Best of Stephen Fry on Religion

[Music] your portion which they gave a kind of divine permanence that these were things that were there that were outside our control and i think most of human history and most of myth and religion is a has been a question of refining um our understanding of things we can't control so when our ancestors were were really were alone and without any uh building or farming yet as being an idea we were hunter gatherers as the phrases um their children looked at the mothers and fathers and they said why does what is it that pushes leaves out of trees it's something that's beyond our control i know if i pick a stone up the stone is picked up but how what is the power behind the leaf coming out of a tree happens every year what is this fire that comes out of a mountain what is the water that drops out of the sky these are things over which we have no control and so it's very natural that our ancestors gave them personality it's the first thing we do it's it's it's as much art and literature as it is religion to to to to make a story out of these forces and so you you you name a god of the mountain that roars fire you name a god of the clouds uh and the thunder and you have a god of nature and of growth and the harvest and one of decay and you make rituals out of it and but then slowly you begin to understand them and each one that you understand the god disappears and i think plato and the greeks understood the idea of heaven although they talked about god in heaven they knew them exactly as a model as an idea it was an ideal to which we strive and the greeks are constantly striving towards something better they don't believe you know that as simon raven the novelist put it the genius of the greeks lay in this understanding of eschatology of of you know the idea of a life after death and uh it was put by sinon i think the greek who said any single person who tells you that they know what happens to a human being after they have died is either a liar or a fool it's a simple and obvious thing to say but the greeks had that and it's mysterious to us because we tribally and for hundreds of years almost a thousand and a half years struggled to have such a simple honest open idea anybody who tells you what happens after you die is either a film or a relationship stephen i i've read you saying somewhere that we must believe there is no life after death oh yes and and because we we will live a very bad life unless we do believe because if we think this is this is just a preparation absolutely yes yeah i remember being shocked before he shocked us for other reasons by mel gibson um when i know there's all but he was being interviewed this is in the 80s at the very height of his young stardom when he was the coolest man on the planet virtually and i had no idea that he was belong to this particularly severe catholic sect in australia that his father was a member of um but the interview said i believe i've read somewhere mel that you are um you you believe in in life after death and in god and uh mel gibson said well i know i know one thing for a fact there's got to be more to it than this i thought what what even if you were just an ordinary guy to say oh yeah this is americans australia there's europe there's the lake district there's the poles there's the deserts there's the tropics there's the bushes there's there's the galaxy but there's got to be more than that surely but not only that you are a star who can have as much sex as you can eat and and as much money as you could possibly demand and you feel it's somehow not enough you know and this idea that um and of course all kinds of obvious ways of knowing that religion you know uses uh uh uses the afterlife and the threat of something better as a way of allowing people or forcing people to put up with what they've got but yes i do believe that even on its own terms if you believe in an afterlife it it limits this life you know you've got to as oscar wilde said try the fruit of every tree of every orchard in the world and some will be bitter and some will be too addictive and so on but but if you and and so i often say to religious people i said um you know it would say well suppose uh you know a calvinist appears at the gates of heaven and uh some peter says so uh what did you make of um uh cannabis sativa the the plant there oh i never tried that no no have you any idea how much effort went into making this very special plant i'm not saying you should have nothing but but you didn't even try it what about wine oh no no no wine touch my lips you do you know do you know how complex the grape is unique of all fruits you don't have to add sugar for it to turn into this remarkable and you didn't even bother to try it that's such an extraordinary idea i mean you should on your deathbed you should be going damn it i i never drank milk from the armpits of a nepalese virgin or whatever it is you know i never i don't know that wouldn't be my particular one but some people um you know i i never climbed kilimanjaro i never you know there's so much that's now it's perhaps unfair of me as a gay man to moan this enormous institution which is the largest and most powerful church on earth has over a billion as they like to tell us members each one of whom is uh under uh strict instructions to believe the dogmas of the church but may wrestle with them personally of course it's a little hard for me to know that i am disordered or again to quote ratzinger um that i am guilty of a moral evil uh simply by fulfilling my sexual destiny as i see it it's it's hard for me to be told that be told that i'm evil because i think of myself as someone who is filled with love whose only purpose in life was to achieve love and who feels love for so much of nature and the world and for everything else and to like anybody decent and of an education realizes that in order to achieve and and receive love it's a struggle it's not one that needs a pope to tell you how to do it it certainly isn't one who needs a pope to tell you that you're evil with six percent of all teenage suicides being gay teenage suicides we certainly don't need the stigmatization the victimization that leads to the playground bullying when people say you're a disordered morally evil individual that's not nice it isn't nice the kind of cruelty in catholic education the kind of child let's not call it child abuse it was child rape the kind of child rape that went on systematically for so long let's imagine that we can overlook this and say it is nothing whatever to do with the structure and nature of the catholic church and the twisted neurotic and hysterical way that its leaders are chosen the celibacy the nuns the monks the priesthood this is not natural and normal ladies and gentlemen in 2009 it really isn't i'm sorry for me to be called a pervert by these extraordinarily sexually dysfunctional people i don't think human history has ever had more i have to i have to say this is not a problem that necessarily is permanent i like to believe that in 10 years time i could come back and argue the opposite even though i've talked about the history and the structural problems of this benighted institution and the cruelty and the unpleasantness it has caused around the world i have yet to approach one of the subjects dearest to my heart i've made three documentary films on the subject of aids in africa my particular love is the country of uganda it is one of the countries i love most in the world been there many times i've interviewed joseph uh to europe and his wife janet uh before unfortunately she suddenly saw god um there was a period when uganda had the worst incidence of hiv aids in the world i went to rakhi the village where it was first spotted but through an amazing initiative called abc abstinence be faithful correct use of condoms those three i'm not denying that abstinence is a very good way of not getting aids it really is it works so does being faithful but so do condoms and do not deny it and this pope this pope not satisfied not satisfied with saying condoms are against our religion please consider first abstinence second being faithful to your partner he spreads the lie that condoms actually increase the incidence of aids he actually makes sure that aid is conditional on saying no to condoms i have been to there's a hospital in bui in the west of uganda where i do quite a lot of work it is unbelievable the pain and suffering you see now yes yes it is true abstinence will stop it it's it's the strange thing about this church it is obsessed with sex absolutely obsessed now they will say they will say we with our permissive society and our rude jokes are obsessed no we have a healthy attitude we like it it's fun it's jolly because it's a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult it's a bit like food in that respect only even more exciting the only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese and that in erotic terms is the catholic church in a nutshell [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Wonderful Truth

Views: 1,181,079

Keywords: Richard dawkins, christopher hitchens, sam harris, ricky gervais, atheism, religion, god, god delusion, debate, non believer, Richard Dawkins, Science, Knowledge, Debate, Religion vs. Science, Atheist, Atheism, Theist, Evolution, Bible, Christianity, Jesus, Christ, Islam, Buddhism, Neil deGrasse Tyson, The God Delusion, Darwin, Ricky Gerwais, facts, fact, Lawrence Krauss, Daniel dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Multiverse, dan barker, Peter singer, Plato, Aristoteles, victor stenger, Stephen Fry

Id: Vpn-NhSPYQE

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021