In Which Stephen Fry Steps In It

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog
February 17, 2015

If you would be so kind, I would like to ask you to view this brief bit of blasphemous cheek. It’ll just take a few minutes.

Now then, all set? Let’s break this down into two basic parts. The first part is that Stephen Fry is given a thought experiment, and we should take a moment to see how he thinks in thought experiments. He doesn’t believe in God, but he is nevertheless asked a “what if.” What if you were wrong, the questioner asks, and the whole thing turns out to be true, with you finding yourself in a conversation with God at the Pearly Gates.

Fry takes that occasion to launch into his diatribe. Bone cancer in children? What’s with that?

But I want to note something really strange about this set up.

Saturday, 7 February 2015

Faux Rage

Pitiable, Risible Stephen Fry

Poor old Stephen Fry. There are few things more pathetic than the moral indignation of an ageing atheist. And, sadly, Stephen in his dotage appears to be growing in his particular moral outrage.

Stephen does not believe in God's existence. His reason? There is EEEEEvil in the world! He works himself up into a lather telling us that the Creator of such eeeeeevil must be hated and rejected, were He to exist. But Stephen Fry, either consciously or unconsciously, is holding himself up to ridicule.

He was asked recently by a media interviewer what he would say to God if he were to die (which is a certainty) and were confronted by Him (also a certainty). Suddenly amoral Stephen got all morally indignant. It almost sounded like he was trying to deflect his own deep sense of guilt and blame, as in, "I have done bad things, but God has done worse than me."

In his imaginary conversation with God, Fry says he would tell him: “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 which is so full of injustice and pain?”

Now, it's somewhat embarrassing to his argument that poor old Stephen appears to hold to antiquated notions of right and wrong, misery and felicity.