Gay Bryne And Stephen Fry Interview – An Answer to Stephen Fry

Gay Bryne and Stephen Fry Interview

In the Gay Bryne and Stephen Fry interview, which you can see here, Gay Bryne asks atheist, and personal favourite of mine Stephen Fry about God.

Stephen Fry provides a wonderful answer that challenges us all to have a think about how we see ourselves, God and the world.

One one side you have a man that experiences God, through some factual inaccuracies of Christianity, Gay Bryne and on the other you side have a man that does not experience God nor understand such an experience actually exists, Stephen Fry.

Predictably, some atheists are loving Stephen Fry’s responses, and some Christians are outraged. We have the age old problem of ‘my experience is more superior/more right than yours’, and favouring those who are closest to our way of thinking. That’s a real issue, and differences in views are certainly nothing to get upset, prejudiced or heated about.

I have inserted my comments as we go. As always I have approached with an open mind and thus openly let my mind be changed by the points, not changed what I read to fit my mind. In this case again as always, we have to let the evidence and facts shape what we believe to be the objective truth, not let what we believe, shape the evidence and facts to fit around it.

It’s all about keeping an open mind, and again, understudying that science and the objective reality are king, not our personal beliefs about them.

Bare in mind that Stephen Fry has never experienced God and will doubt, against all the overriding evidence that any such neurological experience exists, even though it’s been show to be scientifically true from a multitude of sources now, simply it hasn’t filtered down to the mainstream as yet, and won’t for another decade or so I doubt.

As someone that experiences God’s love, (a deep love – a non normal human emotion that wasn’t there before) that experience comes first, then ideas about it (including my own) are seen for what they are, secondary. No matter what I say or postulate, that experience remains.

For someone that doesn’t experience God, ideas must always come first, they are primary. They are tangible, and as such, form the basis of all reality to them. Because to such a person the experience of God is a delusion and thus doesn’t exist, it is always the idea of God that has primacy for an atheist and it is that which is debated or sometimes attacked. It is often the Biblical and factually inaccurate description of ‘plonk down creation’ that’s attacked as well as Biblical based ideas of a God that decides absolutely everything e.g. if your baby gets cancer God chose it, that atheists take exception to. As is usually the case on such scenarios we find there are elements of truth on both sides of the religious atheist debate.

Does the experience of God exist? Yes. Are some of our ideas about God likely wishful thinking? Yes.

As per the norm each person ignores evidence as they wish to fit in around their beliefs and anchors up the rest of their arguments, dismissing anything else that doesn’t fit from the other camp.

Such outdated descriptions and ideas about God we are finding just aren’t the reality, however, as science has shown, challengingly, believing them to be true doesn’t alter that neurological experience of God or it’s existence..

Such debates, or attacks from atheists are very useful, and whilst based partially in scientific and experiential ignorance, they freely challenge theological dogma.

Thus, in the scope of the right mind – a beautiful mind – an open mind – they allow the reshaping and reformation of ideas about God leaving such experiences untouched and real as they always were.

It’s all about keeping an open mind and realising what you knew yesterday is always open to change, disproof and improvement, from there comes true intelligence that mimics the rules of the creation, because it is always evolving.

Gay Bryne and Stephen Fry Interview Section 1

Byrne – “Suppose it’s all true, and you walk up to the pearly gates, and are confronted by God. What will Stephen Fry say to him, her, or it?”

Fry – “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.”

Such occurrences of cancer are very unfortunate byproducts of the evolving creation, which is not perfect and never shall be. Such cell mutations, are the reason we evolved to exist in the first place, and cancer of course is an occurrence where such mutations have gone wrong. I’ve talked a lot about how God must be an incredible scientist and mathematician to set all this creation off, but in terms of mathematics, it’s estimated been 50 and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the average human adult and for an average child between the ages of 8 and 14, approximately 20 billion to 30 billion cells die a day.Thus each cell must be replaced.

And in the blood, a different process is at work called erythropoiesis where approximately 2 million cells are being replenished each second. Thus as Stephen was postulating the terribleness of creation, over 2 billion cells will have died within him and being replaced. (All if you believe him, which came into existence and knew their jobs through evolution (correct) evolution which is itself a process that just existed and began by pure chance – highly unlikely.)

Cancer occurs when just one of these replacements turns cancerous, so just 1 in our 100,000,000,000,000 cells in all goes wrong. Such a deviation is absolutely minuscule, that it is a close to perfect as can be. Hardly a reason to show that creative force hatred as it busily sustains you in order to do so one could argue. Of course therein lies a difficult aspect of our human condition, because no matter who good things are, we will always find a problem or room for something better. Today, due to a huge amount of misinformation, many are unaware of access to that beautiful force within, which unrealised or not, busily works away like a dedicated parent, only to be chastised by it’s at times ignorant and selfish children – the human being and creation of all it’s hard work over billions of years.

Would a loving God want or decree such things as cancer to happen? I think the statistics show, certainly that was not the intention, but they do happen, sometimes in children other times in people, sometimes by total chance, other times through other causes such as genetic and environmental factors. And we hope one day to cure such ailments, as co-creators with that higher, intelligent and evolution enabling force I call God. For Fry to use such an argument that there is no Creator, or that such a Creator is evil because of these occurrences, is like me saying my Mac crashes once every 20 billion times I turn it on, therefore Steve Jobs doesn’t exist… or that he evilly intended to make a faulty computer. Is it better to have no computer at all, rather than one that sometimes develops faults? The question we must ask if we are to put ourselves in the mind of a God who may not may not be existent to us, is this – Is it better to say there should be no life, than life with so many wonders but sometimes obviously terrible occurrences?

What do you think? If you think the latter, then under that argument you should never have children. Would small chances of things going wrong put you off the joy and wonder of having children? That’s a personal decision, for myself, I think the reward outweighs the risk.

If we look at the mind of God, we can say perhaps an imperfect mechanism of creation was chosen over no creation at all, and if that a perfection creation could have been made it would have been, perhaps it is still evolving towards that perfection which it may not may not reach.

The idea of a perfect Biblical creator who plonked everything down on earth exactly as it is, has of course been shown to be false. That creative force operates by rules, and we call those rules science. Sometimes, the consequences of those rules aren’t good at all from a human standpoint. Yet, this creation is evolving, it has evolved to a level where a human child even exists to get cancer, where I, Stephen Fry and you can even be alive to contemplate the question and are being sustained and kept alive as we do so. That is the very definition of something so miraculous calling it eternal love seems an understatement of gigantic proportions.

We have evolved so that meditative techniques are being recommend for those with cancer, to help them relieve the emotional stresses of the disease. Why do these techniques exist? Why are their rules and ways to fight cancer? As we evolve in tandem via and under the rules of that ever-present force that is God, we shall uncover more and more of the “code” of the science of cancer and be better able to prevent and cure it.

Thus we don’t have perfect state of affairs, but we are at least moving towards perfection, albeit slowly.

As for injustice, there is much yes, but overall the rules of reality, which can be bent or abused in the short term, mean that justice will prevail in the long run.

In short, errors and imperfections in the code of life, science, as blown up by Stephen Fry as they have been to fit his ideas, do not at all mean there is no creator. Indeed such statistical minute, could equally be judged to be evidence of a creator, and a highly accurate and benevolent one at that.

Gay Bryne and Stephen Fry Interview Section 2

Byrne – “And you think you are going to get in, like that?”

Fry – “But I wouldn’t want to, I wouldn’t want to get in on his terms. They are wrong. Now, if I died and 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.”

Presuming there is a heaven, are God’s terms wrong? The first thing to realise is we all have the potential to experience God, although miseducation makes that harder than it should be. Environmental factors vastly sway and determine which way you’re likely to go. If experiencing God means heaven or not, then there certainly isn’t a level playing field, so those terms are in essence greatly unfair from an individuals viewpoint. So too you’re far more likely to be of a certain religion based on nationality, if too only one religion is right, thats unfair also.

Of course the great leveller is scientific truth. We can say now the neurological experience of God’s love is real, but no one seems to care about that! Us human beings prefer to shape that around what we believe rather than the other way round.

I think it’s perfectly acceptable to see problems with the creation, to criticise it, and want to solve them. Yet it would be interesting to know, what has Stephen Fry done to help cure cancer in children? Maybe a lot, maybe nothing. There are obviously problems in this world and we should all do our best to solve them, wether we experience God or not. Being angry at that enabling and creative force, God, is that going to achieve much? Certainly if we look from a human standpoint, we can justifiably ask why is there so much suffering. We can get angry at it. Let us not forget we as human beings create a lot of that suffering ourselves with out selfish ways, other suffering such as cancer is a by-product of the creation, and yet more suffering such as emotion and mental, again occurs, but within there is a cure to that, and that is finding God through one of the millions of paths. Sometimes there is a reason for our suffering, for a greater good, other times there isn’t a reason at all and suffering just exists.

This idea that God can come and click his fingers and take away suffering simply isn’t real. Even with coming to experience God, the mechanism requires brain plasticity, it operates under rules and takes time. Using those same rules of science we have the ability to end many of the things that are destructive to us. That’s pretty wonderful once we know the rules and use them in our favour.

Is God a maniac then? Because something is created that isn’t perfect and has problems, does that make someone or something a maniac? Perhaps we bestow too much incredibleness on God and it would seem even God has limits because we can agree there are things wrong in the world, just by design. If making something imperfect makes us a maniac, then using that logic that would make every single one of us maniacs!

What about all the billions that do experience God and his wonderful love? The incredible detail and harmony of the Universe. Should that be ignored? I think God would have a good comeback.

I see this a lot with atheists they they all see God as firstly non existent or a joke, and secondly an evil maniac, often based on Biblical depictions and the issues with the world. They put absolutely everything in his hands and on his shoulders. It’s a little like someone flying in First Class complaining they didn’t get some peanuts on the flight, sure you’re still flying, you’re still alive, it might not be perfect, but it’s pretty good. To say their were issues with the flight, doesn’t mean everyone that made it happen is a maniac, it just means things could be better.

Of course because atheists don’t experience God’s love and deny the scientifically proved experience of such, they come at that argument already biased. I know that intangible called God intimately, I got there through a combination of grace, knowledge and hard work. I feel that love through the changes on my brain that can be seen and which I did’t know would happen, or try and make. I have an anchor to put all else in perspective with. When I didn’t experience God, yes I was pretty angry, as is Stephen Fry. I hated the suffering of the human condition without God’s love, but it drove me to find God. Atheists however have no idea of that experience, plus they mistake belief or religion as needed, because they focus on their ‘ideas’ about God above all else.

These ideas are cherry picked personal reflections they use to form a reality that is based only on belief. They attack others ideas about God which may or may not be factually correct, and view all such people that experience God including me, as deluded, when all the evidence now shows is not true, that there is a very real and wonderful experience going on in the brain – the centre of all your experiences.

Thus atheists can only really focus on their own non experience and the physical reality of the world, for good and for bad. They then set upon their own imagined idea of God as being perfect and all powerful, able to bypass the rules of science and reality, and having set him up to fall, state that you’ve either screwed this up or you meant to make issues and you don’t care, thus if you do exist you’re evil or more likely you’re non existent.

God can change the reality, and physical manifestations such as the brain, but is confined by scientific rules of that reality it would seem. Human beings could always have been on the creative agenda, just they took time to create through evolution and it’s rules of random mutation (which no one seems to know why they occur in the first place nor the reason they do occur). Thus, as confined by rules of science as he is, God may not cure your cancer, but can ease your suffering if you use the available mechanisms to connect to him such as prayer and meditation. Such mechanisms also lower stress levels and could therefore lower likeliness of illnesses occurring too. So in that way there is an influence of God without doubt, it’s just not quite as direct as some people believe.

The miracle of this creation, and the fact we even exist to question it, shouldn’t be ignored. God’s presence in the background of all our postulations, gratitude, anger, belief and unbelief is incredible and it’s hidden to all those absorbed in the senses and the World (anything manifest) as being the primary leader of reality, when in fact they are secondary, to, coming after what was un-manifest, nothingness and everything-ness – e.g. God.

We don’t indeed have to spend our life on our knees thanking God, but does God want you to experience him? Yes it would seem so, because we have the faculty to experience him. This is something we are only now figuring out, free of interpretative inaccuracy, it would seem that we have evolved to be wired to experience God, if there is no God, then why would this have occurred? Why would we have evolved this way? It all seems a great coincidence to some, for me, such a belief is harder and harder to reconcile the deeper I go.

Gay Bryne and Stephen Fry Interview Section 3

Fry continues… ” So, atheism isn’t not just about not believing there’s a God, but on the assumption there is one, what kind of God is he? Yes, the world is very splendid but it also has in it insects whose whole lifecycle 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. It’s perfectly apparent that he is monstrous. Utterly monstrous and deserves no respect whatsoever. The moment you banish him, life becomes simpler, purer, cleaner, more worth living in my opinion.”

Again Fry is attacking the Biblical ‘plonk down’ creation idea. Creation was seemingly set in motion by the Big Bang, by an unseen unknown, or by itself. Either way for whatever reason, for life to be there must be death, a recycling of tissue as it where. The way that is might not suite us and at times may seem evil from our very tiny and limited selfish perspective. It’s interesting to find that Stephen Fry isn’t vegetarian. Thus his arguments about being reliant on killing other things to survive seems rather muted as he, like me, has done so all his life.

Life is here to survive, and from a human stand point, such things as eye eating insects are utterly evil, yet for the insect it’s just eating to survive and have offspring, which is pretty much what we all do as human beings.

There is absolutely no difference whatsoever.

The insect has evolved and mutated to survive using the rules of science that govern evolution, as have all things.

I don’t think God cares how that life force evolves, or in what form. If evolution is happening, improvement is going on and that seems to be a big thing to the Universe and thus we can surmise the Creator. Some sort of balance and harmony, however it is achieved, seems to be the goal. If we wipe ourselves out by destroying our planet, the Universe goes on. We can’t blame God for that, we simply didn’t evolve quickly enough to understand the very obvious rules of our environment and evolve our lifestyle quick enough to carry on. And something else will come along, evolve in the same way and take our place and experience God just as we can.

We could develop something to wipe out all the parasites, great for us, evil for them and anything that feeds off them too.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

Atheists and many religious people seem to think we are the centre of the Universe and we are meant to God’s centre of the Universe too. When you look at the evidence it seems not at all, we are simply his most evolved creation through the said processes, which it would seem were pre-ordained, such as evolution.

Do I think it matters to God if its human beings or instead another life form experience him? No not at all, we are just further along the evolutionary plan as it where, which certainly seems to be for life to evolve into something that can experience what evolved it.

How strange it would seem that was all by blind chance.

That’s where we are right now, that’s what’s happening, for some reason we have a very precious place in the creation right now but it’s no something special about us or our plan, it’s something special about what created us, it’s plans and leading us to where we are.

If we look at the evidence, God, is something that wants to create, that wants life to survive, and obviously, with what we have found over the last 5 – 10 years wants life (substitute human beings at this point in time) to experience him given how our brains have evolved to experience him and deliver peace.

He wants life to evolve, which is why it does evolve. Let us not forget to get to where we are, how many billions of animals and insects have we killed? Is that utterly evil? That without the billions of animals you and your ancestors have killed, you couldn’t be alive now and kiss your partner and feel love? Each kiss you give is tainted with death, does it seem evil to you?

Well it seems, it was either that… or nothing. With your joy of life, must come sadness, and the price, is death, at least in this realm.

Of course we are now evolving further to be able to synthesise meat, so we don’t have to kill at all. The fact billions of animals will never be born because of this future advancements deeming them unnecessary, is that evil or good?

Finally, Stephen Fry says the moment you banish God, life becomes simpler, purer, cleaner, more worth living. I think this is true for an atheist because God is a seen as such a terrible thing. And God isn’t actually terrible, at all, it’s our unpleasantness to each other based on what we do or don’t believe which is really the enemy and what is really terrible. It’s needless division, anger and hate, rather than an approach of peace, unity live and let live. And that’s why it’s great we have us all here on earth, slowly but surely figuring things out and coming to real, objective answers, that don’t depend on what we subjectively believe to be true.

Having an experience of God or not, makes you no greater or lesser worth as a human being, that must always be remembered

So of course, once you take out this idea of a terrible evil creator from your mind that’s meant to be in charge of you, and responsible for creating such evil, you’re going to feel a lot better about yourself. You’re no longer arguing with your own mind and own creation of nastiness.

However, it is the idea that is at fault really because it is yet another barrier to experiencing God, and my goodness there are millions. God is evil, evil exists, religion is evil, the Bible isn’t true, I believe in the Big Bang, parasites are evil, bone cancer is evil, I’ve had a bad life etc etc. And that’s all fine, they aren’t barrier to that experience of God at all. But I think to know God better, you have to actually experience him first, then make the call, rather than looking selectively at his handywork, either through rose tinted glasses of religion or through the atheists darkened shades. And you don’t need to believe the experience of God exists, it does exist and can be reached through factual means.

These ideas are very hard for someone to alter or question because they are central to someones identity and personal harmony. No one likes to ruffle their world view, its uncomfortable and not cosy at all.

Introspection is key, to see that something in your experience remains subtly the same as the ideas come and go, and it is that which is the essence and foundation of all creation and is within each of us now.

So by seeing beyond the ideas you can really go on a journey of discovery and open your mind to the scientific facts of reality, rather than what you believe about them, and use the mechanisms that exist in reality to connect to that source I call God. It’s there you find real truth, not in the layers of debate and interpretation, which as stimulating as they are, are simply secondary to what created them.

To make your own mind up about God rather than what you’ve being told, and confusing him solely with your own ideas and religious ideas is something I’d recommend. There are elements of truth on all sides of the camps, and objectivity lies beyond most of their heavily biased, subjective and lopsided viewpoints.

The beauty of what I’m talking about is it remains in all people, untouched, as you have ideas, feelings, thoughts, it never fades. It’s actually totally unaffected by them, simple comings and goings in it’s presence.

It is then by delving into the experience of that ever present divine ‘something’ within, hidden by all you treat as so important in your life, you shall know your true source, and the source of this pretty perfect, but admittedly imperfect creation.

No matter what you think about the creator, judgment day, the afterlife, the creation, or the word ‘God’, that experience is real and remains and is by far the greatest thing I’ve experienced in my life.

God Bless

Barclay Littlewood

Thanks for reading about the Gay Bryne And Stephen Fry Interview.

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