I did my usual thing tonight; fired up some interesting Google videos to listen to while I cooked and ate dinner. I've been working my way through various Daniel Dennett lectures of late, but before dinner I was reading some of Dawkins'
The God Delusion, and since he mentioned Julia Sweeney's "Letting Go of God" performance, and I'd heard previously heard that it was good, I figured I'd give it a listen, if I could find a copy online.
Unfortunately, the whole performance isn't around in a convenient form, but there are plenty of excerpts and highlights. The longest form is
a 40 minute speech from James Randi's the Amaz!ng Meeting #2, but it's not a great performance by Sweeney, and the recording is in four parts on You Tube. I watched that one, and I recommend it, but more convenient and funny is this 17 minute highlight, from the 2006 TED convention.
The funniest part starts at about 7:40, when she describes a visit she received from two Mormon missionaries. Enjoy.
I'd heard of Julia Sweeney before, but not in years. She did those briefly-entertaining, "It's Pat" sketches on SNL years ago, but when that one trick pony got sent to the glue factory, she was cut adrift. I thought this piece was very funny, but honestly, I'd like it a lot more if another comedian performed it. I find Sweeney's mannerisms very annoying; that giddy, giggly, half-hysterical laughter she throws in every 30 seconds makes me want to strangle someone, and she exudes (intentionally, I think) such a "dumb blond" persona that it makes it hard to believe in the accuracy of any of the historical or literary scholarship she works into the performance. YMMV, of course.
As for the religious nature of the piece... yeah. The fact most of the people on this planet devoutly believe in one or more religions, despite the fact that all of their foundational myths are as or more absurd than Mormanism's, is kind of amazing to me. Sweeney actually does a very good job helping me understand that though, in the rest of this performance. She talks about her desperate need for faith, her "belief in belief," as Daniel Dennett calls it, and how she went from Catholicism to Buddhism to (so help me) Deepok Choprah's "fairies in the garden" version of quantum physics, all trying to find something to believe in, before she was finally strong enough to put all that superstition behind her. Her comments about how becoming an atheist changed her whole world view are quite interesting too.
This segues into a nice bit of insight from Dawkins' book, when he touches on the same theme. On page 178 of the US hardcover edition, he summarizes the beliefs of the Fang people of Cameroon:
...that witches have an extra internal animal-like organ that flies away at night nd ruins other people's crops or poisons their blood. It is also said that these witches sometimes assemble for huge banquets, there they devour their victims and plan future attacks. Many will tell you that a friend of a friend actually saw witches flying over the village at night, sitting on a banana leaf and throwing magical darts a various unsuspecting victims.
Absurd beliefs, of course. Ridiculously primitive. Utterly unlike, say the beliefs of mainstream Christians:
In the time of ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.
The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.
The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days.
Forty days later, the fatherless man went up to the top of a hill and then disappeared bodily into the sky.
If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man, and his 'father' (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and my act upon them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody else in the world.
If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all, even fif nobody else does. You may be rewarded or punished accordingly, including after your death.
The fatherless man's virgin mother never died but 'ascended' bodily into heaven.
Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles), 'become' the body and blood of this fatherless man.
What would an objective anthropologist, coming fresh to this set of believes while on fieldwork in Cambridge, make of them?
Or, to put it more succinctly, just quote a t-shirt.
Of course the LDS church believes this,
and then adds on the high camp of Egyptian hieroglyphics on golden tablets, magic translating rock hidden in a hat, etc. The most amazing thing is that new converts get told that part up front... and they still sign up! As Sweeney says,
even the Scientologists know enough to hold back the "evil Galactic Emperor Xenu dumped frozen aliens into the Hawaiian volcanoes where their souls became thetans" origin myth, at least until you've spent years and tens of thousands of dollars buying into the scam, and are too deeply invested to back out painlessly.
One of Richard Dawkins' big ideas is that we should avoid identifying children with their parent's religion. That there are no "Christian children" or "Muslim children" since after all, kids aren't intelligent or informed enough to belong to any religion; they just believe what their parents tell them. One of Daniel Dennett's big ideas is that comparative religion should be a mandatory subject for school children, just as reading and math and history are. He thinks that knowledgeable, informed citizens would make wiser choices in their religious beliefs.
I like both of those ideas a lot, but then I think about the fact that hundreds of thousands of people sign on to the transparent scam that is Scientology, and that tens of millions of Mormons believe (or choose to overlook) the ridiculous golden tablets story upon which their faith is founded... and I wonder if any amount of education in childhood would really ever help? If people want to believe in something, they're going to believe in it, no matter how transparently ridiculous it might be. That's the magic of religion; almost all 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were Westernized, college educated, and middle class, but pathetic fantasies about immediate entrance to heaven and flocks of brown-eyed virgins were enough to turn them lethally suicidal.
Labels: atheism, daniel dennett, religion
