I'm agnostic -leaning on atheist. I think Fry said it best:
The trouble with atheism is when you stop believing in God, you don't believe in nothing, you believe in anything. And perhaps we do live in a culture where reason and so on are not as glorified as they should be.
However, I don't think we should ever allow religion the trick of maintaining that the spiritual and the beautiful and the noble and the altruistic and the morally strong and the virtuous are in any way inventions of religion or particular or peculiar to religion. It's certainly true that you could say that it was Christ who said "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone". That's a wonderful thing to have said, anybody who would have said that would have won a great deal of respect and interest. But there is absolutely no monopoly on beauty and truth in religion.
And I suppose one of the reasons why I'm so fond of the Greeks and one of the reasons why the radical poet Shelley wrote his 'Prometheus Unbound' is because he understood that if you were to compare the Genesis myth, which had bedeviled our culture for a very long time indeed (2000 years).
It was essentially a myth in which we should be ashamed for ourselves.
God says "Who told you you were naked?". What possible reason do we have to believe that we are naked, or that if we are naked that we should be ashamed of it? That for what we are and what we do, we should ever apologize. We should apologize for our dreams, our impulses, our appetites, our drives, our desires, ... are not things to apologize for. Our actions we do sometimes apologize for and we excoriate ourselves for them rigthly. That's the Genesis myth.
The Greek myth is of Prometheus who stole fire from heaven and gave it to his favourite mortal, man. In other words, the Greek said: 'We have divine fire. Whatever is divine, is in us.' As humans, we are as good as the gods. The Gods are capricious and mean and foolish and stupid and jealous and rapine and all the things that greek mythology shows that they are. And that's a much better explanation it seems to me. And for that, the Gods punished Prometheus (chains, vultures, ... you know the story...).
And Shelley quite rightly understood (and interestingly enough, his wife wrote that Frankenstein was the modern Prometheus) that that mythological idea, that champion of real humanity and real humanism as we have come to call it, is that we ARE captains of our soul and masters of our destiny and that we contain any divine fire that there is. Divine fire that is fine and great. And it's perfectly obvious that if there were ever a God, he has lost every possible taste. You only have to look, forget the impression and unpleasantness of the radical right or the islamic hordes to the east, the sheer lack of intelligence and insight, the ability to express themselves and to infuse others of the priesthood here and indeed in Europe. God had once Bach, Mozart and Michelangelo on his side. And now who does he have? People with ginger whiskers and tinted spectacles who reduce the glory of theology to a kind of sharing.
That's what religion has become, an anemic nonsense. Because we understood that the fire was within us. It was not in some on an alter, whether it was a golden cross or a Buddha or anything else. But that we have it. The fault is in us and not in our stars, but also the glory is in us, and not in our stars. We take credit for what is great about man, but we also take the blame for what is dreadful about man. We neither grovel or apologize at the feet of a God or are so infantile as to ever project the idea that we once had a father as human beings and therefore we should have a divine one too. We have to grow up.
