Julia Sweeney on God & Non-belief
Mar. 7th, 2008 07:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarahmichiganYou may know Julia Sweeney as an ex-SNL member and not know much more about her. Well, she's an atheist who has written a one-woman show about losing her faith in god, a cancer survivor, and the single mother of an adopted child as well.
She gave a speech at a "Freedom From Religion Foundation" convention not too long ago, and there are excerpts on the FFRF website. I love some of the points she makes about religion and belief (and she's funny, too).
#1. People Want to be good. "When I talk to [my friends] about religion, they don't say, "Oh, did I feel good yesterday thinking how Mary was a virgin and conceived Jesus!" They don't say anything about Catholicism. They talk about the community work that they've done. And that's what they connect with their church. They assign that good feeling to their church."
#2. A code of behavior is often necessary.
#3. People want to be in a club.
#4. People love to hate. "People feel closer to other people if they have a common person they don't like. Come on, everybody knows that's true! And it's true for us, too. Religion delivers on that, too! It gives people an instant common enemy, whether it's Islamic fundamentalists or secularists, that's immediately there and provided. At Saturday Night Live, we were never closer than when Steven Seagal hosted--because we hated him so much!"
Read the whole piece here.
She gave a speech at a "Freedom From Religion Foundation" convention not too long ago, and there are excerpts on the FFRF website. I love some of the points she makes about religion and belief (and she's funny, too).
#1. People Want to be good. "When I talk to [my friends] about religion, they don't say, "Oh, did I feel good yesterday thinking how Mary was a virgin and conceived Jesus!" They don't say anything about Catholicism. They talk about the community work that they've done. And that's what they connect with their church. They assign that good feeling to their church."
#2. A code of behavior is often necessary.
#3. People want to be in a club.
#4. People love to hate. "People feel closer to other people if they have a common person they don't like. Come on, everybody knows that's true! And it's true for us, too. Religion delivers on that, too! It gives people an instant common enemy, whether it's Islamic fundamentalists or secularists, that's immediately there and provided. At Saturday Night Live, we were never closer than when Steven Seagal hosted--because we hated him so much!"
Read the whole piece here.
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Date: 2008-03-08 01:39 am (UTC):)Some of this is definitely familiar to me. I always used to joke with folks that there is a second set of basic human needs. The first set is the ones we always talk about -- food, warmth, water, etc. The second, tho, are things like The Need To Belong, The Need To Be Right, and The Need To Be Better-Than-Others... very similar to some of hers.
Organized religion serves to address these pretty well, but so can any number of movements, like political movements or intellectual schools of thought. Embracing atheism may or may not mean a person has transcended these needs, of course... it's far easier to replace one need-meeting structure with another than it is to personally grow to be free of them. (I don't mean to include her in this necessarily -- she has identified her own version of some of these needs, so hopefully that means she's aware of them in all of their forms.)