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Off Topic » in reply to Julia Sweeney's "Letting Go of God"

Literalism has its pitfalls
Mary Anne — (archived)

Julia Sweeney attempted to look at her religion in the social context of her own world. This is what literalist believers do too. (It doesn't work. The world, not to put too fine a point on it, was different then.) She additionally attempted to apply logic to its teachings. Literalist believers seldom do that.

She abandoned religion. Literalists cling to it. To me, it's two sides of the same coin.

Let me say, I'm not attached to any religion either. I was raised Catholic, and came to the conclusion that there was no place for girls in the Church, except to clean the altar and put flowers on it, either as pregnant madonnas or chaste old maids (in or out of habit). I hoped for change, but saw by the time I was in college that the one thing the Catholic Church would never run out of is old men, and as long as old men were in charge, the girls would remain in the housekeeping division. Screw that.

I flirted with atheism, but I've found that, for me, it's just antibelief, which is the same coat worn inside out. Agnosticism works for me because I know we as a species have limited intellectual and sensory resources, and so there really are things we will never know.

But I wonder what Julia Sweeney would have made of the Jesus discovered by the Jesus Seminar. They are a group of scholars that have attempted to discover, through cultural anthropology and linguistics, what the real Jesus actually said out of all those words in the Gospels that are attributed to him. Those words are remarkably few.

But they all agree that the Sermon on the Mount was pure Jesus. I think that was the guy she missed in Catholic Bible study classes. And I know why: I went to them too.

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