Julia Sweeney
From Philosopedia
Sweeney, Julia (10 Oct 1961 - )
Sweeney launched her show business career with the Groundlings improv troupe in 1986. In 1990 she began as a four-season cast member of Saturday Night Live, appearing as a sexually ambiguous character, Pat, one that led to It’s Pat, her own movie. She also had a role in Pulp Fiction.
In a solo performance titled “God Said, ‘Ha!’ ” she made her theatre debut in which she discussed family, career, love, and death, and telling how in 1994 she had learned that her brother Mike had lymphoma. After he moved into her Hollywood bungalow, the two were joined by her parents along with ten suitcases, leading to all kinds of comic happenings, to the point that life became almost surreal. Her one-woman autobiographical stage show about finding atheism is called Letting Go of God.
Sweeney told the Freedom From Religion Foundation,
- It took me years, but letting go of religion has been the most profound wake up of my life. I feel I now look at the world not as a child, but as an adult. I see what's bad and it's really bad. But I also see what is beautiful, what is wonderful. And I feel so deeply appreciative that I am alive. How dare the religious use the term "born again." That truly describes freethinkers who've thrown off the shackles of religion so much better!
Michael Shermer, in his e-Skeptic Newsletter (12 Dec 2000), tells of being with Sweeney on Bill Maher’s "Politically Incorrect":
- [Julia] was raised a Catholic, did the K-12 Catholic school sequence, etc. But then a few years ago she went to the Galapagos Islands and had an epiphany of sorts. Instead of finding God, she found Darwin. She actually read the Origin of Species (a rarity these days, even among evolutionary biologists), and she described it to me as "a page turner." Wow! Then she read my book How We Believe, joined the skeptics, ordered all of the back issues of Skeptic and plowed through them, and has been reading skeptical and free-thought literature ever since. On the show she talked about how she realized that all these creation stories are myths, and, in as articulate a manner as I've ever heard, she explained why living in a world of reality is so much more fulfilling than living in a world of fantasy. She is a wonderful ally to have for science and skepticism and I can't wait to watch her video monologue "And God Said, 'Ha!' " and the upcoming monologue she is working on about all these experiences of finding Darwin, science, and skepticism.
In 2006 at the American Humanist Association's conference in Tampa, Florida, Sweeney received the Humanist Pioneer Award.
