A long way from Braveheart days, Scotland now is a leader in secularism, replacing cries for freedom with enactment of “hate-speech” laws. So perhaps it’s not surprising that one of its famous sons, film star Brian Cox, has thrown serious shade on religion and has labeled people of faith “stupid.”
What’s more, Cox said on a recent episode of The Starting Line podcast, religion has led man into “all kinds of horror,” faith “is a conceit,” and the Bible is “one of the worst books ever.”
Whether he was told to stop mincing words and tell us how he really feels was not reported.
The actor, who had a role in Braveheart and currently plays detestable billionaire media mogul Logan Roy on HBO’s highly rated show Succession, also implicated the Bible in creating the “patriarchy” (which, in the West at least, went the way of the dodo long ago).
Breitbart reports on the story, writing that
the self-described atheist-socialist actor asserted that religion has hurt humans’ ability to face reality, contributing to their own “stupidity.”
“It’s all about this notion of God, the idea that there’s a God that takes care of us all,” he told Starting Line host Rich Leigh. “There’s no such thing, doesn’t happen, that’s not what it’s about. It’s about us, and we don’t examine ourselves nearly enough.”
… Humans “simply haven’t evolved” to the point where we look inside ourselves to deal with our problems rather than trying to solve them with religion, he contended.
“Human beings are so f[*****], basically… because they’re so stupid,” he said.
Repeating this theme, Cox also “labeled the biblical story of Adam and Eve ‘propaganda’ and said that the only reason people believe it is because they are ‘stupid enough’ to do so,” website Church Leaders reports. In fact, he contends that the creation story essentially established “the patriarchy” and that we, as he put it, must “go more towards a matriarchy” because men are just “movable sperm banks that walk around and come and go.”
While one could suspect projection here — Cox has two divorces behind him — the irony is that his prescription is precisely what leads to what he laments. That is, as G.K. Chesterton astutely noted, “What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible.”
Yet it is because of how the Bible, by Cox’s lights, contravenes the feminist agenda that it “is one of the worst books ever, for me, from my point of view,” he said. Well, there you have it: Eat, smoke pot (which the actor endorses), and get high, for tomorrow we die — and disappear into nothingness.
Of course, Cox is clearly confused, as evidenced by how much of his commentary has a stream-of-consciousness flavor to it. Yet as someone who has worn his shoes — I once was an agnostic who scoffed at faith — I know where his beliefs come from. I also know where they go to.
Cox makes a number of now pretty stale claims. Let’s address a few:
- “God is something people have created … to control others,” the actor complained. Even if this were true, so what? Most making this claim are big-government proponents. And is not government also “something people have created to control others”? The reality is that, one way or another, people must be controlled (the alternative is anarchy). And the more they control themselves — from within via respect for God’s laws — the less they need to be controlled from without by the state’s iron fist.
- Religion has bred “horror,” Cox declared, “referencing the Holocaust and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza,” Breitbart informs. This is silly. The Ukraine war has nothing to do with “religion,” and Adolf Hitler was a de facto atheist who sought Christianity’s destruction. In reality, virtually all wars have been driven by a desire for land, resources, and/or power; and/or by hatred (e.g., Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander the Great). Ideology, such as international communism, has also played a role. In contrast, faith has generally been a mitigating factor, not an exacerbating one.
- The actor blamed his mother’s mental health struggles on her religion. This assessment is dubious, as studies have definitively shown that people of faith have better psychological health than do secularists.
Cox also stated that theists aren’t actually “dealing with” reality. Really? Well, there’s a reality he’s not dealing with. As an MSN commenter wrote, “I’d like this clown to defend his basis for morals then. If we are just ‘evolved animals’ then there is nothing immoral about conquering the weak, theft or rape [or war].”
For sure. As I often put it, if atheism is correct, we have no souls and are consequently just some pounds of chemicals and water — organic robots. And then, whence comes “morality”?
Taking this thinking to its logical conclusion leads to what someone I’ve known once expressed. “Murder is not wrong,” he said — “It’s just that society says it is.”
I could argue against this, stating that it’s not true because God exists and His laws (an objective reality) dictate murder’s wrongness. My ex-acquaintance could dispute my premise, of course (God’s existence, etc.), but my logic is airtight. But how could you, Mr. Cox, argue against him?
Your premise is the same as his. To wit:
Without God, society is all there is to say anything.
(Reading the flavors analogy is helpful here, too.)
If Cox really dealt with reality — i.e., his beliefs’ implications — he’d at least embrace botanist Lawrence Trevanion’s conclusion that people are “objects that perceive” and occultist Aleister Crowley’s credo, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Being far more intellectually consistent, he’d then seem less stupid and would be farther along the road toward what devout atheism breeds: that thorough, head-and-heart fulfillment of moral nihilism known as sociopathy.
