John Gray: belief

Transcript context

…The Bible — yes or no? Definitely, the whole of the Bible. One of the key texts for me is two books: the Book of Genesis and the Book of Job. The Book of Genesis because I believe, in the myth of Genesis, one of the central neglected truths of the human situation is brought out, which is that knowledge is ethically neutral. It could be used in various ways. It may, in some sense, be intrinsically good, but it can be put to good and bad uses. And Job because I think it’s in the Book of Job that the origin of, if you like, skeptical thinking is, rather than in the Greeks. Socrates, for example, is often thought of as a fearless inquirer who doubted everything. He even said that. “I only know that I know nothing,” he’s supposed to have said, at least in some accounts of him. But he did believe that the good and the true and the beautiful are one and the same. He believed in the ultimate rationality and justice of the universe. Job didn’t. He questioned God. He questioned the rationality and the justice of the universe. I think Job’s questions — even though he eventually returned to the God he questioned — are more profound. So definitely, the Bible would be a key text along with other religious texts. One of my strong arguments, or at any rate concerns, strong themes of my recent work, is that no one can really understand modern politics who doesn’t really understand religion, because much of modern politics is a succession of footnotes to religion. Those are two of the most pessimistic books in the Bible, right? There’s no resurrection. Genesis is a world without law. In a sense, the message is justice is either arbitrary or meaningless or very difficult to fathom.…

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