Stephen Fry on Religion

well for i want to go i want to now move from the peaks from the peaks of human intellectual activity down to the depths yes i want to start we want to talk about science humanism and ultimately religion and which which we have both have very similar views about um there's a there's a wonderful line in in uh the x-files which is not my favorite tv show but nevertheless which is which is what fox mulder says we want to believe yes we want to believe we all want to believe things we're hardwired to believe in things and that um that is not itself necessarily bad i think you there's a great indirect description of religion you said old people don't know you so old people certainly ten people become often become more religious as they get older he said old people don't know that in the world today there's no one there they don't know that the bible is a customer service announcement and that purgatory is where saint peter puts you on hold and sends you into a self-contained menu driven loop of tone button operated eternity to the sound of vivaldi's spring that was actually petrol isn't it funny to remember that you actually wrote these things well you know there is of course an impulse whenever we don't understand uh a force in the earliest days it would be the moon and the sun and we would give it an agency and the name we give such agencies is a god yes so there was a moon god and the sun god and there was a god of pushing leaves out of branches of trees who who any force any motion that we don't understand and then of course force and motion and the understanding of force of motion is your business and is the business that galileo and and newton were famous for literally the moving of things sure that the the prima mobile that the prime mover is the key to it it's realizing the emotion you hit it you seem to be a great physics student because no really because one of the things why i talk about introductory physics is the difference between galileo and aristotle is aerosol for position was important yeah galileo realized it was motion that simple realization was the creation of modern physics yes and and what is the agency behind that movement and and of course if you don't know and you're not prepared to do the hard thinking that science involves or or you choose to disbelieve science for some weird reason you give that agency to to to a deity yes i prefer well i think these days a single day unfortunately but it was more fun when it was uh it was much more fun than more and they're much nicer when there's a lot of them exactly i agree with you but it's more than that i think it's well maybe i'm more pejorative that you you it's where you stop working it's yeah i say i don't want to think about this anymore so i'll just it's god yeah i mean i i i i'm more hesitant than you i think or our mutual departed friend christopher hitchens i cut more slack to the individually pious and devout individuals in the world i have no wish to offend them or to try to make he did either no i don't think he did particularly you know and i i always think of floatbed you know this is trekkont the three stories of flow but there's one called the cursed sampler the simple heart and it's this this woman felicity she's called which i think is an ironic title happiness she's a she's a hard-working maid and she sits in front of a a stained glass window and looks at it and flow from there's contempt for the cardinals and the prefecture of cardinals and the and the panoply and hierarchy of the church that keeps her on her knees is profound but his love and sympathy for her on her knees being awed by the color and the excitement and the possibility of what religion offers is is deep and and i understand that you know i i think i don't want to shake people and say don't you stare at that stained glass when you don't sing those hymns how dare you it's not my business i have to speak as i find when it comes to the truth behind it which is important but the wonder the sense of wonder isn't celebrating and i guess the i guess my point about religion is that there are many positive things yes we both agree but the question is can you achieve those positive things without without the negative and richard feynman did wonderful remember talking about the flower when they're having an argument with an artist saying i find the flower more beautiful than you do you just you know you sort of find it beautiful then you go into all its stamens and it's atoms and these and richard fineman said well don't you see like you i get the beauty of the flowers as the colors and the aesthetic shape but i also get the beauty of the symmetry inside its cells i get the symmetry of its jeans i get i get the the beauty of its transport systems and it's it's it's you know it's chemical the reactions it's factory the whole thing i get more and more exactly in fact you see i have feynman written here it's so no it's amazing we're on the same place absolutely well but interestingly enough i also had finement in in the sense of you said something independently that was almost exactly the same thing i mean finally we talked about the flower rainbow right he said a rainbow isn't less beautiful because i understand how it works right and you said rationalizing a sunset doesn't make it any less beautiful you said it in the hip-hop hippopotamus oh that's right yes and and which is a wonderful one i liked i liked the book and i liked the movie yeah um uh because it was a wonderful way of addressing this fact that we want to believe yeah and how can you gently show people that they're really misinterpreting the world that there's actually a different explanation which may be more illuminating more useful in the long run as it was in this case to learn about the nature of the of the two young men absolutely and to learn the reality that's the point it's not that it's not a beautiful way of seeing the world but what ultimately leads you to useful actions versus irrational actions and that's my problem at greater depths of engagement in in the world around you and what we really have an objection to of course are the other the power wielders of it is is the the priestly cast that decides it has knowledge that is special that has revealed knowledge that is cannot be questioned that is that is a truth that doesn't need to be proven and um that will set you free and that without it you are in some way damned and and the people who are most likely to be controlled by that are the most vulnerable are the poorest others with the least education and who are denied any sense of it of education or an option of looking into the true depth and wonder of the world because it seems religion wants to count its souls and and and there we know what the danger is yeah oh that there's those dangers but there are so and those are the obvious ones i guess but there are other more subtle ones and i think that that in some sense and again i have this debate with with chomsky at one point he said to me early on i don't care what people think it's what they do the problem is there's an intimate relationship between what people think and what they do and that's that's the problem of religion it seems to me it's not that i mean i find not that it's silly and it it it's that accepting that suddenly is causes people to do irrational and sometimes evil actions so there's that part but then going to hitchens there's a quote which i thought was from hitchens but like many things it wasn't i suppose but um where where i heard him say you know we're we're we're created sick and commanded to be well i've learned since then it was a 16th century quote from another from the name fuki gavil maybe you know the pronunciation he said you were created sick but commanded to be sound i learned that it came from that so but but i first learned it from from from christopher this once more we have to be ashamed of ourselves the sense of shame yeah which is so ingrained in religion is in my mind one of the well especially in the in the in in the judeo-christian religion but philip that that is one of the more insidious and and evil aspects of it yeah so we have to square the circle of that that we we accept the preposterous nature or at least we we we at least agree on that the original sin idea the the the thought that we're supposed to believe that we are guilty should be ashamed but on the other hand we also have spoken of uh without using his name yet clato or the idea that there is a perfection out there that we have not attained that we cannot attain and that browning quotation about the demands we should exceed his grasp of what's a heaven for pushing forward of knowing that we are imperfect by definition perfection isn't that which cannot be achieved but that there are paradigms of perfection there's a there is a thing called truth and there is a thing called a shining moral ethical life that we gesture towards but we haven't got it we are imperfect but the imperfection is not uh a stain on us from birth it's merely that we're given a a a sense of the ineffable and yeah and the inexpressible in ourselves a pattern of something beyond

Channel: The Origins Podcast

Views: 315,593

Rating: 4.8419018 out of 5

Keywords: The Origins Podcast, Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Project, Science, Podcast, Culture, Physicist, Video Podcast, Physics, Stephen Fry, Effective, Relgion, Gay, Far Right, Alt Right, Political Correctness

Id: jVPNhYpjITs

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020