“Letting go of God” – great churchless inspiration

After learning about Julia Sweeney's "Letting Go of God" monologue several years ago, I wrote a post about her evolution from Christian believer to scientific skeptic – without having heard her entire take on the God thing.

"Letting Go of God" has been sitting on my iPod, but until yesterday I'd hadn't gotten around to listening to all of it. A long car trip to central Oregon and back was the perfect opportunity to fill my questioning psyche with Sweeney's words.

Which, it turned out, described a spiritual journey that bore considerable resemblance to mine. And, I'm sure, that of many other people.

Sweeney talks about her up and down relationship with faith. She'd discard one conception of God, then latch on to another.

This is the part of her monologue that I enjoyed the most. The first section about her childhood, viewable on You Tube, was entertaining but not particularly interesting to me.

But when she gets into how Buddhism seemed so right, and then so wrong (along with New Age thinking and Deepak Chopra), I loved Sweeney's honesty.

She's a truth seeker, along with being an actress and comedian. She has a talent for pithy one-liners. Such as (to my recollection), "it turns out that the invisible and the non-existent have a lot in common."

I particularly liked her judgment of Deepak Chopra's pop science after Sweeney took a class in quantum physics: "He's full of shit!" Absolutely true. I've read a lot about quantum physics myself, and what Chopra promulgates in his books and talks is quantum B.S.

Sweeney ends up engrossed by science, finding as much mystery in the physical cosmos as religion attributes to God. She deals with death not by fantasizing this reality away via religious fantasies, but by facing the prospect of her eternal non-existence head-on.

You can peruse a list of the Top Ten Things Julia Sweeney learned from letting go of god. And listen to the 2006 NPR interview that introduced me to her.

There's no substitute for her entire monologue, though. You can get the CDs from Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.

Comments

[Edward]

* Step 1 - We admitted we were powerless over God - that God's lives had become unmanageable
* Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than God could restore God to sanity
* Step 3 - Made a decision to turn God's will and God's lives over to the care of that other God, what ever that added up to
* Step 4 - Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our God
* Step 5 - Admitted to the other God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our God's (Gods') wrongs
* Step 6 - Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of God
* Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove our God's (Gods') shortcomings
* Step 8 - Made a list of all Gods God had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
* Step 9 - Made direct amends to God wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or other Gods
* Step 10 - Continued to take personal inventory and when God was wrong promptly admitted it
* Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God's God as we understood this particular God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for God and the power to AUDIT THAT TO KINGDOM COME
* Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we dropped the whole stupidity and concentrated on being nice to people, because that is hard enough