Julia Sweeney on God & Non-belief

[sarahmichigan]

You 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.

Comments

[leighton.livejournal.com]

She's great: smart and honest. The queen of "fallen" Catholics.

The FFRF radio show (on Air America, but podcasts are faster) is great to have, but it is sometimes painful listening. The guests and subject matter are top notch (Michelle Goldberg!). But the husband host is a horrid ham on the air with constant excuses to play his tepid piano parody songs on the air. We get it, you are a failed musician. Not surprising he was a pastor at one time. I find preachers to be less religious than attention-mongering.

[guttaperk.livejournal.com]

It's a good article.

Ultimately, though, "religion" is a fundamental, near-inescapable aspect of human function that is not even vaguely limited to churchified practises or formal religions. One of the most difficult things for me to come to terms with on this topic has not been the behaviour of religious people, but rather the difficulty people have with recognising religious behaviour in supposedly nonereligious people and arenas.

For example, "atheism" covers a wide scope of beliefs that range from the perfectly logical to the utterly religious.

I do like the way that she approached the list as a list of near-universal human characteristics that can act to support churches and religious behaviour, rather than approaching the list as a set of characteristics of "religious people".

[lilpeace.livejournal.com]

This was interesting, and I generally find Julia Sweeney pretty funny. I agree with most of the points, but I don't think she made a case at all against the existence of a God--just against blindly following a religion. All of those things can be true, and God could still exist...

[rossja.livejournal.com]

I actually saw part of her one woman show on TV a long time ago. I didn't know what it was as I wandered in on it near the end. It's very powerful though. She's great!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_earthshine_/]

(I'll admit up front i didn't read all the comments.) :)

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.)