In a now well circulated interview in 2015 Stephen Fry was asked what he would say if his atheism turned out to be wrong and he came face to face with God. He responded:
“I’d say, Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world to 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.”
Interestingly Stephen Fry is not just an atheist but a humanist. He is a patron of Humanists UK and has worked with them on multiple campaign adverts, the description on the Humanists website says the video “narrated by Stephen Fry, opens with an allusion to Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserting ‘Every human being is born free and with equal rights.’ As it goes on, it enumerates fundamental rights such as ‘the right to be who you are, to love whom you love, to say what you mean, to make your own choices”.
What makes figures such as Fry so fascinating is the strange halfway house they attempt to exist in between world-views, and the kind of pretence that must be kept up in order to exist there.
