, went out to the bars, came home, beat their wives. People would call them worthless drunks.

Like, particularly with the kind of guy who, like, stopped going to work and just gave himself over to vices.

And so, I mean, and that feels very mean, but then, like, that was a form of, like, shame, you know. So part of what we're trying to do as a society is remove all the shameful elements of shameful behavior.

But then the Bible doesn't really go that route. So, I mean, you can look up the word worthless in the Bible, and it shows up in 49 different verses.

Like, a good example of this is, like, Proverbs 28 and 19. Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits will have plenty of poverty.

And that's – like, worthless pursuits there is, like, getting drunk all the time. Not working, getting drunk all the time.

That's just what it's talking about. So, I mean, there are – like in the Bible, worthless fellows are individuals who basically are unemployed young men who get into trouble, right?

Yeah. And typically pursue, like, women or alcohol or vices and, you know, blow things up and everything else.

So, I mean, like these are just biblical ways of speaking about certain behavioral patterns that are destructive.

And we would do well to relearn how to talk about these things, basically. Okay. Fair enough.

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