Sweeney's Swine*

Further proof that Christians need to continually remind the mainstream media of the most basic facts concerning their faith: San Francisco Chronicle religion writer David Ian Miller's failure to correct Julia Sweeney as she utterly mangles a story from the Gospels.

Former (way former) "Saturday Night Live" star Sweeney makes her Bible blunder in an interview with Miller to promote her new book about how she became an atheist. She says that she began to doubt God's existence when, at 38, she attended a Bible study class at her Catholic church and learned what was really in the Good Book:

Well, the most surprising thing overall is that anyone takes it seriously at all. Even if you were, say, Margaret Mead looking at Catholic Christian culture in America and you said all these people believe this thing—every week they go and hear quotes from this book, and everything in this book is so sacred to these people—I, as the Margaret Mead character looking at this, would be stupendously shocked that it was so contradictory and so obviously the result of a historic tribe trying to make sense of an unpredictable environment with limited scientific knowledge and a need for culture and cohesion.

It isn't that there aren't wonderful parts to the Bible, but it's just shocking to me that anyone spends their time defending it as anything more than a culturally special book. In terms of really taking it seriously as the word of God, I can't.

To me, the Iliad offers more insight into human character and lessons than the Bible. You know, like Jesus was angry a lot. When he turned all those people into pigs and made them run off a mountain, it was so hateful, not just to people but to pigs. I felt upset for the pigs!