* Julia Sweeney ~ Letting Go of God

Photo from Wikipedia

I was a Christian by default, and I didn’t take it seriously enough for it to cause me any real trouble. Bob says that the most well adjusted Christians he knows are those that don’t take it seriously. (Whether they are exactly conscious of this or not!) And I think that was me. I think I was well adjusted. But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t also stunted in my maturity by the side effects of benignly believing in the Christian stories and the childlike idea of a loving God who was pulling all the strings.

From Sweeney's Foreward to Robert M. Price's,
The Reason Driven Life

Julia Sweeney (born October 10, 1959) is an American actress and comedian best known for her roles on Saturday Night Live, especially as the androgynous character "Pat." She has written and performed, In the Family Way and Letting Go of God, the latter explaining her atheism.

That Sweeney is an atheist, is "something she brought to light in a one-woman show entitled Letting Go of God. In it, she discusses her Irish Catholic upbringing, early religious ideology, and the life events and internal search that led her to the belief that the universe works fine without a God in charge of it.

"She began performing the show live in Los Angeles. In May 2006, she performed the piece in Austin, Texas, at the Paramount Theater. The Austin show was followed by a half-hour discussion between Sweeney and Ira Glass (host of This American Life). An excerpt of the show subsequently appeared on This American Life in an episode entitled Godless America. Letting Go of God was released on CD in 2006.

"In 2006, Sweeney was awarded the Richard Dawkins Award and the American Humanist Association's "Humanist Pioneer" award, and joined the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America. She also does commercials for the Freedom From Religion Foundation on Air America Radio."

Fuller Biography at Wikipedia

It took me years, but letting go of religion has been the most profound wake up of my life. I feel I now look at the world not as a child, but as an adult. I see what's bad and it's really bad. But I also see what is beautiful, what is wonderful. And I feel so deeply appreciative that I am alive. How dare the religious use the term 'born again.' That truly describes freethinkers who've thrown off the shackles of religion so much better!

Freedom From Religion Foundation

More at Celebrity Atheists

Sweeney's Website
Sweeney's Blog
Sweeney's Discussion Forum
Audio Excerpts and More

* Another Religious Horror Story ~ Authored by the New Testament this Time

The following was posted to the JesusMysteries discussion forum today:

Marcion was the first to realize that the Jewish Scriptures (OT) have nothing to do with Christianity. Even without his belief in 2 biblical gods, one must use twisted, tenuous arguments to make the OT predict Jesus. It is too bad that Marcionites did not win the Church struggle. Marcionites accepted that Judaism was true - on its own terms. We would not have had 2 millennia of nasty Jewish-Christians relations, for Judaism was just another totally different religion.

It's true, no Jew accepted that the messiah would suffer and be executed. If somehow, Jesus had truly been alive again, such that anybody could see him, probably many more Jews would have accepted him; and, if he led an army of angels to destroy the hated Kittim, all Jews would have accepted him. Didn't happen.

Check out Price's The Pre-Nicene New Testament for a great discussion of this.

Best,
Prof. D. Showley

Newest Release by Robert M. Price

The Pre-Nicene New Testament
Fifty-four Formative Texts

The Word of the Aion! Not just a new translation, but a new canon, The Pre-Nicene New Testament supplements the usual twenty-seven writings with another twenty-seven that might have been included long ago but were not. Here is an inclusive, truly representative portrait of early Christianity in all its amazing theological diversity. Familiar works are rendered new again by the first translation to embody generations worth of scholarly proposals, as well as by introductions featuring ultra-radical yet sound biblical scholarship.

Another of Dr. Price's books not to be missed is his The Reason Driven Life, Foreword by Julia Sweeney.

"[The Reason Driven Life] is a deeply thought out, theologically accurate, heartfelt dismantling of Rick Warren’s (and all Evangelicals’) worldview. Even the ideas that seem, on the surface, to be unassailable (like Warren’s call to a life of service to others) Price takes apart, reveals each for the sham it is, with elegance and charm and disturbing accuracy."

~ Julia Sweeney formally of Saturday Night Live, from the foreword.

Cross-reference METAXY Robert M. Price and Julia Sweeney

* Freedom From Religion Foundation

“The only true shield standing between women and the bible, that handbook for the subjugation of women, is a secular government. U.S. citizens must wake up to the threat of an encroaching theocracy, and shore up Thomas Jefferson's 'wall of separation between church and state.' ”

-- Annie Laurie Gaylor, Woe to the Women: The Bible Tells Me So (2004 edition)
* * *
“It took me years, but letting go of religion has been the most profound wake up of my life. I feel I now look at the world not as a child, but as an adult. I see what's bad and it's really bad. But I also see what is beautiful, what is wonderful. And I feel so deeply appreciative that I am alive. How dare the religious use the term 'born again.' That truly describes freethinkers who've thrown off the shackles of religion so much better!”

~ Julia Sweeney (FREF)

Wikipedia

* Favorite Forums

James Randi Educational Foundation
JesusMysteries Forum
Michael Shermer's Skeptic
The End of Faith
Richard Dawkins Forum
Julia Sweeney's List