Julia Sweeney: The Gifts of Not Believing in God

What do you think is more likely that the natural world developed a solar system and that life arose on the planet and went through a long series of evolution to obtain complex animals and that one of those animals developed consciousness and some of that Consciousness allowed them to develop tribes and part of the development of tribes was about developing rituals to be able to identify other members of that tribe and to be able to win over other tribes that had different rituals and proposed explanations for natural phenomena for which they did not have the scientific information. answered themselves and came up with anthropological ideas like there is a God who looks after us and cares about us or do you believe there is a God or do you think it is more likely that there is a God who set the world in motion so that human beings species of human beings could evolve and then at this point in the Middle East he impregnated a young woman without having sexual relations with her so that she would have a baby and this was before the printing press or even recording devices existed, he could come out and say some things about love and then be killed as a terrorist as a religious terrorist and then 70 years later some people wrote some things about him and rituals and tribes grew up around this idea.

What do you think is more likely for me? It's very obvious, but it's much more likely. Most likely, we evolved as a species with a certain psychology that generates stories that create tribes and rituals that create family relationships and that for many years we came up with ideas about how the world works by answering them with anthropological fairy tales and now we are in an information age where we can share scientific information with each other. We have developed the scientific method which is very important and we can share information and we have discovered that it is much more likely that there is no God and that is what came to me about 10 or 12 years ago and changed my life and I never really looked back and, frankly, I still find it very difficult to believe that anyone believes in a God as if they had never doubted it.

I try. Seeing his point of view now this is something I really understand. I totally understand why people would want to be part of a religion that makes a lot of sense to me. I was personally raised Catholic and loved it. I had a really good experience. Um, you know, there was crazy stuff, you know? But I thought they were also entertaining. I have seen the church in a very loving way. My experience going to Catholic schools was good. I felt like I received a pretty good education. I didn't have any traumatic experiences. He was proud to be Catholic.

I liked the rituals. I loved Bach. They say Bach is probably responsible for 50% of the Catholics out there right now because the music is so bad. Des Dick. I totally loved him. it was totally my culture and I was Irish on both sides of my family and being Catholic and being Irish was a big part of their identity and I loved it and I never had a negative view of God so I didn't have a traumatic experience. experience that made me an atheist, oh my god, it was really like this loving guy, he just listened to me and wanted me to win and nothing terrible happened, so I said why should this happen?

I really always thought that the bad things that happened, for example, I had a brother who had cancer and died, you know, was part of this big plan that I didn't understand when it came to proving the existence of God. I thought, oh, there are really smart people who can actually debate, do you know math? and philosophy at these really high levels probably has the answers to everything and I'm not smart enough to really understand that and I just left it at that and then when I went through crises I prayed to my uncle in heaven. and he always encouraged me and whatever happened, I always thought it meant what was going to happen, but then I had this experience and I had, um, it was really a real religious experience, in fact, I had a few before, but they were kind of minor, but I had a bigger one. squaws, I don't want to exaggerate, it was kind of a Loeb experience in the temple where I felt like God was in the room with me, not a crazy lady experience, but something like what people knew I talked about in church very gentle.

An overwhelming feeling of love came over me and I had this deep feeling in my heart that everything was going to be okay. I was going through this breakup at the time and I was really curious about that experience, like what was that experience like? How could you explain that experience to me? And as I looked further and further and read more and more, I began to understand, I discovered the science of observing and I discovered human psychology and it began to make sense that we evolved with this idea that in a crisis we would have a small lobe of the right temple, you know, an explosion almost like a mini seizure that would give us this overwhelming feeling of love.

Does that mean there's something wrong with that? No, that's fantastic, it doesn't mean God gave it. to me it doesn't mean that continuing the feeling of trust in love in the world is not a good idea, it is a very good idea, but it does not mean that there is a God, okay, this was the next part that was. Really surprising to me at first I thought that a world without God was really sad and the truth is that it is very sad, it is a hard world when you think that we evolve and by the way evolution is a horrible process, it is so funny to me that Someone would think that God would invent evolution because it is so full of death, pain and creative destruction in the most horrible ways, so I guess that's the world we live in, but does that make us any less special?

To me, the idea that we are the species that has evolved to have consciousness and to have the scientific method so that we can exchange information with each other and understand that we are going to die, which to me 33 percent of all those who believe are simply trying to pretend that they are We are not going to die if we really accept that we are all really going to die in this room, it is just a little wild flower that appeared at some point and will eventually disappear, that makes life so precious, that makes this moment be so precious every time.

The moment when we are attentive, alive, aware and aware is much more important when you do not think that there is an afterlife or even God taking care of you and to me that is the gift of not

believing

in God and when I hear these statistics here they say that 16 percent of people do not believe in God or are not affiliated with a religious organization in the United States and I am very happy about that because I am very lucky to not have to be part of a religion as a woman and as a being human in most of the world in most of history, you had to be part of the in-group, the final group was the Westboro Baptist Church or whatever, the way you survived was to be part of this group and I have lucky to live in a large society that is so open minded that I am NOT forced to simply insure myself against the things that could happen in life to having to be part of a religion, I don't have to be and I am very happy for that, okay, oh, I said minutes, that's great, so I told them what my topic was, but I hadn't even gotten to my topic.

I told them what my topic was going to be. Should I force my daughter to go to church? Okay, I find religion really fascinating. It's about creating groups of people and creating rituals and identifying mistakes and doing certain things that allow you to identify other members of your group and I have that. in other ways, by the way, I'm part of the Groundlings improv group in Los Angeles and I know who those people are and we know each other and we have certain little rituals that we do, I mean, that's very comforting to me, um, I'm in a family We have our own rituals.

I think we are all group creators. We are great group creators. One of those groups is the churches and they are very effective, they are very effective in organizing people and they are very effective as a force for good, although unbalanced, I think they can be more of a force for good, but they can be a force for the good, but they are a huge phenomenon in our society and I really want my daughter to be one, there are two things, one is me. I wanted to be really smart with people because we are programmed for culture, we came into the world and we were programmed to understand other people's psychology and a big influence on human psychology is religion and I want her to have that information too. inoculate her against becoming religious later in her life.

I'm so nervous about the fact that she was raised as an atheist that I don't want her to go through some crisis in her life and then suddenly she becomes religious, so I would like to expose her. she to enough religion so that she understands how it works psychologically because, um, I know a lot of people who are raised by non-religious people who don't really understand religion and then later in life they suddenly become religious, in my opinion, That's what I feel. Anyway, they don't see the psychology behind it, so I would like to give it to my daughter.

A church I went to, so I did this big church project from January to June. I was going to do it all year and then I just kicked it. but I could pick it up again where I went to a different church every week and just sitting there, I'm interested in my community and I'm interested in people and it was mostly great, it was mostly great, you know, group. meetings um, but one church I went to was the Unitarian Universalists and you know you can really be an atheist, in fact, their whole liturgy is about, you know, here we are trees and grass, it goes away, it's totally all that I think, it was fantastic, um.

I was really on the verge of tears most of the service and in Evanston and then I went to Spokane where I'm from and it was fantastic, they're really smart, really fantastic, a good group of people doing good community service work and I could Think, oh my gosh, I've totally found my church like I don't have to pretend most of the time when I go to church. I think I would still be part of this group, but there's this and I think Jesus is a metaphor and oh. I think death is a metaphor and I like doing all these things, but in the Unitarian Universalist Church I thought there's nothing I don't agree with.

The problem is that I am a misanthrope and not a carpenter. The problem with my fingers is that I don't really I don't like people very much aye-aye-aye I don't want to join another group but I don't want to have something else to have to go to and um and besides I'm already in a family like for me What I need more time alone, not another big group of people to meet, so I didn't join and now my daughter, who is about to turn 13 in a couple of weeks, has something great in the universal Unitarian Universalist.

Church is like the owl show, but they teach you about all the different religions and I can't decide if I should force her to join this group and I think it's probably too late because she already has a negative attitude towards religion, which, of course, me. I have cultivated myself because every day I point out things in the newspaper. Can you believe these crazy people I am? So you know, so I try to say oh, and this lovely person, man, um mostly about the bad things, um, because that's what I think, but I. I think I'm not going to force her to go to church because I feel like she will always have me.

I hope I'm there to give her my opinion and that she can really discover it on her own if she wants and three me. I really hope I almost said pray. I really hope that our society here in the United States, where I hope she lives for the rest of her life, you know, or in our modern world, our modern, secular, creative world, full of artistic ideas, is the world in which that she will live. she'll live there and won't have to go and show her loyalty to some organization that has crazy beliefs and rituals because she's worried about the future, that's what I hope for her, so I guess my answer is no, I'm not going. force my daughter to go to church thank you