Name: 【TED】Julia Sweeney: Letting go of God (Letting go of God | Julia Sweeney)
Uploaded: 2017-11-23T06:48:50.000Z
Duration: 17 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

On September 10, the morning of my seventh birthday,

Past continuous

I came downstairs to the kitchen, where my mother was washing the dishes

and my father was reading the paper or something,

and I sort of presented myself to them in the doorway, and they said,

"Hey, happy birthday!" And I said, "I'm seven."

"Well, you know what that means, don't you?"

And I said, "Yeah, that I'm going to have a party

being seven means that you've reached the age of reason,

and you're now capable of committing any and all sins against God and man."

Now, I had heard this phrase, "age of reason," before.

Sister Mary Kevin had been bandying it about

the phrase seemed all caught up in the excitement of preparations

for our first communion and our first confession,

and everybody knew that was really all about the white dress

And anyway, I hadn't really paid all that much attention

So, I said, "Yeah, yeah, age of reason. What does that mean again?"

And my dad said, "Well, we believe, in the Catholic Church,

that God knows that little kids don't know the difference between right and wrong,

but when you're seven, you're old enough to know better.

So, you've grown up and reached the age of reason,

and now God will start keeping notes on you,

all that time I was so good, God didn't notice it?"

And I thought, "How could I not have known this before?

How could it not have sunk in when they'd been telling me?

All that being good and no real credit for it.

And worst of all, how could I not have realized

until the very day that it was basically useless to me?"

So I said, "Well, Mom and Dad, what about Santa Claus?

I mean, Santa Claus knows if you're naughty or nice, right?"

I think that's technically just between Thanksgiving and Christmas."

And my mother said, "Oh, Bob, stop it. Let's just tell her. I mean, she's seven.

Now, this was actually not that upsetting to me.

My parents had this whole elaborate story about Santa Claus:

how they had talked to Santa Claus himself and agreed

that instead of Santa delivering our presents

like he did for every other family who got to open their surprises

Santa would come to our house while we were at nine o'clock high mass

on Christmas morning, but only if all of us kids did not make a fuss.

It was pretty obvious that it was really our parents giving us the presents.

I mean, my dad had a very distinctive wrapping style,

and my mother's handwriting was so close to Santa's.

Plus, why would Santa save time by having to loop back

to our house after he'd gone to everybody else's?

There was only one obvious conclusion to reach from this mountain of evidence:

our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit,

and my poor parents were trying to protect us from the embarrassment,

this humiliation of rejection by Santa, who was jolly --

but let's face it, he was also very judgmental.

So to find out that there was no Santa Claus at all

I left the kitchen not really in shock about Santa,

about how I could have missed this whole age of reason thing.

It was too late for me, but maybe I could help someone else,

they had to be old enough to be able to understand

the whole concept of the age of reason, and not yet seven.

The answer was clear: my brother Bill. He was six.

about a block away from our house at this public school playground.

It was a Saturday, and he was all by himself,

just kicking a ball against the side of a wall.

I just realized that the age of reason starts when you turn seven,

and then you're capable of committing any and all sins

You have a whole year to do anything you want to and God won't notice it."

And I turned to run. I was so angry with him.

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【TED】Julia Sweeney: Letting go of God (Letting go of God | Julia Sweeney)

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obvious

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apparently