Julia Sweeney

This afternoon, when I was cleaning out the craft closet and Madison was doing an art project with some newly-discovered supplies from the back of said closet, we had on Terri Gross's Fresh Air on NPR. She was interviewing Julia Sweeney, the comedienne of "Pat" fame from SNL.

Turns out Julia is an atheist, and she has just released a new CD called Letting Go of God, an audio CD of her stand-up show of the same name.

Terri was interviewing her about the process of evolving from a Catholic to a Buddhist to an atheist, and Madison was absolutely entranced. Fascinated. They played a clip from the CD in which Julia describes what she did when presented with the argument that "only God could have created an eye, because it is so complex." What did Sweeney do? She read science. She talked about her findings, in a unique Julia-Sweeney humorous kind of way. Turns out that if God created the human eye, he did a really bad job -- squid and octopus, which evolved their eye separately from the human eye, have a lot better of an apparatus, there.

When Madison heard that there is a CD for sale, she insisted we find it on the internet. We found JuliaSweeney.com and then found a place where we could listen to a few more clips from the CD. I thought that she would like the clip "There is no Santa Claus" best, because it describes an experience that Sweeney had on her seventh birthday (September 10!). But no, she liked the "eye" clip ("Intelligent Design") the best.

She wanted the CD so badly that she said she'd spend her own money on it; she has almost exactly the amount necessary. But I said I'd buy it for her, how could I not, with my little philosopher looking at me eagerly like that. She says we (David and I) can listen to it, but she wants to keep it in her room so that she can listen to it on her CD-alarm clock that Aunt Anne gave her for her birthday, September 10. And if we find any more CDs like that, she wants them, too.

When it comes, I will listen to it before I give it to her; in the clips we heard there was one (but only one!) inconveniently-worded phrase ("And do you know what I discovered? That Deepak Chopra is full of shit!")

"Full of WHAT? What did she say?" Madison asked. I had to explain that it is an impolite word for "poop." I'm kind of pleased, frankly, that this is her first encounter with the word, it shows we've done a good job of exposing her to people who don't use foul language. Anyway, I will make sure that the other bits of the CD don't contain more of the same before I hand it over.