Sunday, April 23, 2006

Sweeney's Letting Go of God

A friend just forwarded the following link. The entry's almost a year old. No matter. Julia Sweeney's "autobiography" is timeless. Click on the speaker icon to listen. (The torrented file lacks "seeds" so forget about downloading the file for now.)

Sweeney is awesome! If I could I'd force every Christian kith and kin of mine (which is about, oh, 95%) to listen to her a dozen times. But even if I could have my way I strongly doubt it would deconvert any of them. Belief is tenacious, however stupid and ridiculous what a person believes in may be. (Unconvinced? Just listen to that nutcase Tom Cruise and his scientology babble.) After listening to Julia Christians will simply engage their cognitive dissonance machinery and spout a litany of lame rationalizations to save their investment (no one likes being disillusioned--it's one hell of a downer). So after being contested and debated by rationalists and skeptics, after getting cornered, and when all else fails they'll just slip out through the ultimate backdoor--"God is a mystery"--and plunge at a rate of 9.8 kilometers per second per second into an epistemic abyss of no return.... If only that were the end of them.

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