Irish Police Investigate Old Boring Person For Blasphemy

I see headlines saying that Irish police have investigated Stephen Fry for blasphemy.

He's being investigated because a clergyman asked him on a TV show what he would say to God if, against all of his expectations, he were to find himself at the Pearly Gates, and he replied that he would say to God,

"How dare you create a world in which there is such misery? It’s 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?"

If Fry were actually to end up going to prison for blasphemy, it will be a tragedy comparable to Oscar Wilde going to prison because some aristocrat was deflecting attention away from his poof of a son who'd had an affair with Wilde.

But he won't go to prison, assuming that this article by The Explainer is accurate. It says that the most that could happen to Fry is that he would be fined 25,000 Euros.

That would hardly be a tragedy for Fry personally, unless he's spent every cent he's ever made. He very likely makes 25,000 Euros a day, between all of his movies and TV shows and books, and he's been making enough money for long enough that 25,000 Euros is probably just a chuckle to him.

If it establishes a precedent and encourages Ireland to prosecute poor atheists, that's quite another story.

If this case causes Ireland to finally cease to prosecute blasphemy as a crime, that would be very good.

If Fry somehow engineered all of this so that there would be a huge amount of publicity around a blasphemy trial, causing Ireland to finally stop persecuting blasphemy as a crime, then that was brilliant. I don't think that's what Fry did, but if it is, then major congratulations are in order.

Now: it's getting harder and harder to remember all the way back to when Fry wasn't completely tedious. So Fry's mad at God? I'm not mad at God. You know why? BECAUSE GOD DOESN'T EXIST! I accuse Fry and all the rest of the New Atheists of atheisting improperly, of giving atheism a bad name and making the general public think that all atheists are horrible and boring. It's gotten so bad that many atheists are denying that they're atheists, calling themselves skeptics or nonbelievers or some other thing which means exactly the same as atheists, just because they don't want to be associated with Dawkins and Fry and Harris and Ricky Gervais and the rest of those idiots and bores.

But I would never want to see anyone be convicted of a crime just because they were boring.

Not even if they were as boring as that quote above by Fry, or as boring as Gervais' movie The Invention of Lying.

How To Keep New Atheists From Annoying You

A few years ago I wrote on this blog that I had become so annoyed by New Atheists that I was considering converting to a religion, converting insincerely, just to spite them. And I meant it, I was considering it. But some time after that I found a very effective way to deal with the annoyance New Atheists caused me: I stopped hanging out with them. It is much easier than I had imagined to almost completely avoid them. Nowadays, every now and then a New Atheist will cross my path, but I don't engage with him -- almost always a him -- and pretty soon he's gone again.

Turns out they're not everywhere. Not even close. What a relief!

I have a lot less admiration for Bill Maher and Ricky Gervaise and Stephen Fry than I used to, because of their New Atheist tendencies. The last time I saw Fry on screen was in an Internet video of him debating with some churchman or theologian, who asked him to imagine that Heaven was real and that he had died and found himself at the Pearly Gates: what was the first thing he'd do? Fry immediately said that he'd ask God why He allowed suffering, launching into a very bitter and detailed description of some of the more horrible examples of suffering. And I thought to myself: Really! You find out, against your belief of what is possible, that Paradise is real and exists forever and ever, and the first thing you will do is complain. At that instant, I was completely done. The last ember of my patience for this kind of thing was ground out. I saw no reason at all to prefer Fry over the British churchman or theologian glowering angrily at him as he went on angrily about suffering and Why didn't God stop it. I just saw two angry, unreasonable old men, bitterly arguing about non-existent things, wasting their time and the viewer's time. It was as if I had come all the way down to the bottom of the slide which started at the top when I first heard there was this group called New Atheists, and was so excited, assuming that they were like me.



I have better things to do.

At least Fry and Gervaise still act, and Bill still often talks about things other than religion on his show.

And I still know of no atheist movement to which I can belong. But maybe that's not so bad. I'm not so annoyed at religion any more. I'm still an atheist, but now I have had extensive, exhaustive, thorough proof that atheism does not prove, at all, that a person is Bright. If you believe in God, that means that you and I disagree about one thing. We might agree about thousands of other things. Experiencing New Atheists up close day-in and day-out for years has left me much less bothered by religion, and much less inclined to make moderate believers responsible for the atrocities of the extremists. The moderates and I are both against the atrocities. I don't have to be a dick about less substantial things. Any more.

Before I met the New Atheists, I thought that there was a lot to say against religion. I'm not completely sure about that anymore. Seems like the New Atheists say five minutes' worth of stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

There might be much more to say against religion. It's just that none of the New Atheists seems at all likely ever to stumble over any of it.

There is definitely quite a lot to say about religion, simply because it encompasses great portions of the lives of billions of people over thousands of years all over the world. I can have all sorts of rewarding discussions with people about religion. I can discuss religion for a long time with someone without having a clue whether they believe in anything supernatural or not. But if it's been a long and rewarding discussion, I know that the person I've been talking to is neither a fanatical fundamentalist nor a New Atheist.