Stephen Fry on confronting god after death

B.A._Baracus

Zaph wrote: »

Gay Byrne looks like someone p*ssed in his cornflakes when Fry gave his answer. If you're not prepared to hear answers you don't like, then don't ask the question.

I wasn't gonna post this as it comes off as a "smart arse know it all" type of comment. So with that said please no one view this comment as that

But most interviews are two seperate shot pieces. The person being interviewed comes in and the camera is rolling on them, while the interviewer asks the questions.
Then later as said person being interviewed leaves, the crew reposition the shoot to record 'reaction' shots from the interviewer to be edited in between... to create a seemless dialogue with reactions on tv.

So with knowing that, heck even if this was a 2-camera shoot.... Even a 3 camera shoot.... Was Gay Bryne really "shocked" (or what ever word you want to use) by Fry's comments?
Or did Gay Byrne simply put on the shocked face because realising that alot of religious Irish people were going to be watching? The dude has been on tv for decades. Tends to have an older demographic viewing audience these days.




TL:DR? Gay Byrne's reaction wasn't likely real time.

Bobeagleburger

Great to see an articulate Fry answer the question properly. He's a class act tbh

feargale

Zaph wrote: »

Gay Byrne looks like someone p*ssed in his cornflakes when Fry gave his answer. If you're not prepared to hear answers you don't like, then don't ask the question.

Not at all. He looks like a person who is determined to adopt a neutral stance on the issue, the essence of a disinterested interviewer. Why should he have to express agreement or disagreement? Your second sentence is jumping the gun on Gaybo.

shruikan2553 wrote: »

Is this to become one of those threads where people complain about any criticism Christianity gets while claiming every other religion is protected and then complain about atheists?

Well, did it happen? You make it sound as if you would be disappointed if it didn't.

floggg

RobertKK wrote: »

Stephen Fry acts the idiot.
He was talking about a Christian God, but then the supposed intellectual, disregarded a part of the bible where it says how evil entered the world.
Evil according to the book of Genesis entered the world when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and the price for the disobedience was death was brought into the world, and Adam and Eve allowed evil into the world.

Stephen Fry ignored the bible so he could just have his rant.

He didn't address in his rant about meeting God, how we can choose good or evil, or that by knowing evil, it allows us to know and appreciate what is good.

Also Stephen Fry said if heaven did exist he didn't want to go to heaven, indicating he wants to reside in hell, which is just being stupid for the sake of it.

Anyway I will be watching the Superbowl rather than wasting time on Stephen Fry who thinksthat is heaven did somehow exist he would even get the chance to say directly to God 'How dare you'...

Who exactly created Satan and evil?

And who made man with the capacity for evil? Isn't man made in God's image? So if man is prone to violence, murder, rape etc, isnt that just a reflection of God's nature?

And who made the insects and the beasts? Wasn't that god, not Satan? So didn't god create the nasty insects that burrow into children's eyes? Who is responsible for earthquakes, volcanos, tsuanmis etc?

Who made man with bodies susceptible to cancers and other diseases?

Who murdered the first born Egyptians?

Who commanded the execution of gay people, adulterers etc?

Yea, god is a dick!

floggg

RobertKK wrote: »

The Jews according to the bible had a special covenant with God, when they broke it and turned away from God, the prophecy of Jeremiah 16 said they would be banished to lands they do not know, they would end up being hunted down, their bodies not buried, famine and suffering...but this was to happen before Israel would be restored.

Are you ****ing serious?

You suggesting the holocaust was some sort of deserved punishment from god?

If so, I can't figure which of you is more evil.

probably you, since you actually exist

floggg

padd b1975 wrote: »

That's a pretty good argument for marriage being about children you've just made right there!

No its not.

floggg

RobertKK wrote: »

If you read the passage from Jeremiah that I posted where he gave the prophecy of where the Jews would be in foreign lands , would be hated and hunted down before Israel was restored, you would see there that people will pay for the sins of their ancestors.

Sure we see it with baptism where one gets baptised due to the sin of Adam and Eve and their original sin.

So you dont think punishing all future generations for the sins of their ancestors isn't a completely dickish thing to do?

I will say i do respect you a little bit for admitting god is a dick.

floggg

UCDVet wrote: »

I'm not religious, but generally I think the answer is 'freewill'. But you also have to remember, to a religious person, their time on Earth is infinitely small compared to an infinitely long eternity in heaven. Presumably, Satan has no impact on the eternal bliss we'd find in heaven.

Free will isnt really that great an explanation.

We are free to make our own decisions, but we would not decide to do evil unless the capacity to do evil had been given to us by our maker. So he made us knowing we would use it to do ****ty things.

And given that he is omnipotent, he should have known exactly how we would use it.

floggg

RobertKK wrote: »

Read my post, read the earlier quoted bit from the prophet Jeremiah. Look at why baptism exists.

It has nothing to do with what I believe or don't believe, it is there plain and clear in the bible, and plain and clear in baptism where one is baptised because they are seen to carry the original sin of Adam and Eve.

Where did I post bone cancer in children is acceptable to me?
Stephen Fry knows full well that Earth is not utopia but then acted like a fool and said he would reject heaven, ie a Utopian place where all is good.
Rezident made a good point, Fry acts as if Earth is suppose to be a heaven. Earth is a place where good and bad exists. We can either accept and try and make it a better place, or be bitter as Fry was in that interview.
We were given talent and soon we will cure all cancers as things like gene therapy advance.
Some would argue God given talent...

So God created cancer, but its not evil because he also gave us the capacity to potentially develop cures whatever many thousand of years after he created us.

I'm sure thats a lot of comfort to all the people who died in the meantime.

floggg

RobertKK wrote: »

Stephen Fry acts the idiot.
He was talking about a Christian God, but then the supposed intellectual, disregarded a part of the bible where it says how evil entered the world.
Evil according to the book of Genesis entered the world when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and the price for the disobedience was death was brought into the world, and Adam and Eve allowed evil into the world.

Stephen Fry ignored the bible so he could just have his rant.

He didn't address in his rant about meeting God, how we can choose good or evil, or that by knowing evil, it allows us to know and appreciate what is good.

Also Stephen Fry said if heaven did exist he didn't want to go to heaven, indicating he wants to reside in hell, which is just being stupid for the sake of it.

Anyway I will be watching the Superbowl rather than wasting time on Stephen Fry who thinksthat is heaven did somehow exist he would even get the chance to say directly to God 'How dare you'...

Thats not really that great an answer.

God created Adam and Eve, and also the forbidden fruit. He created man as a being who was vulnerable to temptation, and lacked the will to say no.

As an omnipotent being, he should have known exactly how the would act in that scenario. He surely knew they would take the fruit.

So did he set them up to fail? Or is not all seeing an powerful after all?

And if man is created in God's image, does that mean god also lacks the will power to say no to an apple?

osarusan

B.A._Baracus wrote: »

TL:DR? Gay Byrne's reaction wasn't likely real time.

Is it not likely that they had two cameras - one recording each of them the whole time?

B.A._Baracus

osarusan wrote: »

Is it not likely that they had two cameras - one recording each of them the whole time?

I used to think the same as you.
That two cameras (or more) recording the interview at the same time would mean what we saw, was what happened.

However TV is't like that because of editing.
In my previous post, that's an example of how TV stations such as Sky, BBC and even RTE conduct interviews for their news broadcasts. It's also used in interview specials such as this with Stephen Fry.

Basically.... the "reaction shots" are just placed in - it's all editing. You just loop the sound of the person getting interviewed over the reaction shot.
It doesn't matter if it's a single camera shoot, a two-camera shoot or 3+ camera shoot. It's editing.

Sir Gallagher

Stephen Fry is great at telling other peoples stories.

DEFTLEFTHAND

When his times comes it won't be God he'll be meeting anyway. Knowing Fry though he'll probably pull something from Dantes Divine Comedy and talk his way out of the Inferno, endure purgatorio, then he'll stand at the pearly gates of Paradiso and be rejected.

osarusan

B.A._Baracus wrote: »

I used to think the same as you.
That two cameras (or more) recording the interview at the same time would mean what we saw, was what happened.

However TV is't like that because of editing.
In my previous post, that's an example of how TV stations such as Sky, BBC and even RTE conduct interviews for their news broadcasts. It's also used in interview specials such as this with Stephen Fry.

Basically.... the "reaction shots" are just placed in - it's all editing. You just loop the sound of the person getting interviewed over the reaction shot.
It doesn't matter if it's a single camera shoot, a two-camera shoot or 3+ camera shoot. It's editing.

Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with that - but I'd still say that there are two cameras. You can still do all of what you said, without making the interviewer sit around after the interview faking 'genuine' reactions to answers he heard 45 minutes ago.

I'd say what we see in interviews are usually genuine reactions to questions - but maybe not always the reaction to the question that was just asked.

In this case, I would doubt that an interviewer such as Gaybo, for example, either deliberately reacted like that in a second shoot after the interview ended, or allowed a reaction to a different answer/comment to be inserted out of sequence as an answer to that quesion.

But who knows.

More generally, I don't have any strong opinions on Fry. I think it's a bit silly to be either dismissing what he said because of his personality or holding his words as incontrovertible truths because of it.

What he said isn't really all that new is it? It's just a variation on 'why does a kind God let terrible things happen?'

BenEadir

RobertKK wrote: »

If you read the passage from Jeremiah that I posted where he gave the prophecy of where the Jews would be in foreign lands , would be hated and hunted down before Israel was restored, you would see there that people will pay for the sins of their ancestors.

Sure we see it with baptism where one gets baptised due to the sin of Adam and Eve and their original sin.

So your God punishes children born today for the sins of ancestors they never met? Nice. That makes a lot of sense.

RobertKK

floggg wrote: »

Are you ****ing serious?

You suggesting the holocaust was some sort of deserved punishment from god?

If so, I can't figure which of you is more evil.

probably you, since you actually exist

You could ask yourself the same question you asked me.

I was just posting about what it says in Jeremiah 16 which it gives a prophecy of the Jews being in a foreign land, being hunted down, not getting proper burials, and how this was to happen before Israel was restored.
It is not like the Jews didn't know of this prophecy from fellow Jew, Jeremiah.

I was simply posting a reply to someone else, if a God exists and this God is a creator of us, then this God rules over his creation, in that prophecy it doesn't say God does the holocaust, it says God removed his love from the Jews, not that God did the evil.
Maybe read and understand before you judge

RobertKK

BenEadir wrote: »

So your God punishes children born today for the sins of ancestors they never met? Nice. That makes a lot of sense.

The amount of ignorance towards knowing a religion is unreal.

Do people think baptism is simply for joining the Christian church? I mean that is one part of it, but it is also to do with being born of the sin of Adam and Eve in the original sin, and how the sin is washed away in baptism.

tigger123

RobertKK wrote: »

The amount of ignorance towards knowing a religion is unreal.

Do people think baptism is simply for joining the Christian church? I mean that is one part of it, but it is also to do with being born of the sin of Adam and Eve in the original sin, and how the sin is washed away in baptism.

Original sin is such a horrible concept.

SaveOurLyric

RobertKK wrote: »

The amount of ignorance towards knowing a religion is unreal.

Exactly. The same as the huge numbers of people who havent read The Lord of the Rings. And dont believe in Orks and Elves. They should study the books before they make up their minds or comment on their existence or not.

Grayson

RobertKK wrote: »

The amount of ignorance towards knowing a religion is unreal.

Do people think baptism is simply for joining the Christian church? I mean that is one part of it, but it is also to do with being born of the sin of Adam and Eve in the original sin, and how the sin is washed away in baptism.

But a lot of it sounds like it was made up to justify other stuff. And it all makes sense if you live in a world where magic exists. And those jewish tribes did. Things like illnesses were caused by demons. Bad luck was divine intervention against you.

take the devil. The devil and hell are central parts of christian mythology. There's no mention of the devil until relatively late in jewish thought. It was about 600bc when he finally popped his head up.

the soul didn't even exist. The first person to say we had an immortal soul was pythagoras. It was co-opted in later because it fit with everything else.

The christian image of God and salvation came from St. Augustine of Hippo. He was previously a Zoroastrian. He also felt profound guilt over a love affair that went bad. A lot of the christian outlook on sex and guilt came from him.

The Christian church, along with it's dogma and doctrine, came from a lot of different sources. Some of it came from other religions and some came from the early founders of they church. And those guys had baggage of heir own that centuries of Christians got lumbered with.

Wibbs

RobertKK wrote: »

it says God removed his love from the Jews, not that God did the evil.

So this god removes "his love" from a group of people, knowing that millions of innocent people born to be(by his hand) members of that group would be persecuted and butchered for the guts of two thousand years? This god of yours is a psychopathic evil cúnt and no mistake. Satan has nothing on him. Hell in the case of the Shoah he was deliberately feeding his followers to satan's followers. Utterly evil bastard and no mistake. Made in his image I hope we're not. We're not of course, it's the other way around. It's all bronze age mumbo jumbo dressed up in layers of nonsense.

IMH one of the very worst things to happen to humanity was monotheism and specifically the Abrahamic version. Monotheism is a dangerous concept. It is much more likely to engender feelings of "the other" the pagan, the heretic the unbeliever. Polytheism historically tends to be more easy going. Look at Rome before the craw thumpers got in. Polytheistic and remarkably pluralistic with it. In classical Rome there were rich and poor, but interestingly little or no cultural ghettos. On an average street, you could have an African, an Italian, A Spaniard, a Persian etc all living as neighbours. IMH Polytheism is more likely to encourage that. If everyone has a different house god, vaguely under a shared faith, there's less chance of dissent, the religion itself favours diversity and that trickles down to the people and culture. Plus the Romans imported different gods at different times. They went mad for Egyptian deities for a while and nobody went ape about it. That makes it easier to accept other people and cultures too. One god on the other hand... Hell Jews, Christians and Muslims claim to worship the same god and have been at each others throats for centuries. Daft.

Oh and Judaism wasn't originally Monotheistic. That stuff got chopped out as it evolved(there was even a Mrs God at one point), but there are still clues left over. QV the ten commandments, specifically the second; "Thou shalt have no other gods before me". You'll note it doesn't say there are no other gods... And again a way to mark out you as "chosen" and the other as not. The rhetoric of the Abrahamic stuff is all about exclusion, save for the chosen.

DeadHand

tigger123 wrote: »

Original sin is such a horrible concept.

Truly is. How anyone can tolerate the idea that we are somehow born inherently immoral and unclean is beyond me.

It's part of the disgusting guilt mechanism that Christianity uses to make people feel guilty, lower their self-esteem and make them feel in need of saving thereby making them malleable to the rest of the nonsense the Church wishes to push on them.

Long live Enlightenment. Broad education as well as independence and freedom of thought are the mortal foes of organised religion.

endacl

SaveOurLyric wrote: »

Exactly. The same as the huge numbers of people who havent read The Lord of the Rings. And dont believe in Orks and Elves. They should study the books before they make up their minds or comment on their existence or not.

I don't believe in elves. I have met a few orcs, though.

shruikan2553

SaveOurLyric wrote: »

Exactly. The same as the huge numbers of people who havent read The Lord of the Rings. And dont believe in Orks and Elves. They should study the books before they make up their minds or comment on their existence or not.

Can you prove orcs and elves arent real?

Donkey Oaty

shruikan2553 wrote: »

Can you prove orcs and elves arent real?

Elves is an interesting one.

A University of Iceland study of Icelanders from 2007 showed that:

Only 13 percent of participants in the study said it is impossible that elves exist, 19 percent found it unlikely, 37 percent said elves possibly exist, 17 percent found their existence likely and eight percent definite. Five percent did not have an opinion on the existence of elves.

Source: Iceland Review.

K4t

haveringchick wrote: »

My mother is a daily mass goer. She returns to her church most evenings to sit and pray quietly. She does her best to adhere to the tenets of her faith. Please tell me that you understand that you have absolutely no entitlement yo challenge her or anybody else going about their faith in a peaceful manner.
Your analogy with murder etc. is frankly disgusting and moronic. You complain no dpunt about how other people's beliefs impinge on your life but apparently have no hesitation in ramming your opinion down the throhats of others.

The day I stop your mother on the street and "ram my opinion down her throat" is the day you will have any credibility with that argument. Good day to you.

SaveOurLyric

So what's a goblin then ?

NachoBusiness

Sure in a way, aren't we all just motorcycles on the road of life.

catallus

NachoBusiness wrote: »

Sure in a way, aren't we all just motorcycles on the road of life.

What if you don't like motorcycles?

I've never been on a motorbike?