Letting Go Of God

[Music] [Applause] [Music] on September 10th the morning of my seventh birthday I came downstairs of the kitchen where my mother was washing the dishes and my father was reading the paper and I sort of presented myself to them in the doorway and they said hey happy birthday and I said I'm seven and my father smiled and said well you know what that means don't you and I said yeah that I'm gonna have a party and a cake and give a lot of presents and my dad said well yes but more importantly being seven means that you've reached the age of reason and you're now capable of committing any and all sins against God and man now I had heard this phrase age of reason before sister Mary Kevin had been banding it about our second-grade class of school but when she said that the phrase seemed all caught up in the excitement of preparations for our first communion and our first confession and everybody knew that was really all about the white dress and the white veil and anyway I hadn't really paid all that much attention to that phrase the age of reason so I said yeah yeah age of reason what does that mean again and my dad said well we believe in the Catholic Church that God knows that little kids don't know the difference between right and wrong but when you're seven you're old enough to know better so you've grown up and reached the age of reason and now God will start keeping notes on you and begin your permanent record and I said oh wait a minute you mean all that time up till today all that time I was so good God didn't notice it and my mother said well I noticed it and I thought how could I not have known before how could it not have sunk in when they've been telling me all that being good and no real credit for it and worst of all how could I not have realized this very important information until the very day that it was basically useless to me so I said well mom and dad what about Santa Claus I mean Santa Claus knows if you're naughty or nice right I might have said yeah but honey I think that's technically just between Thanksgiving and Christmas and my mother said oh pop stop it let's just tell her I mean she is seven Julie there is no Santa Claus now this was actually not that upsetting to me my parents had this whole elaborate story about Santa Claus how they had talked to Santa himself and agreed that instead of Santa delivering our presents over the night of Christmas Eve like he did for every other family who got to open their surprises first thing Christmas morning our family would give Santa more time Santa would come to our house while we were at nine o'clock high-mass but only if all of us kids did not make a fuss which made me very suspicious it was pretty obvious that it was really our parents giving us the presents I mean my dad had a very distinctive rapping style and my mother's handwriting was so close to Santa's Plus why would Santa save time by having to loop back to our house after he'd gone to everybody else's there's only one obvious conclusion to reach from this mountain of evidence our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit my poor parents are trying to protect us in the embarrassment this humiliation of rejection by Santa who is jolly but let's face it he was also very judgmental so to find out that there was actually no Santa Claus at all was really sort of a relief I left the kitchen not really in shock about Santa but rather I was just dumbfounded about how I could have missed that whole Age of Reason thing it was too late for me but maybe I could help someone else someone who could use the information they had to put two criteria they had to be old enough to be able to understand the whole concept of the age of reason and not yet 7 the answer was clear my brother bill he was 6 well I finally found bill about a block away from our house at this public school playground it was a Saturday and he was all by himself just kicking a ball against the side of a wall I ran up to and said Bill I just realized that the age of reason starts when you turn seven and then you're capable of committing any and all students against God and man bill said so and I said so you're six you have a whole year to do anything you want to what God won't notice it and he said so and I said so so everything and I'm so angry with him but when I got to the top of these steps I turned around dramatically and said oh by the way bill there is no Santa Claus now I didn't know it at the time but I actually wasn't turning seven on September 10th for my 13th birthday I planned a slumber party with all of my girlfriends but a couple of weeks beforehand my mother took me aside and said I need to speak to you privately September 10th is not your birthday it's actually October 10th I said listen the cutoff for birth dates for kindergarten was September 15th so I told him that your birthday was September 10th and then I wasn't sure that you weren't just gonna go blab it all over the place so I started to tell you your birthday was actually September 10th but Julie you were so ready to start school honey you were so ready I thought back on it when I was four I was already the oldest of four children and my mother even had another child to come so what I think she understandably really meant was that she was so ready she was okay then she said don't worry Julie every year on October 10th when it was your birthday but you didn't realize it I made sure that you ate a piece of cake that day which was comforting but troubling my mother had been celebrating my birthday with me without me what was so upsetting about this piece of information was not that I was gonna have to change the date of my slumber party with all of my girlfriends what was most upsetting was that this meant I was not a Virgo I had a huge Virgo poster in my bedroom and I read my horoscope every single day and it was so totally me in this manner that I was a Libra so I took the bus downtown to get the new Libra poster the Virgo poster was a picture of a beautiful woman with long hair sort of lounging by some water but the Libra poster was just a huge scale this was around the time that I started filling out physically and I was filling out a lot more than a lot of the other girls and frankly the whole idea that my astrological sign was a scale just seemed ominous and depressing but I got the new Libra poster and I started to read my new Libra horoscope I was astonished to find that it was also totally me it wasn't until years later looking back on this whole Age of Reason change of birthday thing that it dawned on me I wasn't turning seven when I thought I turned seven I actually had a whole other month to do anything I wanted to do before God started keeping tabs on me Oh life can be so unfair [Music] not too long ago two Mormon missionaries came to my door I live just off a main thoroughfare in Los Angeles and my block is a natural beginning for people who are peddling things door-to-door sometimes I get little old ladies from the seventh-day Adventist Church showing me these pictures of heaven and sometimes I get teenagers who promise me that they won't join a gang and just start robbing people if I only buy some magazine subscriptions from that so normally I just ignore the door bill but on this day I answered and there stood two boys each about 19 and white start short-sleeved shirts and they have little nametags that identified them as official representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints and they said they had a message for me from God I said a message for me from God and they said yes now I was raised in the Pacific Northwest around a lot of Mormons and you know I've worked with them and even dated them but I never really knew the doctrine or what they said to people when they were out on a mission and I guess it was sort of curious so I said well please come in and they look really happy because I don't think this happens to them all that often i sat them down and I got them glasses of water and after our niceties I said okay I'm ready for my message from God but they had a question instead which threw me a little bit I thought it would be more like a pitch at a studio and I would hear their story and then if I were interested I would have my people called their people or something but apparently this was going to be interactive and they said do you believe that God loves you with all his heart and I thought well of course I believe in God but I don't like that word heart because that anthropomorphize is God and I don't like the word his either because that sort of sexualizes God but I didn't want to argue semantics with these boys so after a very long uncomfortable pause I said yes yes I do I feel very loved and they looked at each other and smiled like that was the right answer and then they say do you believe that we're all brothers and sisters on this planet and I said yes I do yes I do and I was so relieved that it was a question I could answer so quickly and they said well then we have a story to tell you and they told me this story all about this guy named Lehi who lived in Jerusalem in 600 BC now apparently in Jerusalem in 600 BC everyone was completely bad and evil every single one of the man woman child infant fetus and God came to Lehigh and he said put your family on a boat and I will lead you out of here and God did lead them he led them to America I said America from Jerusalem to America by boat in 600 BC and they said yes then they told me how Lehi and his descendants reproduced and reproduced and over the course of 600 years there were two great races of them the knee bites and the Lamanites and the Nephites were totally totally good each and every one of them and the Lamanites were totally bad and evil every single one of them just bad to the bone after Jesus died on the cross for our sins on his way up to heaven he stopped by America and visited the Nephi and he told them that if they all remain totally totally good each and every one of them they would win the war it's the evil Lamanites but apparently somebody blew it because the Lamanites were able to kill all the Nephites all but one guy this guy named mormon who managed to survive by hiding in the woods and he made sure this whole story was written down in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics chiseled onto golden plates which he then buried near Palmyra in New York [Laughter] well I was so into this story I was just on the edge of my seat what happened to the Lamanites and they said well they became our Native Americans here in the US I said so you believe the Native Americans were descended from a people who were totally evil and they said yes then they told me how this guy named Joseph Smith found those buried gold plates basically right in his backyard and he also found this magic stone back there that he put into his hat and then buried his face into it and this allowed him to translate the gold plates from the reformed Egyptian into English well at this point I just wanted to give these two boys some advice about their pitch I wanted to say okay don't start with this story I mean even the Scientologists know to give a personality test before they start telling people all about Xenu the evil intergalactic Overlord well then they said to me do you believe that God speaks to us through his righteous prophets and I said no I don't because I was sort of upset about this Lamanites story in this crazy gold-plate story but the truth was I hadn't really thought this through so I back pedaled a little bit and I said well what do you mean by righteous exactly and and then what do you mean by prophets like could the prophets be women and they said no and I said why and they said well it's because God gave women a gift it is so wonderful that the only gift he had leftover to give men was the gift of prophecy what is this wonderful gift God gave women I wondered maybe there greater ability to cooperate and adapt women's long to wife since the fact that women tend to be much less violent than men but no it was not any of these gifts they said well it's her ability to bear children I said oh come on even if women tried to have a baby every single year from the time they were 15 at the time they were 45 assuming most of them didn't die off from exhaustion it still seems like some women would have some time left over to hear the word of God and they said no well then they didn't look so fresh-faced and cute to me anymore but they had more to say they said well we also believe that if you're a Mormon and if you're in good standing with the church when you die you get to go to heaven and be with your family for all eternity and I said oh that wouldn't be such a good incentive for me well we also believe that when you go to heaven you get your body restored to you in its best original state like if you'd lost a leg while you get it back or if you gone blind you could see I said oh now I don't have a uterus because I had cancer a few years ago so does this mean that if I went to heaven I would get my old uterus back and they said sure I'm happy without it gosh what have you had a nose job and you liked it what God's forced you to get your old nose back well then they gave me a Book of Mormon and they told me to read this chapter in that chapter and they said they'd come back some day and check in on me and I think I said something like please don't hurry or maybe it was just please don't and they were gone okay so I initially felt really superior to these boys and smug and my more conventional faith but then the more I thought about it the more I had to be honest with myself if someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and Dogma for the very first time and they said we believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us and she had a baby and that's the son of God I mean I would think that was equally ridiculous I'm just so used to that story so I couldn't let myself feel condescending towards these boys but the question they asked me when they first arrived really stuck in my head did I believe that God loved me with all his heart because I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about that question now if they had asked me do you feel that God loves you with all his heart I think that would have been much different I think I would have instantly answered yes yes I feel it all the time I I feel God's love when I'm hurt and confused and I feel consoled and cared for I take shelter in God's love when I don't understand why tragedy hits and I feel God's love when I look with gratitude at all the beauty I see but since they asked me this question with the word believe in it somehow it was all different because I guess I wasn't exactly sure if I believed what I so clearly felt okay my religious history in a nutshell I was raised Catholic and for me it was all in all a good experience I know we can't stop reading about all of the horrific and abusive experiences that people have had growing up in the Catholic Church recently in the papers but for me it was mostly wonderful I always felt lucky to be a Catholic my parents were both from Catholic families that went as far back as anyone knew on either side my parents both went to all Catholic schools grade school high school college and then my father even went to Catholic law school my father told us kids that when he was in high school the Jesuits separated out some of the boys and they were on this separate advanced track and he studied Latin for four years in Greek for three years and out of the sixteen of his special group eleven of them became Jesuit priests themselves when my father told us kids this story we thought he's got to be like this genius who's being groomed for the priesthood but lucky for us he chose to get married instead when I was old enough my father introduced me to his favorite writers which he pointed out were Catholic writers GK Chesterton evylyn wah Graham Greene Flannery O'Connor they were in a club that we were into and I felt lucky and privileged I think my favorite time to be a Catholic was in high school my first two years of high school I went to an all-girls school taught primarily by nuns and I befriended one sister in particular sister Antonella and she often invited me over to the convent for dinner and maybe because it was such a contrast to my home life at that time I mean I was the eldest of five children and a typical busy Irish Catholic home but for me the life of the nuns just seemed like heaven the convent was really quiet and calm and the women were dedicated to the education of their students and dinner discussions centered on theological debate or what I thought was theological debate maybe they just talked about a poem that everyone liked but it was just so civilized I don't know the convent seemed like books and incense and rosary beads and meditation and like rationality the sisters lived in an order but they sure seemed to have their lives in order as well now my adult self knows that I am definitely romanticizing these nuns but in the seven or so times that I ate dinner over there and in almost all my personal dealings with them that's how I remember it I became a little bit of a nun of file my favorite shows as a kid was the Flying Nun I watched all those nun movies with relish song of Bernadette the singing nun after watching brother Sun sister moon I took the confirmation name Claire because I liked st. Claire was in love with st. Francis I memorized the trouble with angels and where angels go trouble follows and I secretly wished that I were Hayley Mills and I practice saying I've got the moon skating a brilliant idea naturally I wanted to be a nun myself for a little while in high school and I confessed my dream to sister Antonella and she told me that the church didn't really allow girls as young as me to enter the convent but she could arrange for me to spend the weekend at another convent to see if I liked it this other convent was not like the convent at Mary cliff the nuns just lived in a house in some regular old neighborhood and they just wore jeans and plaid shirts and played guitar and sang kumbaya like help the poor and the sick I didn't want any of that hippy kind of nun life I wanted to have it and a cell and I wanted to flog myself and wear a hair shirt and I wanted the Gregorian chant wafting to the halls the halls that I would walk down right next to the wall because to walk in the middle of the hallway was to be arrogant I wanted to be silent and make all of those hand signals that the contemplative nuns make during meals that mean more salt and thank you for the salt and I wanted my long thick hair to be cut off abruptly like Audrey Hepburn in a nun story and then I wanted to prostrate myself before the cross but it wasn't just the type of convent that was a problem there were also boys I was way into boys even though for a while I really didn't think it could be me and Jesus together forever I have this picture of Jesus in my bedroom and he had this shag haircut and he's big beseeching totally understanding eyes and a sexy beard I will confess to you that that Jesus helped me discover the pleasures of my own body anyway as I grew and matured my understanding of God also grew and matured he really was sort of Santa Claus at first but then he became more abstract I had many experiences which I considered to be religious which confirmed my belief in God I had religious experiences I had a few times maybe five or six times I felt the power of the Holy Spirit come over me and just shake me to the core in fact just before the Mormon boys arrived I had my perhaps most visceral and profound religious experience you see I just suffered the traumatic end to a four-year relationship that well I had a lot riding on I was madly in love and he was not I wanted us to raise children together and he did not and then one day he went away and I thought I would die but I didn't night after night I was waking up crying barely able to breathe it felt like a knife was being plunged into my chest it seemed like the end of the road my dream of being a mother had met a fatal blow and then one night I woke up with the familiar pain and shortness of breath and I could hear myself saying the words heal me heal me I must have been just out of my mind with grief and suddenly I felt this bright light in the room or maybe it was just a feeling inside me like something bursts are released or something but I felt the powerful presence a powerful force of love and transcendence for the first time in weeks I felt whole and I felt absolutely connected to everything and I knew that I would be healed and that God had a plan for me and that my breakup was just part of my divine destiny the next day I was almost blushing to myself thinking about this incident I felt close to God closer than ever before and I did feel healed because you see God had healed me so now you can sort of see how when a few days later these two Mormon boys arrived on my doorstep and said that God had a message for me why was stopped in my tracks and actually let them in and I realized that I was kind of embarrassed that it had taken me so long to answer very simple question did I believe that God loved me and I thought how dare they walk into my house and ask me such a personal private question so cavalierly it made me kind of angry but I wasn't sure if I was angry at them or at me and I realized that I had really been getting a bit lazy about my face in an odd way the Mormon boy's dedication inspired me and I think I glimpsed in them the girl inside of me who wanted to be a nun a person who was willing to go the distance in matters of faith so I decided I would rededicate myself to the Catholic Church I went to several different churches and finally settled on joining one about 10 miles from my house near the ocean it was liberal it was big and it had this dedicated and enthusiastic congregation their masses were wonderful so emotional so full of feeling I would have to choke back tears just to say the Nicene Creed every time I went we believe in one God the Father Almighty Creator of heaven and earth and of all things seen and unseen I love her citing that the voices in church all together in unison but I wanted to say it with conviction not as a child it was just grown up absorbing all of these ideas but with an adult's understanding in my heart and soul the way that God says we should now I noticed an announcements they offered a Bible study class on Thursday nights and honestly almost on a whim I decided to sign up for it now you know the Catholics the Catholics don't really emphasize the Bible all that much their attitude is sort of leave that book to the professionals don't you worry your little self with that complicated book but what little I did know about the Bible I knew there were parts I loved often when I felt scared or confused I repeated the 23rd psalm though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall not fear because you are with me and I felt so much better now I was happy to see that the Old Testament starts out with two conflicting stories about the origin of the universe one where Adam and Eve are created at the exact same moment and then a second creation story right away in Chapter two where Adam is created first and then Eve was created out of his rib after he gets lonely and I thought oh wow for all those people who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible or that every single word of the Bible is true I mean they can't even have read the first two chapters of the Bible I remembered that sister Tara Tina told us in eighth grade that Genesis Genesis was simply a poem on creation we were not to take it literally I shared this with the Bible study class and father Tom this Irish priest who was leading the class said that's exactly right Julia a poem on creation yes yes but then we got to stories like Noah and the Ark and I was kind of funny I don't really remember when I was studying this as a kid sister Mary Kevin highlighting the fact that Noah becomes an alcoholic after the flood and spends most of his time passed out and naked to the point where his sons have to go back up into a room with a blanket just to go cover him up cuz geez dad I realized I had always had the Bible served up to me piecemeal and in sections and it had been edited severely edited it was quite different reading it as an adult as an adult you could begin to see the whole puzzle as an adult it was disturbing for example when I read about the flood as a kid I didn't think about the fact that God killed everyone because he was angry he just drowned them all because he thought they were all bad what you have to assume included a lot of kids and unborn fetuses which I guess was okay with God but then I was relieved to read that God actually comes to Noah afterward and he says you know the whole flood thing it might have been a big mistake and he promises he'll never do it again and that was another surprise God has regrets then we got destroys like Sodom and Gomorrah all I remembered about that story is that there were these two sinful cities like Las Vegas and Reno or something God got mad and wiped them out and Lot's wife looked back when she was told not to and she got turned into a pillar of salt but the nuns of my grade school didn't explain to us what happens right before they flee right before they flee lot is visited by these two angels who are masquerading as two men and they come and stay overnight at his house and this mob forms outside and they yell send out those two angel like men to us so we can have sex with them and lot yells no which I think it's a basic rule of hospitality don't give up your guests to be raped by the angry mob outside but then what does he say next he says why don't you take my daughters and rape and do what you will with them they're virgins okay so lot is evil right how is it that the story we know about him is about his wife getting turned into a pillar of salt maybe that was her only way out maybe being a big pillar of salt is preferable to being married to a lot anyway after lot and his two traumatized daughters flee Sodom and Gomorrah they all go to a cave in the mountains and hide out and during the night lots two daughters get lot drunk and then rape him did they do this in revenge or what their father did to them no the Bible says it's because there aren't any other men around even though the Bible also says that they're not that far from a city named Zohar so I guess no men around for maybe a few miles and wait a minute so lots two daughters just had to drug and rape somebody and then I guess if you're their dad and you're the [Music] [Applause] okay I knew the Bible had many stories I mean I knew there were nutty stories but I don't know I guess I thought they'd be wedged in amongst an ocean of inspiration in history but instead the stories just got darker and even more convoluted this Old Testament God makes the grisliest tests of people's loyalty like when he asks Abraham to murder his son Isaac as a kid we were taught to admire it I caught my breath reading it we were taught to admire it what kind of sadistic test of loyalty is that to ask someone to kill his or her own child and isn't the proper answer no I will not kill my child or any child even if it means eternal punishment in hell at the next Bible study class father Tom reminded us that Isaac represents what matters to Abraham most and that's what God asks us to give up for him I said but protecting and loving and caring for the welfare of your child is such a deep ethical loving instinct and act so what if what matters to you most is your own loving behavior should we be willing to give up our epics for God he said no because your epics your ethics because your epics your ethics is your love and faith in God that confused me a little bit but I decided to just let that one go but then I found that Abraham isn't the only person willing to murder his own child for God in the Bible they're actually all over the place for example in the book of Judges this guy named Jeff that tells God that if he can win this battle he will kill the first person who greets him when he comes home as a burnt offering and who was the first person he sees his only child his beloved daughter who runs to him playing with tambourines and singing hi Daddy what does God say no don't kill your only child as a burnt offering to me or even Jetha who did you expect I mean the first person to greet you when you came home no it appears the most important point of this story is that Jeff athough allows his beautiful daughter to go off into the woods for two months to mourn her virginity I could thinking Ronn before she comes back and he kills her by lighting her on fire even if you leave aside the creepy sacrifice your own offspring stories the laws of the Old Testament were really hard to take Leviticus and Deuteronomy are filled with archaic just hard to imagine laws like if a man has sex with an animal both the man and the animal should be killed which I could almost understand for the man but the animals because the animal was a willing participant because now the animals have the taste of human sex and more ps5 even things that I thought were set in stone like like literally set in stone like the Ten Commandments weren't the Ten Commandments that we are almost familiar with are these rules that God simply told Moses on Mount Sinai without referring to them as Commandments without even setting them in stone it's only later in Exodus when Moses goes back up to Mount Sinai that God gives him a set of two tablets of stone with these rules chiseled on them when Moses gets back down off the mountain he sees the people worshiping a golden calf and he hasn't and how many smashes the stones before he reads them so then Moses goes back up to Mount Sinai and God gives him another set of stone tablets and this is the first time at this point that they are referred to as the commandments and they're chiseled into stone so you'd sort of think that God's got to be pretty firm on the subject of commandments by now but the rules are significantly different than those other rules like how old male children have to appear before God three times a year however that's supposed to be accomplished and how you shouldn't cook a baby goat in its mother's milk and how every domestic animals firstborn males should be sacrificed but then the commandment goes on to say that if you don't want to sacrifice your donkeys firstborn male you could go ahead and substitute a lamb if you really needed to some people think that without the Ten Commandments morality and society would be relative and wishy-washy but in the Bible morality is relative and wishy-washy in fact it sure seems like our modern morality is much more loving and humane than the Bible's morality well father Tom saw me outside of church after Mass one Sunday and he said Julia you know you always looked so very sad in Bible study class I said I'm sorry father it's just that God is so offensive in the Bible really it's like he's bipolar well you know the Old Testaments just remember that the people who wrote it for an ancient Bronze Age civilization the stories are legends they're tales of trickery and deception that were totaled around the campfire by sheiks who made God impressive by their very ancient standards I said oh wow looking at the Old Testament that way it actually makes a lot of sense now father looking at the Old Testament that way it's quite interesting but Homer was also an ancient Bronze Age writer writing about gods I mean how much are we supposed to believe is actually true he said Wow there's no evidence that Abraham is anything other legend or Isaac or Moses or even the whole Exodus story I said the Exodus story is a myth and he said what a myth ish and I said how can something be myth ish and he said well the Exodus story is a myth in the sense that it never actually happened but it's not a myth and a fact that the people believe the story was true and shaped their identity as a culture based on thinking that patrulla you can't read the Bible with modern historical eyes you've got to read it with the eyes of faith because this is the story that God wants us to know I left the church thinking okay calm down this is the Old Testament Oh oldest write the title I knew a newer Testament is coming up and that's why God must sent his son Jesus because we clearly haven't gotten the message right right Jesus was all about tearing down those old archaic ways of worship and reminding people that what mattered most was what we were like on the inside I could hardly wait to meet Jesus again as if it were the first time but oh dear well first of all Jesus was much angrier than I expected him to be I mean I knew I got angry with all those money changers in the temple and everything but I just have no idea that he was so angry so much of the time and very impatient Jesus says that he speaks in parables because the people they just don't understand anything else but the parables are often foggy and meaningless and Jesus is snippy when even the disciples don't get them he says them if you don't understand this parable then how can you understand any parable and are you incapable of understanding I kept thinking don't teach in parables that it's not working even your staff doesn't understand why don't you just say what you mean okay so Jesus isn't so patient and I think he picked a very ineffective lesson giving technique and he's angry most of the time but that doesn't make him bad it's just wow I really expected someone else some of the parables are not just foggy to me they're sort of offensive like in Luke Jesus helps us understand God's relationship with humans by telling us a story about how God treats people the way people treat their slaves they beat some more than they beat others okay I know this was a different time and everything and I really tried to keep that in mind as the Bible refers to slavery all over the place and not only does it not say it's wrong I mean the Bible gives you advice about how you're supposed to keep your slaves and how slaves should behave obediently at all times to their masters but I don't know I guess I sort of thought the son of God would say slavery was wrong but no Jesus does not say that in fact he uses slavery as an example of how God treats people it was really hard to stay on Jesus's side when he started saying really a aggressive just hateful things like in Luke chapter 21 Jesus says that he is like a king who says anyone who does not recognize me bring them here and slaughter them before me or in John chapter 15 Jesus says anyone who does not believe in me is like a withered branch that will be cast into the fire and burned in Matthew he says I come not to bring peace but a sword and in Luke he says and if you don't have a sword sell your clothes and buy one then Jesus just starts acting downright CRAZY I can Matthew chapter 21 when this victory doesn't have a thing for Jesus to eat he condemns the fig tree to death that's right Jesus condemns a fig tree to God not a parable by the way just Jesus pissed off and the fig tree did another thing for me was not exactly the Prince of Peace who taught us to turn the other cheek and then there's family I have to say that for me the most deeply upsetting thing about Jesus is his family values which is amazing when you think how there's so many groups out there who say they based their family values on the Bible I mean he seems to have no real close ties to his parents he puts his mother off cruelly over and over again at the wedding feast he says to her woman what have I to do with you and once while he was speaking to a crowd mary waited patiently off to the side to talk to him and jesus said to the disciples send her away because you are my family now Matthew Mark and Luke I'll tell this exact same story but mark actually tells us why Mary was there to see Jesus he says Mary came to see Jesus to restrain him because the people were saying he's gone out of his mind I kept thinking yes let's go get Jesus and get him some help anyway Jesus discourages any contact his converts have with their own families he himself does not marry or have children and he explicitly tells his followers not to have families as well and if they do they should just abandon them now mostly Jesus says this because he believed the end of all time was imminent Jesus said over and over again that the people who were alive when he was alive would not die naturally but see the end times he tells us this in Matthew Mark and Luke so okay Jesus tells us not to have families because he mistakenly believed that the end of all time was imminent but then he tells us not to take care of the families that we do have already like in Luke chapter 14 Jesus says anyone who comes to me and does not hate father and mother brothers and sisters wife and children cannot be my disciple I mean isn't that what cults do get you to reject your family in order to inculcate you so that's the New Testament family values for you this suppose a big improvement over the Testament family values which seem to me to be mostly about incest and mass slaughter and protecting your own specific genetic line at all costs after the Gospels there's a bunch of letters written by the early Christians the most important of which are written by st. Paul now the Bible's view of women is dreadful in general and you know I know this was a different time and everything but st. Paul he really just gets right to the point st. Paul writes man is the image and glory of God but woman is the glory of man a woman should learn in quietness and full submission I do not permit a woman to teach or have any authority over a man she must be silent if there is anything a woman desires to know let her ask her husband at home for Adam was formed first and then Eve and it was not the man who was deceived it was the woman who was deceived and became the sinner the Bible the Bible the good book the good news I was so disillusioned with the Bible by the time I finished the epistles I just didn't think I could get any worse but it did we were just about to read the last and most oddball book of the Bible a revelation now apparently revelation was written by st. John the same person who wrote a gospel and some of the epistles the biblical historian Ken Smith says that if his epistles can be seen as John on pot well revelation is John on acid it describes the end of days with a little too much gruesome enthusiasm Revelation tells us that in heaven there is a throne and the one who sat there had the appearance of a Jasper around the throne were four living creatures and they're covered with eyes front and back day and night they never stopped saying only only only is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come in heaven Jesus resembles the dead lamb with seven horns and seven eyes and when the gates of Hell are open locusts with human faces and these thing people are there take Revelation tells us that only 144,000 people will be saved and even get into heaven and that none of them will have quote defiled themselves with women which I guess excludes most heterosexual men from heaven and depending on how you interpret that word defiled I don't know I would say it excludes all women do after we finished revelation the entire Bible study groups sat there dumbfounded our Bibles on our laps father Tom said revelations poem about the end of the world I said father Tom I am having a really hard time with this book and he told me to pray for faith I left the church thinking is this one big practical joke where is my god did Jesus I know the one that I love and the one who loves me I was driving home and I was stopped at a red light on Crenshaw and Wilshire and it was a Sunday and all these people are walking to church holding their Bibles and I wanted to roll down the window and say have you read that book I felt like I was in a horror film and the puter the insanity was not some secret document it was a book that everyone was holding that was on every coffee table the biggest bestseller of all time the key to the underpinnings of the faith in every single hotel room in the land and yet if you cared enough to just glance inside you found you'd open the door - what insane asylum with a bunch of crazy people dancing around open that door my mother said Julie I just ignore what I don't like why would you do something how do I go read the Bible cover-to-cover if you weren't just looking for reasons to get upset you'll make your life so much harder than it has to be honey well I went to Book Soup and I wandered around and I saw this book called the history of God by this woman Karen Armstrong Karen Armstrong is this amazing British religious writer who was a nun for seven years and then she left the convent and now I believe she teaches religious history at a rabbinical Institute in England in my mind the Hayley Mills character and the trouble with angels well she grows up to become Karen Armstrong Karen has all sorts of scathingly brilliant ideas I loved the history of God and in it Karen makes a good point she says the stories of the Bible are not literally true everybody knows they're not literally true and it's not even important that they're true what's important is that they're psychologically true and that was a big revelation for me I felt like I finally understood as if it long last I was in on the secret I thought oh yeah that's what everybody already knows only no one says it or maybe maybe this is what father tom was trying to tell me when he said myth ish he meant it was psychologically true I walked around thinking of course of course and I remember the nuns teaching me Dogma in grade school and how exasperated they would get if I asked too many questions and now I knew what they were thinking they were thinking don't you know it's just psychologically true everybody else seems to get that so when I went to Mass on Easter Sunday that year I felt they have this new positive attitude I knew the correct way to look at the stories historical accuracy was not important the people built cultures around them wasn't even important what was important was that they triggered us somehow very deep in our psyche because they were psychologically true but as I sat there in Mass I thought what does that really mean I mean Jesus is death and resurrection death and rebirth okay I get it psychologically true enough but what about other stories on the same theme I mean what about Persephone going down into the underworld I mean that's psychologically true to them I suppose what about stories in the Iliad or Darth Vader or the little engine that could I mean those are psychologically true stories and what's so psychologically true about atonement we were taught that Jesus died for our sins based on this idea of atonement or that somebody else can pay for the sins of other people for the first time after going to church basically my entire life I considered the idea that God sent his son to earth to suffer and die for our sins why I mean first of all you can say that Jesus suffered but you know he didn't suffer any more than a lot of people have suffered I could think of examples in my own family my brother Mike who had cancer he suffered unspeakably for a very long time eyelids freezing open and his eyes drying up canker sores all over his throat and he couldn't swallow weeks and then months of gut-wrenching vomiting and nausea before he finally died so okay Jesus suffered I mean he apparently suffered terribly for one maybe even two days I heard someone say once Jesus had a really bad weekend for our sins why would a God create people so imperfect then blame them for their own imperfections a Hovind sent his son to be tortured and then murdered by those imperfect people to make up for how imperfect people work and how imperfect they inevitably were going to be I mean what a crazy idea I looked at the crucifix and for the first time instead of seeing a symbol of transcendence and compassion I saw a horrible execution device what kind of God sends his son to be tortured and killed like that oh I guess it is the God of the Old Testament that's exactly who would do something like that but then when I looked at Jesus as just a guy just a human just just an impassioned young idealist who sure lost his temper a lot but who could also go on teary-eyed about loving your neighbor and helping the poor and because his ideas were so outspoken it threatened those in power who ordered him to be tortured and then killed and then reading how Jesus died astonished and heartbroken that his own God abandoned him his story became so tragic Jesus's life and death made me want to go out and campaign for free speech not sit in a church and worship Him so I tried to concentrate on what I did like about the church the stained-glass windows are pretty white and the church the religious art the songs not the words to the songs exactly but the melodies were nice especially at Christmas it's also pretty in the church then well father Tom saw me outside the church he said Happy Easter Julia I said Happy Easter father said you know I can see a frowning from the pulpit I'm sorry father but will you please help me because I am just fighting this all just impossible believe he pulled me over to the coffee and doughnuts table he said listen I've been speaking with some of the other priests about your predicament I loved how he said predicament I felt like I was 16 and knocked off yeah he said listen we all struggle with doubt but we all come back just remember proverbs 3:5 trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding so God gave us the gifts of intelligence and curiosity and rationality but then we're not supposed to use them then father Tom sighed like it was so tired of me and my struggle and I was so angry that he used that particular proverb but really felt like he was just slamming the door in my face then all of a sudden father Tom started to bless me it was sort of awkward he just started moving his hands over me and chanting this phrase in Latin not that this is so out of the ordinary or wrong or anything like that it's just in this moment it felt like he was trying to perform an exorcism afterwards I went back into the empty church and I sat down and I stared at the altar when I was 10 or so the sisters at st. Augustine's announced that anyone who is interested in becoming an altar boy we're to go see Monsignor at the rectory and I thought I want to be an altar boy and my best friend Janie Parker and I went up to the rectory and we knocked on the door and Monsignor answered and I said we want to be altar boys or other girls or other people or whatever a Monsignor said don't be ridiculous and he slammed the door in our faces as we stood there Janie and I was so angry we were so mad we just went right back over to the church and we went where they'd always told us we should never go up to the sanctuary and we knew that it was a sacrilege to touch anything on the altar if you weren't a priest or an altar boy and we ran around and touched everything he does every little thing we got our girl and suddenly remembering that like a big ocean wave the force of all that I really hated about this church welled up in me oh the pump is numbing masses the unabated monotony of the rituals all the desperate priests trying to tease something meaningful out of a very flawed ancient text I was driving home going east on the 10 and I was near tears thinking I tried so hard I tried to learn more about my church and it just made everything a lot worse I thought they knew something I didn't know like they had to have because there's this whole huge institution built on it and I thought I feel like I am lying under this great huge cow of the church sucking on a teat trying to get some milk of meaning sucking and then I usually do get a teaspoon of milk and I threw myself in and now my neck is so exhausted even the muscles in my shoulders and back restorative ache and I prayed to God what am I gonna do I can't go back there again we can go to some other church together me and God or find some other way but this is not the right way for me I will not make this drive again it is finished and then I did start to cry and as if God were crying - it began to rain and I could almost feel God sitting in the path you seek next a man when we're ripping down the freeway together and I could practically hear God say I could barely stand it if that church myself let's get the hell out of here and so we did I came home and it felt remarkably quiet sort of like God and I were empty nesters and now we had no church or rituals or special prayers to distract us from each other just me and God not saying much just sort of ponder ease not have big conversationalist God in retrospect I could have easily become an Episcopal at that moment but I didn't instead I went to rocket video and I rented all those bill moyers Joseph Campbell tapes and I rewatched them and I reveled in the common themes that all religions share but it was different than the first time I watched them back in 1988 back then all I really remembered was follow your bliss follow your bliss follow your following my bliss that's good advice but this time I thought you know what I believe in everything all religions worship the same God they just all do it in different ways I began to drift East spiritually speaking I took a meditation class and I began to meditate rather regularly and I found it challenging and it really sharpened my concentration I got Houston Smith's guide to the spiritual classics and I read them all the daodejing the Bhagavad Gita the Tibetan Book of the Dead Rumi the essential Kabbalah I was on a spiritual quest fortunately around this time on the work front I had been cast as the mother into direct-to-video family dog movies Beethoven three and four I know I hate to throw my credits around anyway in one of the scripts that have this nightmare sequence which involved a bunch of drooling Saint Bernards licking my terrified face and this was accomplished by well by taking a whole bunch of Saint Bernards and not feeding them for a very long time taking me to the beach and burying me in sand all the way up to my neck rubbing a bunch of dog food in my hair and then releasing the hounds and as the dogs galloped towards my fragrant cranium I thought maybe I'm a Buddhist in a way it seems inevitable I mean I live in California it's practically Buddhism second hell I was so excited about Buddhism that I decided I wanted to travel in countries predominantly Buddhist and go to the east and see the places where it all began and the money from these two movies allowed me to do it I took off and traveled for several months I went to China and hiked along the Yangtze and then I went to Tibet where I went overland from los zetas Katmandu and then I spent some time hiking in Bhutan this little Buddhist monarchy high up in the Himalayas it's sort of sandwiched between India and China and as I hiked up and up to a monastery I could hear the monks chanting and singing in the distance prayer flags whipped in the wind and the giant mountains hovered and it was also otherworldly and exotic it also happened to be my 40th birthday I kept thinking 40 Wow 40 I was taught to by this age I'd be married and have kids maybe even grown kids I could almost hear God laughing in the wind at how differently everything turned out for me ahead of me on the trail was this old man carrying a prayer wheel and one of those rosaries or prayer beads that has the same number of beads the Catholics use a mala I think it's called and I thought wow see he looks like he could almost be my grandmother walking to church I got closer to the monastery but as I got closer I could see how young some of the monks were it's a tradition in places like Tibet in Bhutan that the second son just automatically goes into the monastery some of the boys are as young as seven the age of reason but hardly an age where someone can make an informed decision about their life purpose I mean they would only get a religious education they would never get to experience well a heterosexual relationship with its particular joys and sorrows or a family of their own instead of being inspired by them I wanted to free them and as I hiked back down I thought maybe I have it backwards maybe we don't all worship the same God I mean after all the Buddhist gods are so different than the judeo-christian God but we all sure seem to worship them in the same ways we were sigh prayers we make sacrifices we wear special garments we use special objects from there I went to Thailand where I happened to talk to this woman who was taking care of a terribly deformed boy who was an orphan and I said it's so good of you to take care of this poor boy and she said don't say poor boy he must have done something terrible in a past life to be born like that when I got back to Los Angeles even though there was still a lot about Buddhism that truly did intrigue me I had to admit I was less interested I got thinking wow the Buddhism we get in California is all cleaned up for us and I wondered what enlightenment really meant I feel pretty good about my levels of attachment and detachment to the world to me life was not all suffering in fact what I mostly felt was this growing sense of outrageous luck I realized that I wasn't just looking for inner peace so that I could feel happier or more content with my own life I was trying to figure out why I was born who God was and I guess what the ultimate meaning of life was well Bill Moyers was to appear once again on my quest not exactly as a spiritual guide showing me down the right road but more like a friendly gas station attendant who has some pretty good maps for sale next to the cash register he did this interview with sister Wendy do you know sister Wendy she is that nun who was on PBS all the time walking through museums talking rapturously about art I love sister Wendy to me she has the perfect dream life half the year she spends in a silent monastery and the other half she spends being a television star ha ha ha I've watched all of her videos and Bill Moyers did this special interview with her he did ask her question after question after question about her sexless existence which got to be rather annoying and then even a little disturbing but at one point he said to her sister Wendy when you're at the monastery what do you do all day and sister Wendy said well well I pray a lot and I live in the sunshine of God's presence it's absolute bliss and I thought the sunshine of God's presence huh the sunshine of God's presence maybe I'll spend more time in the sunshine maybe for me God is nature the beauty and harmony of our natural world and as soon as I said it it felt so right I could almost hear God saying duh and I walk around saying God his name sure God his nature that's the way for me to connect with God by spending time in his masterpiece nature now you know Catholics Catholics don't push nature all that much either I think there's something almost pornographic about the whole idea of nature to Catholics I don't remember a lot of hiking growing up we weren't like those crazy Protestants were out camping all the time I guess the idea was that nature was just so lush and unabashedly ripe you just didn't know what you were gonna get tangled up in out in nature so I decided that I would try to experience God well I was on a hike or on a bike and it was fun it was really fun and I began to notice the smallest leaves and what a web of life there was out there so intricate and beautiful I was able to continue my travels and this time I headed to South America and I went to Ecuador and then went to visit the Galapagos Islands I went on a week-long boat trip with a naturalist and eight other people and in the common area of the boat was Charles Darwin's the Origin of Species and I laughed when I saw because I thought either you would be some wonder what I've already read the Origin of Species and that would be why you even came here to the Galapagos or you would be someone who'd probably never read the Origin of Species I mean how supremely door-key would it be if someone saw this book here and thought oh I wonder what this is about we started reading it here of all places that would be so ridiculous and in a few moments I basically was that person now of course I accepted the theory of evolution I mean I remembered sister Tarantino telling us all about it in eighth grade how we as Catholics believe in evolution we weren't like some of those uneducated Protestants I believe God literally plopped people onto the earth and one fell swoop she said this is the way it happened God said everything in motion in order for humans to evolve then there was a special preordained moment when there was a very very first human man and woman because think about it there had to be some moment when there was the very very first human man and woman and that was Adam and Eve and that's when God put a soul with us and then everything else happened exactly as it says in the Bible and then she sort of encouraged us not to think so much about evolution anymore because after all she had just explained it any case the idea of evolution wasn't threatening to me in any way it's just I didn't really understand that much about it except over time animals change I thought the Origin of Species would be way too scientific of a book for a person like me to read personally I had avoided science at all costs in school in fact I even had this prejudice this idea that doing well at science was somehow an admission that you didn't have the complexity of character the subtlety of mind to take on the humanities science was for people who couldn't handle ambiguities who needed black and white answers probably people who couldn't really get in touch with their feelings and had nothing left to think about but to my surprise the Origin of Species was very easy to read and truly a page-turner and Charles Darwin he described evolution in ways that sister charity nough had not that was a lot more scary and chancy the way Darwin described it the next day we visited an island where the blue footed boobies were tending for their new babies now the blue footed boobies are just the cutest animals in the world I think almost in the level of absurdity they have this bright white fur that sticks out all over in these big blue beaks and feet and these huge plaintive eyes now usually the blue footed boobies have just one baby for pregnancy but every once in a while they have to and when they do usually the stronger of the two pecks the Braves out of the weaker one so we were all looking at these adorable little do footed booby babies and then we came upon one picking the brains out of its weaker sibling and The Naturalist was telling us that this was routine that now the frigate bird would fly in soon and carry the dead baby off to feed its family that's the way I went and I looked at this poor doomed blue-footed movie baby with his brains just hanging out of his head and we looked each other in the eye for a moment and he looked at me like what are you gonna do I'm the weaker blue-footed booby baby God is not nature God is not nature nature is floods and famines and earthquakes and viruses a little blue footed booby babies getting their brains pecked out by those stronger sibling God the God that I know the God of love and compassion exactly found in nature we went back to the boat and clouds formed overhead and I decided I would just lie in the fetal position for a while and consider nature so God a nature are separate it's so obvious that that is true I mean God is a moral force and nature is utterly amoral I mean nature doesn't care about me or anybody in particular any nature can be terrifying gosh why do they even put words like natural on products like shampoo like that's automatically a good thing I mean so Furyk acid is natural I could almost hear God saying duh [Applause] are you because I can't stop freaking lions and tigers and bears oh I walked through the valley of the shadow of death I shall not fear because you are with me [Music] maybe god is love I mean could it be that simple for me you hear it all the time God is love okay God is love God is a force of love God is a force of love in the universe when I was in high school at Mary Cliff the Catholic girls school there was this late eacher who taught PE named Miss Roberts and she was gorgeous she walked like an athlete her head held high she was tall and blond and muscular a goddess in our midst one day the nuns had all of his girls in the gym and we were sitting on the floor listening to this guest musician who I think may have been a friend of Miss Roberts and he was playing his guitar and singing and at the end of his set he began singing this song Vatican rag which is very irreverent and has lyrics like bow your head with great respect and then genuflect genuflect genuflect well the nuns real sister mary harron stood up in the middle of his song and asked him to leave he stopped took his guitar and left they don't remember just sitting there in the gym for a while just sort of decompressing you know just talking about God when all of a sudden sister Mary Howard turned to dismiss Roberts and said do you even believe in God well I've never heard anyone ask another person a question like that before Miss Roberts stared right into the eyes of sister Mary Howard and sister Mary Howard stared right into the eyes of Miss Roberts who after an eternity said I believe in a force of love in the universe all of us girls nodded an agreement for us 11 the universe I mean sure who could argue with that and then we all look back at sister Mary Howard whose eyes narrowed like that is the wrong answer only two years later the attitude of my church towards God being simply love had completely changed Gonzaga Prep the Catholic boys school had gone co-ed and that's where I spent my last two years of high school everything seemed to be changing folk masses were slipping into the main some of the priests seized chalices made of thick handmade pottery and their vestments were made out of unbleached fabrics coarsely woven and instead of the pre-made communion wafers we all just started breaking a loaf of bread into little pieces like Jesus did in the spring Father fitara started teaching us all Transcendental Meditation suddenly there were guitars in math and it throws that right up on the altar transubstantiation was never like this before in my senior year of high school they had us all go on this special retreat called the search and they took us off to this retreat house for a couple of days up in the mountains and they put these big blankets over the windows so we didn't know what time it was and then they didn't let us sleep for two entire days and of course everyone kept breaking down and crying saying God is love only we were actually saying thread as well fred is loved because they asked us to call God Fred instead of God while we were on the retreat because they felt many of God was just too off-putting for so many people and Fred just felt so much friendlier so we were saying fred is love I am walking on friends I remember after the surge all of us seniors were going back to school in this bus tell these really scary winding switchback roads and another senior Larry who a few years later would leave the Catholic Church to become an Evangelic of Christian turned to me with his big beatific grin on his face and said just think if this bus I mean to a big accident like now we would all kill we've all probably go straight up to heaven we all nodded like yeah our souls are so clean up here at this moment how wonderful would it be if we were all killed in a big bus accident right now we'd all slice [Music] [Applause] I didn't really date in high school so here I was years and years later thank God is love again myself but what did I mean exactly I decided no anything more about this whole idea of God being loved the feeling of love I think there was a God behind it or in it I mean there seem to be a lot of incentive to feel loved just for its own sake without God would there be no love in my confusion I found someone who made it clear someone who had thought about this topic a lot now at this point I knew a little bit of science but not a lot and that made me the perfect candidate for Deepak Chopra I read the way of the wizard ageless body timeless mind the quantum alternative to growing old the seven spiritual laws of success and how to know God I basked my way through detox books I thought I'd get it God is energy and intention in the quantum field or something Deepak says that by perceiving changelessness time ceases to exist I love Deepak I did an interview on the view on ABC and Deepak Chopra also happened to be a guest on the exact same show and I got all over him in the green or I'm telling him how wonderful he was I didn't notice that he looked a little older than he looked at his book jacket and I wondered if his perceived timelessness was working on his own I told him how his books for helping me understand what and who God was what ultimate reality was and also I just had to tell him that I appreciated that he also had books about how to create spontaneous wealth and how to lose weight Deepak says the world is the creation of the observer and the body is information and energy spanning universe consciousness is the ground of all being it created us and we are part of it Deepak believes that we can tap into this big consciousness with our awareness and that it is the source of all creativity and intention and synchronicity and if you want proof well the exotic field of quantum mechanics proves all of it I was really enthralled with how deepak was using science the cutting-edge science of quantum mechanics this was so much better than using myths and superstitions to find spirituality I mean this was using physics and science to find spirituality I was so intrigued with this quantum mechanics that Deepak refers to over and over and over again in his books that I decided I would take a class in it and what I found is that Deepak Chopra is full of I wanted to go back in time and instead of gushing at Chopra I wanted to say Deepak what the hell are you doing there is no universal consciousness that can be demonstrated with quantum mechanics there was no healing of the body or arresting of the aging process through telepathy I mean sure subatomic waves and particles do behave in perplexing and strange ways to us specially when we try to measure them apparently but that doesn't mean that there are angels or that the universe wants me in particular to make more money I mean I know this and I took one measly class I turned on the TV one day to find Deepak back on his beloved show the view promoting his new book golfing to enlightenment and all the ladies were so thrilled who knew you could achieve enlightenment on the links I started feeling so angry at the New Age movement so arrogant so clueless I mean here was the generation that was supposed to be the best educated the ones who threw off the shackles of superstition and traditional religion and then what did they do they just gravitated toward chakras and auras and crystals and quantum consciousness I mean what is the matter with people and I thought oh god what is happening to me I'm becoming so cantankerous I'm gonna become one of those angry retired people who just keeps writing letters to the editor [Laughter] and I realized that the class I took didn't just give me a very rudimentary understanding of the very basics of quantum mechanics I actually learned something much more deeply disturbing about myself which was I've never really been taught critical thinking skills before I never really considered how to evaluate evidence I was thought that being smart meant that you knew a lot of things or that you did what the teacher told you to do really really well not that you have this mechanism for filtering information plus the truth was I was starting to get nervous about my relationship with God I felt like we were this married couple in trouble just trying to find some common ground I began to wonder just who I was married to how define did it really need to be for me because the truth was God worked for me William James said it doesn't work because it's true it's true because it works when I prayed I felt calmer more focused it really changed my state of mind but just because the idea of God worked so well for me it didn't necessarily mean that he existed I felt suspicious for the first time I wondered if God wasn't just my imaginary friend as they say the invisible and the non-existent often look very much alike then I thought wait a minute God requires faith and faith does not require evidence right but the more I thought about it the more I had to admit that my faith my faith really was based on evidence the evidence of how I felt when I prayed the evidence of everyone believing in God almost everyone I ever met from the time I was a kid the evidence of what I had been taught by people that I trusted and admired and people who ultimately had authority over me so my faith in God really was based on evidence how could I not examine that evidence but then how did I examine anything how did I even know what I knew I had to know one day I was thinking about these things I was wandering around auntie's bookstore in Spokane Washington and I glanced up and I saw this book called how the mind works by the sky Steven Pinker and I thought wow how does the mind work anyway turns out dendrites and neurons and glial cells and spindle cells I mean apparently the nature of consciousness is still mysterious in some respects but basically we're talking about neurons firing through dendrites often releasing chemicals in our bodies reading how the mind works triggered this appetite inside me for understanding how we understand how we function and what we really know I was surprised to find that all of our brains are on drugs all of the time we give ourselves hits dopamine oxytocin serotonin and vasopressin the next time all of you laugh I'll get a little shot of adrenaline through my veins and if you don't when I expect you to I'll get cortisol instead and feel anxious thank you by the way I always thought that I was a person who had escaped addictions but I realized that I am up here on this stage right now partly because I am an addict also I learned that memory memory is very very unreliable even when we think we remember for sure it turns out our memories are not automatic video playback but instead reconstructions our memories get filtered by our prior prejudices and then mixed up with things that happen later and that was a very scary thought for me because my memories I mean that makes me who I am when I think of myself as my innermost being I don't think of it as a body function my brain creates this idea that my self is not itself I think of myself as something separate looking out from my eyes listening through my ears pulling the strings that make my body move and that is because the brain is not able to perceive its own functioning and this is true for all of us by the way right from childhood when a child is told that it's their brain that thinks they don't think their brain is them they think their brain is this thinking computing machine something that is added to their self to help them understand things and yet the mind is what the brain does just like pumping blood is what the heart does reading about the brain open this door and my interest that I never even knew existed I was catapulted into a binge of reading I was voracious it was like I had been starved my entire life for science like the Cambrian explosion happened in my own brain and I liked it it was challenging and unlike every other knowledge quest this one actually got better the closer you looked for the first time knowing too much didn't ruin it I always thought that science was the set of immutable facts revealed to us by nature and then when I would read you know as a layperson about how say a planet was now not a planet anymore or gravity wasn't like we thought I was thought that was a failing of science another sign that how completely unsure science was but I realized these examples were not signs of weakness they were signs of strength the method was working constantly filtering new and even better information I had it all backwards when I was younger it's actually the scientists who are good at dealing with uncertainty well I was dating a guy at this time who was a big believer in intelligent design intelligent design is this idea that the world is so complex especially the conscious thinking feeling human being who is so complicated that it just couldn't have happened by chance someone or something had to have a hand in creating us and that someone or something is God I mean the watch requires a watchmaker well one morning my intelligent designer boyfriend and I were waking up and he glanced at the books on my side of the bed which were becoming increasingly more biological rather than religious and then we gazed into each other's eyes deeper than ever before it's the human eye you know he said that's the proof there must have been a designer you can't have half an eye half an eyes no good at all either you have an eyes you can see or you don't how could you possibly evolve an eye yes I said that's probably true the eye the eye is very complex after all it's the window into the zoo [Music] so I began to read about eyes I learned a lot more than I ever dreamed about eyes turns out from an evolutionary perspective the human eyes perfectly explainable what began as a patch of skin more sensitive to light than other skin offers some advantage those that haven't lived those that don't do not turns out half an eye actually is pretty valuable about half as valuable now if an intelligent designer or God designed our eyes he would not get such a very good grade because he put the blood vessels and nerves that carry all the visual information to the brain on top of the retina imagine that's like putting all the wiring of a video camera on top of the lens and where the blood vessels and nerves go through our retina into our brain it causes us to have this blind spot that we all compensate for by basically hallucinating which is bad bad bad bad not a good design for an eye and it doesn't even have to be that way octopus and squid they evolved their eyes separately from us and they don't have those annoying features the wonderful biologist Massimo Pigliucci he wrote the only possible conclusions that we can come to from this evidence are that God didn't design the eye or he did and he's pretty sloppy and not worthy of our unconditional admiration or godlike squids a lot better than humans intelligent design gets everything backwards it's like saying that our hands are miraculous because they fit so perfectly into our gloves look at that four fingers in a bum now that can't have been an accident my old cat Rita lumbered onto my lap while I was reading about eyes she was about 15 years old then and have gotten too tired and bothered to go through the entire meow she just started going [Music] we looked each other in the eye instead of noticing the differences I noticed the similarities we inherited our eyes from our common ancestor who probably lived around 100 million years ago our eyes are forward on our skull because we are hunters except wow Rita wasn't much of a hunter and I realize neither was I not if I was dating a guy who was so into intelligent design Rita me out at me like ah who needs to hunt when I have domestic help then I started reading about all of these experiments on the function of the temporal lobes these doctors figured out a way to stimulate electromagnetically the right temporal lobe people who wore this helmet experienced a transcendent sense of understanding an overwhelming connectedness and peace and sometimes the presence of God or of aliens this was often accompanied by a bright white light everyone has a certain right temporal lobe sensitivity we're all susceptible to these types of experiences so this could have been what was happening to me when I have that whole heal me heal me experience of course this doesn't mean that God doesn't just use this physical way to allow us to experience him or her or whoever but that sure was interesting I learned because the brain is in some deep fundamental ways unaware of itself hallucinations like I had or like the people have of angels or ghosts or out-of-body or near death experiences are perceived as real events or actual encounters and so most people including me just instinctively think of the mind as something separate from the body even though there's no evidence that they are separate it turns out we are organic beings in essence our minds living and dying along with our bodies and sometimes even before our bodies as it takes just one visit with a person with Alzheimer's to realize so my comments view of the world can be very mistaken my instincts tell me one thing like that the earth is flat because you know it basically seems to be while I'm walking around on it but the earth isn't flat as the facts show us I suddenly realized that there were implications to everything that I was learning my assumption about God's role in our lives was really getting squeezed I didn't think he intervened in our lives I didn't think he was necessary for us to evolve I tried not to think of the implications come on it was impossible not to then one day I was commenting out my tub and I thought what if it's true what if humans are here because of pure random chance what if there is no guiding hand no external regulation no one watching it's clearly possible that this may be true in fact this is what our scientific evidence is pointing towards but if it were true what would that mean I realized I had spent so much time thinking about what God meant that I hadn't really spent any time thinking about what not God meant a few days later I was walking from my office in my back yard into the house and I suddenly realized that there was this teeny-weeny voice whispering inside my head I'm not sure how long it had been there but it suddenly got just one decibel louder and it whispered I tried to ignore it but it got a little louder there is no God there is no God oh my god there is no God I sat down under my barren apricot tree I didn't realise by the way that trees are like people they stop reproducing when they get older maybe that fig tree that Jesus condemned to death was just menopausal [Applause] anyway I sat there and I thought okay I admit it I do not believe that there's enough evidence to continue to believe in God I mean the world behaves exactly as you would expect it would if there were no Supreme Being no supreme consciousness no supernatural so my best judgment tells me that it's much more likely that we invented God rather than God inventing us and I shuddered I felt like I was slipping off the raft I thought but I can't not believe in God I need God I mean we have a whole history together and then I thought wait a minute if I look over my life every single step of maturing for me every single one has really had the exact same common denominator and that was accepting what was true over what I wished were true I mean this was the case about guys about my career about my parents so how could I come up against this biggest question the ultimate question if I really believed in God or not and then just turn away from the evidence how could I believe just because I wanted to how would I have any respect for myself if I did that I thought a Pascal's wager Pascal argued that it's better to bet there is a God because if you're wrong there's nothing to lose but if there is you win an eternity in heaven but I can't force myself to believe just in case it turns out to be true I mean the God I've been praying to knows what I think he doesn't just make sure I show up for church how could I possibly pretend to believe I mean I might be able to convince other people but surely not God and plus if I lead my life according to my own deeply held moral principles what difference did it make if I believed in God or not and why would God care exactly that I believed in him and then I thought but I don't know how to not believe in God I don't know how you do it how do you give up how do you get through the day and then I thought okay calm down let's just put on the not believing in God glasses for a moment just for a second just put on the no God glasses take a quick glance around and then immediately throw them off and I put them on and I looked around I'm embarrassed to report I initially felt dizzy I actually have the thought how does the earth stay up in the sky you mean we're just hurtling through space and I wanted to run out and catch the earth as it fell out of space into my hands and then I thought oh yeah gravity and angular momentum are gonna keep us revolving around the Sun for probably a really long time and then I thought well what's gonna stop me from just rushing out and murdering people and I had to walk myself through it why are we echo well because we have to be we're social animals we are extremely complex social animals and we evolve this moral sense like an aversion to random murder in order for communities to exist because communities help us survive better and in much bigger numbers and then eventually we codified these internal ethics that evolved inside of us into laws against things like wanton murder so I guess that's why I won't be just rushing out and murdering people and then suddenly I felt so guilty like I cheated on God somehow just by having all of these thoughts and I ran into the house and I prayed and I asked God to please help me have faith but already it felt slightly silly and vacant and I felt like I was just talking to myself and I thought okay I'll just not believe in God for one hour a day and see how things yeah so the next day I tried it again and I thought wait a minute wait a minute what about all those people we're like unjustifiably jail somewhere horrible and they're like in solitary confinement and all they do is pray this means that I I think those people are bring to nobody oh and then I thought we better get those people out of jail because no one's looking out for them but us there is no God hearing their pleas and I guess that goes to really poor people too and really oppressed people who I have this vague idea that they had a God to comfort them and then an even vaguer idea that God had orchestrated their lot for some unknowable grand design I walked around thinking oh no one is minding the store and I wondered how traffic worked have we all just run in chaos all the time and slowly I began to see the world completely differently it's like I had to rethink what I thought about everything it's like I had to go change the wallpaper of my mind eventually I was able to say goodbye to God and I imagined this old guy this old man more like a broken-down version of the God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel but if you look closely you could even see the Jesus from the poster in my high school bedroom but older much older with long gray and white hair and lots of lines on his face an old hippie who still smoked and at one time he seems so all-powerful and all-knowing and all protective and now he just seemed a little stinky I could just see him sitting on his suitcases near the front door of my house and I went to and said I'm sorry God it's not you it's it's me it's just I don't think you exist I mean God look at it this way it's really because I take you so seriously that I can't bring myself to believe in you if it's any consolation it's sort of a sign of respect so sit here for a while if you want to stay a little but if you need to there's no big hurry and slowly over the course of several weeks he just disappeared looking back on it I think I just walked around in the days for a few months my mind became such a private place I realized that I had shared my mind with a God my entire life and I suddenly realized that my thoughts were completely my own no one was monitoring them no one was compassionately listening to them my thoughts my thoughts were my own private affair and something no one but me knew about I had so much thinking to do one day I was walking along Larchmont Boulevard this busy shopping area near my house and I was lost in thought thinking so then I guess I don't think anything happens to us after we die consciousness fades and stops like every other organ so people just die I thought wait a minute so Hitler Hitler just died nobody sat him down and said you screwed up buddy and now you're gonna spend an eternity in a fiery hell so Hitler just died we'd better make sure that never happens again and my brother Mike ah this means that he just died I always had this idea that Mike's death while premature was his divine destiny somehow and that his spirit didn't really die but it lived on not just in the memory of those that knew him but in a real tangible sense and I realized that I now thought he died he really died and he was gone forever and then I realized I had to go back and basically kill off everyone I ever met who died who I guess I didn't think really died and then I thought oh I get it so I'm gonna die so I'm gonna die and I sat down on a bench and I watched people bustling by and I thought wow life is so cheap I'm so precious so I'm just another animal on earth just a type of primate the third chimpanzee better at using tools and able to talk and then I am gonna die and there will be eons of time when I will not exist just like the eons of time before I did I'm in my 40s about halfway through my life I hope at this moment the Sun and the earth and I are all middle-aged just an animal on a planet in a solar system nothing special but then I think about it this way the earth is 4.5 billion years old and for the first billion years on earth there was no life at all nothing and for the next 3 billion years there was just Algy and archaea bacteria dull green and brown primordial slime for 3 billion years and then just 500 million years ago or so boom complex life came on the scene plants and animals including us who've been around for what a hundred thousand years - a million years or so depending on what you consider to be human I mean if Genesis is a metaphor for creation that metaphor is way off God would not be creating man on the sixth day but like the 6,000th day and all of humanity would have been here for less than a minute actually less than a second Adam and Eve are just blinking their eyes barely awake so if you think about it even if simple life exists readily all over the universe it could be that any type of complex life is fairly rare and then when you think how like eyes have evolved over and over again or how like flying flying has evolved over and over again but a species with a brain like ours able to use language and tools the way we do well that's happened only once and four and a half billion years on earth I mean it's not so improbably is to be impossible given all the time involved in all the different ways that species have come up with to try to adapt but still it's got to be pretty rare for animals like us to turn up and in my DNA is a history of this life on Earth not just back to the African Pliocene but even farther back to when we crawled out of the pond and then even farther back from that when there were only single-celled organisms all told in the cells of my own body and to think that I get to live at a time when I can know and understand that it makes me feel so lucky then I started thinking about all the little happenstance is all the random little moves which resulted in me being alive me in particular at this very moment not just of my parents meeting but even of the millions of sperm against the hundreds of possible eggs I thought about this randomness multiplying my parents their parents Tom meeting Murray in Yakima or Henrietta meeting will on that cruise to Cuba and then their parents and their parents and their parents and all the ways it could have gone one way but it went the way it went and all the possible people who could just as easily be here in my place Richard Dawkins wrote certainly those unborn ghosts include poets greater than Keats scientists greater than Newton but in the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I in our ordinariness that are here I suddenly felt very deeply that I was alive alive with my own particular thoughts and my own particular story and this anybody splash of time and in that splash of time I get to think about things and do stuff and love people and walk along Larchmont Boulevard with my coffee if I want to and then that's this I walked to my car and I had a ticket my time had expired and I got in the car and I turned on the radio and there was that old Peggy Lee song it used to be my mom's favorite and I suddenly had this memory of us in the kitchen and that song coming on the radio and my mother flipping hamburgers and dancing around the kitchen taking care of all of her kids my friends let's keep dancing let's break out the booze I went to Spokane to visit my parents my dad walked to church every single morning to Lourdes Cathedral for their 6:30 a.m. Mass and then he took the bus back home on days that I was in town I always went with him my dad was really fun to walk to church with he had this special way of walking downtown that took him past his favorite store windows and he can see if they changed things on the bus ride home we would usually Muse over the wording of certain prayers or recitations in the mass my dad loved it when the priest said Satan who prowls through the world for the ruin of souls we both agreed that it was that word prowls that made that phrase just perfect later that day I told my parents that I'd stop believing in God they just looked at me blankly sometimes I feel so sorry for my parents to have me as a kid sometimes I feel so thankful that my parents had a lot of kids my mother said this doesn't mean that you stop going to church now definitely I suddenly felt so guilty about this religion my parents religion this religion that they had given us kids which I was now basically handing back to them I went to a conference in Washington DC put on by the Center for inquiry this nonprofit group that promotes science and critical thinking a lot of people spoke at the conference and then I got to give a speech too which included my views on God and The Associated Press covered it and the wire story was picked up by my hometown paper Spokane write recently hosted the Catholic Charities luncheon where I'd spoken repeatedly at my Catholic high school and where my parents took such pride in their Catholicism and in their children and who I believe now in retrospect felt that my Catholicism was what connected me to my hometown to my social class and to them in spite of having moved so far away so one day weeks and weeks after the speech and without me even knowing that this article even existed out there my parents got up and went out to get their morning paper and there I was in the back of the front section a big picture of me and bold letters in huge Thai but said Sweeney loses her religion and the first two sentences of the article were Julia Sweeney has come out of the closet period as an atheist period it was the local angle and they led with that and then the article went on and talked about the conference in general and barely even mentioned me again well the first call I got from my mother was really more of a scream a theist atheist my father got on the phone and said you have betrayed your family your school and your city it was like I'd sold secrets to the Russians or something they both said that they were not gonna speak to me anymore my dad said I don't even think you should come to my funeral after I hung up I thought just try and stop now I think my parents had been mildly disappointed when I told them I didn't believe in God anymore but being an atheist was another thing altogether frankly I had not even described myself as an atheist but I suppose I am one I don't live my life under the assumption that there is a God so I guess that makes me an atheist a theist non-theist but I like the word naturalist more to me a theist describes me on religious turf I believe in a wholly natural universe and that makes religious people in my mind a naturalist anyway several weeks went by and there was no contact at all from my parents now this was a huge deal I mean I usually spoke to my parents several times a week and then one day out of the blue I got this phone call from my mother on her cell phone and she said Julie I just got out of the foot doctor and he oh there was a pause she'd forgotten she wasn't speaking to me that began a series of sporadic phone calls that I would get from my mother sometimes in the early hours in the morning what's it like 5:30 in the morning the phone rang and I picked it up and my mother said why can't you just say you're still searching I said well I am searching if what you mean by searching is a continual yearning to understand better but when it comes to God don't you just have to decide for yourself at one point or another I mean the way you look at the world if you believe in God is so different than the way you look at the world if you don't and she said well then why do you have to tell people about it everybody knows that there are those few people out there who don't believe in God but they keep it quietly to themselves last night your father said he even wishes you to announced you were gay it was that socially acceptable to my parents it was like I was rejecting them personally are like saying that I wasn't Irish anymore or worse that I wasn't American anymore once I picked up the phone and my mother said where do you get your piece and I repressed the urge to be sarcastic I said well I guess I do have less peace I mean I don't think everything works out for the best or there's some big grand plan I don't think everything happens for a reason other than a tangible actual reason and the sad things in life and all they seem even sadder but I don't know I guess I just learned how to live with it I my mother said Oh Julie I just want you to be happy aren't you just depressed all the time they said no it's kind of turned out to be the opposite for me the smallest things in life just seem astounding to me now I'll look at a bridge and I'll think hey we figured out how to make that bridge look at all the knowledge that we've accumulated or like I used to think there are no coincidences and now I think there are coincidences Wow coincidences I mean mom if this is all there is everything means more not less right eventually my dad called me and he said listen it's alright I disagree with you but I am proud of you for saying what you really think even though I think Satan might be prowling the world for the ruin of your soul oh maybe he's just sauntering and he said lurking and I said meandering and he said but with a sinister intent Oh dad now I need to tell you and Mom something truly important can you get mom on the other line and my mother got on and said now what I'm afraid and I said mom and dad I'm about to have a baby and my mother said but you can't have children and my dad said and you aren't married and I said mom and dad it's a miracle [Applause] I adopted a little girl from China her name is Mulan lots and lots of people told me how she was destined to be my daughter by the universe and how God had planned our union but frankly it's a lot more meaningful to me that out of all the kids who just as easily could have been mine it's us who ended up together here she is in the vastness of all space and time my kid well I'm just so happens to be beautiful after one party where people were just fawning all over her as we drove home I said well well you're very pretty you're not gonna have to develop a personality like your mother yeah one person said she's so beautiful when you look at her you just know there is a God and I thought because if she were ugly then there would be no of course my parents were immediately in the thrall of Mulan and having her allowed us all to have this whole other wonderful relationship together my father started calling Mulan his little pal just what he called me when I was a kid and the two of them would take naps together on his bed and it was hard to tell which of them was snoring louder my father was ill he had emphysema and as the doctors predicted it was getting worse and worse he also had heart problems and diabetes a lifetime of smoking and drinking were finally exacting their price at the same time although admittedly not on the same level of concern my cat Rita was also very ill an old age thyroid condition had whittled her from a high weight of 21 pounds down to 6 she stopped grooming herself and started to lie around all day and just one little spot on the rug it was like she was an old lady in a stained housecoat with curlers in her hair sang Oh God my father got weaker and weaker and eventually he had to be on oxygen 24 hours a day at the highest potency milan and i started to fly up to Spokane every single month to see him soon he couldn't leave the condo at all and his whole world became about listening to his old Bob and Ray tapes listening to NPR and watching reruns of as time goes by on PBS it was hard to tell if it was truly near the end or not in fact we had been expecting my dad to be going at any time for years and years the doctors had predicted that my father could not possibly live past 50 and here he was seventy for countless Christmases all of us kids would huddle together and get teary-eyed because we just knew this was the last Christmas with dad only to find ourselves crying again the next year because surely this would be the last Christmas with dad and we adored him finally a couple of weeks after one visit my mother called to say that my father was unconscious when I got back to Spokane my mother and the hospice nurses were caring for my father in this hospital but in the middle of the living room it was basically a death watch the family was starting to arrive my sister Meg was flying in from Japan with her husband Tsuyoshi my brothers my aunt's my uncles the hospice nurses were wonderful one of them was particularly religious and she kept saying I think your father is seeing the others who passed over before him my mother told me that a couple of days before my dad lost consciousness the same hospice nurse and said to my dad who are you gonna miss most in this life Bob which really irked me just the automatic assumption that someone is capable of missing someone after they're dead and then being asked to rank them in order but for my mother and the hospice nurse and my father that's actually a reasonable question and my father gestured to his right side where no one was standing and said Janice we don't know any Janice's my mom's pretty sure that my dad didn't know any Janice is either Janice well there's two things I remember about my dad dying and one thing I remember not being able to remember I remember how quickly his body got cold after he died I was so shocked at what heat we almost generate everyone else I've been around at or near death my brother Mike my dear friend Judy their bodies were whisked away right after they died but my dad's body just stayed in the living room for about six hours after he died and we all just got to be with him pet his head and kiss his cheeks and laugh and cry and reminisce and then I remember later that night suddenly being aware that I couldn't remember the last time my dad and I had hugged what was the last time my last trip I suppose where were we at the coat closet what did I say see you later take care I can't remember but I do remember a couple of days before he died when my dad was unconscious and I was alone with him on the Nightwatch and he suddenly opened his eyes and focused his gaze right at me I asked him to squeeze my hand he didn't his eyes were bright and blue and it looked like the universe in there we held each other's gaze and it still seems to me like time just stopped right then and then his eyes unfocused and his lids closed well my mother wanted to set the date of the funeral right away which we could not delay because so many people were in town already from such faraway places so my mother gathered me and my sister and my brothers and we all headed down to Lourdes for Saturday's 5:30 p.m. Mass about 30 people were waiting in the pews for masks to begin we were standing on the side of the altar looking into the sacristy where we could see Monsignor Ribble putting on his vestments to me it was too late to interrupt him before the mass but my mother said follow me and she started to walk right across the altar right across where you're not supposed to go towards the sacristy with her head held high I followed her and so did our whole family heads bowed shoulders hunched coats dangling walking across that altar I never felt so shanty Irish my mother never looked so determined and I never loved our family more Monsignor Ribble was very sad about the news of my father's death and did not in any way seem to be upset that we'd all just descended on him right before Mass not only was my father in his 6:30 a.m. Mass every single morning the two of them had actually taken an exercise class together for survivors of heart attacks that Sacred Heart Hospital put on I remember picking up my dad one time and being so surprised to see Monsignor Ribble without his collar and in these grey sweats doing step ups and step together steps Monsignor asked me if I was going to be speaking at the funeral and I said I suppose so and he took me aside and he said I will ask you to refrain from speaking about your knowledge pilgrimage it was like he said your sexual orgies drug-induced pilgrimage I said oh I wouldn't I wouldn't we went right into the mass and Monsignors homily was all about the need for priests in the Catholic Church he described the situation as desperate I looked down the pew at my brothers and sister none of us are Catholic except my sister Meg who was so far at least choosing not to have children are we typical Monsignor went on to talk about the mystery of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit being one and the mystery of how God loves us in spite of our faults and before I knew it I was sitting in my father's funeral in the exact same pew I looked around the church at all my friends my father's friends and our families friends my family and I got caught up I looked at the altars through my father's eyes and it was rich and beautiful I was baptized in this very church when I was one week old in so many real ways I'll never stop being Catholic I mean Christianity helped shape my brain it suddenly seemed inevitable to me that after all this searching I would now return to the Catholic Church I unexpectedly felt right back where I started surprised like Dorothy back from Oz after all when I left the Catholic Church I didn't realize it was going to be giving up on God altogether I just thought I would find some other church that made more sense to me maybe this time it would be more meaningful somehow because I wouldn't be debating all the time over what I believed and what I didn't believe I would know that I just didn't believe in any of it I mean after all maybe objective reality isn't the most pleasant prism through which we can view this world and maybe by using fantasy we can allow ourselves to glimpse at something even greater than we otherwise would be able to let's face it truth is such a poor competitor in the marketplace of ideas and the love and the community in this church are real and potent even if God isn't well we had the wake across the street from the cathedral at the Spokane club I got up and said I wish my dad could be here tonight to see his family and friends he would have loved this party so very much I had no idea that I had just said something quasi controversial and over the evening several people came up to me and said you know I think your father is here right now right in this very room one person came up to me and said you know you're Jewish right I said why do you know something about me that I don't know about me and he said no it's just the Jews are sort of expected to wrestle with the idea of God even if you don't want to it's almost like an obligation you would fit in perfect well I went outside and I looked at Lourdes Cathedral in the moonlight and I thought I can't rejoin this church I would start listening to the words again and it would just drive me nuts but I do wish there were a beautiful building where I could ritualize the transitions in my life and in my daughter's life with great music and great art but where what we know about the world just isn't blatantly ignored you know a few months ago Stephen Hawking came out and said that his theory that black holes obliterate anything that falls into them probably his greatest contribution to science the theory that much of his particular fame and reputation is based on probably isn't right wouldn't it be great if the Pope could just do the same thing if he could just come out and say oh my I've been reading what science shows us about our spectacular but very humble place in this universe and it is thrilling and mind-boggling beyond all imagining it makes the Bible so puny and uninspired and even less poetic by comparison I am terribly sorry I sincerely misunderstood so much I almost wish there were a God so that I can be punished for all of the suffering that I have caused human beings punishment for me I think I'll spend the rest of my life working in a family planning clinic in Latin America oh well Mulan and I came back to Los Angeles after my father's funeral and two days later our cat Rita died Mulan understood death at this time like a four-year-old understands death which means not really getting it it's like people and animals are suddenly gone but you know they got to be somewhere sometimes she'd say to me why didn't Grandpa come to his big party and I resisted the urge to say some of the people thought he well a couple of weeks later there was a knock at my front door and who was there but two Mormon missionary boys and they said they had a message for me from God I said oh um I actually already got my message from God about three years ago or so a couple of Mormon missionary stopped by here and you know they basically changed my entire life and they said they did and I said yeah because of them I don't believe in God oh I mean they probably didn't affect me in exactly the way they might have hoped but for me it has been a very exciting journey they didn't seem nearly as excited as I was one Father's Day that year Mulan and I and our new dog Arden went hiking in Runyon Canyon which for us means walking very slowly uphill with a lot of rests and we got to this one place called the inspiration point that looks out over the city and Mulan ran up and said mom look it's the whole world where's Chyna and I said oh honey you can't see China from here but if you look way out there you can see Santa Monica we started up the hill again this much steeper part Mulan was just ahead of me and she said who's Santa again and I said oh you remember honey he's that guy at Christmas time that made up pretend mythological guy she whipped around on the hill so she was at eye level with me she said mom Santa lives at the North Pole and brings you presents on Christmas if you're good and I said yes yes that's exactly right my mother says mallanna's going to grow it being none and that's how God is gonna get his revenge on who knows maybe Mulan will be a nun but I hope that I can teach her that true mystery is really all around her because you know the church really has it all backwards when it comes to mystery in fact it trivializes the very thing it claims to represent the awe-inspiring grandeur of true deep mystery we live on a planet spinning about in a wondrous universe without any apparent purpose and the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing is a question we'll probably never know the answer to well I look down at Milan who was brushing the bangs out of her eyes I thought wow if even our memories are so transient all anyone of us truly has is this very moment and Milan looked up at me and said our grandpa and read it together and I said no they died but it's nice to think about him together isn't it and she said well I think they are together and I said well what do you imagine they're doing and she said Rita's sitting on grandpa's lap and she's purring and I said isn't that nice to think that you see people do live on after they die inside of us just thinking about them and she said what I think about is in my head and I said yes that's your brain anytime you want you just think and think and think about whatever you want and she said well I'm thinking about Lego and I said Legoland and she said Legoland and I said all right sounds like a plan [Music] [Applause] [Music] first I was a Catholic girl loved the Massa watched the swirl of smoke from candles burning while Mary looked up yawning agaaca farm did not confess I really felt that I was blessed plus I love my uniform so did the boy who live next door something changed okay age Donnell's things I thought were true Sunday [Music] [Applause] to the east himalayas calling me [Music] poetry came back let go much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all those [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] 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Channel: Julia Sweeney

Views: 73,646

Rating: 4.9040699 out of 5

Keywords: Julia Sweeney, SNL, Comedy, Letting Go Of God

Id: C74-f4ZV-ss

Length: 130min 12sec (7812 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/FreeRunningEngineer]

This was one of my favorite videos after leaving the faith. Julia Sweeney does an amazingly thorough job explaining and justifying each step of the deconversion process with humor throughout.

I originally saw it in 2010 so hopefully there are some new ex-christians that are lucky enough to not have seen it yet. I'm so glad Julia released it for free. Enjoy!

[u/ledastrayjay]

"Invisible and the non-existent often look very much alike"

[u/Sitavatis]

this is fantastic

[u/picoufromraceland]

Thank you so much for sharing this! I’d never heard of her, but this was fantastic!

[u/salululations]

This is an absolutely fantastic video, thanks so much for sharing!

[u/pixeldrift]

Her TED talk about her birth date was one of the best!