Stephen Fry on religion

Here is a wonderful reply by Stephen Fry when asked if secularism leads to a world without imagination and beauty.

(If you can’t see the video, follow this link to the original article.)

Fry begins: ‘I don’t think we should ever allow religion the trick of maintaining that the spiritual and the beautiful and the noble and the altruistic and the morally strong and the virtuous are in any way inventions of religion, or particular or peculiar to religion.’

He then compares the Genesis myth of Christianity, which leads to humans apologising for being sinful, with the Prometheus myth of the Greeks, which leads to humans believing that whatever is divine is within us.

And he concludes: ’That’s what religion has become, a feeble and anaemic nonsense, because we understood that the fire was within us. It was not in some idol on an altar, whether it was a gold cross or whether it was a Buddha or anything else. We had it. The fault is in us and not in our stars but also the glory is in us and not in our stars. We take credit for what is great about man and we take the blame for what is dreadful about man. We neither grovel and apologise at the feet of a god, or are so infantile as to project the idea that we once had a father as human beings and we therefore should have a divine one too. We have to grow up.’

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