John Gray: belief

Transcript context

…What did your parents believe? They were secular Christians. Britain is much more — or at least during my lifetime — has been much more secular. I don’t like the word secular because most of what is secular is just spilt religion, actually. Britain has been, England especially — Scotland and Ireland to some extent, even Wales, are a bit different — it’s been a society for the last maybe 100 years, let’s say, in which religion has not been as life-shaping as it’s been in many parts of the world, and still isn’t, apart from new religions that have grown in the country. Or not new religions — they’re very old religions but are grown in the country because of immigration — Islam and Hinduism and other religions. They were just perfectly normal for whom religion was a part of life. If they read P.G. Wodehouse, they might have agreed with him. P.G Wodehouse is a comic writer, lived in America a lot. He was asked towards the end of his life in an interview — I think he lived on Long Island or somewhere, I can’t remember now — anyway, he was asked, “Do you, Mr. Wodehouse, have any religious beliefs?” To which he replied, “You know, it’s frightfully hard to say. ” I think that’s tremendously clever, much more intelligent than most authors, because what he recognized was that belief — when you get outside of formulating scientific propositions and so on, it’s a very fluid, vaporous thing. You can have residues of religious belief, even if you are an atheist, and you might not be able to formulate your beliefs. Even if you have strong religious beliefs, you might still not be able to formulate. I guess they would’ve said that it was not something they spent a lot of time talking about or thinking about. What do you make of recent speculations concerning UFOs? Is that just more theology?…

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