I had read about this project of Julia Sweeney's before, read that she'd done a stage show, listened to a few audio clips from that show online, and read
talk about a movie, although that seemed a bit iffy, given that a distributor would be hard to find given the subject matter.
Just a few days ago, I stumbled across the movie as coming up on Showtime, and I thought, "Wow! Even if it's just on cable, the movie finally got made!". I set it up to record, and watched it tonight.
Sweeney has a great story to tell here, and she tells it well. It's very different story than the way I became an atheist -- much more emotional, and in that probably much more meaningful to a believer watching the movie trying to relate to how someone who once believed, passionately so, could lose their belief in God.
The story starts out with Sweeney as a believer who had somewhat drifted from active religious involvement, not having lost any faith in God, but suddenly getting a little jolt that gets her thinking about how she's never really thought too much about her faith, a faith that was more felt than understood. Her aim at first was to devote herself more to her faith, to learn more about what it was that she believed.
I don't wish to retell the story here, but suffice to say Sweeney's efforts led to a very different end result than she'd originally intended. This was no casual spiritual journey. She read a lot, studied a lot, and traveled to different places in her quest to understand and refine her faith. She ended up encountering disconcerting thoughts and feelings, however, that shook her faith. She tried to adapt to these shocks, tried to intellectualize her faith, abstract it, cast her faith in different forms -- until finally serious doubts began to arise not just regarding the particulars of her faith, but in faith itself.
Finally deciding that she didn't believe in God was a trying emotional experience. Hearing her retell her struggle made we wonder how different my transformation from being raised Catholic (just like Sweeney) to being an atheist would have been like if I'd ever had so deep an emotional connection with my erstwhile faith as she had with hers.
For anyone else who would like to see this movie, it's still on at least two more times on Showtime coming up in the next couple of weeks (the 9th and 12th, both times early in the morning if I recall correctly). I also discovered that it's available as a
DVD and an audio CD.