YouTubeIf Stephen Fry met God, he'd have some pretty scathing things to say.
In an interview on RTÉ One's faith-based series The Meaning of Life, set to air on TV on Sunday, host Gay Byrne posed a theoretical question to the 57-year-old British actor and comedian, who is a staunch atheist.
"Suppose it's all true, and you walk up to the pearly gates, and are confronted by God," he asked, as seen in a YouTube video posted this week, which has been viewed more than 1.4 million times. "What will Stephen Fry say to him, her, or it?"
"I think I'd say, 'Bone cancer in children?'" Fry replied. "'What's that about'? How dare you. How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault. It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?' That's what I would say."
"And you think you're going to get in?" the host asked.
"No," Fry said. "But I wouldn't want to. I wouldn't want to get in on his terms. They're wrong."
He then started to cite Greek mythology.
"Now, if I died and it was, it was Pluto, Hades, and if it was the 12 Greek gods, then I would have more truck with it, because the Greeks didn't pretend to not be human in their appetites, in their capriciousness, and in their unreasonableness. They didn't present themselves as being all-seeing, all-wise, all-kind, all-beneficent."
"Because the god that created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac…utter maniac, totally selfish. Totally," he said. "We have to spend our life on our knees thanking him? What kind of god would do that? Yes, the world is very splendid, but it also has in it insect whose whole life cycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could easily have made a creation in which that didn't exist. It is simply not acceptable."
Fry, who has played characters on shows such as 24: Live Another Day and Bones and movies such as V for Vendetta, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and Alice in Wonderland, has made similar comments before.
"Atheism isn't just about not believing there's a god, but on the assumption that there is one, what kind of god is he?" he continued in his interview on The Meaning of Life. "It's perfectly apparent that he is monstrous, utterly monstrous, and deserves no respect whatsoever. The moment you banish him, your life becomes simpler, purer, cleaner, more worth living, in my opinion."
Fry recently found happiness with beau Elliott Spencer, 27. The two wed earlier this month after announcing their engagement less than two weeks prior. On Friday, Fry shared a photo of the two with a delicious-looking belated wedding gift.
The adorable darlings of the @cambridgeunion had such a surprise for me last night. We're now tucking in. #yum pic.twitter.com/iTdMCJR6v5
? Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) January 30, 2015On Sunday, after The Meaning of Life interview went viral online, he tweeted, "Oh dear, I did give poor old god a bit of a kicking here, didn't I?!"