My kindred spirit is Pat? Who knew?

One of my more memorable moments in college -- while in class, at least -- came during the first semester of my freshman year, when all of us honors students were forced to take a class called "The Human Situation," a daunting philosophy/literature class that immediately threw all of the greats at us. The second assignment was the books of Samuel in the Bible. One of my classmates, an atheist, objected to the professor that she now, yet again, had to read the Bible after having it forced on her all her life. The professor explained that she was looking at it the wrong way. After all, we had just finished reading "The Iliad," and she certainly had no problems reading about Zeus and Athena while not believing they existed, right?

It was then I realized, for the purposes of the class, that I was reading the Bible incorrectly. I started reading it not as a religious document but as a historical text. I started looking at it beyond the usual Sunday School parameters -- and wow. I realized how little I actually knew about the Bible--and how little so many nominal Christians probably have read it, too--because there's a lot of messy things to resolve when one really looks at it.

There's the contradictions. The implausible or horridly gory stories: men living inside whales, men being asked to sacrifice their children, bloody massacres and talking snakes. Is it literal? Allegorical? How far should faith really eclipse reason?

Little did I know that I would later find a kindred spirit in that journey: Julia Sweeney. Yes, that Julia Sweeney, who used to play Pat on Saturday Night Live. I caught her show, "Letting Go Of God," at the Ars Nova (aka...the ends of the freaking earth in Manhattan) tonight, in which she details her spiritual journey that began when two Mormon missionaries come knocking at her door. Having never seen "God Said, 'Ha!'" I had no idea what an insightful evening it would be.

Her journey started when the Mormons began explaining the founding story of their beliefs to her. Hearing it for the first time, it sounds just about as wacky as the South Park explanation of Scientology. Yet, it caused Sweeney to step back and look at her own Catholic upbringing, and she realized that the basics tenets would sound pretty wacky to someone else hearing it for the first time.

Knowledge is a dangerous thing, though. The more she found out--crawling out of Plato's cave, if you will--the less she found to believe in. Whether it was the vengeful God of the Old Testament, the lingering rigidity in the New Testament, the latent oppression in Buddhism, the heartlessness of nature and the fallacy of intelligent design, the more she looked for God, the further away he seemed to be.

This isn't some faux Hollywood spirituality story. This is the absolutely fascinating story of someone discovering critical thinking. While Sweeney might have ultimately come to a different conclusion than I did--she's now comfortably an atheist, while I have found a comfortable merger of reason and Christianity, albeit one that Jerry Falwell might not like--I loved reliving her journey with her. And in an age where religion is increasingly used to justify absolute stupidity and ignorance, it's a story more people need to hear.

I should add that the pre-show and intermission music chosen for this show was absolutely perfect as well. Cher's version of "It Ain't Necessarily So," Nellie McKay's "Inner Peace," and a somber country version of "In The Garden" -- superb.

My sophomore year, I decided to take a class to examine the Old Testament in its entirety. One guy in the class was always getting into an argument with the professor, arguing for a literal interpretation for everything. He refused to believe that Adam and Eve, while certainly a interesting myth from which we can glean some cultural lessons, might not have really been prancing around in a garden 5,000 years ago. He failed every test. And I'll bet God said, "Ha!"