Today I listened to the story of a woman named Julia Sweeney. She just put out a book called letting go of God. This was her story of how a “happy catholic” (as she puts it) turns to atheism after a failed attempt to read and understand the bible.
The story starts out with some young Mormons coming to her door and sparking an interest in God that had gone out some years ago. She in turn goes looking for a church and settles on a catholic church about ten miles away and starts to attend mass every Sunday. Things are going well so far. Then she sees an advertisement for a bible study class and signs up. Immediately from this point on her story begins to become very hard for me to listen to. She starts to misquote scripture after scripture. She one hundred percent misunderstands everything. She misquotes, misunderstands, and misrepresents the bible from this point on. Everything from “what kind of God asks a person to kill their only son?” and things about Jesus like, “I always thought Jesus was kind but come to find out he is really very angry most the time”. She goes on about Jesus to say, “the new testament also says that our peaceful Jesus did not come to bring peace but a sword” and “sell all you have and go buy swords” and “that if some one does not follow me bring him to me and I will slay him” I can not even find that last one in scripture anywhere!! I think she just threw it in to complete the task of making the Saviour into a terrorist. The point is she removes all of the real verses from there context. Verse after verse pulled from the chapters and books to which they belong. much after the style of modern day cult movements who need secondary literature to explain the verses they rip from the bible. The very sad truth is that there is going to be a lot of seekers who will pick this book up because of the title and will go away from the thing completely disillusioned. They will have a false idea about who God is, who Jesus is, and what the bible says. It’s very very sad to me.
Her story is also very tragic, and very disheartening. I felt so bad for this woman who really thought she was seeking when in reality the only thing she was looking for was a way out of there. Maybe to ease her conscience or to just make life easier for her, I really do not know why she was so closed and blind. But I do know that her heart and mind where shut tight from the first page of the book.
I went onto I tunes and gave my impressions of her work, below is a copy of my comments.
I am very sure I could go through her book and remove statements from their context making Julia sound anyway I please. This is what she has done to the bible. Even someone with little knowledge of biblical exegeses knows that the 144000 are in heaven but not the only ones who will go to heaven (just one small example of how she intentionally tries to discredit the bible by making it sound crazy). She either misunderstands almost every text she talks about, or is on a mission to lead people astray by purposefully misrepresenting the text. No matter what her goals maybe in doing this it’s a false representation of biblical text and therefore totally discredits her book. I would also like to add that I found her story to be very sad, she never seemed to look for the positive in her journey. Instead she seemed to be on a mission to find something wrong. I do not like to speculate but I will, I have a feeling she wanted to prove to her self that there was nothing out there and that’s not hard to do…. U just close your eyes!
